Africa, Brazil and the Construction
of Trans-Atlantic Black Identities
Africa,
Brazil
and the
Construction of
Trans-Atlantic
Black Identities
Edited by
B o u b a c a r B a r r y,
Elisée Soumonni
and Livio Sansone
Copyright © 2008 Boubacar Barry, Elisée Soumonni and Livio Sansone
First Printing 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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the publisher.
Book design: Cover design:
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Table of Contents
gh
Foreword
Boubacar Barry, Elisée Soumonni and Livio Sansone
Introduction
Livio Sansone
Part I: Africa
Chapter 1 Colonialism and the Creation of Racial Identities
in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique.
Valdemir Zamparoni
Chapter 2 Every House has a Story: The Archaeology of Gorée
Island, Sénégal
Ibrahima Thiaw
Chapter 3 An imaginary ocean: carnival in Cape Town and the
Black Atlantic.
Denis-Constant Martin
Chapter 4Transatlantic Transformations: The Origins and Identities of Africans in the Americas
Paul E. Lovejoy
Chapter 5 Making Place, Making Race: St. Helena and the South
Atlantic World
Daniel A. Yon
Chapter 6 Looking through a broken mirror: blackness, shared
memory, shared identity and shared destiny
Chris O. Uroh
Table of Con t en t s
Part II: the New World
Chapter 7 Global names, Creolized identities
Alex van Stipriaan
Chapter 8 Ethnic-religious modes of identification among the
Gbe-speaking people in eighteenth and nineteenth
century Brazil
Luis Nicolau Parés
Chapter 9 Saint Anthony at the Crossroads in Kongo and Brazil:
‘Creolization’ and Identity Politics in the Black South
Altantic, ca. 1700/1850
Robert W. Slenes
Chapter 10 The Construction of a Black Catholic Identity in Brazil
during the Time of Slavery: Saints and Minkisi a Reflection of Cultural Miscegenation
Marina de Mello e Souza
Chapter 11“From ‘Near White’ to ‘Almost Black’: Racial Classifications in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Brazil
Jocélio Teles dos Santos
Chapter 12‘Terras de Quilombo’: Land Rights, Memory of Slavery,
and Ethnic Identification in Contemporary Brazil
Hebe Mattos
Chapter 13The Atlantic Connection: History, Memory and Identities
Ubiratan Castro de Araújo
The contributors
vi
Foreword
Boubacar Barry, Elisée Soumonni and Livio Sansone
gh
W
hat is the difference between this book and others on the Black
Atlantic or the African Diaspora? To begin with, it is the result of
a very special international South-South workshop held on the island of
Gorée, Senegal, between the sixth and the ninth of December 2002, on
the transatlantic making of notions of race, black identity and anti-racism.
The aim of our workshop was twofold. First, it critically assessed the study
of fluxes and refluxes, ruptures and reciprocal influences in the relations
between the two shores of the Atlantic. Certainly, the relative lack of direct
contact between Africa and the new World over the last century helps to
explain why in Africa, as well as in Latin America, the debate over notions
of race and ethnic identity has received more attention than the historical
phenomena of civilization, métissage and the relationship of domination
between the North and South. The workshop also scrutinized the agenda
of the leading researchers of this field of study (‘classic’ scholars, e.g. Melville Herskovits, C. Anta Diopp, Roger Bastide and Pierre Verger, as well
as more contemporary scholars, e.g. Richard Price, John Thornton, Paul
Gilroy and Lorand Matory).Second, the aim of this exchange was to create
a common field from which a number of topics for joint research projects
on the double dimension Africa/Diaspora can emerge. In this sense, the
workshop evaluated existing networks and established a new network—or,
rather, a network of networks.
How to reestablish direct South-South contacts across the Atlantic
was, in fact, the main aim of this workshop that brought together researchers from the three continents to discuss their own experiences and create
durable connections centred on deepening the knowledge of social and
cultural dynamics in Africa and among people of African descent in the
Americas who interact with people of native American, Asian and European descent. In this pioneering South-South workshop the themes of
the debate were relatively open in order to allow all the contributors to
exchange their experiences and perspectives on the longue durée between
Ba r ry, S o u monni , S ansone
the XV and the XXI century. The aim of this exchange was to create a
common field from which can emerge a number of topics for joint research
projects concerning groups of researchers from both shores of the Atlantic
who can deal with the double dimension Africa/Diaspora. These future
exchange projects should also involve graduate students from the two
regions who can benefit from a double supervision from an African as
well as a Latin American university.
The workshop brought together 46 researchers of various disciplines
from nine countries with different colonial traditions and languages, and
each of them presented a paper. With a tight budget for so many people
we gave simultaneous translation. Those of us who were fluent in at least
two languages translated for free the intensive presentations and ensuing
debates. It was an enthusiastic though extenuating exercise. We come
short of words to thank Sephis, without whose investment this daring and
enthusing workshop would not have taken place.
A limited number of key scholars based in the North who have developed important networks across the Atlantic were also at the workshop:
Paul Lovejoy and David Trotman (Harriet Tubman Research Center
on the African Diaspora York , University, Toronto), Dan Yon (Dept. of
Anthropology, York University, Toronto), Denis-Constant Martin (CERI,
Paris), Kadya Tall (IRD, Paris), François Veran (Université de Lille), Maria
Turone (Universitá di Lecce), Paul Vandepitte, Jamima Pierre (University of
Illinois), Agustin Lao-Montes (University of Massachusetts at Amherst),
Sheila Khan (University of Warwick), Alex van Stipriaan (Erasmus Universiteit, Rotterdam). These distinguished scholars paid for their expenses,
since the funds the organizers had were especially meant to enable scholars
from Latin America and Africa to attend. They witness to the interest in
South-South dialogue among scholars based in the North.
The venue and the organization of the workshop deserve a special
word. The academic sessions of the workshop took place in the Gorée
Institute. This young pan-African institute (founded in 1992) has considerable experience in organizing international seminars and courses.
Consequently, it was an ideal place for discussing issues dealing with the
workshop. The Institute is located at the former “ Maison du Soudan” in
the historically well-known Gorée island —a short boat trip from Dakar.
Gorée provides a good international and national setting for the workshop.
It has a historical trademark and a past altogether tragic and sumptuous.
The importance of Gorée derives from slave trading, slave ships, indignity, suffering, tears and death. Controlled successively by the Portuguese,
the Dutch, the British and the French, that small island of fishermen has
viii
F o r ewo r d
become since the 17th century, the center of a triangular traffic between,
Europe, Africa and America. It was one of the principal slave trade points
towards Guyana, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. Even though a visit to
Gorée is a “journey to the heart of pain and suffering through empty yet
poignant places poses”, the island is today far from a sinister place. First,
Gorée has taken an important symbolic position in the reconstruction of
cultural and intellectual ties between Africa and the Americas. Second,
the island is a wonderful peaceful place covered with colonial style houses
and decent beaches. We were all moved and charmed by the style of these
houses in ochre, with wooden balconies, as well as by the small sandy streets
that all lead to the sea.
The workshop was convened by historian Boubacar Barry (Université Cheikh Anta Diopp, Dakar), historian Elisée Soumonni (Université
Nationale du Benin, Cotonou) and anthropologist Livio Sansone (at that
time Centre of Afro-Asian Studies, Universidade Candido Mendes, now
at the Centre of Afro-Oriental Studies of the Federal University of Bahia).
In our work we were wonderfully assisted by Dr. Ndeye Sokhna Gueye
(SEPHIS-CODESRIA Program Coordinator, Dakar). Working together
was great and fun.
Our aim was to bring to the Black Atlantic a Southern perspective, by
broadening the scope of this notion and making it more cosmopolitan and
genuinely transnational by trespassing the magic limits of the Englishspeaking world and confronting the colonial legacy of Spain, Portugal,
France and the Netherlands in the New World. Such an attempt cries
for new comparative studies, the methodology of which should be closely
scrutinized under the light of our epoch characterized by a growing set of
global ethnic icons, which makes the distinction between local specificities
increasingly difficult to analyze. The workshop that generated this book
was an attempt in this direction: it succeeded in creating an intellectual
climate through which scholars based in the South, and a few scholars
based in the North, could talk to each other on equal footing.
It goes without saying that this volume is not flawless. The conveners
of the workshop would have liked to have had more contributions from
Africa and the rest of the Americas. The large presence of Brazilians was
however one of the strong points of the workshop, revealing the existence
of a new and growing centrality of African studies to Brazilian scholars.
The event, of which these papers are the result, was quite likely the largest
gathering of Brazilian researchers in the humanities on African soil after
the international festivals of the 1960s in Dakar and late 1970s in Nigeria
described in a recent book by Andrew Apter (2005). In fact, this book
ix
Ba r ry, S o u monni , S ansone
poses the centrality of Brazil in any effort to refine the perspective centered
on the notion of the Black Diaspora or the Black Atlantic and to assess
strengths and weaknesses of attempts to generalize about racial formation
across the Atlantic as well as across different colonial styles that nowadays
still largely correspond to language areas.
Boubacar Barry, Elisée Soumonni and Livio Sansone
Dakar, Cotonou and Salvador, April 2006
Introduction
Livio Sansone
gh
T
he flow of ideas about race, anti-racism and black or African identity
across the Atlantic is the focus of this book. Throughout history this
flow has concerned ideas of very different political tinge—ideas of race
and racism as well as of the universal value of human life and antiracism.
In fact, one could see the history of the Black Atlantic as a history of ideas
and practice of emancipation up against ideas and practice of racialized or
labour domination (Linebaugh and Rediker 2001). This book focuses on
ideas in transit and the transit of ideas because the organizers hold firmly
that, especially in the making and deconstructing of notions of race and of
different races, little is as local as often celebrated. If this is always the case
in the processes of racialization that have accompanied the making of the
modern world more generally, it is even more pronounced in the context
of black versus white relations, a context that comes into being through a
gigantic international operation—the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Black cultures and identities have historically been created and redefined through a triangular exchange of symbols and ideas between Africa,
the New World and the black Diaspora to Europe. Also the racialization
of social relations and of particular groups has been based on categories
created throughout the international exchange across the Atlantic. The
engine of this exchange has been a chain of events sparked off by the
enslavement of huge numbers of Africans and followed by the Atlantic
traffic, the establishment of new and large-scale plantation societies, the
Livio S ansone
process of Nation-building in the New World, the colonization of Africa,
the anti-colonial movement and the struggle for civil rights among the
descendants of Africans in the New World and in Europe.
On the one hand, notions such as tribe and ethnic group, which
were created within the colonial experience in the Americas, traveled to
Africa, informing the making of the Other, and later bounced back on
the Americas. On the other hand, anti-racist and Black Nationalist discourses that developed within such international exchanges have tended
to draw, among others, upon Egypt-centred (heliocentric) or Ethiopiacentred and diffusionist notions of world history—often supported by the
so-called Hamitic principle— as much as they are currently drawing from
the theorizing about the politics of identities in the social sciences. For
example, ideas of negritude, blackness and pan-Africanism created in the
New World have always been inspired either by African intellectuals and
struggles for independence or by images of what African societies were
prior to European colonization. Several Afro-American religious systems
have maintained—and are recently reinforcing— symbolic and social contacts with a number of religious centers in Africa.
This process of the making of black cultures has been creating the
contours of a transnational, multilingual and multireligious culture area,
defined by a series of powerful, albeit emotional, terms such as the Atlantic
World System, the African Diaspora and, more recently, the Black Atlantic—each of these expressions has a specific political connotation, employs
specific distinguishing icons and identifies a specific originating centre for
the process. One could say that the first terms hinges upon slavery and the
plantation; the second term incorporates African and black agency; and the
third terms suggests a relative centrelessness in the Atlantic flows. The trope
of each of these terms could be, respectively, the slave, Africa and the ship.
It is in this context that new black cultures have been commodified,
through dynamics that are activated from within as well as from without
the black population, by selecting certain traits and objects to represent
black culture as a whole—to objectify it by making it solid and material.
Even though the kind of ‘black objects’ that are chosen vary from one
local context to the other, often these objects have had to do with the body,
fashion and demeanor, either as markers of stigma or as signs of mobility
and success. These black objects as well as, more generally, the way people
of (part) African origin have redefined themselves in the New World has
traditionally bounced back onto the African continent itself and has made
inroads in such varied fields as political thinking, music, fashion and urban
youth culture—in fact the ´blackization´ of Africa calls for more research.
I n t ro d u c t ion
This process of transatlantic commodification has been going on for centuries. It is one more evidence that the globalization of racial ideas as well
as anti-racist thinking can be processes with a long history, and that they
have also concerned peoples that, from a Eurocentric perspective, were
often considered as being ‘without history’.
For these reasons, in analyzing the making of black cultures across the
Atlantic, and the consequences of this process for the use of ethnic and racial
categories in Africa itself, the contributors to this book focus on creativity
rather than on the traces of possible ‘Africanisms’—with the way ‘Africa’ is
re-invented for political reasons rather than the capacity to retain African
culture throughout centuries of hardship. The thirteen contributions work
towards a biography of black objects, icons and ideas—detecting how and
why they achieve or lose value. Direction, actors, circuits and hierarchy of
these flows reflect the specific and changing position of Latin America and
Africa in the world system. There is still much to be done. It is pivotal to
shed light on the ways that Africa itself has been affected by its use and
abuse in the New World, as an instrument to classify and racialize, but also
as a tool for empowerment. The history of popular music, youth cultural
life, conspicuous consumption and the making of (new) ethnic identities in
African cities have shown that Africa is not the immobile, deep continent
of most of its representation in the New World. It would be also important
to pay attention to the role that a number of anthropologists and historians
have played over the last century in the creation of such categories as black
culture and identity, and Afro-American religious systems.
In the transatlantic triangulation that is the focus of this book there
have been important changes over this long period of time, which configure
a shifting geo-politics of knowledge, hierarchization and racialization, in
which, over the past centuries, giving and receiving ends have evolved and
moved from one shore to the other, between hemispheres and have traveled between different colonial styles. Latin America—and Brazil—have
become less important in the transatlantic making of ‘black’ and ‘white’.
The agents and centers of production of racial thought have undergone a
process of, so to speak, de-Iberization. For example, the category ‘travelers’,
which was created post facto around the end of the XIXth century, when
another category of observers of social and racial dynamics had emerged,
the essay-writers, almost never included people from the Iberian Peninsula. In the last century historians and anthropologists, mostly Europeans
but also Americans, have played a key role. More recently the number of
Africans and ‘black’ people from Latin America involved in this circuit
has increased—some of them researchers, others writers and/or civil rights
activists.
Livio S ansone
Thus, so far venues for the trans-Atlantic discussion on these topics
have been, by and large, restricted to a number of cosmopolitan researchers—mostly historians and anthropologists— who, often, became themselves part and parcel of the flux and refluxes between Africa, the new
World and Europe. We are thinking, first of all, about the work of Melville
Herskovits, Pierre Verger and Roger Bastide. The work of these authentic white pioneers of the Black Atlantic was very important in inspiring
further research on identity formation and cultural production among the
descendants of Africans in the New World. We now think that it is pivotal
to reconstruct, through a variety of more recent perspectives, this research
tradition, by contextualizing it sociologically and in terms of the scientific
paradigms of its time, and by evaluating critically its consequences for the
further development on the flux and refluxes across what is now called
the Black Atlantic. That research tradition had both subversive and conservative effects. It created a new curiosity for things African in the New
World, but it operated through categories—such as the notion of ‘Africanisms’- that were imbued in the racial and colonial rationale of their
time. The use of categories, or sub-variation thereof, such as Guiné, Mina,
Sudanese, Mandinga, Nagô, Jeje, Congo, Bantu and Yorubá, but also Egypt
and Ethiopia, on both shores of the Atlantic, and their changing and positioned significance, is a good example of how ambiguous and politically
complex has become the academic and research enterprise liaising across
the Black Atlantic. If there was a colonial library, as Valentin Mudimbe
calls the common ground of reading and writing, essential for the art of
colonial mastery, to which anthropologists contributed to a great extent, it
always had the connotation of a trans-Atlantic transit.
This transit has been studied through several perspectives: the slave
trade and its impact on Africa, the impact of slavery on the making of the
New World and its nation States, the history of ideas around the notion
of race, the making of (transnational) black cultures and black cultural
production (e.g. Afro-American religious systems, music, cuisine, Creole
languages and patois), religion and the religious market (the network and
crossroads created by the Catholic Aecumenia, traveling black saints and
orixas, networks and facilities created by Protestant churches and, recently,
Pentecostal internationalization). In an important trend over the last two
or three decades this transit has been closely associated to the making of
the modern world and has even been seen as a pre-condition to the First
Modernity—that which was made possible by the Great Discoveries and
the making of the New World (that is, its incorporation into the world
system that become consolidated approximately five century ago). Paul
Gilroy’s book The Black Atlantic has been central in attempting to embed
I n t ro d u c t ion
the analysis of black identity formation and cultural production within
universal history and trends, while emphasizing the inherently ‘impure’
nature of any idea around blackness and whiteness—in the sense that such
ideas have no specific and geographic defined origin. Although agreeing on the importance of the slave trade for the making of First World
modernity, a number of other authors (e.g. Paul Lovejoy, Luis Nicolau
and Bob Slenes, all contributors to this volume, John & Linda Thornton,
Joseph Miller), who one could call the new Afrocentrists, disagree with
Gilroy’s interpretation of the Black Atlantic as a system of revolving doors
and on the intrinsically new nature of culture production of population of
African descent in the New World, as Sidney Mintz and Richard Price
stressed in their seminal little book first published in 1972 (Mintz and
Price, 1992).1 The overwhelming majority of social scientists would now
consider the use of notions such as “cultural retention” and “Africanisms”
obsolete at best, because they suggest an intrinsic fixity of African cultures
and tend to make a generalized statement on Africa that disregards the
plentitude of difference within Africa. In a very different fashion, for most
new Afrocentrist authors the study of processes of ethnogenesis in Africa,
as well as of the dynamics in and around the ports of slavery, are essential
in understanding later or contemporary processes of African ethnogenesis
in the New World. Without any attempt to strike a new balance between
these two perspectives, this book suffices presenting them in their candid
version, wishing perhaps to suggest the need of more dialogue and a possible combination of these two perspectives.
The focus on the trans-Atlantic transit of ideas in this volume is
intended to clear the study of ideas and people generated from Africa as
well as the study of Africa proper from ideas about the African continent
as best described with terms such as ‘dark’, ‘past’, ‘original’ or even ‘exceptional’. We are especially concerned with the way Africa as a trope as well
as things and icons seen as African are used as ethnic markers in the New
World. In many respects the way people, through a variety of different
perspectives and positions, rediscover or reinvent their own Africa in the
Americas often operates as a contradictory short blanket: in order to regain
humanity and self-consciousness in the New World, populations defined
as Afro-American or simply black have reconstructed an idea of Africa
that is pivotal to them though leaves African intellectuals very uncomfortable (if only because it tends to deny them the pretty universal right
to be or become cosmopolitan); also intellectual and political elites have
redefined their own Africa in the New World, in the past more often than
not as equivalent to past and backwardness (fearing that the African origin
of part of their population would have bogged down the modernization of
Livio S ansone
Latin America) and over the last century as an asset rather than a liability
(especially in Cuba and Brazil the African component of the nation has
been celebrated as characterizing the specialty of Latin American modernity and popular culture—the Latin American national character). So,
using and abusing Africa in the New World is generally done in a way that
is or can be damaging Africa and the intellectual climate in Africa. When
Africa is mostly used to celebrate originality, purity and authenticity in
culture and personality—be it for the sake of countering the processes
of racialization and marginalization of the population of (part)African
origin— attempts to focus on Africa as a changing continent, modern
Africa or African cosmopolitanism become almost absurd. To make things
worse, one needs to place this phenomenon in the context of the global
geo-politics of knowledge, which assigns to Africa (and, to a lesser extent,
Latin America) one specific task: the place where research can be done,
but hardly processed, stored or published; the place that is incapable to
fund its own researchers and therefore needs ‘naturally’ to enter a colonial
relationship with the Great Academic Nations.
Acknowledging that what I state here is shared with many African
colleagues (let it suffice here to mention the efforts in this direction by
CODESRIA), as well as with several colleagues based in the North who
are aware of the hegemonic geo-politics of knowledge and are in many
ways our fellow-travelers (and I am happy that this volume includes the
contribution by a number of these very good scholars), I hope with this
book to contribute to this struggle for a less skewed or rude and more gentle
or sophisticated use of Africa in our political and academic projects.
I hope this book also contributes to the general debate on ethnic formation and processes of racialization. Perhaps one can start thinking of
ideas of race and emancipation as something constructed within different
strands of transatlantic and even global flows, whereby the Black Diaspora
or Black Atlantic is a key strand but not the sole one. Possibly, narratives of
race and emancipation are also influenced by specific colonial styles (such
as that soon established by the Portuguese seaborne empire), Catholicism
(in its high brow and popular version, each with networks and icons of
their own), the melodic tradition (that combines with percussion and call
& response—often seen as key elements of ‘Africanism’ in music), and, of
course, the style and culture of the class condition (both the working and
the upper class). Maybe one powerful way to contribute to the antiracist
struggle is by showing the variety and complexity of the strategies of resistance constructed by Africans and people of African descent in different
times and places.
I n t ro d u c t ion
As in many other ‘local’ contexts for race relations, Brazilian race relations and system of racial classification, often seen as unique and exceptional, can and have to be reinterpreted in the light of transatlantic flows
of ideas of race and emancipation. For instance, the heated debates that
followed Brazilian abolition of slavery in 1888 and the proclamation of the
republic through a coup in 1889 reflect the new geopolitics of knowledge
and domination established at the congress of Berlin a few years earlier.
Not only ideas travel, also those who produce ideas of race and emancipation do. In Brazil, as in other points of the Black Atlantic, not only the
militants of the anti-racist struggle, but also travelers, essay writers, firsttime ethnographers, anthropologists, and, lately, tourists have contributed
to the creation and recreation of the Brazilian system of racial classification: their main aim, throughout history, has been to put order in what
they consider an ambiguous and relativistic system of racial classification.
Brazilian intellectuals have always felt embarrassed by the way ordinary
people were defining themselves in terms of colour and ethnicity—usually
considering them either too rude or too ambiguous. The papers dealing
with Brazil, wholly or in part, posit four points:
1. Though conceptualized as idiosyncratic, Brazilian ethnic and racial
categories are much less ‘local’—and an oddity—than often assumed.
2. Though generally placed in the New World as a site of high intensity of ‘Africanisms’ (see Herskovits), especially in the State of Bahia
and Maranhão, Brazil is in itself the site of a hierarchical distinction
between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ forms of black cultural production or, as I
would prefer, strong/good and weak/bad Africanisms. Such polarity
has been located in terms of space as well as style: Rio versus Salvador
da Bahia; malandro (the streethustler in zoot suit) versus baiana (the
woman dressed in African clothes selling food of African origin in the
street); carnival versus candomblé.
3. Though this polarity has often been seen as an anthropologists’ creation—something that relates to the romantic spirit of much of the
anthropological enterprise—it is in fact much longer and deeper a
phenomenon, a clear case of longue durée and continuity through
innovation. We need to go back in time, to the period when physical
and socio-cultural anthropology were still one and beyond. Anthropology started its classificatory crusade not in a vacuum, but in an arena
already saturated with former classification systems and discourse.
In the case of Afro-Brazilian cultural forms, anthropology reclassifies, usually corroborating rather than subverting, what had already
Livio S ansone
been classified along a polarized model by essay writers and travelers. Anthropology posits an epistemological rupture that in fact never
properly occurred.
4. In the process of creating and recreating ‘Africas’ in Brazil—which
includes the ethnogenesis of entities associated with notions and names
such as Mina, Angola, Guinée, Sudanese, Bantu, Nagô and Yoruba—
different white and black voices, agents and agendas are involved. They
represent often-conflicting standpoints and have developed in time.
The Black Atlantic is of course not an innocent space, but a tense field
that is both academic and ethno-political.
With no claim of completion whatsoever, this book presents a variety
of contributions, essays and solid historiography and ethnography from
different disciplines and angles. It is the selection of a much larger set of
papers and essays that the Gorée workshop yielded.2 The contributions
emphasize continuity as well as rupture in Africanisms as well as in the use
of Africa as trope. The book presents thirteen contributions, divided in two
sections, Africa and the New World.
The Africa section of this volume starts with Valdemir Zamparoni´s
contribution on the Portuguese colonial administration of Mozambique.
This had already been put in place, of course, not without some difficulties
and skirmishes, long before the actual military conquest of the Mozambican territory. Faced with the problem of a European minority population
swallowed up by a larger population that included Africans, Chinese and
Indians from diverse origins and with a cultural diversity that the Portuguese found threatening, one of their earliest concerns was how to create
subordinate identities for this overwhelming ‘colored’ population (especially the Africans), while at the same time demarcating ethnic barriers
between the African population and the other non-African groups so that
each would get a different treatment from the colonial administration. The
various peoples who fell under the colonial administration of the territory
that later came to be known as Mozambique were all lumped together as
native populations. The many distinctive identification features of the diverse
social groups, as was the case with the segment of the population that was
of Asiatic stock, were all reduced to bare racial marks and it was pure racism
that regulated the relationships that existed between the different groups
in the colony. The essay demonstrates how such colonial agents used their
power, either officially or otherwise, to create privileges for the white minority while establishing a politics of territorial exclusion for the non-whites.
I n t ro d u c t ion
Chapter two focuses on Gorée island, an ideal laboratory for the
study of the Atlantic constructions of racial memories. However, historical
constructions focus on the slave warehouse or Maison des Esclaves that
represented only one of many aspects of everyday life in Gorée. Recent
archaeological sampling in different individual houses within the island
has allowed for a more inclusive history than was possible from one single
house. This archaeological evidence has yielded critical insights on AfroEuropean interactions, contributing to the re-evaluation and supplementing of historical constructions based on texts or oral sources. The distribution of material goods and the uses of space within the island indicate that
wealth and perhaps sex have in practice contributed to the subversion of
colonial policies of racial discrimination. While classic historical reconstructions emphasize the number of slaves who transited on the island in
their evaluation of the significance of Gorée in the formation of the Atlantic World, recent archaeological evidence has re-centered the debate on
material culture and settlement pattern in order to re-evaluate the nature
and consequences of Atlantic contact on patterns of culture contact and
interactions within the island. It is suggested that archaeological evidence
is well-suited for investigating the local dynamics of culture interactions
in transcultural settings. Gorée Island is one of the most controversial sites
in coastal Western Africa. The island’s role and significance in the Atlantic
commerce is a source of profound differences of opinion among historians
with far reaching consequences on Senegalese and Pan-African popular
cultures. This has resulted in a politically charged debate, enmeshed in
memory discourses in which race and identity resonates with a unique
intensity.
In Chapter 3, Denis-Constant Martin argues that the idea of a “black
Atlantic,” which usually implies a direct historical and human connection
between Africa and the Americas, should also acknowledge the imaginary
dimension of this phenomenon: the “black Atlantic” is a social construct
that carries representations of Africa and the Americas, especially of the
United States of America ; it serves to define and redefine identities in
relation to both non African-Americans in the Americas and Africans.
A study of the Minstrel Carnival in Cape Town can help apprehend the
strength of the imaginary dimension of the “black Atlantic”, for in this case
the meaningful link established between Africa and the United States is
divorced from the origin of most of those who construed it. The connection
between Africa and the United States is an essential component of festivals
celebrated by people—labelled coloureds under segregation, then apartheid—who, in their majority, are descendants of slaves brought to South
Africa from Indonesia, India, Madagascar and Africa (Mozambique and
Livio S ansone
West Africa) ; in the Cape Colony, they created an original culture which
expanded in Cape Town after emancipation. Music and festivals were, and
still are, central features of Cape Town’s urban culture. Musical repertoires
and aesthetic codes (in particular carnival costumes and make up) were
largely borrowed from the United States in the 19th and 20th century ;
today, borrowings from America are still quite frequent. At the end of the
19th Century, the influence of blackface minstrels (both white and black)
bore heavily on the shaping of the New Year carnival. An analysis of the New
Year carnival based on detailed observation and non-directive interviews
shows that, strange as it may appear, the impact of blackface minstrelsy in
Cape Town was reinforced among coloureds because it was intertwined
with the representation of the United States as a land of opportunity for
non white people, as a place where a particular brand of modernity, both
creative and mestiza, has been allowed to blossom, a brand of modernity
whose very existence denied the claim made by racists in South Africa that
creativity and modernity lied only in white civilisation.
Paul Lovejoy´s essay is an attempt to distinguish religious and ethnic
factors in the process of identification and community formation under
slavery. Ethnicity and religious affiliation provide distinct categories which
were essential in the identification of the enslaved, as they were for all sections of society in both Africa and the Americas. In the context of slavery,
ethnicity and religious affiliation are often thought to have overlapped to a
considerable extent, although ethnic and religious plurality was common.
Religion and ethnicity offered related but contrasting mechanisms for
group identity that must be examined in historical context. Both religion
and ethnicity served to integrate individuals of diverse backgrounds into
communities and social networks of interaction that were products of the
slave trade. Ethnicity and religion “creolised” slaves in the sense that these
conceptual frameworks provided individuals with various means of establishing social relationships under the oppressive conditions of slavery. Both
religion and ethnicity required individuals to subordinate previous identities in favor of a new, shared level of consciousness as slaves in a racialized
context.
Close to the quincentenial year of its discovery, the significance of the
Island of St Helena, in the South Atlantic, remains a missing link in the
historical chains and circulations of ideas that variously constitute the
conceptual and special notion, Black Atlantic. Dan Yon´s essay responds
to this gap in the field. Rather than report findings, it maps a project
in progress on the making of the South Atlantic World. The vital role
played by the island (since its discovery in 1502) in the vast expanse of the
Atlantic, facilitating imperial interests in the East, is noted. While much
10
I n t ro d u c t ion
has been written about the Middle Passage and the millions who were
forcefully transported via the same, this essay is concerned with, St Helena’s role in facilitating what was a massive movement of people and the
oceanic networks this role suggests. The massive movement goes beyond
the Atlantic world to incorporate the Indian Ocean. The making of St
Helena and the South Atlantic World emerge in this project as a study in
the making of community, culture, race, and identities through networks,
movements and the transmutations these processes imply. In identifying
some of the threads in the specific St Helena/South African connections,
the essay is also engaged with anthropological concerns, with studies of
peoples in movement, culture as transition, creolization and diasporas, as
well as concerns about memory and place. It works across the disciplinary
boundaries of social/economic history and social anthropology as well as
across conventional spatial, racial and cultural boundaries.
Chris Uroh´s piece, in chapter 6, is vehemently against those who
attempt to establish a philosophical basis for the belittling of the African.
He draws a line linking Hegel´s denial of history to the African continent
with recent attempts to disavow claims of strong African influences in
Greco-Roman civilizations. In a different fashion Uroh is also unsatisfied with modes of argument originally devised by western scholarship to
express a revolt against white racism, as he sees it in the work of Cesaire
and Senghor. The whole piece is in fact an appeal for Africans to re-gain
their self-esteem and self-confidence by anchoring the fundamentals of
universal philosophy in the context of the African continent.
The second section of the volume, on the Americas and especially
Brazil, starts with a contribution by Alex van Stipriaan on naming and
renaming— an important instrument in the colonization of the world
by Europeans, particularly in the slave colonies of the Americas, where
Africans were stripped off their original identity and European ones
were imposed upon them. However, the enslaved Africans recreated their
own identities by, among other things, constructing new naming practices, using African and European elements but giving it a new, creolized
dimension. The essay analyzes why the globalization of European names,
in the (former) slave colony of Suriname (Dutch Guiana), did not result in
a globalized, i.e. Europeanized, i.e. Dutchified identity, but instead resulted
in something specifically Afro-Surinamese and at the same time recognizably belonging to a more general Black Atlantic culture. Along the way van
Stipriaan shows what could be considered as top-down and bottom-up
developments. The (creolising) development of naming and identification
between the African forbears and their descendants today on both sides of
the (Black) Atlantic, is, therefore, the main focus of this essay.
11
Livio S ansone
Luis Nicolau, in Chapter 8, argues that contemporary Bahian Candomblé offers individuals and groups not univocal identities, but multiple
layers or distinct sets of conceptual referents for alternative processes of
identification, largely determined by context and the identity of the interlocutor. The analysis of diverse eighteenth and nineteenth century data
on the Gbe-speaking peoples shows how behind the outwardly imposed
generic terms Mina and Jeje a far more complex repertoire of African
ethnonyms was operative. The data also help us outline certain aspects of
the interface between ethnic identity and religious practice, as well as to
demonstrate the persistence throughout Candomblé’s history of a similar
system of multiple modes of ethnic-religious identification. As the Creolization process progressed, most of the original African ethnonyms (or
“sub-nation” labels) gradually lost visibility, while the “meta-ethnic” referents Jeje, Nagô and Angola became more prevalent. It was precisely in
this late nineteenth century process that the concept of “nation” became
restricted to the religious context and came to serve as a means of classifying different ritual modes.
In Chapter 9. Bob Slenes tells the reader how in the dismembered
Kingdom of Kongo in 1704 and in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in 1848
and 1854, Central African ‘community cults of affliction’, aimed at restoring the ‘health’ of their group of reference, were at the heart of important
political movements. In all three cases Saint Anthony (‘of Lisbon and
Padua’) was present: embodied in Kongo in the prophetess Kimpa Vita,
whose ‘Antonian movement’ sought to end warfare and slave raiding; and
worshiped by the Brazilian cults, disposed to rise up against slavery. This
article examines the understandings that these movements had of Saint
Anthony, as a case study of ‘creolization’ or ‘transculturation’—defined here
as the selective appropriation and reinterpretation of the culture of the
‘other’, particularly in struggles to define social identities. It argues that
Kimpa Vita had a profounder knowledge of Catholic texts about Anthony
(perhaps especially certain sermons of Antônio Vieira) than has previously
been suspected. Yet, she not only reinterpreted this saint from the perspective of Congolese religious categories, but—more emphatically than
is usually thought—appropriated Christianity for the Kongolese people,
denounced missionaries as witches and accused the native elite of a betrayal
of trust. The Saint Anthony of the Brazilian movements had also been
refashioned by Central African precepts, as part of a plantation slave identity opposed to that of masters. Slaves brought this reinterpreted Anthony
with them from Kongo, or minted him anew from Kongo-related moulds,
once in contact with Luso-Brazilian traditions. Recent research, particularly that of John Thornton and Linda Heywood, on the long interchange
12
I n t ro d u c t ion
between African and European religious traditions in Kongo and Angola,
has emphasized the early creation there of hybrid cultures, which then
served as a base line for further cultural transformation among Central
Africans in Portugal and Brazil. Conceptually, the focus is no longer on
the “reinterpretation” of foreign rituals and sacred objects in West-Central
Africa by traditions which remained essentially unchanged and alien to
each other—so much so that they merely engaged in a “dialogue of the
deaf ” (Wyatt MacGaffey)—but on the interpenetration of understandings
and the formation in that region of new, “Creole” cultures. Slenes argues
here, however, that “Creole culture” will remain a rather blunt concept
unless “reinterpretation,” now conceived of as arising from the context of
identity politics, is restored to its central place in analysis.
The Luso-African-American traditions of celebrating black kings
in Catholic brotherhoods, which is the subject of Chapter 10., should be
viewed in the context of the Atlantic routes and the Diaspora the slave
trade imposed on many Africans. This situation led to the creation of new
identities and social relations in the Americas, through the combination of
memories, knowledge kept and shared, and elements brought from different places and put together in certain permitted spaces. Africans integrated
with African-Americans in the Luso-American colonial society through the
making of annual festivals to celebrate black kings and their courts, trying
to incorporate some arguments in other studies on similar issues. The essay
describes how black kings existed (and still exist) in Brazil during and after
slavery, how they were elected, celebrated, what they represented to the communities that elected them and to the colonial officials and slave masters.
Finding spaces to create community ties in the heart of colonial brotherhoods that worshipped certain saints, institutions common in Spanish and
Portuguese America, the Afro-Brazilian community adopted this colonial
institution as their own. In these brotherhoods they elected their kings of
Congo, a symbol understood differently by African slaves and their Portuguese masters. Marina de Melo e Souza shows how in these rituals images of
Catholic saints had characteristics in common with African minkisi, indicating connections between African cultures and Afro- Brazilian manifestations. The use of feathers stuck in the hair of the statues of Catholic saints is
one of many clues that allow us to identify similarities between these images
and the ones used in Central-Africa, known as minkisi.
In Chapter 11. Jocélio Teles dos Santos deals with the very old history
or racial terms and classification in Brazil—a current theme in the Brazilian social sciences. Since the XX century several analyses have been
trying to explain the singularity of Brazilian racial terminology and its
difference in relation to the “bipolar” racial classification in the US. In the
13
Livio S ansone
last years, this academic debate has been dislocated to the public sphere
because since 1996 the Brazilian government has decided to promote
affirmative action. The classification of color has become a key issue in
mass media and reveals that it is a kind of Brazilian Achille’s heel. This
essay discusses racial classification in colonial Brazil and how it became
multi-polar already during the end of the XVIII century and the beginning of the XIX century. In this direction we can see the construction of a
local system in a dissonance/consonance with the Portuguese transatlantic
empire. The research was carried out in the Santa Casa da Misericórdia, a
secular Catholic institution, founded in Lisbon in 1498, that in the end of
XVI century had established branches in Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, Goa e
Macau. The Santa Casa da Misericórida created the Roda dos Expostos, a
space addressed to receive orphans anonymously. The registers of orphans
indicate sex, age, clothing and colour. The essay shows how the categories
of color—black, white, brown and several others—were used in contrast to
the Portuguese pattern.
The 1988 Brazilian constitution recognized a claim of Brazil’s organized black movement: that rural black communities identified as “remaining from maroon settlements” be given the right to land. The new constitution threatened to trigger serious controversies between anthropologists
and historians. Which of these two academic sectors should be heard in
determining how to enforce the article and define which rural groups
should benefit? Taken in its strictest sense, as classically employed in the
historiography of slavery and post-abolition societies in the Americas, the
term “remaining from quilombos” (settlements of runaway slaves) would
apply only to a few groups, mostly in northern Brazil. Because of their
prior experience preparing anthropological reports for the recognition of
indigenous lands, anthropologists were asked to voice their thoughts. The
Brazilian Anthropological Association stated that the black movement’s
political struggle in Brazil had resignified the term “remaining from
quilombos”. Now “quilombos” encompass not only the old settlements of
runaway slaves but all rural communities established during the time of
slavery and organized as ethnic groups around a memory of a common
origin traced to the time of captivity. However, these groups should have
clear mechanisms for determining membership of the community and
should occupy their land collectively, whether for private and/or public use.
What the country witnessed then was an extraordinary process that reinforced black identity in rural Brazil, assigned a newfound importance to
the memory of the experience of slavery, and had an impact on the agrarian conflicts. The texts focus on this multi-actor process by examining five
reports produced by a team of anthropologists and historians that identify
14
I n t ro d u c t ion
communities “remaining from quilombos” in the state of Rio de Janeiro,
where most of Brazil’s last slaves were concentrated in the late nineteenth
century. The point of departure is a brief historical overview of the context
in which the last slave populations of the former Province of Rio de Janeiro
lived and of their social roles in the rural world shortly after emancipation.
By exploring the oral history sources produced by the reports, the goal is
to comprehend the historicity of their claims for land and the singularities
of the racialization they experienced to get the right to be recognized as
“remaining from quilombos”. Hebe Mattos´ essay focuses on two strategic
moments: (1) before and after the abolition of slavery in 1888, and (2)
before and after enactment of the 1988 constitution precisely one hundred
years later.
The volume comes to a closure with a political essay by Ubiratan Castro.
Like a spider, during three and half centuries the transatlantic slave trade has
woven its web of connections across the Ocean— a truly complex territory
of water and land through which circulated men and women, possessions,
powers and knowledge. This is the territory of Afro-Brazilian culture. After
the end of the transatlantic trade between Africa and Brazil, in 1850, this
web anchored on the populations that survived the trade: the Afro-Brazilians in the West and the Agudás on the East (the community of Brazilian
and Cuban former slaves that settled in various towns of the Bight of Benin).
Among the former the religious communities of African tradition became a
locus of memory, in which African ethnicity played a formative role for black
identity in Bahia. Strengthened by these bilateral links between Bahia and
the Bight of Benin that have been described by Pierre Verger, Bahian blacks
have been struck by the winds of transatlantic pan-Africanism, shielded as
they were by a centuries long experience in resistance, black identity formation and cultural invention. The ideas of negritude according to SenghorCésaire-Dumas arrived very late in Bahia, more precisely after 1964 (the
year of a right wing coup d´etat). Anglophone pan-Africanism, centred on
the US and the Caribbean, did not play a key role until the 1970s. In both
cases, “Bahian-style” africanisms always hinged upon the recognition of this
loci of memory as ´our Africa,´ left to us by our ancestors. More recently,
however, an expanding evangelical and neo-pentecostal movement in Brazil
has provided fertile ground for the emergence of groups of black Brazilians
who, on account of their religious beliefs, have started to demand the separation of black Brazilan identity from the heritage that has been preserved by
the Candomblé communities.
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Livio S ansone
References
Apter, Andrew. (2005). The Pan-African Nation. Oil and the Spectacle of Cultura in
Nigeria, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker (2001). The Many-Headed Hydra. The
Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press.
Mintz Sydney & Richard Price. (1992). The Birth of African-American Culture. An
Anthropological Perspective, Boston: Beacon Press.
Notes
1.
2.
It is worth stressing that, as the result of time and trends, also these two
authors seem to have re-centred their statement on the origin of black
culture somewhat in the direction of Africa, as the change of the title of their
booklet between the first and the second edition seems to suggest. Originally
published in 1976 with the title Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American
past (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues) it was published
again in 1992, with an abridged foreword by Sidney Mintz, with the title The
Birth of African-American Culture. An Anthropological Perspective (Boston:
Beacon Press).
Only a third of the papers and essays presented is included in this volume,
a selection dictated by considerations of both space and coherence. A part
form the contributors to this volume, the workshop comprised papers by
Lucette Labache, Naana Opoku-Agyemang, Jemima Pierre, Maria Rosaria
Turano, Ousseynou Faye, Alexis Adandé, Lébéné Philippe Bolouvi, Carlos
dos Anjos, Agustin Lao-Montes, Sheila Khan, Paul Vandepitte, Maria
Antonieta Antonacci, Félix Ayoh’Omidire, Penda Mbow, Alain Pascal Kaly,
Jean-François Véran, Mirta Fernandez, Emmanuelle Kadya Tall, Denise
Barata, Julio Corbea, Marcelo Cunha, Patrícia Pinho, Salloma Salomão da
Silva, Claudia Mosquera, David Trotman and Luena Nunes Pereira.
16
Part I
Africa
Chapter 1
Colonialism and the
Creation of Racial
Identities in Lourenço
Marques, Mozambique
Valdemir Zamparoni
gh
I
n the past one and a half decade, a wide, strong historiography has been
set forth around the question of transnational historical phenomena,
either of the ‘Black Atlantic’, the ‘Indian Ocean’, or even that of the various
‘Empires’. If, on the one hand, such approaches are salutary, inasmuch as
they advance an integrated view of those spaces as well as the processes
which shaped them, on the other hand they often end up assuming a perspective not really far from an ‘Imperial History’, and even from certain
nostalgics of an imperial past forever lost, but whose ashes are at times
lightened again by nationalist projects that intellectuals in quest of scarcer
and scarcer research grants eagerly embrace.
Many would do it by mere opportunism, others because they do share
the tenets of such projects, while yet others aim at widening the analytical and interpretative dimensions of their studies. Roughly, those different
reasons produce, in my opinion, results of different depths. The first bring
about superficial, factual works, though allegedly objective; the second
produce chauvinistic interpretations, either straight or elegantly concealed.
The third achieve meticulous and long-ranged results, many of which, albeit
unawarely, will actually end up contributing to strengthen the role of the
European as the only central actor in the drama, to the detriment of all
others. At times, the very process is taken as the dynamic historical agent.
In such a case, the object of study becomes the working of the imperial
system itself, a proceeding that does not take into account the fact that
Vald emi r Z ampa roni
every Empire is concretely exercised over specific groups, peoples and cultures. Not rarely, one seeks to outline the essential characters of one colonial
Empire or another in order to compare them, what tends not only to devalue
but rather to obscure the multiplicity of imperial practices and constitutions
brought on by their clashing with different peoples and cultures.
While it is true that the notion of ‘Empire’ corresponded to a historical
reality and therefore can be useful for heuristic effects, it carries along this
hidden trap, for ignoring the concreteness and subsuming its very existence
cannot but lead to a search for models of imperial action. Such an attitude
will after all amount to a Eurocentric bias, even when the original intention
was to criticize it. It is not enough to be on the side of the ‘colonized’. Only
the study of the multiple confrontations—some, in a disturbing euphemism,
would prefer to say ‘encounters’—between the imperial action and each of
the societies involved, with its irreducible specificity, will permit to supersede
this approach. One could argue, I know, that this not really new proposal
embeds the danger of an undesirable enshrinement of the old Positivist
narrative. Far be it from me to pursuit such a goal. What I aim is neither
to address the racist practices of the Portuguese Empire as a whole, nor to
assemble analytical models, but rather to understand the specific patterns
the Portuguese colonial action fashioned in the building of racial identities
in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique, between 1880 and 1940.
These crucial years cover both the period of theoretical elaboration of a
colonial model to be applied in Africa as well as, and above all, the period of
actual domination and the multiple attempts made at realising such models.
The military campaigns may have been spectacular indeed, from the point
of view either of the contemporary, or of historians who allow themselves to
be carried away by the sound of canon shots and fooled by the smoke screen
raised. Yet this was not the most relevant conflict to oppose Europeans and
Africans. While military conquest set the cornerstone of the new colonialism in African lands, by suppressing former sovereignties, the following
age of administrative occupation became the most critical and tense period
within this whole time span, as a result of the many attempts made by
colonial authorities to impose foreign values to the detriment of local ones.
These expedients gave way to the emergence of new sociabilities and caused
ultimately an irreversible reconfiguration of all social practices.
In Mozambique, and particularly in Lourenço Marques, this period
was profoundly conformed by administrative practices that envisaged a
legal and spatial constraining of a host of groups under markedly racial
premises. These practices, in their turn, originated anti-racist reactions on
20
Colonialism and the Creation of Racial Identities
the part of those targeted at. The urban space, conceived by the conquerors
as their own par excellence, was the privileged arena for these skirmishes.
Even before completing the military conquest of the territory, the
Portuguese colonial state started implanting its administrative machinery
in Mozambique, although not without sweat and difficulty. Face to the
irrelevant number of European settlers, along with the cultural diversity
existing on the ground (which included Africans, Chinese and Indians of
several origins), one of the European power’s concerns was the creation
of subordinate identities for the others, especially for the overwhelming
African population. A further concern was to draw identity lines between
this African mass and the few Africans who would be exempted from it.
The ultimate goal was to rule the life of these newly created social and
cultural categories in their relation with colonialism.
Thus, the several peoples brought under the colonial domination of
Portugal in the wide territory that was to become Mozambique had their
distinctive features ignored while of the constitution of the category of
indígenas. The diverse identifying features of these social groups, as the
several Asian identities, were reduced to the barest racial essentials. It was
racism that dictated the nature of relationships between the colonial state,
the colonial administrators, and these diverse, culturally distinct peoples.
The aim of this article is to reveal how the colonial authorities actually
exercised their prerogatives—official or otherwise—to create privileges
for the White minority and to establish exclusive non-White zones, apart
from creating confuse identities still nowadays entrenched in Mozambican social life.
The late nineteenth-century capitalism required the creation of a
labour force in the colonies permanently integrated into the productive
sphere. However, the market laws which customarily attained this objective in Europe had no effect in the colonies face to the local context. In the
opinion of colonial theorists, the only way to advance production in the
colonies was to force the non-European peoples into it as soon as effective
domination had been laid down. Nevertheless, the establishment of distinctive identities for the ‘others’ was necessary in order to the domination
to be exercised without judicial cumbers. The old liberal law was no longer
useful—it had been shaped in a time Europeans had limited mastery over
lands and populations, and had little impact on African colonies since its
practical effects varied according to the degree of individual insertion into
the colonizer restrained political and cultural space. In any case, the liberal
legislation was assailed in favour of another, which should consider ‘the
matter under the “utilitarian” and “practical” point of view of the interests
21
Vald emi r Z ampa roni
and urgent needs of the colonial administration and its progress’ (Ribeiro,
1946: 157). One of the toughest anti-liberals of this period was Oliveira
Martins, who, in a work published in 1880, vituperated, based on the widespread philosophical and scientific theories of the time and mixing the
expected positivist objectiveness with the cruelty of capitalist interests:
Documents certainly abound to show that the Negro is an
anthropologically inferior being, not rarely in close relation to
the anthropoid and hardly worthy of being called human. The
transition from one to another is evidenced, as is well known,
in several features: the increase in the capacity of the cerebral
cavity, the converse decrease of the cranium and the face, the
resulting widening of the facial angle, and the location of the
occipital orifice. In all these marks, the Negroes find themselves
placed in between the human and the anthropoid. (Martins,
1920: 284-5)1
Would not this be enough, argued Oliveira Martins, to demonstrate
the impossibility of ‘civilising’ the ‘savages’? The liberal, Enlightenmentinspired thesis that education was the way by which the Negro could be
‘civilised’, or, in other words, could become a true human by adopting
European values (conceived as universal ones), was regarded by Oliveira
Martins as ‘absurd, not only before History but also before the mental
capacity of these inferior races’ (Martins, 1920: 286). It was an illusion to
believe in the possibility of civilising Negroes with the aid of the Bible,
education, and cotton clothes, for ‘all history has proven that it is only by
force that barbaric peoples can be educated’ (Martins, 1920: 283). Such a
discourse went to sustain a new perspective of the racial and social relationships in the colonies, since, until then, it was possible to find in the
colonial society some racial mixture, with Mulatto families enjoying some
economic prestige and power. (Cirne, 1990: 40, 526; Neves, 1878: 202) It
sought to impute racial and social inequalities to the natural order of things,
making it impossible to extend any rights whatsoever to the non-White
population. The Africans could not be civilised because they were innately
inferior, and could not bear any rights because they were uncivilised. The
infernal circle that justified colonial domination was thus perfected. Even
those who believed that Portugal should ‘prepare the savages and enlighten
the spirit of the natives through instruction and interaction’ supported the
theses of Spencer. Faced with cultural disparities, they argued that before
trying to ‘level the laws’ it was necessary to ‘level the human beings’, in
order to make them share ‘the same feelings, customs and civilization’.
Once this situation, if feasible at all, could only be reached in ‘a very far
22
Colonialism and the Creation of Racial Identities
and undetermined future’, the Portuguese possessions needed ‘at least’ two
distinct “civil and political statutes”, one “European” and the other “indígena” (native)’ (Costa, 1946: 86). It is easy to see that this assertion, while
apparently laying far from an Eurocentric approach and seeming to aim
at defending the natives from an indiscriminate use of metropolitan laws,
disguise its intention to deprive the colonized from their citizenship rights
by establishing a distinctive and lowering identity for them, cleaning the
path to coercively obtain cheap labour force.
But if they were no citizens, who these just conquered Africans were?
Which place were they reserved in the colonial law and imaginary? Different acts and regulations sought to define the necessary features for the
creation of the indígena category. The first Portuguese colonial legislative
act that attempted a definition of whom would be classified as indígena
goes back to the last years of the nineteenth century, coinciding with the
campaign led by António Ennes pleading for the labour to be compulsory
for the indígenas of African colonies. The decree, promulgated on September 27 1894, instituted the punishment of public labour, applicable in
all Portuguese lands of Africa; its first clause reads that ‘only people born
overseas, from both indígena parents, and who cannot be distinguished
by enlightenment and customs from the common of their race, are to be
classified as indígenas’. The wording and form in which this act was written
shows the intention to apply the category in a restrictive manner (although
it did comprise the greatest majority of the population of the colonies), for
it exempted not only people with one non-indígena parent—half-castes,
for example—but also Africans whose enlightenment and behaviour were
distinct from the hegemonic social practices among Africans or somehow
closer to European values. Albeit shaped in a time when the ideas on
Physical Anthropology and social Darwinism were arising, the act did not
take into account the physical attributes of the individuals to characterise
them as indígenas. This was a sign of the social importance still held by
the half-caste group, because of their role, after the end of the slave trade,
as the middle men between the outdated Portuguese mercantile economy
and the African hinterland.
It is thus surprising that the same definition had been maintained in
the ‘Regulation of the Servants and Indígena Workers in the District of
Lourenço Marques’, published in 1904, eight years after the actual occupation of Mozambique (Colónia de Moçambique, 1904, art. 1). Soon after,
however, the ‘Provisional Law for the Concession of State Lands in the
Province of Mozambique’, passed in 1909, on addressing the land concessions to indígenas defines them as ‘coloured individuals, native of the Province and living therein, who, in their moral and intellectual development,
23
Vald emi r Z ampa roni
have not distanced themselves from the common of their race’ (Colónia
de Moçambique, 1909). The change, although rather slight, introduced an
element hitherto lacking: a physical attribute, namely the colour, became
the preliminary criterion of classification—and, no doubt, ‘coloured’ here
stands for all non-Whites, not only Blacks. Nonetheless, the Provisional
Law did not fix any specific criteria for determining which, among the
‘coloured individuals’ had attained the required moral and intellectual
development beyond ‘the common of their race’. Five years later, in 1914,
the ‘Regulation of Imports, Sales, Use and License of Firearms’ defined
as indígena not only the ones ‘whose both parents belong to the native
races of Africa’, but also those ‘who, bearing the physical characteristics of
such races cannot prove another descent’ (Colónia de Moçambique, 1914,
art. 14 §8) With relating descent and physical attributes, the biological
assumptions underlying the definition became more explicit. It exempted
only the half-castes who could prove their non-Black descent, in other
words, only those who had been officially acknowledged by their European
parents, which usually meant they would receive a European education.
As for the others, no social or cultural achievements could supersede the
biological barrier of this identity. Implicit in this regulation is the fear of a
larger number of Africans coming into possession of firearms.
All these discriminatory acts were received with opposition by the
emerging Black and Mulatto local petit bourgeoisie. They believed they
should not and must not allow that Portuguese subjects, ‘Black, White
or Yellow’, be ruled by especial enactments, and therefore the indígenas
should be obliged to ‘no law but [...] the ones that govern all Portuguese
in general’. This objection to any form of exception laws was manifested
as soon as the fourth issue of the newsletter O Africano (The African), in
1909 (OA, 24/04/1909), and it appeared recurrently thereafter. At times,
colonial officials stated that Portuguese law had to be adapted in order
to fit the cultural conditions of the indígenas, should their ‘customs and
traditions’ be preserved. On the other side, the local Black petit bourgeoisie,
especially its more influential leader, João Albasini, fought such proposals.
He charged colonial authorities and settlers of, in name of these customs
and traditions, refusing to teach the indígenas ‘morality, good conduct,
equity and justice’, or even ‘to work and “be human”, whereas they shut
their eyes to the practices of incest, adultery, dowry rackets, male domination and female enslavement’. He argued further that the hut tax, forced
labour, colonial wine, and military recruitment did not figure as part of
these ‘customs and traditions’, but were imposed all the same upon the
indígenas for the benefit of the Whites. The introduction of especial laws
for the indígenas, Albasini believed, was only meant to ‘keep the little Black
24
Colonialism and the Creation of Racial Identities
halted in the same spot: forever an animal, forever ignorant’. This was, he
used to say, the best means to assure the superiority of the colonists (OA,
24/11/1911; 01/12/1911; cf. OBA, 30/09/1922).
In spite of having undertaken such protests, the local petit bourgeoisie
ranks have not had their rights directly touched by these acts, and at least
their most prestigious members, namely the half-castes, were granted some
form of immunity and enjoyed the general citizenship rights. Yet this situation did not last long. The 1917 Provincial Act 317 regarded as indígenas
‘those of Black race or descendant therefrom who cannot be distinguished
by enlightenment and customs from the common of that race’(Colónia de
Moçambique, 1917, art. 1), thus reiterating the same terms used in the 1894
decree, which had introduced the clause on ‘enlightenment and customs’
as a distinctive issue. Nevertheless, this new act entailed renewed protests
from the local petit bourgeoisie, inasmuch as, contrarily to the previous legislation, it enumerated a series of requirements that had to be completely
fulfilled before any non-European or non-Asian individual would cease to
be reckoned as indígena before the law and would be regarded as assimilados, or assimilated to the Europeans Henceforth, one would have to bear
an especial identity card, the alvará, in order to prove one’s exemption to
the treatment reserved for indígenas.
This Provincial Act only considered as assimilated (italics in the original) to the Europeans the individual of Black race or Black descent who
had abandoned wholly the customs and traditions of his race, were able to
speak, read and write Portuguese, adopted monogamy, who had a profession, art or office compatible with ‘European civilisation’ or who ‘earned
by licit means’ enough to feed, maintain, clothe and house himself and his
family. These demands were extremely rigid, and, if strictly enforced, very
few would have been the Blacks or even half-castes capable of meeting the
requirements. A good number of the Whites themselves would not be able
to fill the conditions, mainly because about a third of them were illiterate,
some engaged in barely concealed polygamy, and lots were unemployed
due to the economic crisis caused by World War I.
The half-caste children of non-indígena (what is to say, non-Black)
fathers, were not obliged to meet the requirements in order to receive the
alvará, but this privilege was valid only while they lived with their fathers,
or while they were interned in educational institutions. It was generally
took for granted that the acquaintance with a non-indígena father was
to inculcate into the child customs and behaviours conceived as civilised,
which conversely, if the father lacked, would be wasted. The situation of
intern on an educational institution on its side would secure that the child
25
Vald emi r Z ampa roni
would not only receive a European education but also that he would remain
shielded from the alleged cafrealising influences.2
But which would have been the reason behind the elaboration of this
act? Although administrative causes and local political concerns can be
stated (Moreira, 1984: 76, 102), I would assert that the most significant
motivation was to widen racism in colonial lands, which, increasingly,
pushed towards framing the natives into more fixed categories in order
to control and except them better. The act that introduced the assimilados
was not aimed at broadening citizenship rights, but instead to curtail them
to the least. The distinction it established between indígena and the newly
created social-racial category of assimilado did not intend to restrict the
rights of the immense African population which, having few contacts with
the colonial administration, had no need to have its members regarded as
citizens. It rather purposed to except from such rights the small portion
of Blacks and Mulattoes who had undergone some European education
and who could bring unquietness to the ‘spirits afraid of competition’ (OA,
07/08/1918).
It was not promulgated to sanction the exclusion of the great majority
of indígenas from the applicability of Portuguese laws, but rather to ensure
that such applicability would be granted to as few as possible (Soares &
Zamparoni, 1992: 133). It established new barriers between the indígenas
and the local petit bourgeoisie, comprising these learned Blacks and Mulattoes, in view of the fact that the old informal barriers had already lost their
efficacy and were no longer acceptable to the authorities. In an evermore
growing city, the identity of each individual was no longer a matter of interpersonal relationships. With the expansion of the market economy, the use
of European-style clothes, for example, was increasingly disseminating, and
this trustworthy clue of withdrawal from native ‘customs and traditions’,
that used to work as an informal borderline, made the number of indígenas
who somehow were granted some sort of citizenship rights seem dangerously enlarged. By means of the act, the colonial state pulled back the civil
rights enjoyed by this portion of the population as trusted by the social
practice, and reserved itself, by the formalisation of an appropriate juridical statute, the power to define the social locus and the mobility limits of
each individual. The imposition of the duty to carry the alvará turned to
be, in fact, a new version of the identifying plate which, sometime ago, all
Africans had been exacted to wear (Zamparoni, 1998a: 290-4). By creating
the official category of assimilados, supposedly bearers of rights, the colonial
government ended up isolating both politically and ideologically the ones
who fitted into the new category from the Whites, and, especially, from the
greater mass of indígenas, whom they used to think of as allies and protégés.
26
Colonialism and the Creation of Racial Identities
This contributed to hasten racial conflicts that already started to take shape
within the ranks of this local petit bourgeoisie.
Beside indígenas and assimilados, the Portuguese colonial administration in Lourenço Marques had to cope with people come in from elsewhere,
and sought to frame them into a racial classificatory plan that, in spite of
meant to be rigid, has turned to be quite elastic as the years went by. The
first census held in Lourenço Marques in 1894 grouped the population of
the town into the racial categories of brancos (Whites), indianos (Indians),
amarelos (Yellows) and negros (Negroes) (Reis, 1973). Under the following
one, held in 1912, the negros (Negroes) went to be called pretos (Blacks),
and the category indianos (Indians) gave place to pardos (Coloured). The
census did not specify undoubtedly who was to be included in each of the
categories, thereby making it difficult to determine, for instance, who the
pardos were. The fact is that it comprised Indians from both Portuguese
and British-controlled regions, but the Mulatto offspring of Black mothers
and White fathers were likely to be included as well (Azevedo, 1912).
In 1928, the ‘Non-indígena Population Census’ used another classification system made up of mixed racial, religious, national, and territorial
references (Colónia de Moçambique, 1930). It dropped the term pretos and
replaced it with africanos (Africans); amarelos was maintained to describe
the Chinese; but the category called pardos disappeared altogether, giving
way to two new categories. The category of indo-britânicos (Indo-British)
referred simultaneously to the origin, religion and colonial domination.
This category would suit the Hindus, popularly called baneanes. The category indo-portugueses (Indo-Portuguese) was built up in the same lines,
and would match the Indians from Portuguese-controlled territories, most
of whom were from Goa and were Catholics. The category brancos was
replaced by europeus (Europeans), however comprising not only Whites
born in Europe but also in the Americas or in Mozambique. At last,
another new category emerged to circumscribe the mixtos (half-caste),
whose composition is more difficult to sketch out because the mixture used
to come about from multiple combinations, involving parents enlisted in
each and every of the census categories. For sure, most were the offspring
of both mixto parents, followed by the children of White fathers and Black
mothers.3 The 1935 ‘Non-indígena Population Census’ excluded all Africans but the assimilados, and the one held in 1940 included africanos civilizados (civilised Africans) and left the remaining Africans off (Anuário,
1930; Anuário, 1936). The host of categories brought about by the censuses suggest a rational concern to frame the diverse cultural variations
and change them into social-racial identities. As such, they represented an
expression of a growing racism.
27
Vald emi r Z ampa roni
The White rulers and colonial masters harboured a strong racism not
just against the Blacks, but alike towards the other non-White groups
living in Lourenço Marques. The Asians as a whole were targeted at by the
oddest racist demonstrations (Zamparoni, 2000: 191-222). In Lourenço
Marques, beside the Africans, one of the most segregated communities was
that of the monhés. The epithet in itself already carried, as it still does today,
a deprecatory connotation and it was used as a popular designative for the
various cultural groups of Indian origin except that of the Goan Catholics
who sought to emulate the Europeans in their ways.4 The term comprised
baneanes, Hindus mainly from Gujarat, as well as Muslim mouros (Moors),
either from Oman or British-ruled India.5 In the Portuguese colonial
administrative records, the term monhé was not very usual. The distinction
was stated occasionally, but all Indians were ordinarily classified as asiáticos
(Asians), making it extremely difficult for historians to trace back such
social-racial categories.
These Asians arrived at Lourenço Marques whether as an unfolding
of trade enterprises that had been established in the northern coast for
centuries, or whether as a result of the economic links that brought the
town into contact with the neighbour Boer and British colonies, where,
from 1860 onwards, thousands of Indian coolies were brought in, somewhat
forcedly, to serve as workers in the sugar cane plantations (Leite, 1996: 1318; Freund, 1995). Along with the coolies came also, as voluntary migrants,
Muslim traders who spread throughout the provinces of present-day South
Africa. There, and especially in Transvaal, acts restraining the presence of
Indians passed from 1895 onwards helped to lead them into Mozambican
lands (Leite, 1996: 15-19).6 While in this Portuguese colony the prejudice was not lesser, the laws were not so restraining and, as soon as 1894,
the Asians summed up to 23 per cent of Lourenço Marques population.
Thereafter, this ratio steadily decreased, but the community kept growing
in absolute numbers (Reis, 1973: esp. annexes; Azevedo, 1912: 177-93;
Colónia de Moçambique, 1930).
Undoubtedly, one of the greatest detractors of the Asians was the
Royal Commissioner for Mozambique, António Ennes, who claimed in
his reports that European traders considered the Asians worse than an
invading ‘swarm of voracious grasshoppers’, for they would be worthless
even to ‘to fertilize the land they devastate’. His account about the Asians
were composed of a chain of racist assessments (ENNES, 1971 [1893]).
He sustained that Asians used to come to Lourenço Marques packed in
the ship decks amidst general flutter, frantic exotic music, and, in particular, animals amongst which they lived.
28
Colonialism and the Creation of Racial Identities
Their feeding habits were scanty and frugal, nothing more than ‘a
handful of rice boiled along with spicy drugs’. It is curious that the famous
oriental spices, the eagerness of which propelled the ‘glorious’ Portuguese
expansion so much prized by Ennes generation, could be turned into
‘drugs’ when the motive was to disapprove the Asians. Ennes found the
presence of these people unpleasant to the sight as well as to the smell;
they stubbornly refused to assimilate European values, what could be
proved by the fact they did not wear trousers, preferring to walk about the
streets ‘with their naked hairy legs, coming out from the wide wrinkles of
clothes that once have been white, dragging with haste their feet about
in slippers of undefined shapes, stepping in every trade, every industry,
every craft, and, so they say, every quiet plunder, in the coast as well as in
the country’. Thence they were unable to play the role of civilising factors
(Ennes, 1971—1893).
Ennes was of the opinion that the Asians, because of being born in
mangroves, on the tropics, were able to withstand the colony climate,
thereby having an advantage over the Europeans. Moreover, their religious
beliefs, their ‘ancestral customs’, and their rapacity provided them with a
protective shield against intemperance—something that could be fateful
for Europeans. These would have been the secrets of their commercial
success. Ennes admitted that Asians never hesitated to face the harshness
of trading in the inner country, traveling on foot, sleeping in the open air
or in rustic huts, sunburned or humid, eating whatever ‘the bush has to
offer or the Negroes waste’, and furthermore, ‘surrounded by half-savage
people who not seldom do rob and kill them’. In summary, they did endure
situations which would be unbearable for the Europeans, used to a life of
comfort and abundance.
According to Ennes, the Europeans lacked, above all, the tenacity and
the quietude with which the Asians bore the offenses made by the indígenas, the ‘ductility with which they accommodate to indígena customs,
the sagacity with which they pervade their defences, the twist in language
with which they explore the indígenas without exasperating them, robbing
them and yet leaving them contented’ (Ennes, 1971—1893). These words,
however, were not meant to be kind. The intent was to stress the rapacity
allegedly peculiar to the Asians. With living in the poorest conditions,
with no consumption habits and imbued with the eagerness to accumulate, they could sell and work for less than anyone else, saving meager rice
grains and turning them into capital, thereon multiplied by means of usury
(Ennes, 1971—1893).
29
Vald emi r Z ampa roni
Ennes sustained that, if some of them wore silk gowns and goldbraided waistcoats, it was certainly because such ‘showy stuffs’ had been in
the family for generations. Their shops were described as ‘badly-frequented
taverns’, where the owner and their attendants cohabited ‘in the company
of four poisonous reptiles [which] engender heat and filthiness, reptiles
the householder dare not kill because of his devotion, which at best he
takes delicately out so they can look for lodging elsewhere. The attendants
get food and almost nothing else’. Once the Asians ‘stuffed their pouch’,
they would sail back to India, ‘stretched out on the deck hatchway mixed
up with monkeys, and eating maybe the leftovers of that boiled rice with
which twenty years before they emigrated from the homeland of famine’
(Ennes, 1971 -1893).
According to this point of view the Asians were promiscuous—they
were associated, in the reporting officer’s mind, to the bestiary. Since they
live with animals one can infere they are similar to animals both in customs
and behaviour. However, in spite of nourishing a deep-rooted contempt
towards the Asians, Ennes, as the administrator he was, was forced to
acknowledge that Asians were a peaceful, obedient, apolitical population
which never begged, kept almost absent from police records, and never
made a single request to the colonial state. On the contrary, they contributed a good deal to the state revenue in form of customs taxes and had
pioneered the inner country markets, hence they could not be that nasty
that had to be expelled from the colony.
Ennes concludes, in an apparent contradiction with his earlier descriptions: ‘their sordid placidity shocks me less than the intemperance used
by settlers of races which repute themselves as advantaged’ (Ennes, 19711893). It would be too simple however if all the previous peroration were
but empty words. Inspired by Ennes a series of acts attempted to restrict the
mobility and presence of Asians in Mozambique (Zamparoni, 2000b).
Not having to nourish the state concerns which Ennes had to keep in
mind, Father Daniel da Cruz summarizes the current opinion in Mozambican colonial entourage about the ones he labels as ‘the Prophet fanatics’. He describes the physical characters in a manner and with a wording
current in the scientific circles then: ‘average height, full face, aquiline
nose, regular features, brown complexion, jet-coloured hair, slim and
flexible limbs’; next, he describes the clothes they usually wear, which he
finds weird especially by the particular that such people never wear socks.
Having described the physical type, in conformity with the proceedings
of the contemporary Anthropology, it starts to depict the environment in
which such people lived:
30
Colonialism and the Creation of Racial Identities
Their lodgings [are] tiny, filthy, without air or light, veritable
repellent dens where great number of people inhabit, usually
located in the most concealed, remote and forgotten sites, what
they do in order to make sordid savings. Together with endless
variety of merchandises they jam the household and the pallets,
and along the night it is on the bare pavement or the balcony,
over the goods, that boss and employees sleep.(Cruz, 1910:
305)
After portraying both the type and the environment, Father Cruz goes
on to describe what he regarded as distinguishing features of the Muslim
Asian temper and behaviour: ‘with a quite servile and flattering humour,
compelled by an unsatisfiable, stingy cupidity, they possess a remarkably
bashful psychology and a much degenerated temper. Astute and clever
in their small business, they develop extraordinary skills in filching every
little coin they hear jingle in the pocket of their indígena customers’ (Cruz,
1910: 305).
Father Cruz ends here the characterisation of this parcel of the Asians
and proceeds to address the baneanes, whom he regards as a ‘race much
lower than the preceding one’ for they are ‘usually of a smaller stature, have
small, rounded head, somewhat irregular features, tiny, black, sharp eyes, a
little flat, not expressive small nose, a much wheat-coloured, tarnish complexion, and a languid and effeminate look’. Having effected the physical
description, conduced irreproachably along the lines of the contemporary
scientific practices of the Physiognomy, Father Cruz affirms that the
baneanes’ abodes are still ‘more loathsome than those of the monhés [...],
without air or light, or cleanliness of any kind, actual focuses of diseases
and filthiness’. Living in such conditions, they must be of an ‘unmatched
sordidness’, as they ‘follow Buddha [which] prevents them to kill both
the cow, object of a particular worship, and the microscopic parasite that
tortures their bodies’. Once again, the depiction of the type and the environment is succeeded by comments about the temper of the baneanes. They
are considered as having ‘focused minds, as if they sought since now to
link themselves up to Nirvana, a very bashful Psychology and a sense of
morality inferior to that of the monhés’. They were indolent and apathetic,
and, maybe because of this, very peaceful and long-suffering. They became,
as a result, ‘not rarely victims of outrage and oppression by inhuman and
cruel colonists’ (Cruz, 1910: 305).
The qualifiers used both by António Ennes and Father Cruz leave no
room for doubts: within colonial imagery, these were sordid, astute, degenerate, covetous, stingy, avid, insatiable, languid, effeminate, repellent beings.
31
Vald emi r Z ampa roni
Worse, like animals, they lived in tiny, disgusting, filthy and unhealthy dens.
If a poet, journalist and colonial high official, on the one hand, and a priest,
on the other, both learned and enlightened, would describe in such terms
these people, it cannot be surprising that the rough and illiterate majority
of the colonists found it licit to assail them with insults and ascribe them
multiple faults.
Another minority, also marginalized, and that lived shut out from
others, were the chinas. It is not well known when the first group of the
Chinese reached Mozambique. The Chinese community was concentrated
in the cities of Beira and Lourenço Marques, where most of them worked
on construction sites, especially as carpenters. Yet the image generally held
of them in the popular mind, certainly influenced by the press, was that
they were farmers who used human excrement to fertilize their gardens,
thereby bringing public health at permanent risk. Those Chinese were
marginalised because they held on to their worships, their language, dress,
diet and their culture-specific social practices. Like the monhés and the
baneanes, they too were seen as servile, dirty and filthy, and, in spite of
their mastery in various handicrafts, were always bedeviled by the White
population of Lourenço Marques.
These racist images conceived by the White population about the
Asians were translated into concrete action by the colonial administration.
The Asians generally came to be regarded with mistrust each time an epidemic was announced in Lourenço Marques or in any of the surrounding
British colonies. In 1901, in view of being stated an outbreak of bubonic
plague in the neighbouring colony of the Cape, the Governor-General of
Mozambique created a Sanitary Police empowered to inspect all gardens,
hostels kitchens and eating houses, as well as ‘tenting of the Blacks, houses
of Moors, gentiles and baneanes’, apart from all houses with rooms for
rent, workplaces, food shops, brewing houses and drugstores. The colonial administration aimed particularly at Africans and Asians: the orders
enforced the demolishing of houses not meeting the required hygienic
conditions; specified that bedrooms should comply with a standard of at
least five square metres and twenty cubic metres for person; and expressly
forbade anyone to lodge in fabric or food stores. What is more, Asians
and indígenas whose housing conditions would represent a ‘risk to public
health’ could be removed and isolated. In 1907, a new epidemic threatened
the town, serving as another pretext for further racist measures, among
which the burning of huts considered suspicious and the restriction to the
freedom of movement of Africans and Asians. The Asians’ eating houses
taken as filthy were demolished; the burned huts gave room to authorised
buildings. In other words, both measures favoured the Whites. In colonial
32
Colonialism and the Creation of Racial Identities
Lourenço Marques Jews had been replaced by indígenas, chinas, monhés
and baneanes as the scapegoats for the invisible threats feared by European
imaginary. They endured every sort of persecution because of the plague of
India (Swanson, 1995: 25-42; Gregory, 1971).
Moreover, Africans and Asians were also discriminated against in
public transport, on beaches, and in other public places. In 1904, the
Regulation of Tramways, which had recently been introduced in Lourenço
Marques, affirmed that indígenas and Asians were only allowed to travel
in standing position within the small area reserved for them in the rear, or
hanging on to the wagons. According to the Regulation of Beaches, nonWhites were disallowed not only from using facilities like cafés, bars, etc.,
but also from swimming in the same areas as Whites. Still, these same nonWhites were supposed to contribute to the Commission for the Improvement
of the Beaches, which was ascribed 25 per cent of labour registration taxes
from indígena workers in Lourenço Marques, as well as 50 per cent of
the taxes paid by Asians workers (Colónia de Moçambique, 1910). These
discriminatory measures were met with strong protests from the journal
O Africano (06/12/1916), but the ban was kept. If the non-Whites wished
to swim, they would have to do it far, beyond the guard net, hazarding to
shark attacks.
In 1906, after a fierce campaign led by some organs of the media,
all interracial bars as well as all betting houses frequented by Blacks
were moved to the outskirts of the town (DN, 06/01/1906; 07/02/1906;
17/02/1906; 24/07/1906; 16/08/1906). The argument for this action was
that such establishments, generally known as cantinas and mostly run by
Asians, were hideouts for prostitutes, places of moral and physical degradation, and thus incompatible with the desired urban setting which was to
be modern and hygienic (Zamparoni, 2004: 125-135).
Indeed, racist practices pervaded all the daily activities of the town,
especially within the urban professional environment in which the typical
competitive mechanisms of a capitalist economy were not allowed to
operate. The distribution of functions and earnings in no way respected
individual ability or the quality of work; racial criteria based distinctive
ranges for the wages, performing a profound fragmentation within the
labour force, what prevented its several segments to converge (Zamparoni, 2000a: 147-74; 2002: 59-86). White industrial workers used to give
tongue to socialist-inspired, eloquent speeches, but the daily praxis of the
local workers’ movement was markedly racist whether against the Blacks
or whether against the Asians. They excluded Blacks and Mulattoes from
their salarial claims, urged for the institution of placement reserves for
33
Vald emi r Z ampa roni
Whites, and promoted public demonstrations in demand of expelling the
monhé traders, charged of promoting the scarcity and the high cost of living
(OE, 24/05/1920; 31/05/1920; Zamparoni, 1998a: 189-248; Capela, s/d).
Although the Indians had a sizeable representation in the trade, and
the Chinese were prominent in the field of civil construction, both communities did not take part in the associations that grouped together the
merchants, such as the Chamber of Commerce or the Association of Shop
Owners, as well as all others civil societies, class gatherings, charity and
recreational organizations or even political lobbying groups. Whether
excluded or self-segregated, the Muslims, the Hindus and the Chinese
created their own associations, in order to keep united before the aggressions, as well as to provide themselves with acquaintanceship opportunities that would further strengthen their cultural ties. Even the goeses, who
had a remarkable presence in the middle and top echelons of the colonial
administration, along with the other natives from Portuguese possessions
in India, most of whom were Christians and bore Portuguese names, were
discriminated against.
Yet the struggle for social inclusion and, most especially, for employment opportunities, carried on in conformity with the racial bases set
forth by colonialism, opposed not only Whites to Blacks and Mulattoes,
or Mulattoes against Blacks. At times, the Mulattoes gathered with the
Indians to forge a line against the Whites; soon after the parts would split
off and advance racist arguments against their erstwhile allies. The alliances
were unstable and not rarely fell onto the ground of personal interests,
since, in a community as small as Lourenço Marques, clientele and other
sorts of interpersonal relationship, along with racial-oriented solidarities,
were inherent features and tangling factors in the social setup.
O Africano, voice of the learned Blacks and Mulattoes, had sustained,
during the decade it was published (1908-1919), a frankly hostile position
against the Asians, regardless of their origin. Among other charges, the
newspaper accused them of refusing to nationalise themselves, that is, they
did not embrace European customs, Portuguese language and Catholic
religion; the baneanes besides embarked their earnings and riches back to
India (OA, 03/12/1913; 30/06/1915; 14/07/1915). This position seems to
have changed, at least regarding the indo-portugueses, with the creation of
the succeeding newspaper, O Brado Africano (The African Yell), in December 1918. This new orientation however did not last after 1921, when the
Mozambique-born candidate for the Portuguese Parliament, supported by
the newspaper and by the Grémio Africano (African Club), was not voted
for by the indo-portugueses, and namely by the goeses (OBA, 10/05/1919;
34
Colonialism and the Creation of Racial Identities
20/09/1919; 27/09/1919; 27/08/1921; MOREIRA, 1984: 128-36). This
caused O Brado Africano to insult the goeses, labelling them ‘canecada’ (a
deprecatory designative), and comparing them to parasites which lived on
the efforts of others. The journal stated they occupied posts that should be
reserved for the ‘native-born’, or the Blacks and Mulattoes who comprised
an emergent social class, whose interests were being restrained by stronger
opponents (OBA, 17/09/1921; 24/09/1921). The goeses were charged of,
unlike the Africans, being impervious to Western civilisation and absolutely intractable to acquainting to the Whites and adopting their customs.
That is why the journal called for the canarins and canecos to be ousted back
to India.
The canarins, whom, albeit we find repulsive, we do not hate,
would better canton and intrigue along with their fellow countrymen and carry their ‘patriotic’ demonstrations at the Mandovi
banks, for the sake of our land. Thus we would be free from
worthless neighbours and from the danger of their poisonous
slaver. [...] Africa for the Africans and for the races which further
its civilisation, and India for the Indians with their ‘typical civilisation’, that is the point. (OBA, 05/11/1921)
Blacks and Mulattoes found themselves hedged in by Whites and indoportugueses on their struggle for social opportunities and employment. They
hit out at both sides, but, preferentially, at the weaker. In doing so they sought,
and attained, support from some Whites. Thus, for months, lots of editorials were published with headlines reading ‘Sweeping the Dirt’, or ‘Back to
India, Scum’, in which the Indians were labeled ‘infamous, damned rabble’.
The newspaper assumed a reactionary and straightly racist line, which once
it had fought, in a time when it appealed to the empire of the rights and
individual values, and execrated the racial and colour criteria as a guideline for
social inclusion (OBA, 22/10/1921; 29/10/1921; 05/11/1921; 19/11/1921;
03/12/1921; 17/12/1921; 07/01/1922).
A few years later, the learned Blacks and Mulattoes and Indians allied
once again to counter State-sponsored discriminations and racist practices,
as was the case in 1926, when the local Bishop and officials endorsed the
institution of a European College, to be maintained with public funds,
but from which all non-Whites were excluded. In protest against this, the
general population (Blacks, Mulattoes and Indian Christians) stopped
making financial contributions at masses, and instead started slotting into
the offering collection boxes letters of criticism against such moves (BDA,
31/07/1926; BA, 07/08/1926; OBA, 28/08/1926, 13/10/1928; 1932
35
Vald emi r Z ampa roni
virtually all issues). In 1930, a new crisis further strengthened the antiracist ties that united the two communities. The Town Council sought to
give legal backing to the creation of a placement reserve for the White
workers (Colónia de Moçambique, 1930). A cry was immediately raised
against this measure, which attempted to establish a ‘hateful colour selection, denounced by the public demonstrations and by the Republic’. They
called on the White socialist workers for solidarity, evoking the ‘egalitarian
principle of right to sun and rain for both saints and sinners, Coloured
and Whites alike’ (OBA, 21/06/1930). A vain hope indeed. The White
workers, who were the main beneficiaries of such a privilege, turned a deaf
ear to such calls.
However, in this employment rush, yet another category emerged,
apart from the traditional colour divisions of negros / mulatos / africanos,
indianos / goeses / monhés, chinas / amarelos, and europeus / brancos: the category of naturais da colónia (colony naturals). This term had been used in
the 1920s to refer to Negroes and half-castes born on Mozambican soil
(OBA, 17/09/1921; 24/09/1921; 21/07/1928; 24/01/1931), but there was
another kind of naturais da colónia who were not Negroes nor half-castes—
these were the White offspring of European settlers who, as early as 1928,
already made up one-third of the White population of Lourenço Marques
(Colónia de Moçambique, 1930: 309-10). This group found itself in a sui
generis condition, given that all colonial legislation regarded ‘Europeans’
and not ‘Whites’—if strictly applied, this segment of the White society
would not be entitled to the privileges enjoyed by those who were born in
the metropolis. Actually both terms, ‘Europeans’ and ‘Whites’, have always
been taken as equivalents, either by official agencies—as proved by the population censuses—either by the general population in their daily practices.
The matter of dissociating ‘Europeans’ from ‘Whites’, and of defining who
should be considered naturais, was only raised in face of the 1930s crisis.
The Liga de Defeza e Propaganda da Colónia de Moçambique (League for
the Defence and Promotion of the Colony of Mozambique) cabled Lisbon
claiming that the administrative posts should be filled preferentially by the
naturais who were sons of settlers, and not by the naturais in general (CA,
25/02/1933).7 The Blacks and Mulattoes asked the Government not to pass
such an act, for the situation on the ground was already bad since they were
‘excepted not by law, but by a covert policy that seems to be held against the
natives’ (OBA, 15/04/1933). Needless to say, it was a lost cause right from
the beginning.
In conclusion, one could safely attest that along the period under study
the racial classification was the basis upon which the Portuguese colonial
practices in Mozambique relied, as well as the guideline for the colonial
36
Colonialism and the Creation of Racial Identities
policies targeted at the several cultural groups present on the ground.
This pseudo-scientific classification framed hierarchically the non-White
population, conceived as a cumber to the full achievement of the allegedly moderniser colonial project, once they did not share the same cultural
patterns as Europeans: part of them lived in huts; cooked and ate, with
their own hands, weird meals; were organised into unlike kinship patterns;
had different moral references; exercised workmanships and professional
practices which neglected the juridically established standards; dressed in
an exotic manner in the opinion of European observers; devoted to worships and recreations regarded as suspicious—in short, their behaviour was
considered unacceptable, for it did not comply to the good customs and
morals required by European culture. The presence of Africans and Asians
in the town was a mere necessity—tolerated, but not desired—and should
be kept distance as much as possible. They should be put out of sight, disciplined or, at least, excepted from citizenship rights. In the urban area the
race and colour hierarchy was translated into a spacial segregation of the
bodies, and brought about the conditions and hygienic attitudes aimed at
building a world in which each thing, creature and body was to be put in its
proper place (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1992: 64). Living quarters, schools,
cinemas, tramways, beaches, bars, hotels, job placements, and even queues
were separated more or less rigidly along the racial lines drawn by the
coloniser power. And this remained so until colonialism was defeated by
the force of arms. But that is another story altogether.
37
Vald emi r Z ampa roni
Figure 1: Rua da Gávea, 1920’s (the neighbourhood of the Islamic
community). Source: Agência Geral do Ultramar.
Figure 2: Article on ‘lobolo’, from the
newspaper O Africano
38
Colonialism and the Creation of Racial Identities
Figure 3: Article from O Africano
39
Vald emi r Z ampa roni
Figure 4: O Africano
References
Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique (AHM), Direção de Serviços e Negócios
Indígenas (DSNI), Secção E, Instrução e Cultos, cx. 1292, Proc. 39/A, ano
1911, “Informação do Intendente de Negócios Indígenas e Emigração ao
Governador Geral,” 20/03/1911.
Lobato, Alexandre. (1970). Lourenço Marques, Xilunguíne. Lisboa: Agência Geral
do Ultramar.
Ennes, Antônio José. (1971). Moçambique: Relatório apresentado ao Governo. 4. ed.
Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional / Agência Geral do Ultramar.
Anuário Estatístico da Colónia de Moçambique. (1930). Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional.
Anuário Estatístico da Colónia de Moçambique. (1936). Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional.
Lopes, Armando Jorge. (2002). Moçambicanismos. Para um Léxico dos Usos do Português Moçambicano. Maputo: Livraria Universitária/UEM.
Ribeiro, Artur R. de Almeida. (1946). “Descentralização na Legislação e na Administração das Colônias” in: Antologia Colonial Portuguesa. Lisboa: Agência
Geral das Colônias, v. I: 149-162.
Freund, Bill. (1995). Insiders and Outsiders: The Indian Working Class of Durban,
1910–1990. Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Reis, Carlos Santos. (1973). A População de Lourenço Marques em 1894 (um censo
inédito). Lisboa: Centro de Estudos Demográficos - Instituto Nacional de
Estatística.
Colónia de Moçambique. Repartição de Estatítica. (1930). Censo da população não
indígena em 1928. Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional.
——. (1942). “Censo da População em 1940.” Lourenço Marques: Imprensa
Nacional.
Costa, Eduardo da. (1946). Princípios de Administração Colonial. Antologia Colonial
Portuguesa. Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colônias v. I: 79-96.
Daniel da Cruz, Pe. (1910). Em terras de Gaza. Porto: Gazeta das Aldeias.
Neves, Diocleciano Fernandes das. (1878). Itinerário de uma viagem à caça dos elefantes. Lisboa: Typographia Universal.
Ferreira, Rita. (1985). “Moçambique e os naturais da Índia portuguesa.” Seminário
Internacional de História Indo-Portuguesa. Lisboa: Instituto de Investigação
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Colonialism and the Creation of Racial Identities
Científica Tropical / Centro de Estudos de História e Cartografia Antiga,
v. II: 615-648.
Gregory, R.G. (1971). India and East Africa: A History of Race Relations within the
British Empire, 1880–1939. Oxford: Clarendon.
Azevedo, Guilherme de. (1912). Relatório sobre os trabalhos do recenseamento da
população de Lourenço Marques e Subúrbios, referido ao dia 1 de Dezembro de
1912.
Martins, J. P. de Oliveira. (1920). O Brazil e as Colónias Portuguezas. 5. ed. aumentada, Lisboa: Parceria Antonio Maria Pereira.
Jean Comaroff & John L. Comaroff. (1992). “Home-Made Hegemony: Modernity, Domesticity and Colonialism in South África”, in Karen Tranberg
Hansen (ed.). African Encounters with Domesticity. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press: 37-74.
Leite, Joana Pereira. (1996). “Em torno da presença indiana em Moçambique
- séc. XIX e primeiras décadas da época colonial.” IV Congresso Luso-AfroBrasileiro de Ciências Sociais. Rio de Janeiro: IFCS/UFRJ, 02 a 05/09/1996.
Capela, José. s/d. O Movimento Operário em Lourenço Marques, 1898-1927. Porto:
Afrontamento.
Moreira, José. (1984). A luta de Classes em Lourenço Marques 1900-1922. BA Long
Essay: Universidade Eduardo Mondlane.
Machado, José Pedro. (1977). Dicionário Etimológico da Língua Portuguesa. 3. ed..
Lisboa: Livraria Horizontes.
Antunes, Luís Frederico Dias. (1992). A Companhia dos Baneanes de Diu em
Moçambique (1686-1777). MA. Dissertation, Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
Cirne, Manuel Joaquim Mendes de Vasconcelos e. (1990). Memória sobre a Província de Moçambique. 2. ed. Maputo: Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique.
Swanson, Maynard W. (1995). “The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic plague and
urban native policy in the Cape Colony, 1900-09,” in William Beinart and
Saul Dubow (eds.). Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South
Africa. London: Routledge: 25-42.
Soares, Paulo & Zamparoni, Valdemir. (1992). “Antologia de textos do jornal O
Africano (1908-1919).” Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 22, set.: 127-178.
Zamparoni, Valdemir. (1998). Entre narros & mulungos: colonialismo e paisagem
social em Lourenço Marques, c.1890-c.1940. PhD thesis: Universidade de São
Paulo.
——. (2000a). “Gênero e trabalho doméstico numa sociedade colonial: Lourenço
Marques, Moçambique, c. 1900-1940.” Afro-Ásia 23:147-174.
——. (2000b). “Monhés, Baneanes, Chinas e Afro-maometanos: colonialismo
e racismo em Lourenço Marques, Moçambique, 1890–1940.” in Michel
Cahen (ed.). Lusophonies asiatiques, Asiatiques en lusophonies. Paris: Karthala:
191-222.
——. (2002). “Trabalho, raça e classe no contexto colonial de Lourenço Marques,
Moçambique, c. 1890–1940.” Stvdia: 61-88.
41
Vald emi r Z ampa roni
——. (2004). “Copos e Corpos: a disciplinarização do prazer em terras coloniais.”
Travessias 4/5: 119-137.
Newspapers
O Africano (OA)
Brado Africano (BA)
O Brado Africano (OBA)
Brado do Africano (BDA)
Clamor Africano (CA)
Diário de Notícias (DN)
O Emancipador (OE)
Legislative Acts
Colónia de Moçambique, “Regulamento de Serviçaes e Trabalhadores Indígenas
no Distrito de Lourenço Marques”, Decreto de 09/09/1904. Boletim Oficial,
n. 45, 1904.
Colónia de Moçambique, “Regimem Provisório para a Concessão de Terrenos
do Estado na Província de Moçambique”, Decreto de 09/07/1909. Boletim
Oficial, n. 35, 1909.
Colónia de Moçambique, “Regulamento da Commissão de Melhoramento das
Praias de Lourenço Marques” Portaria Provincial 874 de 03/11/1910. Boletim
Official, n. 45, 1910.
Colónia de Moçambique, “Regulamento para Importação, Venda, Uso e Porte de
Armas de Fogo”, Portaria Provincial 2.292 de 07/12/1914. Boletim Oficial, n.
51, 1914.
Colónia de Moçambique, Portaria Provincial 317, Boletim Oficial, n. 02, 1917.
Colónia de Moçambique, Boletim Oficial, n. 20, 1930.
Notes
1.
2.
J. P. de Oliveira Martins authored a wide academic work. He was founder
and president of the Sociedade de Geografia Comercial do Porto (Society of
Commercial Geography of Porto). He also was one of the founders of the
Cia. de Moçambique (Mozambique Company). His ideas echoed in the one
of the founders of the Cia. de Moçambique (Mozambique Company). His
ideas echoed in the twentieth century. See AHM/DSNI (20/03/1911).
Cafre, in Portuguese as in English, comes from the Arabic kafr, infidel. In
all three languages the word came to mean the Black Africans in general,
and especially the Bantu-speaking people, as a result of the contemporary
Anthropology taking the term as a subdivision of the Black race. As for the
Portuguese colonial universe, it was generally acknowledged that one could
42
Colonialism and the Creation of Racial Identities
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
actually become like a ‘cafre’, in terms of customs, if acquainted for long to
Africans, hence the verb cafrealizar and the derived adjective cafrealizante,
translated here as the neologism cafrealising (NT).
The 1940 census offers an interesting perspective on the patterns of miscegenation in the Mozambican colony, classifying the half-castes according
to age groups and the racial origins of their father and mother, Colónia de
Moçambique (1942: 151-7).
Lopes (2002: 108) states that “the origin of the word seems to be the Bantu
mwenye (from Ciyao, or Cinyanja, or Emakhuwa), meaning lord, master,
someone who owns goods and honor, and therefore deserves some deference”. This confirms Cruz (1910: 302).
In the Sanskrit language, banij means commerce, vanij means trader, and
vanij-jana means businessman; in the Gujarati language, vãniyãn means
trader, which seems to be the origin of the word baneane (Machado, 1977:
371). The baneanes were members of the vanias cast (i.e. váixias of the Veda
period), used to follow certain dietary codes and marriage customs, and
were totally dedicated to the pursuit of commercial activities. The Indian
mouros are distinct from the Omanian mouros, although both are Sunnis.
Both groups came from Muslim British India, specifically from the Gujarat
region. For a good summary of the long history of the Indian presence in
Mozambique, see Ferreira (1985: 616-48); a more recent sketch can be found
in Antunes (1992). See also Cirne (1990: 38-40, 66), Lobato (1970: 198) and
Leite (1996).
Indian Immigration (Amendment) Act of 1895; Cape Immigration Act of
1902 and 1906; Transvaal Immigrants Restriction Act of 1907; Immigration
Act of 1908 and its Amendment in 1911; Union Immigrants Regulation
Acts of 1913 and the 1921 and 1922 Amendments.
The newsletter Clamor Africano was only put out for two months, to replace
O Brado Africano, whose publication had been suspended by a court order.
43
Chapter 2
Every House has a Story:
The Archaeology of Gorée
Island, Sénégal
Ibrahima Thiaw
gh
T
he history of Gorée Island is tightly intertwined with that of the
Atlantic system and its corollary, the infamous slave trade. Gorée is
mainly known for its slave warehouse or Maison des Esclaves, which, for
many, stands as a living testimony to the horrors of the Atlantic traffic
in human commodity. In the course of the past four decades, Gorée has
become a veritable ‘lieu de mémoire’ and a powerful symbol in African
and African American memories of the Atlantic slave trade (Nora, 1984).
However, even people of non-African descent, including the Portuguese,
the Dutch, the French, the British, some European Americans and many
others, have memory links to the island. The affective and emotional relations that these different groups have with Gorée and the Maison des
Esclaves vary considerably. As a result, the island is a forum where memories and representations are constantly contested.
From the fifteenth century onwards, Gorée was involved in processes of a global magnitude leading to the formation of a transnational
and trans-ethnic community. Today, historical productions on the island
revolve around the slave warehouse and the role and significance of the
island in the transatlantic commerce. The number of slaves on the island is
used as a measure to evaluate the impact and consequences of the Atlantic contact on Gorean society, the Senegambia, and beyond (Barry, 1998;
Bathily, 1989; Becker, 1986; Curtin, 1969). Too often, the resulting debate
is controversial and politically charged as it is embroiled in black-and-
I b r ahima Thiaw
Figure 1: Early 18th Century map of Gorée (B. L’aine, 1725)
white divides, and enmeshed in memory discourses in which racial issues
resonate with a unique intensity (Barry, 1998; Bathily, 1989; Becker, 1986;
Curtin, 1969; Roux, 1996; Samb, 1997).
Evaluation of the impact of the Atlantic system on African societies,
important as it is, cannot be reduced to a mere statistical equation (Becker,
1997; Thioub and Bocoum 1997: 209). Although efforts to quantify the
number of slaves drawn from the Senegambia and those who had transited through Gorée or elsewhere are relevant, the impact of the Atlantic
slave trade on African societies at large was so varied and so profound that
demographic calculations alone cannot permit one to grasp its importance.
Additionally, evaluations of the impact must consider pre-contact contexts
to gauge the nature, the magnitude, and the trajectories of change from the
pre- to the post-Atlantic periods (Lightfoot, 1995; McIntosh and Thiaw,
2002; Thiaw, 1999).
Since 2001 I have initiated an ambitious programme of archaeological
and archival research on Gorée to evaluate the role and significance of
the island in the Atlantic commerce (Figure 1). Although work was not
possible in the Maison des Esclaves, several other houses, house courtyards
and public lands were investigated, permitting one to gain insights into the
quotidian life on the island over the past five hundred years and beyond.
Evidence on trade, artisanal activities, subsistence economy, material
culture, mortuary practices, refuse disposal, and site layout and settlement,
was used to examine the nature and changing patterns of the lifestyle and
interactions of all groups, including those marginalized in documentary
and other textual sources. The data accumulated permit one to develop
initial insights into how race, class, gender and identity, all elements that
were seminal to the expanding Atlantic world, were defined and nego46
Every H o u se has a S t o ry
tiated through material culture and settlement. Through archaeological
excavations, surveying and testing, a large body of data was collected to
supplement documentary and other textual sources.
The first section of the article analyses the politics of memory in Gorée
in relation to historical production on the slave trade, racial identity and
nationhood to elucidate some of the processes involved in memory selection. Racial rhetoric dominates in the narratives of the Atlantic experience
and the perspectives it offers are too general, with little concern paid to
historical processes at the local level.
The second section of the article examines historical processes in
Gorée in the light of available archaeological and documentary sources.
This section explores the possibilities of writing a more inclusive history
of Gorée, which would focus on local processes and which would take
into account the life experiences of all groups, including those traditionally
marginalized in the historical sources. We follow a long-term perspective that considers both pre- and post-Atlantic periods, permitting us
to evaluate how the pre-European settlement was impacted by changes
brought about by the Europeans. The study of post-Atlantic interactions
between the different nationalities and ethnicities shows the multiplicity
and complexity of historical processes, especially as Gorée became a plural
community.
Politics of memory and historical
production in Gorée
I begin this section with the story of a courageous Gorean woman
of slave descent. While doing fieldwork on the island during the 2002
field season, one of my students who was working on Gorean populations
came across a woman who confided in him about her slave origins (Samba
Gaye, oral communication in preparation). She claimed to have found evidence for this in the Town of Gorée archives where she works. Although
there are success stories among slaves and slave-descent people in Gorée
(Hinchman, 2000), both she and her parents never had a place of their own
and still squat in abandoned old buildings.
The story is incredible because it is extremely rare that people of slave
descent come freely forward to claim their slave origin. Part of the problem,
says Klein (1989), is that in most of West Africa, status is ascribed and, in
contrast to African American slave descendants, people of slave descent in
West Africa are stuck in the social categories traditionally assigned to them.
As a result, they are either silent about or knowingly deny their origins, and
therefore remain essentially a ‘people without history’ (Wolf, 1982).
47
I b r ahima Thiaw
Figure 2: Maison d’Anne Colas, actual Maison des Eslaves (Adolphe
d’Hastrel, 19th Century, in Hinchman 2000: 368)
In telling her story, this woman broke the silence, and in doing so she
demanded to be incorporated into Gorean historical reconstructions of
which she was a part but from which she has been excluded. How many
women and men of slave descent with links to Gorée are still out there?
Census data from the second half of the eighteenth century until emancipation in 1848 strongly indicate that domestic slaves largely dominated
in the island’s populations (Andanson, 1763 in Martin and Becker 1980,
ANS 1767-3G2/123; Golbéry 1802, ANS 1847-3G2/182; Searing, 1993).
The signares (free Afro-European and African women) and the habitants
(free Afro-Europeans and Africans) owned many domestic slaves who
they rented to Europeans, who in turn employed them as boatmen, skilled
labourers, domestics, soldiers, etc.
The Maison des Esclaves is a site of intense historical production where
memory is viewed either as racial politics or moral consciousness (Figure
2). However, historical production is not amenable to the same scrutiny as
historical scholarship (Austen, 2001). There are very few or no references
to domestic slavery. Too often, narratives are presented as if slavery was
concerned primarily with African American Diasporas and as if all slavers
were Whites/Europeans.
This perspective—which selects what we ought to remember about
our past—was inspired by pan-African identity concerns of the Negritude
movement of the interwar period (Thiaw in press). It offered meta-narratives
to liberate and unite Africans and African-descent people worldwide and
inspire a brighter future than the Atlantic experience, which was marked by
the enslavement of many Africans. As Brooks (1993: 220 in Blake 1999:
48
Every H o u se has a S t o ry
423) pointed out in the case of American history, the past was viewed as a
‘usable’ resource that ‘yields only what we are able to look for in it’.
Gorée was an ideal laboratory for the post-colonial project of Negritude as defined by President Senghor, and in which the themes of resistance and the goals of the colonial builders of the nation were equally
promoted (Diouf, 2001; Thioub, 2002). Senghor’s goal was to achieve a
mixed culture combining elements of African and Western civilizations in
order to usher Sénégal among the ranks of the Big Nations of World Civilization (Thiaw, 2002). Most streets maintained their colonial names, like
Boufflers, Saint Germain, Malavois, etc. As early as the nineteenth century,
light-skin-coloured signares (free Afro-European and African women),
who were later celebrated by Senghor in his poems, were portrayed as the
prototype of the ideal Senegalese woman both for their beauty and their
virtue (Boilat, 1984). The rue Bambara (Bambara street), the Bambara or
slave quarter, and the Maison des Esclaves are some of the rare evidence of
the African presence on the island. Too often, the relation between blackness and slavery is implicitly invoked.
The Maison des Esclaves, born out of the struggle for national and
pan-African freedom and independence, aimed to commemorate the
tragedy of the slave trade. It is not the actual conservator Joseph Ndiaye, as
some have assumed, but more likely European expatriate researchers based
at the former Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, now Institut Fondamental
d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), who first identified the Maison des Esclaves. In
1954–5, the Maison des Esclaves was a house in ruins, and restoration was
carried out in the early 1960s (Cariou, 1955; Mauny, 1954). Gorée was
recognized as a site of historic importance, leading to its classification as
a national commemorative site by the colonial regime in 1944 (Mauny,
1954; Toupet, 1957).
The conservator Joseph Ndiaye, a former soldier in the French army,
entered the picture only in the early 1960s (Hinchman, 2000). Thanks to
his excellent performance as an orator, Ndiaye played a critical role in publicizing the Maison des Esclaves. The inclusion of Gorée in the UNESCO
world heritage patrimony in 1978 bestowed a worldwide reputation on
the site. This was followed by visits to the site by well-known personalities from the 1980s onwards, including Pope John Paul II, Jesse Jackson,
Nelson Mandela, François Mitterand, Bill Clinton, Stevie Wonder, etc.
(Hinchman, 2000: 318).
In making history in the Maison des Esclaves, Ndiaye was probably
inspired by the romantic and spiritual view of the past, particularly views
of the Negritude and pan-Africanist thinking that were quite à la mode
49
I b r ahima Thiaw
before and during the early years of independence. His historical reconstruction is concerned primarily with European slavers, transit slaves, the
middle passage, and the life experiences of slaves in the plantations of the
Americas. This perspective—which says very little about the everyday life
and the interactions between free and enslaved African men and women
and ordinary European expatriates who lived on the island—diverts us
from the real-life stories of the Goreans. Ndiaye’s narrative certainly has
different effects on different visitors. Many African and African-descent
people come out feeling embittered and emotionally shaken, while some
European-descent people feel that they are being blamed for a past for
which they are not responsible. Many other Africans, however, like the
Gorean woman of slave descent, may feel excluded as Ndiaye’s story
begins with a description of the horrifying condition of transit slaves in
the Maison des Esclaves and ends with the drama of exile, misery, overexploitation and gruesome death in the sugarcane and tobacco plantations
of the Americas.
In Gorée, transit slaves were employed not only to load and unload ships
but also to break rocks, which were used to build many of the houses on
the island (Cariou, 1966). Domestic slaves included many master masons,
carpenters, smiths, etc., who used their knowledge and expertise to keep
the island prosperous. Therefore, the extraordinary life experiences and the
existence of both transit and domestic slaves must be considered in historical
studies.
Ndiaye’s perspective overly personalizes the Atlantic experience,
ignores the role of wealth and power in the internal dynamics and the
contradictions within Gorean society and beyond, and massages historical
facts to achieve that goal. It seems to me that this perspective is neither
preoccupied with the emotional well-being of visitors, nor is it inspired
by any sort of therapeutic concerns. Unprepared visitors from all sides are
confounded and come out troubled; they are at the mercy of the conservator, who while hitting at their souls at the same time also hits their pockets
(Hinchman, 2000: 318).
The problem with this approach to the past is that the Maison des
Esclaves and the island as a whole do not emerge out of a vacuum, but have
real histories that link them to the Atlantic experience. The Maison des
Esclaves was not an empty architectural carcass without life but instead
was filled with people who engaged in daily activities and interacted constantly with one another as well as with the broader world in multiple ways.
Unlike other monuments such as the projected Memorial of Gorée (Sall,
2002), the Eiffel Tower in Paris, or even the Statue of Liberty in New York
50
Every H o u se has a S t o ry
City, which were designed specifically for the purpose and were meant to
imbue specific symbolic meanings, the Maison des Esclaves and the island
of Gorée as a whole have real stories that linked them to the Atlantic slave
trade before they were elevated to the status of shrines symbolizing that
trade. This is why in Gorée Island any fiction cannot be admitted as history,
and why the stories of the conservator of the Maison des Esclaves, like any
other historical production, must be scrutinized.
Ndiaye claims that he is not a scholar, and we understand that talking to
tourists cannot be the same thing as holding university seminars. However,
his discourse is directed at thousands of local and foreign students who
come to Gorée every year to reconnect with a past that they did not know
about but that nevertheless haunts their memories. I understand that any
search for the truth is an unending quest and also that truth is too often
biased and partial, but the question of slavery is far too sensitive. Hence,
reconstructing histories based on the facts is a moral duty for all those
involved in this endeavor.
Drawing on Freud and Saint Augustine, Blake (1999: 432) suggests
that memory is a ‘source of conflict–conflict within the psyche, conflict
between our best self and our other selves, conflict between the self and
society’, and that therefore ‘we need to draw on collective memory to help
us in our deliberations’. This civic memory that confronts the hard facts
of history, and works through its pain and anguish, is more suited in reconciling us with our past than the romantic view of the past recounted in
nationalist and pan-Africanist meta-narratives.
The aftermath of Sénégal’s national independence in 1960 was characterized by the failure of the state to improve sensibly the life conditions
of ordinary people, and the need to tackle the real problems of the nation
was voiced in forms that countered national and pan-African meta-narratives (Diaw, 2002; Diop and Diouf, 1990; Thiaw in press; Thioub, 2002). In
Gorée, however, the romantic reading of the Atlantic experience symbolized
by the conservator Ndiaye persists. It maintains its global nationalist and
pan-Africanist perspectives and ignores the long-silenced voices of slave
descendants within Senegambian and Gorean societies. The slave origins
of African Americans are obviously acknowledged, and Europeans are
considered as being responsible for their horrifying historical experiences.
The involvement of Africa and Africans in the practices and processes of
enslavement are ignored and overlooked, and contradictions and conflicts
within ‘traditional’ African societies—which today have been transformed
into relations of dependence and clientage—are left unexplored.
51
I b r ahima Thiaw
Recent paradigmatic swings in Senegalese historical production
show a profound desire to engage with local and civic memories in all
their varieties. New concerns regarding traditionally marginalized groups
have been raised (Thioub, 2002). The story of the Gorean woman of slave
descent calls out for a similar change in attitude. Like African Americans
who were marginalized in American historical production, traditionally
marginalized African groups also seem to be calling for more inclusive
histories.
Historical Processes in Gorée
The impact of the Atlantic slave trade on the Senegambia has long
been a subject of debate among historians. One of the goals of the Gorée
Archaeological Project was to collect archaeological material and data in
order to cross-check documentary and other textual sources. Data were
collected through archaeological testing, surveying, mapping and excavating in different parts of the island (Figure 1). Analysis is still underway and
most of our conclusions are preliminary. However, emerging patterns can
illuminate processes linked to the formation of the Atlantic World, including the definition of new identities, the formation of plural communities,
large-scale movements of populations and trade goods, and the development of a global market economy, etc. Preliminary analysis permits us to
distinguish between two different assemblages: a pre-eighteenth-century
assemblage dominated by African manufactures and a post-eighteenthcentury assemblage where European imports predominate.
Important deposits predating the European contact period were uncovered in Gorée. The assemblage of this early occupation seems to indicate
a rather permanent settlement by a small-scale society. Large amounts of
fish and shell seafood remains were recovered, and may have represented an
important part of the diet. However, no pre-European fishing equipment
was recovered, and it is possible that the occupants did only occasional
fishing and imported most of the fish they consumed from the mainland.
Additionally, occupants of the island occasionally used stone tools instead
of iron, which only appeared in the sequence beginning in the European
contact period. Cultural remains are mainly dominated by pottery that
may have been imported from inland regions, as clay sources are rare on
the island.
One of the most revealing traits of this pre-contact assemblage is the
presence of ritual pots (Plate 1). These features are characterized by several
miniature pots deposited either in other small pots (5 to 15 cm. diameter)
or in cymbium shell. They are always found covered with potsherd frag52
Every H o u se has a S t o ry
Plate 1: Ritual Pottery from Unit G6B
ments or cymbium shell. Several of these features were recovered in preEuropean deposits in a house that is allegedly associated with the Dutch
governor of the island in the seventeenth century (Cariou, 1966).
Analysis indicates possible cultural affiliation with Madeleine Island
as well as the Cap Vert peninsula where identical features have been found.
A radiocarbon sample associated with the Madeleine Island assemblage
yielded a late first and early second millennium date (Descamps, 1982).
Tests and excavations sampled different parts of the island and show that
this pre-European settlement was confined to the north-western part of
the island.
Portuguese sailors first sighted the island in 1444 but had no permanent establishment there beyond a church where many Christians who
died in the Senegambia and the Guinea coast were laid to rest (Boilat,
1984: 41; Fernandes in Boulegue, 1987: 110). In 1627–8, the Dutch settled
on the island where they built two forts, one atop the hill in the southern
end and the other in the north-western part (Moraes, 1993; 1995; 1998).
Curiously, the north-western fort or Fort Nassau encompassed the African
pre-European settlement.
Documentary and other textual sources tell us that the Dutch bought
the island for a handful of nails (Boilat, 1984; Cariou, 1966). In any case,
on the basis of archaeological evidence, we may conclude that the European establishment was accompanied either by the displacement of the
53
I b r ahima Thiaw
first African occupants or their incorporation into the new European settlement. Again, this analysis is still preliminary, but from a material culture
point of view, European presence on the island is barely visible prior to the
eighteenth century. This suggests that if Europeans were present prior to
that time, they were largely dependent on African manufactures and food
resources and may have even lived like Africans.
This picture changed drastically in the early eighteenth century. European manufactures predominate largely in the assemblage, indicating
wide-scale access to and/or circulation of imported goods. Deposits from
the different tests and excavation units throughout the island yielded a vast
range of imported European goods, including alcoholic beverages such as
liquors (gin, cognac), wine and beer bottles, imported ceramic, tobacco
pipes, beads, a variety of metal artifacts, etc.
Maps from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries demarcate European spaces from habitant (free African and Afro-European)
and slave spaces (Figure 3). However, there are very few clues indicating
such differentiation in archaeological patterns of uses of space or in the
material record. Although segregation in the use of space was possible, it is
very likely that this was short lived.
Adanson (1763 in Becker and Martin, 1980) reported only 257 people
in the mid-eighteenth century. By 1767, however, the Gorean population
had grown rapidly, reaching 1,044 (ANS, 3G2/123, 1767). From the second
quarter of the eighteenth century until 1848, the Gorean population reached
4,000 to 5,000 (Golbéry, 1802 ANS 1847-3G2/182; Knight, 1970, 1977;
Searing, 1993). For a site of just 17 ha., this was considerable. Most of the
island was then occupied, and this is clearly visible in the archaeological
record.
The segregated settlement in the early eighteenth-century maps
shows that until that time power and race may have resonated with a
unique intensity. However, from the last quarter of the eighteenth century
onwards, Gorée was fully multi-ethnic and transnational, and racial and
social discrimination disappeared in the settlement (Figure 4). Africans,
Afro-Europeans, Europeans, Americans, women and men, slaves and
masters, rich and poor, all shared space in the public sphere as well as at
the more intimate level in their homes.
Post mid-eighteenth-century archaeological assemblages exhibit
little visibility in the Gorean landscape that could relate to the boundaries between Europeans, free Africans, Afro-Europeans and slaves. Using
historical maps, excavations, tests and surveys targeted at historically
known quarters, the data collected and the patterns observed have not so
54
Every H o u se has a S t o ry
far permitted us to delineate unambiguously a segregated settlement. The
self-identification of Afro-Europeans and free Africans on the island as
‘habitants’, which literally meant residents without regard to any ethnic,
racial, national or religious differences, is in this regard suggestive as the
group included people of various nationalities, ethnicities and religions
(Boilat, 1984).
Gorée was overcrowded, and houses and lands were constantly split
between heirs who often became embroiled in family disputes that ended
up in the colonial courts. The island became too small for its growing
population, and the management of space then became a critical issue that
led the colonial government to intervene more actively to regulate the life
of the Goreans in the name of urbanization, public hygiene and security
(Thiaw, 2003). The French, for instance, intervened to regulate refuse disposal, burial practices, house architecture, gardens, etc. in order to create a
purely Europeanized landscape (ANS 4B/56, correspondence no. 51, 1874,
5B53).
Until the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the European settlement was male dominated and intermarriages between Africans, AfroEuropeans and Europeans were frequent (Adanson, 1763 in Becker and
Martin, 1980; Boilat, 1984; Knight, 1970, 1977). Through these marriages
à la mode du pays, African women had direct access to European wealth.
Equally, European success in the inland and coastal trade depended mainly
on the signares, who used the complex web of social relations to mediate
between their European partners and African inland populations. Signares
owned many domestic slaves, but it was more profitable for them to rent
than to sell slaves to Europeans, who constantly complained of the signares’
reluctance to give up their slaves (Boilat, 1984).
A close examination of census data from the eighteenth century
onwards shows that the large majority of domestic slaves were women.
Slave women were put to a variety of domestic activities, but it is also likely
that they provided sexual services to Europeans (Adanson, 1763 in Becker
and Martin, 1980; Cariou, 1966; Delcourt, 1952; Hinchman, 2000). In
any case, census data show significant numbers of infants among the slave
population, some of whom were probably fathered by Europeans. Curiously, the last names of infant slaves were often systematically censured
at the moment of archives’ production. In the light of this evidence, it is
likely that through their sexual and domestic services, signares and slave
women played a critical role in the circulation of both genes and material
wealth, contributing significantly to the subversion of any project of racial
discrimination. This makes a great deal of sense in the light of post-eigh55
I b r ahima Thiaw
Plate 2: Ritual Metal Can from Unit G6B
teenth-century archaeological patterns observed in the island, including
the wide distribution of European trade goods and the little visibility of
spatial segregation in the settlement pattern.
European settlement in Gorée brought about profound changes in the
island as well as mainland Senegambia. These included the definition of
new identities, new trade patterns, incorporation into the world market
economy of the Atlantic World, and competition for the control of the
island both among European and Senegambian coastal polities. Several
slaves captured inland transited through the island on their way to the
Americas, but Gorée itself was also a big consumer of slaves.
The interactions between free and enslaved Africans, Afro-Europeans
and Europeans, the exiguity of the island, the male composition of the
European expatriates and their dependence on local populations for the
success of the trade, all led to the emergence of a new community that was
fundamentally transnational and trans-ethnic. This is exemplified by one
of the ritual features uncovered in post-eighteenth-century deposits within
the yard of the same house allegedly associated with the Dutch governor
(Plate 2). The feature is a rusted metal can probably imported originally
from Europe and containing two pieces of folded paper, a large piece of
charcoal and seven or eight nodules of quartz (one nodule may have been
accidentally displaced). The chronology may be anachronistic because it is
possible that the feature was posterior to occupation of the house by the
Dutch. However, it is likely that the house remained in European hands
after the Dutch were ousted in 1677.
56
Every H o u se has a S t o ry
What is important to note here is that post-eighteenth-century
Gorean society was extremely fluid and accommodated artifacts, practices, beliefs, and people of different nationalities, races and ethnicities.
The feature described above shows the incorporation of European material
culture (the metal can) into African pre-Islamic rituals. The feature seems
to indicate both continuity and change in African belief systems as the
metal can replaced the small pottery and the laterite nodules the miniature
pots. However, it is likely that the rationale and usage of this feature find
their origins in the same world view rather than in the ritual pots found
in pre-European contexts. Yet Gorée was a society with its own contradictions within the global Atlantic World.
The history of the Maison des Esclaves must be understood in the
context of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century processes
described above. It was built sometime between 1780 and 1784 (Cariou,
1966). The name of its owner, Nicolas Pépin, of Afro-European ancestry,
is listed in a 1767 census. He was then living in the household of signare
Catherine Baudet, his mother. Catherine was apparently a very wealthy
woman as thirty-two domestic slaves were listed in her household at that
time (ANS, 3G2/123, 1767). Catherine’s offspring, including Nicolas and
Ann Pépin, may have inherited part of that wealth, including domestic
slaves, as they became some of the most prominent people on the island in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nicolas was educated
and may have earned a living as a public writer, but he may also have been
involved in inland or coastal trade. At the death of Nicolas, the house was
inherited by his daughter, Anacola. In 1817, she rented it to the French
colonial government, which used it as a chapel (office divin – divine office)
(Cariou, 1966: 168).
After emancipation in 1848, Gorée progressively became a backwater island and its population steadily declined in significant proportions.
Former slaves, their descendants and the signares and habitants also left
Gorée en masse, disrupting the economic basis of the island (Boilat, 1984:
38; Toupet, 1957). By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Gorée had lost both its administrative and economic importance at the
expense of inland coastal establishments like Dakar, Saint Louis, and
Rufisque. However, it did maintain a certain prestige and historical importance for the colonial government, which purchased many houses in ruins.
Independent Sénégal maintained the same interest in the island, buying
some of the houses in ruins, including the Maison des Esclaves, which was
bought from the Benga family in the early 1960s (Hinchman, 2000: 316).
57
I b r ahima Thiaw
Conclusion
This contribution is an invitation to think about what we in the present
ought to deem important to remember about our past. The problem exposed
here is not about the importance of Gorée Island because most will agree
that it is important and relevant for understanding processes linked to the
formation of the Atlantic World. The problem is that we tend to generalize
too much about the impact and consequences of processes linked to the
expansion of the Atlantic World. In doing so, we toss away contradictions
within African societies and other important aspects of local history and
collective memories. Quite often, local histories and memories are silenced,
but remain latent and can erupt at any time to disrupt imagined identities
of race, ethnicity, citizenry, and nationhood. Truth and reconciliation must
begin at home at the local level before becoming global.
In part, the failure and crisis of the post-colonial African state owes
much to the exclusion of many groups in the production of collective
memories. Nationalist and pan-Africanist meta-narratives, although they
fostered Black African and African-descent identities and helped articulate a powerful discourse around the themes of freedom and unity, failed
to address the contradictions within African societies at the local level. Yet,
culture-contact experiences and global processes vary considerably from
one setting to another, and therefore they must be contextualized historically and culturally in order to probe the multiple facets of the dynamics
they underpinned.
Over the past decades, historical production and the construction of
a memory of the Atlantic contact in Gorée and the Maison des Esclaves
were inspired by the global and romantic meta-narratives of Negritude. As
a result, historical production on the island, in focusing on transit slaves,
European slavers, the middle passage, and the life experiences of slaves in
the Americas, failed to address the contradictions within Gorean society,
which itself was a big consumer of slaves.
In our recent research program on the island, we used archaeological
material evidence and documentary sources to gain insights into the quotidian life of Goreans from the pre- to the post-Atlantic periods in order
to evaluate the nature and magnitude of the transformations wrought by
the Europeans. This supplemental perspective permitted us to delineate
historical processes and patterns of culture contact on the island.
From being a small-scale society, with limited exchanges with adjacent
coastal polities, Gorée became involved in the global market economy
of the Atlantic World. Historical sources insist that those changes began
in the mid-fifteenth century, while for archaeology the external impact is
58
Every H o u se has a S t o ry
barely visible prior to the eighteenth century. In any case, the magnitude
of the changes caused by the Atlantic system is more perceptible in the
eighteenth century than in any other anterior period. Those changes led
to the formation of a transnational community feeding both on local and
export slaves.
The eighteenth century is characterized by wide access to and circulation of European trade goods, and the available documentary sources
suggest that women may have played a major role in that process. From
that time on, domestic slaves, women in particular, dominated in the
island’s population and provided both domestic and sexual services to
Europeans. These interactions contributed towards subverting the system
of racial segregation and in doing so also created conditions for increased
social mobility.
This local view of Gorean history permits us to write a more inclusive
history that takes into account the life experiences of groups traditionally
marginalized in the global perspective that developed out of the Maison
des Esclaves. The history of this house cross-cuts historical processes of the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the island.
Acknowledgements
Fieldwork in Gorée Island was possible thanks to a generous grant
from the National Geographic Society and a two-year fellowship from
the Sephis Program. I extend my profound gratitude to both foundations.
I thank Susan K. McIntosh, Roderick McIntosh, Mark Hinchman and
Christopher Decorse for their kind advice. I also thank all the participants
in the project including: François Richard (Syracuse University), Raina
Croff (Yale University), Ndèye S. Guèye (CODESRIA), Dibor Thiao, Dib
Faye, and Abou Dème, and the students of the History Department of the
University Cheikh A. Diop: Moussa Niang, Adama Guèye, Samba Gaye,
Bassine Gaye, Mor Faye, Mboussiriou Diallo, Ousmane Niokhor Thiam,
and Amadou Sara Bâ.
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62
Chapter 3
An Imaginary Ocean:
Carnival in Cape Town and
the Black Atlantic
Denis-Constant Martin
gh
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory, sirs?
In that gray vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.
–Derek Walcott (1992: 48)
‘D
aar kom die Alibama, Daar kom die Alibama, Die Alibama kom
oor die see’. Here comes the Alabama, here comes the Alabama, the
Alabama comes over the sea. A ship, the Alabama,1 and the sea feature
in the opening verses of Cape Town’s most famous song, collectively and
anonymously created in the 1860s, at a time when slavery had been abolished for almost thirty years and when segregationist laws had not yet been
adopted, at a time when New Year festivals were progressively taking shape.
It is no wonder that such a song became an anthem of sorts for Cape Town
and first of all for the people who were labelled coloureds in the twentieth
century. It deals with the sea, a bed and a girl, and lists the twelve months
whose names were frequently given to slaves;2 it sings the space that slaves
and political prisoners deported from the ‘East Indies’ were forced to travel
when they were brought to South Africa; it alludes to their capacity for
survival and their permanence as the pillars of Cape Town in spite of the
passing of time.
Denis - Cons tan t M a rt in
In this perspective, the sea takes on yet another dimension. It signifies
not only the two oceans that meet at the southern tip of Africa, on which
sailed slave ships coming from Indonesia, India, Madagascar, Mozambique
and West Africa.3 The metaphor of the sea merges the Indian Ocean, the
Mozambique Channel, the African Atlantic, and the waters spread between
South Africa and North America, connecting rather than separating them,
as evidenced by the presence of the Alabama in Cape Town’s harbour. The
sea, therefore, appears as a universe encompassing the three cardinal points
that define the history of coloured people in Cape Town: the places from
where they came, the place where they developed as a group, and the place
in which they saw the symbol of what was denied to them in South Africa:
freedom, respect, and modernity.
Two Oceans in the Poetics of the Relation
‘Daar kom die Alibama’, melody included with its allusion to an
American song revamped by Cape Town’s ghoema beat,4 is an expression
of what Edouard Glissant calls the ‘poetics of the Relation’, a creation that
altogether relays and relates, an expression that links and unites, and at the
same time tells the story of those who are linked in the process, and of how
they are linked. For Glissant, the ‘Relation’ is dynamic and ever transforming; it is a totality permanently animated by an effort to achieve a more
accomplished form of completeness (Glissant, 1990: 40, 48). ‘Daar kom
die Alibama’, because it symbolically asserts the links between lands of
origin, the land of forced settlement, and a land of dreams, can be considered as an audible manifestation of Cape Town’s coloured working class’s
‘world-echoes’.5
According to Glissant: ‘Every individual and every community fashion
for themselves the world-echoes they have imagined, world-echoes of
might or boasting (jactance), of pain or impatience, in order to live or
express confluences. Every individual produces bits of this music, and every
community too. And the realised totality of individuals and communities
also.’ (Glissant, 1990: 108) The Alabama ‘world-echo’, as well as the various
cultural practices associated with this song, condense meetings of cultures:
physical encounters of people from Asia, Madagascar, Africa, and Europe,
as have taken place in South Africa; imaginary junctions between Cape
Town’s coloured people socially born from these encounters and people of
North America who were once called coloureds;6 and the original culture
whose seeds were sown on South African soil by these real encounters and
imaginary junctions. Looking at Cape Town’s culture in this light confirms
that it should be considered as a creole culture, if we agree with Glissant
that creolization designates a process, not the content of particular cultures.
64
A n I magina ry O cean
Creolization means blending and mixing (métissage) without limitations or
endings; it transcends concrete meetings and mere syncretisms to open
onto yet unexplored dimensions and absolute newness. Cape Town’s creole
culture has found (and founded) its uniqueness in (and on) the particular
type of relation that coloured people established between their experience
as members of slave, then subaltern communities and a will to escape, even
if in the imagination, from their condition, spurred by the image that they
shaped of America and African America.
The conception of creolization proposed by Glissant, and developed by
other West Indian thinkers (Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant, 1989),
converges with Paul Gilroy’s contention that identity is more a process of
movement and mediation than a question of roots and rootedness (Gilroy,
1993: 19). In situations of creolization, identity is even more than elsewhere a matter of choice (Martin, 1994, 1995b), underpinned by intricate
and very often painful processes of identification. In the case of members
of Cape Town’s working class coloured communities, the choice to identify
with certain aspects of North America, to make the Atlantic part of the
system of relations used to define themselves, amounted to locating themselves within a ‘counterculture of modernity’ (Gilroy, 1993: 1–40), to grant
themselves the possibility of appearing in their own eyes as participants
in, and agents of, a modernity that was denied to them by South African
authorities.
In order to illustrate how members of Cape Town’s coloured working
class identified with North and African America, and to analyse the significance of these identifications, I shall now sum up the history of the
New Year festivals and identify elements signifying a particular relationship with North America, before proposing a few conclusions regarding
the role of the imaginary in the invention of diasporas.
Cape Town’s American Connections
In Cape Town, the experience of slavery brought together people
coming from various cultures, who did not share the same language, the
same religion, the same food and the same clothing habits, nor the same
music. What was common to them was their condition, and, as slaves did in
other parts of the world (Martin, 1991), they had to invent ways and means
of surviving. From what some of them had been able to retain from their
culture of origin, and from what they could take from the masters’ cultures,
they created a creole culture that became the ground on which Cape Town’s
culture, and to a certain extent South African culture (Coplan, 1985), grew
and developed. After the abolition of slavery, events taking place during the
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austral spring and summer provided the opportunity of displaying some of
the prominent features of this culture in the making: Guy Fawkes Night (5
November), Emancipation Day (1 December), Christmas, the New Year,
and Tweede Nuwe Jaar (2 January, which the collective memory associates
with the day when the slaves were granted a holiday). Eventually, New Year
celebrations developed into a complex festival, starting on New Year’s eve
and lasting for three or four weeks, involving various organizations known
as Kaapse Klopse, Sangkore and Christmas Choirs.7
The Triumph of a Creole Coon
In the twentieth century, the Coon Carnival became the apex of the
‘Big Days’ (the summer holidays), a time that was looked forward to during
the whole year and for which Cape Town’s coloured proletariat prepared
actively for several months before 1 January. Then, every year, the core of
Cape Town’s popular culture was reignited; then changes affecting it could
be seen in the open, in the streets and at stadiums, where the troupes held
their competitions. A decisive transformation took place at the end of the
nineteenth century. On the creole tree that had grown during slavery and the
decades following emancipation was now grafted a new aesthetics imported
into South Africa by groups of American blackface minstrels. Their songs,
musical instruments and musical forms, dance styles, costumes, and makeup were incorporated into local practices and contributed to giving the
New Year festivals a new élan. Alongside troupes donning period costumes
appeared bands of Coons in tailcoat and top hat, the face made up in black
and white; in addition to old creole songs such as the nederlandsliedjies or the
ghoemaliedjies, singing groups rendered American novelties.
In the course of the twentieth century, the ‘Privates’, disguised as Roman
warriors, Spanish bullfighters, or noble Europeans disappeared, leaving the
Coon and his fellow, the American wild Indian (or Atja), as the unique masks
of the carnival; the string bands that used to accompany them were turned
into brass bands playing more jazzy tunes. Every time a new musical fashion
came out of North America, and especially from black North America, it
was appropriated and added to the many layers of American styles sung and
played in Cape Town: jazz, rock, soul, disco, rap and techno can be heard
in carnival competitions, where original moppies derived from the old ghoemaliedjies still permit the possibility of commenting with a sharp wit upon
social behaviours and current events.
The origins of the American graft on Cape Town’s creole culture can be
dated back to the mid-nineteenth century. Before abolition, slaves already
had a reputation for being musical and several big estates kept a slave orchestra; a few taverns in town also had slave musicians to entertain their patrons.
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Music continued to be intensely loved and practised by the descendants of
slaves after emancipation. Some turned professionals and provided the only
bands available in Cape Town, with the exception of military orchestras.
But many people sang and played an instrument. Since urban homes were
usually crowded, music was mostly made in the streets; members of singing
societies, which appeared in this period, as well as simple groups of friends
and neighbours spent evenings polishing their harmonies outdoors; weddings, picnics and the New Year were celebrated with songs and dances,
of which we do not know much. European repertoires were definitely performed: dance tunes and English romances, Calvinist hymns and Dutch
songs. But there is also evidence that new creole repertoires were part and
parcel of this musical culture in the nineteenth century. Love songs, initially
sung at Muslim weddings, and derived from religious chants, which had
probably retained memories of Indonesian krontjong: the nederlandsliedjies
(Desai, 1983); drum songs that were beaten at picnics or in the streets whenever people felt like dancing (Martin, 1999: 58–60, 73–4; Winberg, 1992).
Informal groups and singing societies that paraded the streets at New Year
probably interpreted a mix of both imported and creole repertoires.
Behind the Blackface: White, Black and Coloured
American songs arrived at the Cape within the decade following the
abolition of slavery and became rapidly popular with everyone. The coming
to Cape Town of a troupe of Christy’s Minstrels in 1862 was welcomed
with exceeding enthusiasm and soon stimulated the mushrooming of local
troupes among all groups of the population. In 1890, another minstrel
troupe had a tremendous impact on Cape Town, but this time the comedians in blackface were not whites pretending to impersonate slaves from
the American South; they were African Americans. The Virginia Jubilee
Singers led by Orpheus McAdoo, a graduate of the Hampton Institute in
Virginia, while perpetuating several traits of the white minstrel show, also
introduced new items, such as ‘Jubilee Songs’, as black spirituals were then
called. The reporter of the daily Cape Argus could not help but hear ‘hopes
of liberty’ in the ‘peculiar kind of part song’ they presented (Cape Argus,
1 July 1890). The Virginia Jubilee Singers came back to South Africa in
1896–8; they ran into financial difficulties and some of their members
decided to stay there and interacted with coloured musicians (Erlmann,
1991).
Christy’s Minstrels had brought to the Cape a new type of show, original songs, peculiar costumes, blackface make-up, and unknown instruments: the bones and the banjo, which soon became ubiquitous in Cape
Town’s orchestras. Groups of ‘serenaders’ and singing societies participating
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in New Year parades were getting more organized; they prepared for the
event and started to distinguish themselves from their rivals by the clothes
they wore, the colours of their banners, and the pieces of fabric that they
hung across the street they used as a rehearsal place. Some of them decided
to borrow the minstrels’ costume and make-up; they became known as
Coons, after the name of a character depicted in many a minstrel song.8
The Virginia Jubilee Singers reinforced the American minstrel influence
among coloured musicians and certainly contributed to making it perennial, for those who attended their performances associated the latest craze
in modern entertainment with freedom experienced by recently emancipated slaves and successes in the uplift of their community. The New
Year carnival was the stage on which this influence was exhibited for all
to see, and many troupes chose names evoking the United States.9 More
discreetly, the banjo found its way into the string bands accompanying
Coon troupes and choirs; it even backed old creole songs with the unusual
chords that North American music disseminated across the world.
The Coon was not the only mask10 inspired by America. At the end of
the nineteenth century, the Wild Americans (aka Red Skinners, Apaches,
Atjas) also appeared. Their origin is uncertain; they may have been conceived after the Indians of Wild West shows; some think that they were
started by immigrants from the West Indies having fond memories of the
‘fancy Indians’ who were one of the most important characters in the carnivals of their youth. Whatever the case, they played a very important role
in Cape Town’s carnival; accompanied by red devils, they were instruments
of disorder and freedom; they ran after children in the streets, howling
strange cries, and frightened them, which indeed the kids loved. When
they paraded, sometimes mounted on horses, sometimes on stilts, they
waved the Stars and Stripes as if to claim an American origin.
The Vehicles of Identification
For the reveller, to wear a mask, especially in a rite of renewal such
as a New Year carnival, allows him to be at the same time one’s self and
someone, or something, else (Martin, 2001). The selection of a mask is a
sign of identification; when one mask is collectively chosen and eventually
eliminates all other masks from such a celebration, it indicates a very strong
collective identification to what this mask symbolizes. The Coon and the
Wild Indian refer without any doubt to the United States of America.
At the end of the 1940s, they remain as the only masks with which one
can play carnival. The Coon dominates and all masks—all ensembles of
costume, make-up, hat and umbrella—are designed according to the same
model, every troupe differentiating itself from its competitors by the deco68
A n I magina ry O cean
ration and the colours of its mask, with the Atjas occupying a peripheral
place. The name Coon Carnival, although it has been in use for a long
time, now corresponds exactly to what the festival has become. This evolution does not mean that the carnival has been ‘Americanized’; it signals
the strengthened identification of Cape Town’s coloured proletariat with
the United States, the forms of which have been permanently updated
through music and the unceasing co-optation by singing Coons of all the
styles created at the other extremity of the Atlantic.
Sounds, Images and Ideas
This evolution is part of a process that can also be witnessed in other
domains of social life ( Jeppie, 1990). Many songs presented in competition
by Coon troupes were taken from American musical films. The film theatres, or bioscopes, were the hubs of District Six and other predominantly
coloured neighbourhoods, and long queues formed in the streets whenever
a new American film was shown. The success of Alan Crossland’s The Jazz
Singer, starring Al Jolson, first presented in Cape Town in 1929, was followed by many others. Films generated the multiplication of copycats, who,
in the streets, on stage, and during carnival competitions, impersonated
actors and singers seen on the screen. Cape Town had her own Charlie
Chaplin, Al Jolson, Paul Robeson, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Jerry Lewis,
etc. Thrillers and detective movies also attracted huge crowds; gang leaders
and members were fascinated by the manners of American celluloid gangsters. They imitated the way they dressed, they talked, they walked, they
smoked. Many Cape Town gangs adopted names reflecting this fascination: the Americans, and the Junky Funky Kids ( JFKs), to name but two
of the most famous (Pinnock, 1982, 1997). Music played outside carnival
was also permeated by American influences; Cape Town, especially in the
times when the government started to implement apartheid more brutally,
at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, became the capital
of jazz in South Africa and nurtured the elaboration of new styles combining the American swing with the ghoema beat (Rasmussen, 2001).
The attraction exercised by the United States was not only felt in the
popular or artistic milieux, but intellectuals and political activists were also
sensitive to it. It percolated through churches, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and was propagated by newspapers and magazines
published for coloured readers. The interest of Peter Abrahams in African
Americans was aroused by the discovery of a recording by Paul Robeson
(Couzens, 1982). The founder of the first political organization created
to promote the interests of coloured citizens in Cape Town,11 F.Z.S. Peregrino, had acquired some experience in the United States; he was linked
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to the AME Church and followed the ideas of Booker T. Washington
and W.E.B. Du Bois. Later, liberation theology circulating in a network
linking American and South African churches (Goguel, 1984) played a
decisive role in the awakening of ‘black consciousness’, a philosophy and
a movement supported by many young Capetonian activists in the 1970s
and 1980s.
Relation and Modernity
From the first reactions to the Virginia Jubilee Singers’ shows to the
inspiration that students marching in the streets of Cape Town in the
1980s found in Martin Luther King or the Black Panther Party, the perceptions of the United States and of African Americans among Africans
and coloured Capetonians alike remained largely similar. These perceptions were based on the idea that the ‘United States was a land of plenty,
the black Utopia as such [ . . . ]’ (Erlmann, 1999: 150). The United States
was a place where former slaves had been able to make considerable progress, even in the decades immediately following emancipation. African
Americans had demonstrated their capacity to uplift their community and
had shown a way that should be followed by oppressed people in South
Africa. Commenting on a lecture given in Cape Town by the Right Rev.
L.J. Coppin of the US AME Church on 8 May 1901, announced under
the title ‘From Bondage to Freedom’, the editor of The Spectator wrote:
‘The Spectator trusts that the lecture will survive as an inspiration to the
Coloured people hereabouts. That which is possible to the American Negro
is equally so here.’ (South African Spectator, 18 May 1901)
The notion of progress—an improvement in living conditions and the
access to all rights enjoyed by citizens of the country—was from the start
associated with that of modernity. From the end of the nineteenth century,
the United States had been seen as the source of all modernity, not only in
engineering and warfare, but also in music and entertainment. Blackface
minstrelsy was the most modern form of spectacle in the second half of
the nineteenth century. The Jazz Singer was acclaimed because it brought
to the Cape the latest version of the blackface minstrel through the most
modern medium: the talking movie. Every new musical genre coming out
of the United States was hailed as marking a new step towards a more
complete modernity. The suggestions made by Edouard Glissant and Paul
Gilroy, about ‘world-echoes’, the Relation and a totality that permanently
strives to complete itself, about the Black Atlantic as a counterculture of
modernity, find here convincing evidence. The ‘black Utopia’, the ideal
United States reconstructed in imagination, generated among coloured
Capetonians a collective identification precisely because they combined
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A n I magina ry O cean
hopes of progress and aspirations to modernity with a vision of the United
States and its culture as mixed (métis).
From slavery to the Tricameral Constitution of 1983, the historical
experience of coloured people in Cape Town has been one of oppression
and scorn. They have been taught by the ruling powers ‘[. . . ] two mythical
lessons: (1) white is positive and black is negative; and (2) racial purity is
superior to mixing’. (O’Toole, 1973: 27) They were considered by the rulers
as children who could not take care of themselves, who did not have any
culture of their own, who therefore could not, because they were of mixed
descent, because they were ‘bastards’, create anything original or modern.
And there, in the United States, they saw people of colour founding their
own universities, training doctors and lawyers. They heard people of all
shades of skin playing music, singing and dancing in a manner unmistakably fashioned by the contact between people of African and people
of European descent. They witnessed the dissemination of these mixed
(métis) styles of performance across the world, and their recognition by the
whitest authorities that could be. Queen Victoria applauded to Christy’s
Minstrels; she was moved by the Fisk Jubilee Singers who introduced
Europe to black spirituals, to the same songs that South Africans discovered
when the Virginia Jubilee Singers visited them and when preachers of the
AME Church settled in Cape Town. Whatever the realities of the United
States, whatever African Americans had to endure there, the identification
of coloured Capetonians with the United States meant the establishment
of a link, imaginary yet extremely strong, between themselves and people
who were seen as proof of the existence of a creative non-white, mixed
(métisse) modernity, recognized and legitimized by the whites themselves,
worldwide and even, to a certain extent, in South Africa.
The Imaginary Atlantic
For the greatest number of coloured Capetonians the identification
with the United States is mediated by the mask of the Coon. The mask is
a requisite device without which a rite of renewal can hardly be celebrated;
the Coon mask became the indispensable instrument of Cape Town’s
New Year carnival. The mask allows the individual who wears it to access
other worlds, to enter into different mental states; the Coon mask puts
the reveller in a state of tariek, that is, in the words of a Cape Town troupe
captain: ‘[ . . . ] in another frame of mind, [ . . . ] at another level, [ . . . ] in
a different world.’ (Martin, 1999: 40) In this other world, an imaginary
world indeed, the United States occupies a very special place; it is a land
of freedom, of creativity and modernity, a land where people who are not
white (as defined by South African authorities before 1990) are accepted
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as they are, where their talents are recognized.12 Identification is one of the
foundations on which are constructed discourses of identity; identification
amounts to granting an individual or a community a privileged place in
one’s self-image; an identification shared by a great number of members
in one particular social group gives the individual, or the community that
is the object of identification, a central role in the collective imaginary of
this social group, a role that becomes instrumental in the definition of this
social group’s identity. Identifying with the United States is one of the
mechanisms used by members of Cape Town’s coloured working class to
devise an inner sense of self-identity (as opposed to the identity imposed
upon them by South African authorities).
This confirms Cornelius Castoriadis’s assertion that the social imaginary ‘institutes’, that it is productive and creative. It creates and holds
together a society (a social group), and gives meaning to actions undertaken
within it or in its name (Castoriadis, 1975). The social imaginary informs
and channels attitudes and behaviours; it works like a compass that can
point to directions located beyond the concrete reality experienced in daily
life. It does not just transform reality; it connects it to other places where
aspirations, ideals, hopes and dreams appear attainable, and makes the connection emotional (Ansart, 1990). ‘Far from being a secondary function of
the social, the imaginary plays a role of primary creator because it makes
possible to endow oneself with what does not exist and to go beyond all
limits and all feelings of finiteness.’ (Hastings, 2002: 42) If imagination
can lead to acquiescence and submission to the powers that be, the capacity
of the imaginary to trespass every boundary allows it to inspire new plans
for collective life. These plans, these new conceptions of collective life conceived of in imagination, articulate the local, the place where one is living,
with other worlds (Appadurai, 1999; Erlmann, 1999: 4).
Identification is the outcome of a choice, consciously or unconsciously
made. Because it opens the road to other, imaginary worlds, the ties it
creates between those who identify and the object of their identification
can never be governed by kinship or ancestry. This is certainly one of the
lessons that can be drawn from the analysis of Cape Town’s Coon Carnival
as a manifestation of identification with the United States on the part of
members of the coloured working class. Their ancestry is extremely mixed
and their genealogies lean more towards the East, in a very general sense,
than the West. This has not precluded their identification with a country
with which they had no biological ties. Through the mask of the Coon,
they have located themselves within the Black Atlantic, as other coloured
South Africans did through other mediations, exclusively on the basis of
the representation that they had of the United States, and of the use they
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A n I magina ry O cean
could have for it in the place where they lived. For the imaginary connection with the United States had at least two functions: it helped restore,
sometimes even build, their self-esteem, which had been shattered by
the material conditions in which they lived and the segregation to which
they were submitted, and it did that by including them in the realm of
modernity. These functions could not have been fulfilled by other possible
identifications, with Malaysia and Indonesia or with Africa. Lands from
where the slaves were brought could have offered coloured Capetonians’
imaginary a prestigious past, a spirit of resistance to European domination, but not the image of a mixed (métisse) modernity that was relevant to
their situation in South Africa because it contradicted negative stereotypes
forged by the racist rulers. This may change in the future, as the end of
apartheid coincided with a transformation of the images generally associated, at least, with Malaysia, now perceived as a successful, modernizing,
predominantly Muslim country. But it seems that only a few members of
the learned and well-off elite have recently claimed an identification with
Malaysia.
For the time being, the transatlantic construction of the notion of
being coloured in Cape Town’s underprivileged classes has nothing to do
with blood, and everything to do with the imaginary. Their history proves
that this construction was a lasting and effective one and suggests that
most feelings of belonging to international communities and diasporas
should be apprehended as the result of choices made in the imaginary in
order to meet very strong local needs.
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Figure 1: Adderley ST déco
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Figure 2: Woodstock Starlites
Figure 3: Hadji Melvin
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Notes
1.
The Alabama was a Confederate raider said to have captured a Yankee ship
and towed it along to Table Bay in 1863. On the origins of the song, see
Martin (1999: 84-85). “Dar kom die Alibama” can be heard on: The Tulips
2002.
2. The main verses of “Dar kom die Alibama” are, following those that have
already been quoted: “Nôi nôi die riet-kôi nôi, Die riet-kôi word gemaak,
Die riet-kôi word vir my gemaak om daarop te slaap [...] Januarie, Februarie, Maart, April, Mei, June, July, August, September, Oktober, November,
Desember.” Girl, girl, the reed bed, he reed bed is made, The reed bed is
made for me to sleep on [...] January, February, March, April, May, June,
July, August, September, October, November, December. It was a common
practice in Cape Town to name slaves after the month in which they had
been born.
3. Slavery lasted from 1652 to 1834-38. According to historian Robert C.
Shell, 26,4 % of South African slaves originally came from Africa (mostly
Mozambique and West Africa); 25,9 % from India; 25,1 % from Madagascar; 22,7 % from areas included in today’s Indonesia, see Shell 1994: 40-41.
4. The melody includes elements of Stephen Foster’s “There’s no place like
home”; the ghoema beat is a rhythmic figure originally played on the barrel
shaped ghoema drum. Both the rhythmic figure and the drum have become
emblems of Cape Town’s creole music.
5. Although “Dar Kom die Alibama” has been adopted by most Capetonians,
whites included, its origin, its place in the repertoires of Coon troupes and
Malay Choirs, indicate that it must be first considered as representative of
the imaginary of those who participate in Cape Town’s New Year Festivals,
that is mostly coloured members of the dispossed classes, what could be
called in another vocabulary the proletariat and the lumpen-proletariat Martin (1999, 2000b.)
6.To qualify this junction as imaginary does not mean that actual meetings
between coloured Capetonians and Americans, especially African-Americans, did not take place ; it implies that the imaginary dimension of the relationship between them was a structuring trait of coloured peoples’ imaginary,
and furnished the backdrop against which even real meetings were at least in
part experienced.
7. Kaapse Klopse (Cape Clubs) are known in English as Coon or Minstrel
Troupes; for capetonian revelers, the word coon does not have the racist
connotations it has acquired in the United States. Sangkore (Singing Choirs)
are also called Malay Choirs (Malay being used as an equivalent of Muslim,
the religion a majority of singers in Sangkore profess), Hollandse Team (after
the name of one of their most important repertoires, the Nederlandsliedjies)
or Nagtroepe (Night Troupes, because they march in the older part of Cape
Town, the Bo Kaap, during the night of December 31 to January 1). Christmas Choirs are actually Christian brass bands.
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8.
On the ambiguities of the word Coon and its origins, see Martin (1999:
78-79); Bean et al. (1996); Lhamon (1998).
9. Some refer to places : Happy Boston Coons, Liberty Philadelphia Minstrels,
Mississippi Nigger Minstrels ; to musical styles : California Jazz Singing
Coons ; Ragtime Millionaire Darkies ; to the US in general : Star Spangled
Crooning Minstrels, Yankee Doodle Dandy Darkies, American Stars ; to the
myth of the South : Dixie Entertaining Minstrels, Cotton Field Darkies. On
names and naming, see Martin (2000).
10. By mask, I mean not only something that covers the face, but the whole
complex of artefacts used to change the appearance of the body.
11. The Coloured Men’s Protectorate and Political Protection Association,
founded in 1900, Lewis (1987: 16-18).
12. The names of Joseph Gabriels, who sang at the Metropolitan Opera in New
York, pop musician Jonathan Butler, and jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (formerly Dollar Brand) are frequently given as instances of the blossoming in
the United States of talents that were stiffled in South Africa.
79
Chapter 4
Transatlantic
Transformations:
The Origins and Identities
of Africans
in the Americas
Paul E. Lovejoy
gh
E
thnicity and religious affiliation provide distinct categories that were
essential in the identification of the enslaved, as they were for all sections of society in both Africa and the Americas.1 In the context of slavery,
ethnicity and religious affiliation are often thought to have overlapped to a
considerable extent, although as Maureen Warner-Lewis has argued, ethnic
and religious plurality was common (Warner-Lewis, 1997). Thus, Yoruba
slaves are readily identifiable through religious practices, particularly their
association with orisha, Ifà divination, and santeria. Similarly, Ewe/Fon are
associated with vodun, and while obeah is sometimes associated with Akan
and more recently perhaps with Igbo origins, the ethnic/religious overlay
is again apparent. In the context of some ‘creole’ societies in the Americas, there is disagreement over the African roots of particular religious
practices and beliefs, in which ethnic origins and religious observance are
considered to be intrinsically linked. This essay is an attempt to distinguish
religious and ethnic factors in the process of identification and community
formation under slavery2
Religion and ethnicity offered related but contrasting mechanisms
for group identity that must be examined in historical context. Despite
confusion in the scholarly literature, I would contend that both religion
and ethnicity served to integrate individuals of diverse backgrounds into
communities and social networks of interaction that were products of the
slave trade. Both ethnicity and religion ‘creolized’ slaves in the sense that
Pau l E . L ovejo y
these conceptual frameworks provided individuals with various means of
establishing social relationships under the oppressive conditions of slavery.
The perception that sometimes equates religion and ethnicity is misleading, however. Both religion and ethnicity required individuals to subordinate previous identities in favour of a new, shared level of consciousness as
slaves in a racialized context. Where that increased consciousness began
to develop is open to question, and it is here that the distinction between
religious and ethnic identification offers a key to understanding patterns
of slave identification as ‘resistant responses’ to racial slavery (Olwig, 1995:
23–39; Mintz and Price, 1992).
In contrast to many enslaved Africans who adjusted to slavery in the
Americas by establishing new identities as members of pan-ethnic groups
like Igbo/Calabari/Calabali or Lukumi/Nago/Aku/Yoruba, enslaved
Muslims banded together on the basis of religion, not ethnicity.3 The contrast between these situations suggests that ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ factors
sometimes reinforced community structures, cultures and patterns of
resistance, but in the case of Islam, ethnic identification was subordinated
to the religious community. The question then becomes, what was the
relationship of other ethnic identities to religious affiliation? Did ethnicity develop as subordinate categories in larger religious brotherhoods?
In understanding the process of ‘creolization’, the contrast between the
‘pan-ethnicity’ of the Yoruba and the subordination of ethnicity to Islam
is striking, especially since many ‘Yoruba’ were also Muslims, revealing
tensions in group consciousness. This contrast highlights the conflicting
strategies of those slaves who used religious observance to reinforce and
intensify ethnic identification and those who overlooked ethnic differences
when individuals proclaimed themselves Muslims.
The differences in patterns of community identification suggest that
simple models of ‘creolization’ or ‘transculturation’ do not sufficiently
explain the process of cultural adaptation associated with ethnicity and
religion. Islam in itself has some parallels with the usual model of adaptation to slavery assumed to have characterized the behaviour of the enslaved
through ‘creolization’. In Islamic societies, ethnic categories were associated
with slavery; indeed, ethnic identification was associated with free status
as well; being Muslim also implied an ethnic affiliation, and sometimes
it meant more than one ethnic identification through parents. The complexity of ethnic identification in Muslim societies, it is suggested here,
resulted in a similar process of socialization that is comparable to what
has sometimes been called the process of ‘creolization’ in the Americas.
Religious and ethnic factors were overlapping but not always inclusive
influences on the patterns of culture change within the slave communi82
T r ansat lan t ic T r ansfo r mat ions
ties of the Americas. The continuities and disjunctures in the transatlantic
experiences of the enslaved established two ‘charter’ principles of reaction
and resistance, those based on religion and ethnicity. Both categories were
products of African historical experience across the Atlantic.4
‘Charter’ Generations and the Origins of
Slave Culture
I take as a starting point the idea that recognizable communities of
slaves with a shared culture evolved in Africa, across the Atlantic, and
in different parts of the Americas. These communities included Yoruba
(Lukumi/Aku/Nago), Kongo, Igbo, and Muslims, often identified as Mandingo. The questions that I am asking attempt to identify the principles that
were fundamental in the establishment of these transatlantic communities.
Following the lead of Ira Berlin, what were the basic or ‘charter’ principles
that determined community formation and group identity? (Berlin, 1996:
251-88). However, I also follow Douglas Chambers in allowing for stages
of ‘creolization’ since the continued arrival of people from an emergent
homeland had the effect of reinforcing certain ‘charter’ principles, at least
in the case of Igbo slaves (Chambers, 1996).
The issues that I wish to raise ask where and how the ‘charters’ were
established. The case of Islam suggests that the ‘charter’ could have been
established in Africa itself, while Yoruba identity seems to have emerged
in Africa and the diaspora in tandem. These contrasts suggest that people
adjust by associating with a larger community, but exposure to that community might occur anywhere along the slave route. We cannot presume to
know a priori the extent to which such adjustment was forced or voluntary
as a form of resistance, why and how people chose one strategy of survival
over another, and when.
In examining the ‘charter’ generation of transatlantic port communities, Berlin raises the issue of layers of adjustment and identity formation,
which intersected with religion and ethnicity. According to Berlin:
The assimilationist scenario assumes that “African” and “creole”
were way stations of generational change rather than cultural
strategies that were manufactured and remanufactured and that
the vectors of change moved in only one direction—often along
a single track with Africans inexorably becoming creoles. Its
emphasis on the emergence of the creole —a self-sustaining,
indigenous population—omits entirely an essential element of
the story: the charter generations, whose experience, knowledge,
83
Pau l E . L ovejo y
and attitude were more akin to that of confident, sophisticated
natives than of vulnerable newcomers (Berlin, 1996: 253–4).
By ‘charter generations’, Berlin refers to the early generations of
contact between western Africa, Europe and the Americas which did
not experience the deracination of plantation slavery. Berlin contrasts the
history of this ‘charter’ generation of Africans, with its links across the
Atlantic world, with the relative isolation and deracination of plantation
slavery. I am suggesting, however, that other ‘charter’ principles crossed
the Atlantic, not just those affecting Berlin’s ‘Atlantic creole’, and that the
process continued in later generations, especially in contexts of relatively
concentrated immigration. The formation of communities under slavery
could and did rely on common linguistic and cultural backgrounds in the
establishment of pan-ethnic groups, and religion was frequently a mechanism of social integration within the slave community. But the interface
was not uniform.
In determining ethnicity, the ‘charter’ principle seems to have been
based on common language. Yoruba, Igbo, and other languages facilitated
communication, even as ethnic and geographical distinctions recognized
in Africa often continued. Nonetheless, ethnicity allowed internal differentiation among slaves within a system subordinated to racial categories.
The difficulty in analysing ethnogenesis emerges in considering religion,
because ethnicity sometimes was tied to a religious category, as in vodun,
and sometimes religion could serve as a pan-ethnic force of community
development; Islam was a religion that inherently did so. Moreover, the
Islamic case suggests that some slaves, at least, had complicated ethnic
backgrounds. In Islamic West Africa, the role of long-distance trade and
relocations through slavery strongly influenced ethnic and religious formation. Even elites were of mixed origins because of the widespread practice
of concubinage, which required women to be of slave origin, that is, not
Muslims and almost always ethnically distinct. In response to the racial
categorization of slavery in the Americas, it can be seen, religion could
transcend issues of ethnicity. Factors of ethnicity and religion created a
spiral or circular effect on the development of slave society, with both ethnicity and religious affiliation defining and explaining the other.
Religion and ethnicity overlap but are not coterminous, although religion can be one dimension of ethnicity, so that at times religious observances have been given an ethnic assignment. For many people actually
involved, it seems, the idea of ‘religion in the making’ predominated, in
which tradition was being manipulated or created as a defensive response
to the subordination and oppression of slavery. Religion, therefore, some84
T r ansat lan t ic T r ansfo r mat ions
times has been inclusive of many influences, some of which generated
distinctions that are thought to have had an ethnic basis. The ‘traditional’
religion associated with African ‘survivals’ is often syncretic and modern,
and should be considered to reflect the modification of tradition in a
changing historical context. This ‘modernizing’ form of tradition stands in
contrast to Islam, which was ‘traditional’ in the sense that the practice of
Islam in West Africa was replicated under slavery as much as possible. This
‘conservative’ reliance on tradition emphasized the pillars of faith, the use
of Arabic, literacy, and an identifiable dress code. This contrast in the forms
of adaptation as characterized in religious behaviour is also reflected in the
methods of self-identification through ethnic designations. The emergence
of ‘super-ethnic’ groups like Yoruba/Aku/Lukumi/Nago or Calabari/Igbo
accompanied the ‘modernizing’ process of religious synthesis. Often, ethnically based subgroups shared religious orientations. Ethnicity operated
within a religious world view that integrated people of diverse backgrounds
into recognizable communities. By contrast, Muslims brought with them
such a sense of community, which was re-established upon identification
of Islamic symbols and expressions. Once a new arrival who was Muslim
came in contact with another Muslim, the community surfaced. The generation and maintenance of this sense of community originated in Africa,
in contrast to the development of pan-ethnic Yoruba and Igbo identities.
This difference reflected the situation in West Africa, where sub-ethnic
distinctions among Yoruba and Igbo were more important than a common
identity, whereas identification with Islam was more important than ethnic
distinctions for Muslims.
Which cultural and religious orientations proved most adaptive to the
conditions of slavery varied and which resulted in the greatest chance for
‘survival’ is open to question. Islam almost disappeared, despite attempts
at self-preservation, while other religions flourished in the post-emancipation period. Despite the concentration of Muslims in Bahia, and pockets
of Islam in Jamaica, North America and Haiti, Islam only emerges after
the ending of slavery in even more scattered locations. The presence of
Islam has been continuous, but it has been weak. Other religious traditions
have proven to be more vibrant and adaptive, as in candomblé, santeria, and
vodun. Unlike Islam, these religions had a tradition of incorporating other
traditions and practices, thereby showing that religion has ways of accommodating people of different ethnic identities. Hence, in St. Domingue,
vodun appears to have included a Kongo component, although the basic
religious structure and vocabulary are from the ‘Slave Coast’. In Brazil,
lay brotherhoods allowed ethnic organization within a religiously derived
structure of Christianity, so that candomblé, of west-central African origin,
85
Pau l E . L ovejo y
became the means of consolidating ‘Nago’ ethnicity. In all cases, ethnicity and religion played off each other, but in the case of Islam there was
something different; Islam stands apart as a mechanism for integrating
people into the community. The cloak of Christianity provided the cover
for the transformation of specific African religious practices and beliefs
into new forms, which are not consistent with a static, generic ‘traditional
African religion’. The way that Yoruba ethnicity evolved in Brazil, Cuba,
Sierra Leone, and the Nigerian hinterland indicates that the interaction
between religion and ethnicity was often complex. Who is Yoruba is better
answered by what language is spoken rather than by religious affiliation,
which in the nineteenth century could be with particular orisha, with Islam
or with Christianity, or indeed combinations thereof.5
Ethnicity and Slavery in the Americas
Another area of analysis that is particularly fraught with ahistorical
generalizations concerns issues relating to ethnicity.6 With few exceptions,
the study of slavery in the Americas has tended to treat ethnicity as a
static feature of the culture of slaves. Twentieth-century ethnic categories
in Africa are often read backwards to the days of slavery, thereby removing ethnic identity from its contemporary political and social context
and overlooking how that might affect analysis and projections. Michael
Mullin, for example, is certainly correct in noting that ‘tribal’ is no longer
‘good form’, but in my opinion ‘ethnicity’ is not ‘a euphemism for tribal’, as
he claims (Mullin, 1992: 14).
The concept of ethnicity is a particularly valuable tool for unravelling the past because it is a complex phenomenon tied into very specific
historical situations. For example, Hall’s account of Africans in colonial
Louisiana traces the movement of a core group of Bambara from Africa to
Louisiana, although the details of this population displacement, especially
the chronology of enslavement in West Africa, has yet to be reconstructed
adequately (Hall, 1992). What does it mean that ‘Bambara’ arrived in Louisiana in the eighteenth century? To answer this question requires a detailed
study of how the term ‘Bambara’ was used in different contexts at the time,
not only in Louisiana but also in other parts of the diaspora and in West
Africa. Since specific ethnic identifications had meaning only in relation to
reference to the boundaries that separated different ethnic categories from
each other, including the political, religious, and economic dimensions of
these differences and how these changed over time. Certainly, historical
associations with Africa were also essential features of these definitions of
community, and rather than being static, the links with Africa were seldom
disconnected from events across the Atlantic.
86
T r ansat lan t ic T r ansfo r mat ions
Ethnicity underwent redefinition in the Americas. On the one hand,
European observers developed categories for African populations that
involve problems of interpretation: the ‘Chamba’ of slave accounts refers to
the Konkomba and Gurma of the upper Voltaic region, not the Chamba
of the Benue River basin in Nigeria; Gbari is an ethnic group referred to
as Gwari by Hausa speakers, but Gambari is a Yoruba term for Hausa;
Nago is a sub-section of Yoruba speakers but was sometimes used as a
generic term for Yoruba; Tapa refers to Nupe. These labels had meanings
that have to be deciphered in context. In the Sokoto Caliphate, conversion
to Islam often meant becoming ‘Hausa’, since many probably were nonHausa in origin. The imposition of European labels for African populations further compounds the problem, since these were not necessarily the
names used by enslaved African themselves. As the study of ethnicity in
Africa has demonstrated clearly, ethnic identities can only be understood
in the context of the times; present ethnic categories cannot be applied
backwards in time any more than present religious practices can be.
A brief guide to ethnicity in the context of slavery in the Americas would include a discussion of a dozen or so ethnic groups or ethnic
clusters, including the following: Wolof, Mandingo/ Bambara, Akan/
Koromatin/Coromantine, Gbe/Mina (Allada/Fon/Ewe/Mahi), Yoruba
(Nago/Aku/Lukumi), Igbo (Carabali/Calabari), Ibibio (Moco), various
Bantu groups, including Kongo and Mbundu (Kongo/Angola), Muslims
from the central Sudan (Hausa/Nupe/Borno). Gbe is actually a modern
linguistic term used to refer to the cluster of languages that includes Fon,
Allada, Ewe, and Mahi; historically, the term ‘Mina’ was sometimes used
to designate these people, especially in Brazil, although that term itself has
to be deciphered carefully because it was used to mean different things in
different contexts (Hall, 2003). There were numerous other ethnic groups;
the upper Guinea coast was characterized by a great number of groups,
and some parts of the interior were lumped together as ‘Chamba’ (Konkomba/Gurma), and although few in number, the Fulbe (Fulani/Peul) also
stand out. This list may seem like a bewildering number of ethnic groups
to the non-specialist, but in the African context, it is relatively few. Indeed,
a dozen ethnic concentrations compares favourably with the concentration of European populations in the Americas, which included Spanish,
Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, Danish, Irish, Scots, and Jews, at
least. If absolute numbers of people are considered, moreover, many more
Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic before the middle of the
nineteenth century. Hence, the usual assumptions that Africans came
from far more diverse backgrounds than Europeans is only part of the
story. The nature of enslavement guaranteed that isolated communities
87
Pau l E . L ovejo y
and small-scale societies were targeted, so that it can be expected that the
backgrounds of people were indeed diverse, but in most cases, enslaved
individuals from isolated backgrounds followed trade routes, and temporarily, at least, remained with people whose language, cuisine, and culture
were imposed upon them. Moreover, many of the enslaved came from near
the coast, from societies and states that were influenced by the demand
for slaves across the Atlantic. Hence, people who understand the Akan
language (Twi), one of the Gbe languages, Yoruba, Igbo, Ibibio, Kikongo
and Kimbundu were concentrated in sufficient numbers in some places
where these languages survived, often for longer than a generation because
of the continued influx of new arrivals who spoke the same languages or
dialects of those languages. Again, the number of African languages is
about the same as the number of European languages that spread to the
Americas, although the African languages tended to be distributed more
widely, while European languages, arising from political power, were more
concentrated and thereby became the common languages of expression,
despite the development of creole forms of these languages as well. Those
enslaved individuals from Africa did not come from theoretically ‘pure’
ethnic groups but had experienced complicated and disruptive interaction
with their enslavers and the merchants who took them to the coast. Slave
owners in Africa considered how best to exploit the value of their human
chattel, which might well mean keeping individuals in Africa as slaves,
not just selling them to European ships. Ethnicity cannot be considered a
static concept, although in some essentialist sense, ethnicity often implied
a degree of continuity that was ancient and primordial, in the same sense
that English, French, German, and other European ethnicities are often
considered.
A study of ethnicity among the enslaved population of the Americas
can be achieved in several ways: first, by considering the regional origins
of the enslaved population leaving Africa and the destinations of that
population; second, by examining plantations records, wills, and other
documents in the Americas; and third, by studying the detailed records
collected by the British anti-slave trade patrols of the nineteenth century.
The regional origins of the enslaved population, which can be calculated
from the voyage database developed by David Eltis, David Richardson
and Stephen Behrendt, allows a chronological and regional breakdown of
the slave trade to the Americas, and in broad outline enables an identification of the principal ethnic groupings, confirming numerically the relative
importance of different coastal regions and allowing a correlation with
political events in the interior and hence the determination of the affected
populations.7
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T r ansat lan t ic T r ansfo r mat ions
The various demographic data that have been selected to display the
range of ethnicities under slavery demonstrate that there were heavy concentrations of people of similar regional or ethnic background. Hence, the
port of York in Virginia received the bulk of its imported population from
the Bight of Biafra between 1718 and 1739 (Table 1); of those whose
regional origins are known, 7,600 people came from the Bight of Biafra,
out of a total population whose origins are known of 14,218, representing
53 per cent of the population. Since the majority of these people were
either Igbo or had learned to speak some Igbo before arriving in Virginia,
it is hard to imagine that there was not an important Igbo presence in the
early cultural development of the tidewater area.8 As the Virginia data
reflect, regional categories become standardized in the study of the slave
trade, and are now further codified in the voyage database, which is likely
to be the statistical source of most demographic data on the slave trade for
some time to come. In the Virginia case, the problems with the standardized divisions do not matter very much. However, for certain purposes,
the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin can be combined conceptually
because of extensive interaction along the coast and between the coast and
the interior, which also overlapped. Senegambia, upper Guinea and Sierra
Leone can be combined, too, both because even in combination the far
western Sudan and the Guinea coast provided relatively few slaves, except
in specific contexts, and the overlap with the interior and along the coast
was considerable. By contrast, ‘Angola’ is too broad a category, and it makes
sense to distinguish between Cabinda and the Loango coast to the north
of the Congo River, and Luanda and Benguela and their subsidiary ports
to the south of the Congo. The Bight of Biafra stands out as a region that
is relatively distinct, but there were links with the Gold Coast and Sierra
Leone that qualify this generalization.
Considerable diversity in ethnic origins is recorded in plantation
records, as revealed in plantation records for St. Domingue (Tables 2–4),
census records and inventories for Bahia (Tables 5–8),9 and slave registration data for Trinidad (Table 9),10 but again all these cases display considerable ethnic concentration. Moreover, the St. Domingue data reveal
considerable variation in the gender composition of the enslaved population as organized by ethnicity (Table 4), and the Bahian data demonstrate
that ethnic categories carried over into the freed population.11 The Bahian
material also allows a comparison of urban and rural slave populations
and ethnic identifications. Each of these cases suggests that information
on ethnicity, religion, and gender exists, which can be used to reconstruct
the impact of the slave trade on the emergence of the new societies in the
Americas, and that this analysis can be informed through the exploration
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Pau l E . L ovejo y
of ethnic and religious concentrations and their significance in connecting
the history of the diaspora with the history of Africa.
The ethnicity, religion and culture of the enslaved population kept
changing. Before the abolition of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, new slaves were constantly arriving and thereby infusing slave communities with new information and ideas, which had to be assimilated in
ways that we do not always understand at present. There is often confusion
in the identification of language, culture, religion, place, and political entities, any of which could be and was used as a proxy for ethnicity. An analysis of facial and body markings, and who had these and who did not, can
help to identify the backgrounds of people. In the nineteenth century, the
movements of former slaves, both before British abolition and especially
afterwards, continued transatlantic contacts, thereby complicating issues of
ethnicity and ethnic identity. Being ‘Nago’ in Bahia in the early nineteenth
century was not the same as being ‘Yoruba’ in West Africa, but uncovering
the differences and what these labels meant at the time is a major task
whose undertaking must inform any analysis of the slave condition.
Methodological Problems
The interaction and interconnections of religion and ethnicity as identifying mechanisms raise problems of methodology in the reconstruction
of the history of the African diaspora.12 The discussion of slave religion
and ethnic identity has tended to be static, not careful in using empirical
documentation to substantiate speculation derived from anthropology. The
difficulty is trying to avoid telescoping history, which thereby disguises the
integrative forces of religion in transcending ethnic divisions.
The technique that many scholars have adopted in overcoming the
supposed paucity of sources is the application of anthropological observations from the twentieth century to the past.13 ‘When correlated with later
anthropological accounts,’ according to Raboteau, ‘some of the distortion
and confusion can be neutralized (though it would be naïve to assume
that some modern accounts of African religions do not also suffer from
bias) (Raboteau, 1978). But can anthropological insights be used without
verification through the usual methods of historical scholarship? Without
the verification of contemporary documents, the findings of anthropology
are nothing more than speculation. Unfortunately, specialists of slavery in
the Americas generally have failed to document their analysis of religion
and culture on the basis of the lived experiences of the enslaved Africans
themselves.14 In discussing Igbo customs and practices, for example, Sterling Stuckey uses twentieth-century data to demonstrate the continuity
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T r ansat lan t ic T r ansfo r mat ions
and longevity of African customs and practices, but he does not establish
how and when culture was transferred (Stuckey, 1987). The result is bad
anthropology and even worse history. A critical examination must use the
same rigorous historical methodology that characterizes other areas of
history.
In Raboteau’s words, the issue is ‘the question of the historicity of
“traditional” African cultures’.
Can it be assumed that African cultures and religions have not
changed since the close of the Atlantic slave trade a century
ago? To simply use current ethnological accounts of African
religions without taking into account the possibility of change
is methodologically questionable. Due to pressures from
without—intensified Muslim and Christian missions, European imperialism, Western technology and education—the
growth of African nationalism during the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, African traditional religions have changed
and continued to do so . . . Besides external pressures to change,
there are also indigenous processes of change within traditional
African societies themselves. ( Raboteau, 1978:. 325–6).15
Despite Raboteau’s caution, the examination of religion is usually
treated in static terms; it is not shown what people believed and how they
expressed these beliefs in different times and places, not even in Raboteau’s
work. Nor has there been sufficient attempt to demonstrate how religion
was related to ideology and political structures in Africa and how this
changed in the Americas. Instead, the concept of ‘traditional African religion’ has been presented as an unchanging force that was all-embracing
over vast parts of the African continent; observations from a variety of
sources are merged to fabricate a common tradition that may or may not
have had legitimacy. For want of historical research, the religious histories
of Africans from the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, Kongo, and the
interior of Angola are accordingly reduced to the meaningless concept of
‘traditional’. Hence, the concept ‘traditional’ has little functional or analytical use.16
The same standards of historical reconstruction should apply to the
study of the African religious tradition as in the examination of the impact
of Christian missions and evangelicalism and the spread of Islam. Unlike
the study of ‘traditional’ African religion, the conversion of slaves to Christianity in the Americas has been the subject of extensive research. Consequently, scholarly analysis has not been prone to ahistorical generalizations,
except with respect to the African background. Until recently, moreover,
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the African contribution to the spread of Christianity in the Americas
was overlooked. As John Thornton has demonstrated, some Africans from
Kongo and Angola were already Christians before reaching the Americas,
and hence enslaved Christians were also a factor in spreading the faith
among slaves in the Americas.17 Thornton’s discovery indicates that the
interaction between African religious traditions and Christianity was
more complex than previously thought. Moreover, the context for analysing the conversion to Christianity includes Africa as well as Europe
and the Americas. Clearly, the complexities of African religious history
are blurred because there has been little research done on this important
topic. The possible exception is the study of Islam among slaves, where
the historical context of enslavement has sometimes been identified with
concurrent political developments in West Africa.
The approach that is developed here attempts to situate ethnicity in
historical context, demonstrating the ways in which culture changed, especially in diaspora. Nonetheless, the relationship of diaspora to homeland
influenced the conceptions of ethnicity. People had to live in the present,
and when that was under conditions of slavery, there was not much place for
nostalgia. Ethnic labelling and stereotyping are only one component of the
slave experience, but unravelling what these meant in historical context can
help to unravel how the enforced migration of slavery shaped the cultures
of the Americas, and indeed of Atlantic Africa. Ethnicity and religion are
to be deciphered for specific situations because their deconstruction is the
methodological means of reconstructing how the African diaspora came
into existence, and thereby making more sense out of the ‘creole’ forms that
the various components of the diaspora have developed.18
Creolization in Context
Creolization can be perceived as a process of integrating overlapping
ethnicities—European and African—as Earl Lewis does, but it is not
clear how African history fits into the picture (Lewis, 1995; Berlin, 1996).
The term ‘creole’ is thought to derive from the Portuguese crioulo, which,
according to Berlin, originally referred to someone of African descent born
in the Americas, although recently this etymology has been challenged
by Warner-Lewis, who suggests a Bantu origin for the term.19 By extension, the term has been applied to people of European descent as well,
and sometimes specifically to the racially ‘mixed’ offspring of Africans and
Europeans. In 1968, Kamau Brathwaite articulated his idea of ‘creolization’
as ‘the process . . . which is a way of seeing the society, not in terms of white
and black, master and slave, in separate nuclear units, but as contributory
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parts of a whole’. For Brathwaite, creolization was the cultural process that
occurred under slavery in tropical plantation colonies.
[W]ithin the dehumanizing institution of slavery . . . were two cultures
of people, having to adapt themselves to a new environment and to each
other. The friction created by this confrontation was cruel, but it was also
creative. The white plantations and social institutions . . . reflect one aspect
of this. The slaves’ adaptation of their African cultures to a new world
reflects another. (Brathwaite 1971: 306). 20
Brathwaite envisioned creolization as the emergence of ‘authentically local institutions’ and a ‘little tradition’ among slaves, which reflected
a division within Jamaica between two separate traditions, one African
and inferior and the other European and superior. Cultural polarity was
the basis of the ‘creole’, which was defined more by its divisions than its
similarities, and hence was not a ‘plural’ society that evolved ‘increasingly
common values’. Braithwaite’s creole falls along a ‘historically affected
social-cultural continuum . . . [with] interrelated and sometimes overlapping orientations’.21 The idea can be traced back at least as far as Philip
Curtin’s ‘Two Jamaicas’ (Curtin, 1955).
As Mintz and Price developed the concept, creolization was meant to
emphasize the cultural creativity of the enslaved in the Americas, and it
involved a process of adjustment under slavery that was remarkably fast.
According to Mintz and Price:
The beginnings of what would later develop into “AfricanAmerican cultures” must date from the very earliest interactions of the enslaved men and women on the African continent
itself. They were shackled together in coffles, packed into dank
“factory” dungeons, squeezed together between the decks of
stinking ships, separated often from their kinsmen, tribesmen,
or even speakers of the same language, left bewildered about
their present and their future, stripped of all prerogatives of
status and rank . . . and homogenized by a dehumanizing system
that viewed them as faceless and largely interchangeable (Mintz
and Price, 1992: 42).
But their hypothesis that ‘distinctive, ”mature” African-American [i.e.,
Creole] cultures and societies probably developed more rapidly than has
often been assumed’, indeed ‘within the earliest years of slavery’ is not
proven, as they admit.22 Indeed, the assertion compounds the difficulties
with their basic assumption that African culture could not be conveyed
to the Americas because of the heterogeneity of the enslaved population
and for want of appropriate institutions. The extent to which culture dis93
Pau l E . L ovejo y
sipated in the course of the transatlantic crossing has to be demonstrated
for specific historical situations, with documentation, not assumed a priori,
nonetheless. Despite the reservations of Mintz and Price themselves, subsequent students of slavery have frequently assumed lack of evidence was
confirmation of rapid creolization.23
Creole or Krio was also used in West Africa to describe the population
of mixed ancestry in Sierra Leone and subsequently along parts of the
West African coast (George Brooks, 1993; and Akintola Wyse, 1991). The
origins of this usage derive from the use of the term for essentially linguistic purposes, deriving from Portuguese pidgin, as noted above; the pidgins
spoken along the coast were trade languages often specifically identified
with people of mixed European and African origins, including former
slaves from the Americas. As in the Americas, the term suggests that
people had diverse origins and hence a new identity emerged that more or
less effectively amalgamated these differences. Unlike the way the term is
often used in the study of slavery, Krio emerged as an ethnic designation.
Hence, the various uses of ‘creole’ present a problem in analysis; originally referring to American-born people of African descent, whether or
not racially mixed, by extension, the term became associated with culture,
and creole was applied to mixed populations, whether of African descent
or not, as long as they were born in the Americas. The problem with the
term is establishing the parameters of its use; in some constructions, birth
was essential in establishing the boundary, but Berlin has demonstrated
that birth was not always essential. According to Berlin, the term ‘Atlantic
creoles’ designates
Those who by experience or choice, as well as by birth, became
part of a new culture that emerged along the Atlantic littoral—in Africa, Europe, or the Americas—beginning in the 16th
century. It departs from the notion of “creole” that makes birth
[in the Americas] definitive. Circumstances and volition blurred
differences between “African” and “creole” as they defined only
nativity. “African” and “creole” were as much a matter of choice
as of birth. The term “Atlantic creole” is designed to capture the
cultural transformation that sometimes preceded generational
change and sometimes was unaffected by it. (Berlin, 1996:
254).24
Berlin is describing the hybrid culture of the Atlantic rim, centred
on port towns, and adopting one or another pidgin form of a European
language.
94
T r ansat lan t ic T r ansfo r mat ions
Stages of Creolization
The emphasis of Mintz and Price on the ‘rapid’ creolization of newly
arrived slaves from Africa poses special problems. Stephan Palmié, as a
result, asks for greater attention to historical context in criticizing the idea
that synthesis was rapid and occurred early.25 Palmié argues that:
Despite its theoretical sophistication and methodological
soundness, the “rapid early synthesis” model suggested by Mintz
and Price fell short of stimulating a thorough historicization of
African-American anthropology. Instead, and quite contrary to
these authors’ intentions, it sometimes seems to have encouraged hypostatizing the concept of creolization to a degree
where it allows glossing over history in a manner reminiscent
of an earlier inflationary use of the concept of “acculturation”.
This tendency . . . not only trivializes the question of how exactly
“creole” synthesis was achieved, but also obscures the formidable
problems presented by cases where covariational “adhesions”
might plausibly be attributed to Atlantic transfer—not necessarily of concrete forms, but of organizational models.26
Since creole could refer specifically to the mulatto population, as well
as all others born outside of the native lands of their parents or grandparents, whether in the Americas or elsewhere, it is worthwhile distinguishing among ‘creole’ populations, carefully isolating the use of the concept
as a linguistic designation for dialects (pidgins) from its use in a cultural
context. These various usages suggest that population mixture implicitly
denies ethnic ‘purity’. From this perspective, the process of ‘creolization’
could be realized as quickly as Mintz and Price have argued, or much more
gradually, even in stages.
An analysis of the gradual process of incorporation, in contrast to the
rapid adjustment postulated by Mintz and Price, was developed by Fernando Ortiz as early as 1916. Ortiz described this process as ‘transculturation’.
transculturation . . . expresses the different phases of the process
of transition from one culture to another . . . [which] does not
consist merely in acquiring another culture [i.e., acculturation] . .
. , but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting
of a previous culture, which could be defined as deculturation.
(Ortiz, 1995: 101–2). 27
Such a view suggests phases of creolization, in contrast to the model
of Mintz and Price postulating an initial, sudden introduction to ‘creole’
95
Pau l E . L ovejo y
culture by the mass of newly imported, deracinated African slaves. Ortiz’s
problem is that he did not know enough African history; he saw the reformulation of African norms in the context of Cuba, as Palmié has recently
summarized, but he, and indeed his successors, failed to allow for the possibility of ongoing interaction across the Atlantic, even during the days
of slavery.28 The flow of culture, for these analysts, is one way only, from
Africa to the Americas, and then in the context of ethno-destruction. The
dichotomy that is perceived is between African retention, whether specific
survivals or generalized cultural responses, and the European imposition of
an early form of colonialism. But this was a colonialism of what? What were
the origins of the enslaved? How were people enslaved? What were their
perceptions? Was the severance from natal Africa as dramatic and severe
for all as claimed? The recognition of the importance of ‘African’ culture,
even if not analysed in historical context, does indeed call into question one
of the basic assumptions of the Mintz/Price model. It suggests, as Berlin
calls the first generation of enslaved Africans in each American colony, a
‘charter generation’, I would assume. Douglas Chambers has attempted to
describe the different, but continuous, processes in terms of primary and
secondary creolization, the initial stage emphasizing the high proportion
of African-born slaves and the latter stage indicating a predominance of
American-born slaves in the population (Chambers, 1997: 72–97).
At first consideration, the description of creolization as a gradual
process of cultural transference, subject to adjustment through ‘resistance
response’, seems to explain the emergence of an American-born population, and its eventual assimilation into a common ‘American’ or ‘creole’
culture and society (cultures and societies?), but I would contend that these
qualifications of the ‘creolization’ model still skip over African history.
Palmié asks ‘how exactly historical human agency makes the respective
(formal and functional) variables “stick” in specific instances’. By agency,
Palmié is referring to the ability of enslaved people to determine their own
fate. Nonetheless the extent to which people could shape their surroundings with reference to the African past has to be addressed. According to
Palmié, the creole theory ‘evades the issue of systemic articulations that
may . . . reveal single observational units to be part and parcel of larger,
encompassing historical processes operating on a transatlantic scale’. The
historical context is crucial, but Palmié does not allow for enough interaction across the Atlantic, even in the case of Ekpe. The history of Ekpe or
Abakua in Cuba and in the interior of the Bight of Biafra were certainly
connected, but why is it assumed that influences only flowed one way, most
especially in identifying institutions that Mintz and Price claim could not
have crossed the Atlantic? The location of acknowledged exceptions in the
96
T r ansat lan t ic T r ansfo r mat ions
nineteenth century does not alter the critique. Perhaps there were similar,
long-standing cultural and historical traditions that lasted as long, but
dating from an earlier period and now no longer existing in a recognizable
form. The question then becomes, what is the rate of creolization? Was it a
question of ‘sudden creolization’, being born in the Americas and achieved
within a generation, or did the variety of conditions that obtained under
slavery result in more complex patterns? Perhaps the connections with
Africa were stronger than Mintz, Price and others of the ‘creole’ school
have assumed.
In identifying individual enslaved Africans and following their route
into slavery, the ‘creolization’ model is challenged to explain individual life
histories. These histories reveal that individuals were enslaved most often
for political causes, and occasionally for more narrowly defined judicial or
religious reasons. They were rooted in specific places at exact times. How
and why they reached the Americas has to be analysed in historical context,
using rigorous historical methodology. Also, individuals reflected communities, whether particular towns and settlements were destroyed or not during
the act of enslavement. The idea of stages of creolization is tempting; it is a
move in the right direction but does not go far enough because it does not
recognize that agency was always present, and that adjustments to enslavement began at the point of enslavement. Agency present flowed across the
Atlantic in both directions.
Conclusion
In exploring ethnicity and religion as charter principles in the formation
of the African diaspora, I am suggesting that Africans moved across the
Atlantic in identifiable patterns, which were understood in ethnic and religious terms. However, the recognition of ethnicity and religion as essential
in the self-identification of enslaved Africans is not sufficient; each must be
understood in terms of process and change. Locating where the process of
community redefinition occurred is the question. Those models of ‘creolization’ and ‘transculturation’ that emphasize the extent of adaptability in the
Americas cannot explain the role of Islam in the diaspora. Certainly, a similar
process of ‘creolization’ shaped communities, including both slave and free,
in West Africa. Enslaved Muslims in the Americas had already undergone
this transition. In West Africa, ethnic plurality characterized Muslim society.
Through enslavement, conversion, and migration, people of diverse ethnic
backgrounds came to identify with Muslim culture. ‘Pan-ethnic’ groups
similar to those familiar in the Americas emerged in this situation. Hausa,
Mande, and Borno indicated such ‘super’ ethnic groups.
97
Pau l E . L ovejo y
The Muslim experience suggests that religion and ethnicity both
played a role in the cultural adaptations under slavery and the emergence
of what might be called the ‘cultures of servility’, which in their social
forms required the subordination of the enslaved population but in that
subordination also the basis of resistance. This process was underway
along the trade routes and in the ports of western Africa. Both ethnicity
and religious affiliation enabled individuals to establish new relationships
under slavery, and at the same time allowed them to establish themselves
within the structure of slave society. Moreover, I would contend that the
development of a trans-ethnic religious framework subordinated issues of
ethnicity within the slave community. In the case of Islam, this subordination of ethnicity to the larger community had already occurred in Africa
and was transposed to the Americas. Other religious movements, such
as vodun, candomblé, Ifá, and santeria, evolved in a transatlantic milieu, as
promoted by the regular and continuous interaction across the Atlantic
in their development. Unlike Islam, however, ethnic categories became
associated with ‘chapters’ of these religions, and hence ethnic categories
emerged within the context of the religious framework.
98
T r ansat lan t ic T r ansfo r mat ions
Table 1: Geographic Origins of Africans Entering Port York, Virginia,
1718–39
Origin
Bight of Biafra
Angola
Gold Coast
Senegambia
Madagascar
Windward Coast
Sierra Leone
Total, Known Origins
Origins Unknown
Percentage Unknown
1718–26 (%)
60
5
13
4
9
7
1
8,400
213
3
1728–39 (%)
44
41
5
10
5,818
2,968
34
Source: Allan Kulikoff, ‘The Origins of Afro-American Society in Tidewater
Maryland and Virginia, 1700 to 1790’, William and Mary Quarterly, vol.
35, 1978, pp. 226–59; table on p. 232, citing Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America, Washington, 1931–32, IV, pp.
183–5, 188–204.
Table 2: Ethnic Composition of African-Born Slaves, Sugar Estates,
St. Domingue
Senegambia
Senegal
Bambara
Fulbe (Poulard)
Mandinke
Upper Guinea Coast
Kissi
Susu (Sosso, Tini)
Mesurade/Canga
Cap Lao
Other
Gold Coast
Côte d’Or
Bandia, Banguia
Koramantin (Caramenty)
Mina
Bight of Benin
North
West
West
(1778–91) (1785–91) (1796–97)
99
1.4
4.0
0.7
3.0
1.5
3.0
0.8
0.5
1.7
3.5
0.5
1.0
0.4
1.2
2.5
0.0
6.3
0.0
0.2
0.7
0.9
5.4
0.1
1.6
0.2
1.6
4.5
0.9
0.0
0.0
3.4
0.1
1.5
0.7
3.0
0.1
1.1
2.4
0.2
Pau l E . L ovejo y
Gbe (Arada, Fon, Foeda, Adia)
Yoruba (Nago)
Bariba/Borgu (Barba)
Tem (Cotocoly)
Gurma (Tiamba/Kiamba)
Nupe (Taqua, Tapa)
Hausa (Aoussa/Gambary)
Bight of Biafra
Igbo (Ara, Arol)
Ibibio (Bibi)
Anang (Moco)
West-Central Africa
Congo
Mondongue
Mozambique
Number of slaves
15.9
8.9
0.8
0.3
2.5
0.8
0.7
16.0
16.1
0.8
1.8
2.5
1.3
4.9
17.3
18.6
1.6
3.2
2.7
3.0
4.3
2.5
0.0
0.0
5.6
0.0
0.1
7.2
0.4
0.1
40.8
2.5
0.6
2,143
31.3
0.8
0.8
1,059
21.0
1.5
1.0
2,641
Source: David Geggus, ‘Sugar and Coffee Cultivation in Saint Domingue and
the Shaping of the Slave Labour Force’, in Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan
(eds.), Cultivation and Culture: Work Process and the Shaping of Afro-American
Culture in the Americas, Charlottesville, 1993, pp. 73-98.
Table 3: Ethnic Composition of African-Born Slaves, Coffee Estates,
St. Domingue
Senegambia
Senegal
Bambara
Fulbe (Poulard)
Mandinke
Upper Guinea Coast
Kissi
Susu (Sosso, Tini)
Mesurade/Canga
Cap Lao
Other
Gold Coast
Côte d’Or
Bandia, Banguia
Caramenty
North
West
West
South
(1778–91) (1785–91) (1796–97) (1796–97)
0.7
2.0
0.4
2.9
2.0
5.9
0.2
0.0
2.2
6.2
0.6
0.3
2.5
5.9
0.9
1.6
0.2
0.3
0.9
0.0
2.5
0.0
0.2
0.2
2.8
2.8
0.0
1.0
0.6
0.8
3.3
0.2
1.4
2.2
0.0
2.6
0.7
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.7
0.1
0.8
0.4
0.3
0.0
0.0
100
T r ansat lan t ic T r ansfo r mat ions
Mina
Bight of Benin
Gbe (Arada, Fon,
Foeda, Adia)
Yoruba (Nago)
Bariba/Borgu (Barba)
Tem (Cotocoly)
Gurma (Tiamba/
Kiamba)
Nupe (Taqua, Tapa)
Hausa (Aoussa/
Gambary)
Bight of Biafra
Igbo (Ara, Arol)
Ibibio (Bibi)
Anang (Moco)
West-Central Africa
Congo
Mondongue
Mozambique
Number of slaves
1.0
0.4
1.2
2.7
10.1
5.7
10.3
5.4
5.5
0.1
0.0
1.1
9.2
0.0
1.1
1.5
12.2
0.4
2.3
2.1
9.3
0.3
0.6
2.0
0.5
0.4
0.7
1.8
1.4
2.7
0.6
2.4
2.3
0.0
0.0
10.5
1.8
0.0
8.8
1.5
0.3
13.0
2.3
1.3
63.9
0.1
4.2
973
47.3
2.6
2.6
457
35.3
2.9
2.4
1,578
36.0
2.0
4.1
1,576
Source: David Geggus, ‘Sugar and Coffee Cultivation in Saint Domingue and
the Shaping of the Slave Labour Force’, in Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan
(eds.), Cultivation and Culture: Work Process and the Shaping of Afro-American
Culture in the Americas, Charlottesville, 1993, pp. 73-98.
101
Pau l E . L ovejo y
Table 4: Sex Ratios of Selected African Ethnic Groups in St.
Domingue, 1721–97
Region and Group
Senegambia
Bambara
Senegal
Mandingue
Poulard (Fulbe)
Sierra Leone
Sosso/Tini (Susu)
Timbou ( Jalonka)
Windward Coast
Mesurade/Canga
Gold Coast
Mina
Caramenty
Bandia (Guang)
Slave Coast
Gbe (Ewe/Fon)
Arada
Adia
Foeda
Fond
Nago (Yoruba)
Chamba/Gurma (Thiamba/Kiamba)
Cotocoli (Tem)
Bariba/Borgu (Barba)
Hausa (Aoussa, Gambary)
Nupe (Taqua/Tapa)
Bight of Biafra
Igbo
Bibi (Ibibio)
Central Africa
Congo
Mondongue
South-eastern Africa
Mozambique
Total
Sex Ratio
214
278
156
167
163
84
91
57
120
110
151
136
208
143
99
66
69
89
51
48
87
191
116
155
1,588
324
103
97
186
166
168
144
219
231
133
Sample
1,380
718
379
192
71
206
128
58
253
124
633
441
79
73
4,552
1,962
(1,694)
(119)
(103)
(46)
1,580
297
166
84
287
161
1,245
1,129
83
4,928
4,561
283
137
129
13,334
Per Cent
10.3
1.5
1.9
4.7
34.1
14.7
2.1
1.3
9.3
37.0
1.0
Source: David Geggus, ‘Sex Ratio, Age and Ethnicity in the Atlantic Slave Trade:
Data from French Shipping and Plantation Records’, Journal of African
History, vol. 30, no. 1, 1989, p. 32.
Table 5: Ethnic Designations of Slaves in Bahia (1775–1815)
102
T r ansat lan t ic T r ansfo r mat ions
Designations
Bight of Benin
Gbe ( Jeje)
Yoruba (Nagó)
Benin
Savaru
Mina
Côte de Mina
Central Sudan
Nupe (Tapa)
Bariba/Borgu
(Barbá)
Hausa
West-Central Africa
Angola
Congo
Benguela
Sao Tomé
Mondubi
Gabon
Sub-Total
Other
Gentio de la Côte
Africain
de la Côte
Total
Number
104
100
4
1
40
15
12
1
50
167
4
93
1
1
596
Per Cent
44.3
10.6
45.1
3
100
270
13
2
881
Source: Maria Inês Côrtes de Oliveira, Retrouver une identité: Jeux sociaux des
Africains de Bahia: (vers 1750 - vers 1890), Thèse pour le Doctorat en Histoire, Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), 1992, 98, citing Testament
et inventaires après décès: Chartes de Liberté; Enquête du Calundu de
Cachoera; Liste des Africains résidant dans la Paroisse da Penha.
103
Pau l E . L ovejo y
Figure 1: Muslims in Asante. Source: Joseph Dupuis, Journal of a
Residence in Ashanti(London, 1824)
Figure 2: Three Men from the Central Sudan. Source: Francis de
Castelnau,Renseignements sur l’Afrique Centrale et sur une nation
d’hommes a queue quis’y trouverait,d’aprèsle rapport des Négres du
Soudan,esclaves a Bahia(Paris, 1851)
104
T r ansat lan t ic T r ansfo r mat ions
Figure 3: P.E.H. Hair, Adam Jones, and Robin Law, eds., Barboton
Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa 1678-1712
(London: The Hakluyt Society, 1992), vol. 1, p. cxv; vol. 2, fig. 44.
Figure 4: Mandingo chief and headman. Source: Joseph Corry, Observations on the Windward Coast of Africa(London, 1807)
105
Pau l E . L ovejo y
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Ralph Austen and Kenneth Warren, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade in African
and Diaspora Memory. Durham: Duke University Press.
Peel, J. D.Y. (2000). Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Raboteau, Albert J. (1978). Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press.
Reis, João José. “Ethnic Politics among Africans in Nineteenth-Century Bahia.”
in Lovejoy and Trotman, eds., Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the
African Diaspora. London: Continuum, 240-264.
Stuckey, Sterling. (1987). Slave Culture, Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of
Black America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Thornton, John. (1992). Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World,
1400–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trotman, David V. “Africanizing and Creolizing the Plantation Frontier of Trinidad, 1787–1838.” in Lovejoy and Trotman, eds., Trans-Atlantic Dimensions
of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora. London: Continuum, 218-239.
Warner-Lewis, Maureen. (1997a). “Genealogical Evidence of Ethnic and Religious Plurality among African Immigrants to Trinidad.” in Paul E. Lovejoy,
ed., Identifying Enslaved Africans: Proceedings of the UNESCO/SSHRC
Summer Institute. Toronto: York University.
——.(1997b). ”Posited Kikoongo Origins of Some Portuguese and Spanish Words
from the Slave Era.” América Negra, vol. 13.
Wyse, Akintola. (1991). The Krio of Sierra Leone: An Interpretative History. London:
Hurst.
Wood, Peter M. (1974). Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from
1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
The research for this paper was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada and was undertaken in the
context of the UNESCO Slave Route Project through the York/UNESCO
Nigerian Hinterland Project, York University.
Lovejoy (1999: 249–78). Also see the various contributions in Lovejoy and
Trotman, 2003.
Lovejoy (2004: 1-31; 1994: 151–80; 2000b: 11–44).
Lovejoy (1997; 2000a: 1–29).
108
T r ansat lan t ic T r ansfo r mat ions
5.
For a discussion of the interaction between orisha worship, Islam and Christianity in nineteenth-century Yorubaland, see Peel, 2000.
6. Many studies consider ethnicity, although rarely in detail and without an
attempt to explore the meaning of different ethnic identities in Africa and
the Americas at the time. See, for example, Littlefield, 1981; Wood, 1974.
Demographic data, including ethnic identification of slaves in the British
Caribbean, have been tabulated by Higman; see Higman, 1984, but the
meaning of the different ethnic labels in historical context has yet to be
studied. Similarly, Geggus has explored French shipping and plantation
records to identify ethnic patterns but without analysing the historical
origins in Africa in detail; see Geggus (1989: 23–44). Karasch’s study of
ethnicity in Rio de Janeiro is largely static as well; see Karasch’s, 1987.
7. Eltis et al., Atlantic Slave Trade. For an analysis, see Lovejoy, 2000c.
8. For a discussion, see Gomez (2003).
9. For an analysis, see Oliveira (2003).
10. For an analysis of the Trinidad data, see Trotman (2003).
11. For a preliminary analysis of some aspects of the demographic material in
relation to ethnicity, see my ‘Ethnic Designations of the Slave Trade and the
Reconstruction of the History of Trans-Atlantic Slavery’, in Lovejoy and
Trotman (eds.), 2003.
12. See Lovejoy, 2000a. Also see my 2002.
13. In constructing ‘the world they made together’, Mechal Sobel, for example,
relies extensively on twentieth-century anthropological accounts to gain
insight into eighteenth-century events and developments; see, Sobel, 1987.
14. Even such classic studies as (Genovese, 1974) fall into this trap. Consequently, the juxtaposition of the African religious tradition and Christian
conversion is an inadequate mechanism for examining the development of
slave culture. At its worst, this approach fails to grasp the major developments in the historical reconstruction of the role of religion in Africa in the
specific context of the slave trade.
15.Raboteau observes that ‘religion, particularly religious myth and ritual, might
be among the most conservative elements of culture’.
16.Until recently, the failure to examine contemporary religious expressions and
experience within Africa during the period of slave exports can be partially
excused for want of historical study by Africanist historians, but this is no
longer the case; see, for example, the excellent research of Robin Law, 1991.
For other studies, see Brandon, 1993; and Montilus, 1988.
17. Cf. Thornton, 1992, although at times Thornton may have overstated his
case with respect to the extent to which Africans from the interior of westcentral Africa were already Christians before reaching the Americas.
18. See Lovejoy, 2002.
19. As Berlin (‘Creole to African’, 253fn) notes, ‘creole’ has been extended to
‘native-born free people of many national origins, including both Europeans
109
Pau l E . L ovejo y
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
and Africans, and of diverse social standing. It has also been applied to people
of partly European but mixed racial and national origins in various European
colonies and to Africans who entered Europe. In the United States, creole
has also been specifically applied to people of mixed but usually non-African
origins in Louisiana. Staying within the bounds of the broadest definition
of Creole and the literal definition of African America, I use both terms to
refer to black people of native American birth.’ See also Holms, 1988–9,
2 vols. For the thesis that the term is Bantu in origin, see Warner-Lewis,
1997b.
Brathwaite (1971: 306). The book is based on his Ph.D. thesis.
Brathwaite, 1971, pp. 309–11. Brathwaite was responding in particular to
M.G. Smith’s conception of plural society; see Smith, 1965.
According to Mintz and Price (1992: 48), ‘to document our assertions that
fully formed African-American cultures developed within the earliest years
of settlement in many New World colonies involves genuine difficulties.
These stem from the general shortage of descriptive materials on slave life
during the initial period, as well as from the lack of research regarding the
problem.’
See, for example, Olwig, 1985. The fact that Olwig studies three centuries
would have the effect of emphasizing the adaptation and ultimate ‘creolization’ of the population.
Also see Mintz’s (1971: 481–96) description of the process of creolization,
‘The Socio-Historical Background to Pidginization and Creolization’, in
Dell Hymes (ed.), Pidginization and Creolization of Languages: Proceedings
of a Conference held at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, April
1968, Cambridge..
Palmié, Stephan. (1995). “A Taste for Human Commodities: Experiencing
the Atlantic System, in Palmié (ed.), Slave Cultures and Cultures of Slavery, p.
40–54.
Stephan Palmié, ‘Ekpe/Abakuá in Middle Passage: Time, Space and Units
of Analysis in African-American Historical Anthropology’, in Ralph Austen
and Kenneth Warren (eds.), The Atlantic Slave Trade in African and Diaspora
Memory, Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming.
According to Ortiz, Africans ‘brought with them their diverse cultures, some
as primitive as that of the Ciboneys, others in a state of advanced barbarism
like that of the Tainos, and others more economically and socially developed,
like the Mandingas, Yolofes [Wolofs], Hausas, Dahomeyans, and Yorubas,
with agriculture, slaves, money, markets, trade, and centralized governments
ruling territories and populations as large as Cuba; intermediate cultures
between Taino and the Aztec, with metals, but as yet without writing. The
Negroes brought with their bodies their souls, but not their institutions or
their implements. They were of different regions, races, languages, cultures,
classes, ages, sexes, thrown promiscuously into the slave ships, and socially
equalized by the same system of slavery. They arrived deracinated, wounded,
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T r ansat lan t ic T r ansfo r mat ions
shattered, like the cane of the fields, and like the cane they were ground and
crushed to extract the juice of their labor. No other human element has had
to suffer such a profound and repeated change of surroundings, cultures,
class and conscience. They were transferred from their own to another, more
advanced culture.’ Also see Ortiz, 1916, especially Chapter 2, ‘Los negros
afrocubanos’, 37ff. Ortiz drew on an extensive amount of documentation
for 1916. For a listing of ethnic categories in Cuba in 1916, see ibid., pp.
40–66.
28. Palmié, ‘Ekpe/Abakua’.
111
Chapter 5
Making Place, Making Race:
St. Helena and the South
Atlantic World
Daniel A. Yon1
gh
T
his short paper is being written as St. Helena celebrates the quincentennial year of its discovery on 21 May 1502. ‘Discovery’, in this
context, is entirely appropriate to describe Juan da Nova Castella’s encounter with this 47-square mile piece of land situated 15 degrees south of the
equator and 5.5 degrees west of Greenwich in the mid-South Atlantic.
Castella and his party, home-bound from the East, found no signs on
the island of any human habitation, past or present. The importance of
its location for the voyages back to Europe was immediately recognised.
In the ensuing decades and centuries, St. Helena was to assume immense
importance in the old imperial oceanic networks as it became a place of
convergence for East and West, North and South. The transformation of
this prehistoric place in the middle of the ocean, to a social place with
considerable historical significance within a set of global networks, is one
of the concerns of my larger project, ambitiously entitled The Making of
the South Atlantic World. This article draws from that project. While the
making of the locality of St. Helena and its natives are important processes, equally important for this project are the networks and movements,
and an effort to conceptualise the ‘watery wastes’ of the South Atlantic
as well as the places that are connected through it. This particular focus
seeks to bring the South into the spatial and conceptual frame of The
Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993). While the actual geographical parameters
of the South Atlantic world remain an open imaginary, some concept of a
Daniel A . Yon
geographical space, with St. Helena as a pivotal point, was clearly assumed
in 1859 by Robert Gray, the Anglican Bishop of Cape Town. Gray saw
the Diocese of St. Helena as including Tristan da Cuna and Ascension
Island, and as having pastoral oversight of the South American churches,
notably Recife in Brazil. This geographical space overlaps with ‘the Middle
Passage’, which has figured prominently in the history of the slave trade.
Bringing the South into The Black Atlantic pays attention to the movements of Africans from the more southerly parts of East and West Africa
to South America, often via St. Helena, as well as the movements between
the Indian and the Atlantic Oceans.
It is impossible to do justice to the dense and rich history that is St.
Helena’s and its place in the Atlantic world. Mindful of this impossibility,
in this article I merely provide a few snapshots or ‘fragments’ of history,
which I hope will evoke a sense of the place-making in the South Atlantic.
The accounts of early visitors are among the fragments that evoke the place.
Take the example of an account provided by the narrator of the voyage of
Thomas Cavendish, who was the first English seaman to visit the island.
After discovering St. Helena, the Portuguese built a chapel at the entrance
to the valley on the north and leeward side that offered the best anchorage. ‘Chapel Valley’ became the name for this space snuggled between two
commanding hills. When Cavendish visited the island, having forced a
Portuguese captive to show him its whereabouts, his narrator described
the valley thus:
An exceedingly fair and pleasant valley wherein diverse handsome buildings and houses were set up; and one, which was a
church, was tiled and whitened on the outside fair . . . There is
over and against the church a very fair causeway made up with
stones reaching upon a valley by the sea-side . . . The valley is the
fairest and largest low plot in all the island and is exceedingly
sweet and pleasant and planted in every place either with fruit
or with herbs ( Jackson, 1903).
The following year, the annual Portuguese fleet arrived, piloted by the
Dutchman Jan Huyghen Linschoten. Upon sighting the ‘earthly paradise’
which had been ‘miraculously discovered’ there was ‘great joy in the ship as
if we had been in heaven.’ Linschoten continued:
When the ships come hither, every man maketh his lodging
under a tree, setting a tent about it. . . . Every man provideth for
himself fresh fish, fruit and wood, for there is enough for them
all and everyone washeth his linen. . . . There they hold a General
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M aking P lace , M aking Race
Fasting and Prayer with Mass every day with great devotion
with procession and thanksgiving and other hymns, thanking
God that he has preserved them from the danger of the Cape
of Good Hope and brought them to that island in safety. . . . We
found names that had been there since the years 1510 and 1515
and every year following, orderly, which names stood out upon
fig trees, every letter being of the bigness of a span, by reason of
the age and growing of the trees (Gosse, 1990: 22).
Such accounts, celebrating the importance of the island set in the midst
of the South Atlantic Ocean, and suggestive of the transforming of the
place, abound in the early records on St. Helena. As the Portuguese began
to turn their attention increasingly towards South America, the Spanish
and the Dutch vied for the island. The Dutch claim to the place, however,
was short lived. In 1659 the English East Indian Company of Merchants
laid official claim and took formal possession of St. Helena. Except for a
brief few months in 1673 when it was captured by the Dutch, St. Helena
has been English, and then British, ever since. Upon taking possession of
the island, the English East India Company began formal occupation. It
brought setters and plants from England, established a regiment and built
fortifications. Chapel Valley became James Valley, named after James, Duke
of York, and later Jamestown. Aside from the range of settlers brought to
the island from Britain, slaves were brought from Africa and South East
Asia, and when the slave trade ended, small groups of indentured labourers
were brought from East Asia. By the end of the eighteenth century there
were ‘natives’ of St. Helena derived from this convergence and transmutation of diverse peoples. The island’s raison d’etre had to do with its place in
the immense ocean, its connections with elsewhere and, in particular, its
services to shipping from the East. An anonymous ‘well-informed traveller’ of 1805 described how ‘dissentions subsisting among individuals’ were
suspended for the time ships were in port as guests were entertained and
minds ‘occupied with foreign events, of which the strangers bring accounts
to them (Anonymous, 1805). Local identities, from these early times, were
thus always paradoxical in being intimately connected and produced by
comings and goings by way of the sea and in this way open and connected
but, at the same time, as closed off from the outside world by the sea.
Lieutenant William Innes Pocock, whose stay at St Helena was
extended while his ship, which was storm-damaged around the Cape of
Good Hope, underwent a refit, offers a snapshot of the global ‘economy’ of
the island in 1809. His account was not published until 1815, to satisfy the
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Daniel A . Yon
demand for information on the island when Napoleon was exiled there.
Pocock provides significant insights into St. Helena’s ‘global’ economy:
In the Company’s Godown [storehouse] are lodged a large
quantity of stores from China, consisting of teas, sugar-candy,
nankeen and silks. From India quantities of pepper, spices,
muslins, handkerchiefs, long cloth, gingham and the long list
of other articles from both these countries. From England two
store ships in the year touch there and deposit vast quantities
of provisions; for not only the garrison, but also the inhabitants
who depend principally on the Company’s stock of . . . This vast
collection is carried off by the retail dealers on the island itself;
by North Americans who bring provisions which are always
saleable and procure in return the produce of the East at this,
rather than make the longer and more precarious voyages to
India and China; and by the Portuguese and Spaniards of South
America . . . provisions thus collected from every part of the
world must necessarily be dear. Cattle and sheep are brought
from the Cape and sold at about one-third the price of those
bred on the island (Pocock, 1815: 7-8).
Pocock captures well the sense of St. Helena’s global connections and
interconnections. Here we see the island as a place for the circulation of
goods, people, and we might assume ideas, from disparate places—China,
India, England, North and South America, and Africa.
As noted, at the time when Pocock gave his account of the activities
in Jamestown, there were already references to ‘natives’ of St. Helena in the
records. To evoke a sense of how ‘natives’ were made, I offer the following extracts as historical fragments from Philip Gosse’s St. Helena (Gosse,
1990) with which to think:
1663. Twenty-six men arrive as settlers/labourers from England
via the ship Constantinople (p. 51).
1667. Approximately thirty people arrive as settlers/labourers
after being left homeless in the Great Fire of London (p. 51).
1676. It is stated that all English ships trading to Madagascar
which stop at St. Helena are obliged to leave on the Island one
Negro, male or female, as the Governor chooses (p. 81).
1734. Ten ‘natives’ (quotation marks in the original) of the
Maldive Islands are found drifting out at sea by the English
ship, Drake. The survivors, five men, one woman, and a boy are
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M aking P lace , M aking Race
landed at St. Helena where they are put to work as slaves (p.
172).
1744. Ten male slaves escape the Island in a stolen boat. All are
assumed dead (p. 183).
1757. Owing to the constant desertion (as well as suicides and
murders of slaves) it became necessary to import more slaves
into the island. To this end, ten men were bought in Malabar
and brought to St. Helena, one man having died in transit (p.
191).
1758. The two ships, Mercury and Fly, arrive at St. Helena after
having bought slaves in Madagascar. In all, twenty-six men were
landed at St. Helena from these two ships – sixteen men and
ten boys (p. 192).
1770. One sergeant of artillery, six soldiers, and one slave steal
a long boat and escape from the Island. During the next year,
news reaches the Island that these men survived and made
their way to Brazil and then to England. Two years later, John
Fortune, the slave who had escaped with the soldiers in 1770,
arrives back at the Island and surrenders himself, explaining
that he had simply been fishing when the soldiers stole the boat
with him in it (pp. 204–5).
1782. Visit of Miss Eliza Fay, author of Original Letters from
India, 1779–1815. While in St. Helena, she paid for her lodging
by leaving her slave with the proprietress of the inn in which
she stayed. When, nine years later, she visited the Island in the
American ship, Henry, in order to stand trial for her action, Miss
Fay bought the freedom of her former slave and had to pay her
passage back to her family in India (pp. 200–4).
1802. Because of labour shortages, a consignment of “Coolies” is
requested for the Island (p. 231).
1807. A slave ship that is part of the homecoming East India
Fleet arrives in Jamestown carrying the measles infection.
Within two months, 58 Whites and 102 Blacks are dead, and
many more follow (pp. 239–40).
1811. The arrival of the second detachment of “Coolies” for the
Island from Canton. Their contracts, originally for three years,
were extended to five. Numbers of Chinese labourers who eventually went back to China are offset by the Chinese sailors who
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volunteered to remain on the Island as labourers during their
stop-overs there. The Chinese colony at its height numbered
650, but levelled out at approximately 400 (p. 246).
1839—1849. After the abolition of slavery in the British
Empire, a Vice Admiralty Court for the trial of vessels engaged
in slaving was established on the Island. During these years,
large numbers of these vessels were brought to St. Helena to be
condemned. The “liberated African Depot” was established in
Ruperts Valley where liberated Africans were housed, fed, and
clothed until they could be returned or shipped to the West
Indies where there was much demand for their labour. It is estimated that over 10,000 liberated Africans passed through St.
Helena during this decade (p. 310).
These accounts of people en route, and rooting, convey in very broad
brush strokes a sense of the making of St. Helena and its natives. The
insights provided by these extract regarding slavery, and efforts to suppress
the trade in slaves, are also significant for this project. With respect to the
question of slavery and the Black Atlantic, St. Helena may be distinguished
from the Caribbean and the New World on two accounts. First, it was never
a plantation colony due to it geography. This helps to explain the relatively
smaller numbers of slaves involved in settling the island. Relatively small
numbers made the prospect of a critical mass of folks, retaining cultural
continuity with the places from which they had come, untenable. It also
made difficult the prospects for a critical mass of racialized subjects. The
emphasis here is on ‘critical’ mass as this observation does not detract from
the presence then of St. Helena’s own variety of what Gordon Lewis coins,
for the Caribbean, a ‘pigmentocracy’(Lewis, 1993). Second, the diversity of
origins of St. Helena’s population—from India, the islands of the Indian
Ocean, Madagascar, and East and later West Africa—also made the ‘racial’
composition of the island’s slaves different from those of the Caribbean
and the New World and more akin to that of the Cape Province of South
Africa. St. Helena’s total population rarely exceeded 5,500. This size also
worked against the emergence of a Caribbean type of ‘plural society’ structured along ethnic lines. Significantly, at a time of growing interest in
race science, the Governor of St. Helena observed in 1868 that there was
no other place on earth where it would be more difficult to discriminate
between the various strains of blood of which the body of the island’s
population is composed (H. Schulenburg and A. Schulenburg, 1997). The
governor’s observation should, however, be kept in perspective. It should
not, for example, detract from the many accounts of slave uprisings and
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resistance as well as successive legislation to suppress them in the early
part of the nineteenth century and during the two preceding centuries.
Furthermore, as we shall see below, his observation should not conceal the
anxieties about race and the prejudicial positions and practices that also
marked the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Returning to the actual slave trade and its suppression, the St. Helena
records reveal accounts of visits by local officials to slave traders stopping
at the island, en route across the Atlantic. During the period from 1840
to 1847, Britain set up the Vice Admiralty Court and naval squadrons
patrolling the high seas off the African coast brought captured slavers to
St. Helena. Emily Jackson (1903:261) reproduces data concerning ‘the
number of Africans captured by H.M. Cruisers and brought to St. Helena
between June 9 1840 and September 30 1847, and the manner of their
disposal’:
Received
Born
Total
Emigrated to the West Indian Colonies:
To Jamaica
To British Guiana
To Trinidad
To Cape of Good Hope
Deceased
Removed from the depot as servants
Missing, supposed to be drowned
Remaining in charge on 30th Sept., 1847
Total
9,133 slaves
22
9,155
1,093
2,115
1,136
1,410
2,926
445
1
29
9,155
The records of the Vice-Admiralty Court provide interesting details
on ships caught in the slave trade and brought to St. Helena. Take, for
example, the case of the case of the Brazilian brigantine Saspiro which
was captured thirty-three days from Rio in July 1845 by H.M. steamsloop Protemeteus and sent to Sierra Leone for adjudication. Or, the case
recorded for May 14, 1846:
Three vessels were condemned for being equipped for and
engaged in the slave-trade, viz. Brazilian brig Gabriel, taken by
H.H.S. Waterwitch (commander Birch); the schooner Gaio,
taken by H.M.S. Wasp (commander Ussher, after considerable
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Daniel A . Yon
resistance, in which three of the Wasp’s crew were wounded,
and three of the Gaio killed; and the brigantine, name and
nation unknown, taken by H.M.S. Actaeon (Captain Mansel) (
Jackson, 1903: 272).
And again, an extract from the Vice Admiralty Court, 18th February, 1847
which reported on the ‘three prizes’ brought into St. Helena, namely:
The Brazilian felucca, Saron, captured on the 18th March, 1847.
The schooner, name and nation unknown, of 52 tons, with 317
slaves, captured on 30th March, 1847, and Brazilian schooner
Joanito, captured on 4th April, 1847, which vessels bearing 315
surviving slaves were condemned in the Vice-Admiralty Court
on Thursday 22nd instant (Ibid., p.286).
Historian Trevor Hearl notes that historians of slavery and the slave
trade overlook St. Helena’s role in the suppression of the trade. There is no
mention of the island’s role in, for example, William Ernest Frank Ward’s
The Royal Navy and the Slavers (1969); William Law Mathieson’s Great
Britain and the Slave Trade (1929); Robin Blackburn’s The Overthrow of
Colonial Slavery (1988), and perhaps, more astonishingly, not a word in
Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade
(1997). (Trevor Hearl, personal correspondence).
I have thus far placed emphasis on the importance of convergence
and circulation as useful concepts for thinking about the South Atlantic
World. In so doing, I am mindful of how anthropologist Sidney Mintz
urges us to keep contemporary concerns with movement, globalization, and
transnationalism, in historical perspective (Mintz, 1998: 117–13). Mintz
reminds us that in the nineteenth century, one hundred million people
left their homes to make journeys across oceans, primarily in search of
gainful employment. He notes that fifty million of these were ‘European’,
and the other fifty million or so were considered ‘non-White’ and known
variously as ‘Coolies’, ‘Chinamen’, ‘Africans’, ‘Blackbirds’, and ‘Kanakas’.
This massive movement was, of course, at a time when transport was not as
efficient as it is today. The sheer length of these journeys and the numbers
of people on the high seas at any one time ask us to consider the vast
expanse of the oceans as a counter point to anthropology’s dominant trope
of people in their place. Movements on the oceans suggest a culture of
becoming; a condition of liminality and the making of other modernities
(see Gilroy, 1993). Thus, nineteenth century accounts of a hundred million
people travelling and of cultures in motion on the high seas foreshadow
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M aking P lace , M aking Race
late twentieth century concerns with de-spacialized identities and conditions of de-territorialization and re-territorialization.
I return to more snapshots and fragments of history, this time from
the St. Helena Guardian, published weekly in Jamestown, that further
illustrate the movements to which Mintz refers, and the ways in which
St. Helena is implicated in them.. Here are three samples of its weekly
‘Shipping News’:
Thursday, May 16th 1872. SHIPPING NEWS: Wednesday May
8th arrived the Dutch ship “Jason” from Batavia to Rotterdam,
25 passengers on board. Also arrived the French ship “Arabic”
from Manilla Bell Isle. Both vessels put in for water and stores.
Thursday May 9th arrived ship “Glenavon” from Bombay for
Havre; ship “Janet Cowan” from Calcutta for London and bark
“Cornwallis” from Karikal via Mauritius for Martinique. Supplied with water and stores. The latter has on board 440 Coolies
(9 deaths in passage).
Thursday, September 11th 1873. In our last issue we mentioned
the arrival of the French Steamer the “Charles Albert” with 600
coolies from Macao for Havana. No sooner did she put out to
sea than her boilers were worse than ever and she was obliged
to make for St. Helena, where she has been detained a fortnight under repair. The “Charles Albert” left all well on Monday
evening the 8th instant, and we are glad to add that the Coolies
on board have much benefited in health during their delay at St.
Helena, during which time they had been assiduously attended
to by Mr. Cole, the acting Colonial Surgeon.
Thursday, November 3rd 1881. SHIPPING NEWS: English
Bark “Earl Granville” from Calcutta with 407 Coolies to Trinidad. English ship “Plassy” from Calcutta with 618 Coolies to
Demerara.
Although these accounts of ‘the Coolies’ and of ‘Coolie Ships’ suggest
that the ocean traffic traversing St. Helena in the latter parts of the nineteenth century was still considerable, it was greatly reduced in contrast
to an earlier intense history reflected in Pocock’s description. In 1875,
John Charles Mellis, the Colonial Surveyor, described the island’s state as
‘deplorable’ as the ships calling there lessened by the day (Melliss, 1875).
This was the context for an increasing movement of people away from the
island, specifically to South Africa, which was popularly referred to in the
Guardian as ‘the larger colony’. I return to this movement south not to
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Daniel A . Yon
document its extent, which was considerable, but to juxtapose materials
that reveal insights into identity-making, and hint at the ways racial identifications are constituted and re-constituted in relation to St. Helena.
The Lord of Isles was a ship that worked between St. Helena and the
Cape. On Saturday, 24 June 1871, it left St. Helena with nineteen passengers, Islanders going ‘to seek a better fortune in the larger colony’. The
St. Helena Guardian wished them well while regretting the perceived need
for this migration. It was within living memory, the paper argued, that
‘men of European birth’ were well received on the island, and were able to
find ample economic opportunity. It lauded the ‘introduction of European
(blood and habits) of good character and conduct’ as ‘off-setting the evils
incidental to an increasing coloured population’ (St. Helena Guardian, 29
June 1871).
Here we might recall observations stated about earlier claims about
the difficulties of discerning ‘different races’ on St. Helena. The Guardian,
interestingly, invokes a discourse that produces race as industry, conduct
and character. The cultural, as in habits, is here inherently conceived as
biological, as in blood. ‘Evil’ is also incidental to ‘coloured’. As the 1870s
progressed, reports were continually coming back to St. Helena from what
was by then the increasing numbers who had ‘sought a better fortune in
the larger colony’. In 1872, the Guardian reported, ‘nothing but good news
from those who had left’, but went on to caution those wanting to follow:
Don’t be fooled by the fabulous accounts of easy wealth that the
diamond fields purport to offer. No one need think of going to
the diamond fields unless he possess more than the mere capacity for labour. If that is all, he will find himself on a level with
the Kafir labourer largely employed there (St. Helena Guardian,
16 May 1872).
Later the same year, the Guardian drew attention to the many advertisements both in its own papers and on the walls of Jamestown calling on
all labouring men, mechanics, wharf-labourers, and boatmen to emigrate
to the Cape of Good Hope, Port Elizabeth, and the mines of Port Nolloth.
It again warned potential emigrants to exercise caution in their desire to
emigrate:
Of the large number that have left St. Helena there are several
classes. Those heading for the Diamond Fields must not only
have the physical suitability but also the money for startup and
the awareness of risk and possible failure. There is another class
consisting of young men of some education, fair natural ability
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but no prospect of finding suitable employment here. A good
number of these have found work as clerks in Cape Town or
Port Elizabeth but steady habits are a must and low pay to start
is the rule. Domestic servants are in demand all over the Colony.
The news from them via letters seems satisfactory. St. Helena
could afford to send over a lot more of this class if arrangements
for passages could be made. However, we strongly advise farm
labourers and ordinary town labourers of St. Helena not to try
and improve their condition through emigration to the Cape.
The conditions of work and living, the races of half-savage
people they must associate with, and even the language, are all
conditions that should give pause (Ibid).
Here the framing of the ‘lower’ class—farm and ordinary town
labourer—in relation to the racialized, ‘half savage, Kafir labourer’ is striking on a number of accounts. We might note, for example, that the St.
Helenian ‘coloured’ and ‘lower’ class, though constituted as inferior to
European, and though possessing tendencies towards evil, are nevertheless constituted as superior to the ‘races of half savages’ (‘Kafirs’) that were
believed to exist outside. In this sense, the Guardian is also staking out St.
Helena’s place and identity in the nineteenth-century constructions of race
and the attendant ideas of a civilized/uncivilized hierarchy.
The high rate of emigration from St. Helena to South Africa in the
1870s affected every aspect of life on the island. Thus, for example, the
Guardian reporting on how the performance of the Band of the Royal
Engineers and the St. Helena Volunteers had ‘greatly enliven[ed]’ Jamestown on the last Thursday of March 1874, also lamented the ‘continued
stream of emigration’ and its effects, evident even in the reduced numbers
of volunteers in the band. Indeed, the impending departure of the band’s
founder, his son, and another band member prompted the inclusion of
‘Auld Lang Syne’ in the evening’s programme (St. Helena Guardian, 2 April
1874). Also, significantly, the Guardian noted how the same people who
had been alarmed by the emigration of their breadwinners were now comforted by ‘very acceptable remittances’, citing the Post Office orders by one
mail steamer in 1874 as ranging between £80 and £90 (St. Helena Guardian,
17 September 1874). Furthermore, the steady flow of domestic servants by
every mail steamer continued to dominate public debates. These kinds of
debates, coupled with examples of remittances, point to other aspects that
constitute the ‘flows’ through which the local St. Helenian community was
constructed. News from the outside came to affect local agendas in many
different ways. Take the example of the Bishop of St. Helena having to
preach ‘a practical earnest sermon’ on the occasion of the fifth anniversary
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Daniel A . Yon
of the Church Provident Society for Women. In this, he found it necessary
to ‘dwell upon the ill repute our emigrants in the Cape had excited by the
habit of untruthfulness’, which he traced back to ‘the cowardice fostered
by ancestral slavery, when, by unreasonable unjust oppression, a servile race
was forced to the coward’s defence of lying’. Notwithstanding this ‘fact’,
the Bishop was able to ‘intimate how hard it was to alter inherited disposition, but he pleaded the transforming power of grace and rising above the
timidity of reserve that had lain upon Anglicism for two hundred years’ (St.
Helena Guardian, 22 March 1883).
Finally, here are two extracts from the Guardian that point to the ways
by which ‘native’ St. Helenian travels and is reconstituted. The Guardian in
May, 1890 reproduced two letters that had earlier appeared in the Times
of Natal. Provoked by what were considered derogatory comments about
St. Helenians in that province, reproduced in the press, a certain Crowley
refused to allow the ‘malicious statements to pass unchallenged’:
I feel extremely sorry that your limited knowledge of the St.
Helenas has been with the West coast African (passing as St.
Helenas) and others of a low character. We came to this colony
at our own expense and not under any obligation to the taxpayers or to the government . . . I fail to see where the comparisons
come between Kafir, coolie and St. Helenas (St. Helena Guardian, 29 May 1890).
Further, from one who called himself ‘Old Rock’:
Sir, The remarks in your leaderette of the 21st have given much
offence to not a few respectable St. Helenas in Natal, being as
unjust and as uncalled for . . . You got with the few respectable
ones many of the offspring of liberated slaves from the West
coast of Africa and the sweepings of the streets and it is from
this “sample” no doubt that you have stigmatized all the natives
of the Island as “little better than the native Kafir and on par
with the coolie . . . ” St. Helenas, Sir, are pretty much scattered
over the globe, and may be met with in all respectable grades of
society as mechanics, ship masters, doctors and commissioned
officers in Her Majesty’s army and navy . . . To all these your
odious comparison is applied (Ibid).
The outbursts on the part of these two contributors to the Times of
Natal seek to define the St. Helenian ‘native’ by conflating race and respectability, as well as to delineate racial boundaries by defining who belongs
and who does not. Here we might recall the sense of convergence, both in
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terms of the ‘races’ and the cultural crossings through which the place of
St. Helena and its natives have evolved. I have attempted to map a sense of
a local culture of transition, and to imagine identifications with the same
as similarly transitional and partial. In their efforts to ‘fix’ a more stable
idea of what it means to be St. Helenian, the contributors to the Times
asserted a St. Helenian identity in racial terms that excluded Africans, particularly the more recent arrivals from West Africa. Here we might recall,
for example, the data above concerning those Africans ‘removed from the
depot as servants.’ In the desire to assert St. Helenian as respectability, the
discourse of civilized and uncivilized, ‘Kafirs’, ‘Coolies’, and ‘Europeans’ is
re-inscribed.
The two final extracts in this article describe relationships to the
place of St. Helena and the kinds of identifications and imaginations they
suggest for these late nineteenth century contributors to the Time of Natal.
In these specific identifications, efforts are made to delineate the ‘races’
that converge at St. Helena in order to distinguish the self in the new
home of Durban, South Africa. Race, in this delineation, summons discourses of the civilized and uncivilized. My more recent research (in progress) suggests a different process at play, particularly for those designated
‘coloured’ in apartheid South Africa a century later. In this research, I am
interested in how the memory of St. Helena works to produce alterities
within ‘Colouredness’; how identification with St Helena, as the place of
origin rather than convergence, has been, and is, taken up to counter the
marginalization and the humiliation that arise within the racial economy
of South Africa and the legacy of Apartheid. One of my respondents in
this preliminary research explained: ‘They would say my grandmother was
a Cape Coloured but she was married to a St. Helenian.’ He elaborated:
‘The St. Helenian might be darker but what was important was that he
came from St. Helena.’ Here we might recall the pronouncements in the
Guardian distinguishing the local from the racialized other believed to
exist elsewhere. In the claims made by my respondent, the island of St.
Helena begins to assume almost mythical status as the place of origin, in
ways that eclipse the convergences and transmutations The place of St.
Helena becomes a place of identification through which difference within
‘colouredness’ can be imagined and through which one may imagine and
claim the self within the racial economy of South Africa.
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References
Anonymous. (1805). A Description of the Island of St. Helena containing Observations on its singular structure and information and also an account of its climate,
natural history and inhabitants. London: R. Philips.
Gilroy, Paul. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Gosse, Philip. (1990). (New Edition with Introduction by Trevor Hearl) St. Helena
1502 – 1938. Oswestry: Anthony Nelson Ltd.
Jackson, Emily. (1903). St. Helena: the historic island. London: Ward, Lock, and
Co. Ltd.
Lewis, Gordon. (1993). Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: the historical evolution of the Caribbean in its Ideological Aspects, 1492 – 1900. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press.
Melliss, J.C. (1875). St Helena: a physical, historical and typographical description of
the island, including its Fauna, Flora and Meteorology. London: L. Reeves and
Co.
Mintz, Sydney. (1998). “The Localization of Anthropological Practice: From area
studies to transnationalism”. Critique of Anthropology 18(2): 117.
Pocock, W. Innes. (1815). Five Views of the Island of St. Helena; From Drawings
taken on the Spot: to which is added a concise account of the island. London: S &
J Fuller Temples of Fancy Rathborne Place.
Schulenburg, H., and A. Schulenburg. (1997). St. Helena, South Atlantic. Allersberg: Jacob-Gilardi-Vilag.
St. Helena Guardian. 29 June 1871.
——. 16 May 1872.
——. 2 April 1874
——. 17 September 1874
——. 22 March 1883.
——. 29 May 1890.
Note
1.
I am, as always, extremely grateful to my friend, historian Trevor Hearl, of
Cheltenham, England, for the passion and extent of his interest in the St
Helena’s history and for his help in continually providing me with insight
as well as materials from his finest collection on St Helena. I have come to
value his generosity greatly.
126
Chapter 6
Looking through a broken
mirror: blackness, shared
memory, shared identity
and shared destiny
Chris O. Uroh
gh
T
he problem jointly confronting Blacks today, whether they are on the
African continent or in the Diaspora, can conveniently come under
a single heading as a problem of self-definition or a crisis of identity. The
questions here are many while the answers to them overlap: Who are we
as a people? What is our past made of? How can we come to terms with
present realities? How do we confront the looming future? The failure of
the Black African to get the appropriate responses to these questions is
what stands between her and her proper positioning in a world that is
today characterized by the politics of difference and the construction of
otherness. This problem arises for the Black African mainly because of the
cultural amnesia she suffered as a result of cultural discontinuity occasioned
by her contact with the West. Today, she is caught between a past she can
hardly recall, a present she is ill-equipped to understand and participate
in, and, above all, a future she can only anticipate with trepidation (Uroh,
2002).
It is the contention of this paper that the critical factor in the generation of this crisis is the ‘cultural dislocation’ suffered by Black Africans, a
dislocation occasioned by Africa’s chequered history, the history of a people
forced into slavery, and therefore of involuntary migration to ‘strange lands’,
the history of colonization which threw traditions and values overboard,
displacing them, but not effectively replacing them. Among other things,
this resulted in the ‘delegitimization’ and consequent displacement of the
C h r is O. U roh
socio-cultural values of the Black African with an alien and alienating
world view (see Uroh, 1998, 1999). Today, whether on the African continent or in the Diaspora, the Black African is positioned within the margin,
among the underdeveloped, located at the periphery, the hopeless ‘other’,
those who Fanon would categorize as ‘the wretched of the earth’. She is at
the outer edge; the ‘rim’ of the metropolitan western world, always south to
someone else’s El Norte (Hall, 1994). Thus, with the humiliation of history,
the disorientation occasioned by geographical displacement, coupled with
a successful assault on the African cultural heritage, Blacks all over the
world became, in the words of the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, a
people who have lost confidence in themselves.
The main arguments of this paper are that the Black dilemma today,
even though the dimensions and manifestations of it may vary according
to geography and time, is basically cultural; it is a by-product of African
histories — of slavery, migration, colonialism, neocolonialism — and today
it is compounded by globalization; the destiny of Blacks, both within the
continent and in the Diaspora, in this respect are tied; and finally, rather
than continuing to bemoan the past, the Black, privileged ‘within’ and
‘outside’ ‘modern’ culture, stands a better chance of turning around the
fortune of the Black race if only she can take seriously the emergent cultural syncretism both in the Diaspora and on the continent.
Like a Fish out of Water
Having identified the African crisis as cultural, let me by way of prefacing the discourse quickly sketch out the idea of culture and ‘cultural
dislocation’ that I have in mind. Briefly, we see culture simply as the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, meanings, beliefs, values, religion,
concepts of self and the universe, and the self–universe relationship that
a group of people acquires over the course of generations through group
striving (Porter, 1972). Culture defines ‘the way a people live’. It is that
which determines as well as shapes a particular people’s ‘ways of thinking,
feeling, believing and behaving and the system of related technologies and
material goods that allow members . . . to adjust to that society’s physical
and social environments’ (Thompson, 1991: 20).
Culture as the sum total of a people’s ‘solutions to problems of survival’
therefore goes beyond the types of food they eat, the kinds of apparel they
put on, or the sorts of festivals they celebrate. While all cultures incorporate these elements, they also transcend them in their constitutive role in
the lives of participants of each culture. Against this background, one can
rightly conclude that nothing gives ‘meaning to our existence’ as human
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beings than our culture. And there are several ways in which our culture
does this:
Firstly, culture provides lenses of perception, a way of looking
at reality, a world view. How people view the world is greatly
conditioned by one or more cultural paradigms to which they
have been exposed . . . Secondly, culture provides standards of
evaluation. What is good and what is evil, what is beautiful
and what is ugly, what is legitimate and what is illegitimate
are all rooted in criteria provided by culture . . . Thirdly, culture
conditions motivation. What motivates individuals to perform
well or to really exert themselves is partly inspired by cultural
factors. Fourthly, culture is a medium of communication . . .
Fifthly, culture provides a basis of stratification, a pecking order
in society. Status, rank and class are partly the outcome of a
cultural order . . . Then there is the link between culture and
economics . . . The seventh major function of defining identity,
of determining who are ‘we’ in a given situation and who are the
‘they’ (Mazrui, 1980: 47–8) Culture as the ‘the totality of knowledge and behaviour, ideas, and
objects that constitute the common heritage of the people’ serves as the
opaque lens through which they perceive and interpret reality. It is ‘the
locus of value priorities, indicating the behaviours of a given social group
and, hence, the choices among the many possible futures’. It is in this way
that culture becomes the bearer of a people’s identity. And it is also on
this account that the effect of cultural dislocation or discontinuity on the
victims is pervasive.
By cultural dislocation I mean, among other things, a forceful disorientation or delinking of a people from their collective heritage in the arts,
sciences, political and social organizations, social norms, religious belief
systems, linguistic usage, and so on. In this regard, losing one’s culture is
more than being unable to eat a particular kind of food, or play and dance
to a particular kind of music, and what have you. It is tantamount to suffering from amnesia. For it means the loss of a past, which, as I said earlier,
makes the understanding of the present more taxing than it should have
been, and, inasmuch as the present is a prologue to the future, the future of
a culturally dislocated person is equally compromised. And this, to me, is
the situation that most Africans find themselves in today. The dislocation
of African culture through contacts with the West has not only resulted in
the disorientation or delinking of the people from their collective heritage
in the arts, sciences, politics, social norms and religion, but also the cultural
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amnesia that has followed has created a ‘split personality’—a bifurcation of
the soul into two conflicting parts—in the African, be she in the Diaspora
or on the continent. I will return to this point later.
But first let me try to look briefly at the falsehood that preceded and
was used even by respected western intellectuals and supposed clergymen
to justify the rape of the African continent and the dehumanization of the
African people. It is not that going into this history would make much
difference to the project of reconstructing the African mind, which to me
is the biggest challenge facing Black intellectuals all over the world today,
but it would at least help us to put into perspective where our troubles
started, the point in history at which we lost our confidence and dignity as
humans, a loss that still remains the biggest challenge that we face today,
and so be able to work out the best way of picking things up again.
Theorizing a Lie
Most of these stories are quite familiar and their falsity is already a
matter of public knowledge, but apart from helping us in clearing the past
for the navigation of the waters of ‘prejudiced imagery’ in which Blacks
are still swimming today, the need for contemporary African intellectuals to take this matter seriously is equally underscored by the fact that
some western scholars even today are bent on hawking about in respected
academic journals and books the time-dishonoured thesis that there is a
correlation between colour and intelligence, and, more importantly, that
the ‘lighter’ one is the more intelligent she is. The implication of this argument is that Blacks are placed at the lowest rung of the ladder in intelligent
ratings. Two recent articles in a US-based journal, Society, illustrate this
point clearly. The first is by Linda S. Gottfredson (1994) entitled ‘Egalitarian Fiction and Collective Fraud’. The main concern of the author, in her
words, is to show how the ‘Social science today condones and perpetuates
a great falsehood (which) holds that racial-ethnic groups never differ in
average developed intelligence . . . While scientists have not yet determined their source, the existence of sometimes large group differences in
intelligence is as well-established as any fact in the social sciences.’ The IQ
debate is a familiar one, and so there is no need for an elaborate discussion
here. Rather, what is of interest to me is that, without being able to provide
even one example to substantiate her claim, Gottfredson maintains that ‘it
is impossible here to review the voluminous evidence showing that racialethnic differences in intelligence are the rule rather than the exception . .
. , and that the well-documented black–white gap is especially striking’.
There is no gain in repeating that this claim is not true. Every-day reality,
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tunities and social exposure with their white counterparts in schools as
well as the various breakthroughs recorded by Blacks in highly intellectually engaging tasks, go to show the inadequacies of all attempts to equate
racial differences with differences in intelligence. In most IQ tests, children of different social backgrounds are usually subjected to aptitude tests
that are skewed in favour of some particular group. In one of the earliest
reported cases of IQ testing in Africa, carried out in South Africa in the
late nineteenth century, the outcome was, as expected, that white children
performed far better than Black children. It is, however, instructive to note
here that in the IQ studies, the Blacks samples were made up mainly of
‘children of coal miners who, because of cultural deprivation and linguistic
shortcomings [and who therefore] would normally be expected to perform
poorly in tests of intelligence, were compared with children from middle
class European homes, who, needless to say, had a better environment than
the black subjects’. The outcome could not have been otherwise.
The second article by Mary Lefkowitz (1994), entitled ‘Myth of a ‘Stolen
Legacy’’, is a critique of George G .M. James’s seminal work on the African
ancestry of Greek civilization and philosophical thinking and the subsequent borrowing of western philosophy and civilization therefrom. In any
case, James’s work Stolen Legacy was first published in 1954. It is, therefore,
curious that a scholar should be ‘reviewing’ it in 1994. James’s central argument, with which he opens the book is, ‘The term Greek philosophy . . . is a
misnomer, for there is no such philosophy in existence.’ According to him,
‘The true authors of Greek philosophy were not the Greeks, but the people
of North Africa, commonly called the Egyptians; and the praise and honour
falsely given to Greeks for centuries belong to the people of North Africa,
and therefore to the African continent.’ James noted further that ‘this theft
of the African legacy by the Greeks led to the erroneous world opinion that
the African Continent has made no contribution to civilisation, and that
its people are naturally backward . . . the basis of race prejudice which has
affected all people of colour’. We recall here that the Senegalese scholar
Cheikh Anta Diop spent the better part of his life unravelling the mysteries
behind this stolen legacy. His findings, which have been corroborated by the
works of other scholars, are to the effect that not only was the Greek civilization African in origin but, more importantly, that this civilization was
Negroid, having belonged to the original occupants of Egypt, the Nubians.
There is enough evidence indicating that many Pharaohs were Blacks.
However, the fact that ‘this race of black men,’ as Volney (1987) puts it,
‘is the very race to which we (i.e. whites and indeed humanity as a whole)
owe our arts, sciences and even the use of speech’, is the truth that Mary
Lefkowitz and her co-travellers in the racial coach would not want to
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accept. She thus rejects the argument that Greek philosophy was a plagiarized version of the philosophy of ancient Egypt. She rejects also the claim
that the ancient Egyptians were Blacks. Curiously, however, she admits
that ‘the population of Egypt was racially mixed’, by which she implies
that it was ‘not exclusively black at any time’. No history of human settlement or migration tells us that different races started to live at one place at
the same time. There is always ‘the first to arrive’, the aborigines. Anyone
who is familiar with the history of the African continent in general and
of Egypt in particular would agree that the multiracial period in Egyptian
history could only have been after the Arab invasion of the Nile Valley. It
makes sense to believe that it was after this that Egypt became multiracial.
Many studies have concluded that the Nubians, who even today are dark
skinned, were the ancient Egyptians who were displaced by the invading
Arabs. But it is understandable why Lefkowitz and scholars of her persuasion would want to deny the Blackness of Egypt and Egyptian civilization.
Cheik Anta Diop explains that the idea of stripping Egypt of her achievements for the benefit of a people of genuine white origin was a way of
justifying the unproven, and in fact, unprovable, thesis that blacks have not
contributed to world civilization. He continues:
This false attribution of the values of an Egypt conveniently
labelled white to a Greece equally white reveals a profound contradiction, which is not negligible as a proof of the Negro origin
of Egyptian civilisation. As can be seen, the black man, far from
being incapable of developing a technical civilisation, is in fact,
the one who developed it first, in the person of the Negro at
a time when all the white races, wallowing in barbarism, were
only just fit for civilisation.
In saying that it was the ancestors of Negroes who today inhabit
principally black Africa, who invented mathematics, astronomy,
the calendar, science in general, the arts, religion, social organisation, medicine, writing, engineering, architecture . . . in saying
all this, one is simply stating the modest and strict truth, which
nobody at the present moment can refute with arguments
worthy of the name (Diop, 1964)
Though several studies have confirmed the fact that the Egyptian
civilization is a Black civilization and that ‘the Greeks’ heavy borrowing
from it are historical evidence’, students of Black history, familiar with
the prejudiced narratives of western scholars, would agree that there is
nothing really new in the positions taken by Gottfredson and Lefkowitz.
They all fall within a trend and an established tradition of western scholar132
L ooking t h ro u gh a b roken mi r ro r
ship, a scholarship whose goal is to present ‘the blackman as ineducable,
biologically inferior to whites, incapable of understanding and of abstract
thinking’. In a series of lectures delivered as far back as 1822, the German
philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel dismissed Africa as an insignificant part of the world. Africa for him was ‘the land of childhood, which
lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark
mantle of night’. The Africa of Hegelian knowledge was also not capable
of rational thinking. He states further:
The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for
the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite give up
the principle, which naturally accompanies all our ideas – the
category of Universality. In Negro life the characteristic point is
the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realisation
of any substantial objective existence – as for example, God, or
Law – in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and
in which he realises his own being . . . The Negro, as already
observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and
untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and
morality – all that we call feeling – if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be
found in this type of character (Hegel, 1991: 93).
It is important to remind ourselves here that Hegel’s assertions about
Africa and Africans were not based on any direct, first-hand experience of
Africa or the Africans of his narrative. Instead, like several other western
‘experts’ on African affairs, Hegel relied on what he describes as the ‘copious
and circumstantial accounts of missionaries’. Hegel’s mission partly was
to provide the philosophical foundation for the inhuman treatments to
which Negro slaves in Europe of his time were subjected. No wonder then
that Hegel maintained that the devaluation of humanity among Africans
was normal, and by implication, that there was nothing wrong if whites
inflicted any kind of inhuman treatment on Blacks. Hear him: ‘Tyranny is
regarded as no wrong, and cannibalism is looked upon as quite customary
and proper. The devouring of human flesh is altogether constant with the
general principle of the African race.’
Yet Hegel was not alone in spreading this falsehood, in this debasement of the Blacks. He had several accomplices. David Hume, another
philosopher, was one of them. In his essay Of Natural Character, Hume
(1964) writes:
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I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species
of men . . . to be naturally inferior to the whites. There was
never a civilised nation of any other complexion than white,
even any ingenious manufacture amongst them, no arts, no sciences. Such a uniform and constant difference made an original
distinction betwixt these breeds of men . . . there are Negro
slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered
any symptoms of ingenuity.
When he was reminded of the achievements of some Blacks, particularly the Jamaican-born poet Francis Williams, Hume said that Williams’s
feat was like that of a parrot that can speak plainly a few words picked up
from its master. Hume’s position was no different from that of Immanuel
Kant (1960), who also asserted, again without any evidence than fairy tales
from so-called missionaries and explorers, that the difference between ‘the
black and white races . . . appears to be as great as in regard to mental
capabilities as in colour’. Of course, the whole pre-logical mentality thesis,
which saw non-western culture as ‘primitive’, is quite familiar. It need not
detain us here.
I have gone to this length in discussing these falsehoods for at least
two reasons. First, as I have already mentioned, such falsehoods formed
the basis for justifying the dehumanization of Blacks either as ‘natives’ in
the colonies or as Negro slaves in the Diaspora. Take, for instance, the
1740 South Carolina law that made it criminal for owners of Negro slaves
to teach them to read or write on the ground, among others, that Blacks
were ineducable. As the statute provided, ‘All and every person or persons
whatsoever, who shall hereafter teach, or cause any slave or slaves to be
taught to write, or shall use or employ any slave as a scribe in any manner
of writing whatsoever . . . shall, for every offence, forfeit the sum of one
hundred pounds current money.’ The statute maintained that attempting
to educate the Negro amounted to ‘suffering’ the slaves while ‘attending
with great inconveniences’ both to the slaves and their owners.
The second reason for examining this falsehood, and why, as I said
before, contemporary Black scholars should not take the matter lying low,
is that earlier responses to it, in spite of the volumes of material that have
been produced in the process, have not risen to the challenge the persuasive power that it possesses even today. In fact, most of these responses,
especially those by African nationalists, were more or less affirmations of
the negative western imagery of Blacks. In that scholarship, we see situations where attempts to respond to and contradict pejorative western narratives start from the very fact of the western stereotypical construction of
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the Black person as second-rate; first, a tacit admission that the Black was
different from whites even in terms of intellectual exertions and applications. Though genuinely made as a way of creating a separate identity for
the Blacks that is not contingent on that of any other race, the reading is,
however, that of the inferiorization of the African world when compared,
as we cannot but do in a racialized world, with those of the white. It was
the view of Leopold Sedar Senghor, for instance, that, ‘Emotion is Negro
[while] reason is Hellenic.’ Though the intention of Senghor was to valorize what he considered as the African unity with the Other, as against the
European subject–object divide, it was very easy to read him as affirming
the prejudice that Blacks were not capable of abstract thinking. Again, read
this: ‘The African is, as it were, shut up in his skin. He lives in the primordial night. He does not begin by distinguishing himself from the object,
the tree or stone, man or animal or social event . . . The African is one of the
worms created on the third day . . . a purely sensory field.’ The impression
one gets from this is that the African is never critical in her appreciation of
her environment. But she was. Similarly, Aimé Cesaire did not see anything
wrong in affirming that Africans ‘did not invent gunpowder or compass . .
. never knew how to tame steam or electricity . . . have explored neither the
sea nor the sky’. Again, this when taken literally would be to affirm that
the African had no knowledge of how to do some of these activities before
she made contact with the West. But this is very far from the truth. Here
is just one confirmation from G.T. Basden, a white colonial officer in the
then eastern region of Nigeria. In his book Among the Ibos of Nigeria,
Basden narrates how knowledgeable the ‘natives’ were in the production of
firearms before the advent of colonialism and, more importantly, how such
productions were stopped and declared illegal by the colonial authorities.
This is how he puts it:
When I first came to this country, there was an abundance of
firearms of many patterns . . . Arms of precision, that is, any other
than flintlock guns, are now prohibited and great numbers have
been called in and destroyed since British rule was established.
Now the Ibo man has to be contended with what he can get.
He wanders through the ‘bush’ with his fearsome weapon, a real
source of danger to the owner’ (Basden, 1921: 128).
This is a confession of a white man who witnessed the destruction of those
technologies that, Cesaire claims, if only sarcastically, Blacks never had.
Further studies have equally confirmed that both the Igbo-Ukwu and the
Nok cultures in Nigeria, which dated as far back as 900 BC or so and had
been in existence before the people had any contact with the West or any
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outsiders for that matter, had ‘iron metallurgy’ as part of their civilizations
(see Njoku, 1991).
It is important to always point out these facts if only because when we
keep silent in the face of falsehood, we give it an implicit stamping of truthfulness, especially to those who are not in the position to know the truth.
While one does not entirely condemn Senghor or Cesaire for taking their
positions in defence of the African heritage, the point is that they probably
would have done better if they had not started their ‘fights’ by deploying the
same weapons used by their opponents. For though their statements were
made as ways of defining an identity that is peculiarly African, by deploying
a ‘mode of argument originally devised’ by western scholarship to express
their ‘revolt against white racism’ (Hountondji, 1983: 158), they ended up
with a Black personality that is nothing but the opposite, a negation, if not
the inferior other, of the white. Surely, this was not their intention, but nevertheless this was the end result of their response. Even today this continues
to be a source of the cultural dilemma that weighs down the Black both on
the continent and in the Diaspora. On this account let me return to where
I veered off earlier, by looking at how the delegitimization of Black history
has impacted the Blacks today.
The Burden of History
As I have been trying to show, the Black African dilemma is a product
of the Black’s history. I will now examine some of the concrete manifestations of this crisis in the lives of the people as a prelude to what I consider
to be the appropriate responses to it. Let me start from the continent where
the Black African dilemma has arrested development, making Africa not
just the most backward continent today, but also the only one that is actually backsliding. The cultural crisis continues to manifest itself in different
forms. At the economic level, it manifests itself in the underdevelopment
of the continent, occasioned largely by the disadvantageous linkage of
the African economy during the colonial days to the western capitalist
systems within which the African economy cannot compete. The result is
that today Africa remains the one continent that produces what it does not
consume but consumes what it does not produce. We produce raw materials that can only be processed outside the continent, in Europe, while we
consume industrial goods that are manufactured outside the continent. In
both instances, the West determines the price. The great pan-Africanist,
Kwame Nkrumah, described Africa as a paradox: ‘Her earth is rich, yet the
products that come from above and below her soil continue to enrich, not
Africans, predominantly, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa’s impoverishment.’ The South African President, Thabo Mbeki (1999),
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laments: ‘We are subjected to a strange situation that the process of the
further reproduction of wealth by the countries of the North has led to the
creation of poverty in the countries of the South. There is something out of
joint where wealth begets poverty.’ With the prime mover of the African
economy outside the continent, African leadership loses the development
initiative in the continent. This is why Africa remains the laboratory for all
forms of economic experimentations by the International Monetary Fund,
the World Bank, and what have you. The outcome is as real as the poverty
on the continent today. These attempts have all failed. But they were bound
to. Development is never attained by proxy. It is attained only by the active
participation of the people, precisely the agents who have been marginalized in the economic strategies dictated to the continent by international
agents interested in their share of the loot from the continent more than
anything else.
The economic crisis dovetails into the political. Africa confronts this
cultural crisis on its political landscape in the form of the commonplace
crisis of political legitimacy, which has put the question of political order
almost permanently on the agenda of most African states. Today, many
states on the continent hover on the brink of disaster. Economic underdevelopment apart, the displacement of indigenous African political
systems as well as the cramming together within the artificial state created
by colonial administrations is at the root of most of these political crises.
Unfortunately, the nature of the problem is such that liberal democracy
is ill-equipped to resolve it. The simple reason for this failure is that the
‘majoritarian’ and winner-takes-all principles of liberal democracy have only
ended up creating permanent majorities and minorities in many African
states. This partly explains why the more African states democratize, the
more ethnic conflicts we have. A similar case could be made for the now
rampant religious conflicts in some parts of the continent. Here we must
recall that inter-religious conflicts were never part of traditional African
societies, even when these societies were multi-religious. The problem,
however, is that part of the processes of delegitimizing the African cultural
heritage was the heathenization of indigenous African religions as well
as the demonization of the African God. This continues to create tension
between the ‘unbelievers’ (meaning the adherents of indigenous African
religions) and the followers of the new faiths on the continent.
Perhaps the most central factor in the deepening of the crisis was the
loss of the African language. As an instrument for cultural communication,
the language of a people is their ‘collective memory-bank’. It is their reservoir of ‘past achievements and failures [and] forms the basis of a common
identity’ (Wa Thiong’o, 1981). In this way, language ‘provides humans with
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their intellectual bearings in the production and reproduction of social life’
(Prah, 1993: 73). In this way, the development of any culture is contingent
on the development of the language with which such a culture is communicated and cultivated. To deny a people their language is therefore like
‘uprooting that community from their history’, as well as making it difficult
for them to properly appreciate their world since a people’s ‘conception of
reality is a matter of [their] linguistic categories’ (Searle, 1982: 156). I am
not saying that language creates reality, but that the only reality that we
can possibly be aware of is one mediated by our language. The colonialists
knew how central language is to the development of a culture, and so one
of their policies was to stop the growth of indigenous African languages.
Not only were they not taught in schools, but it was also a crime for pupils
to speak their mother tongues (the vernacular) at school. Defaulters were
punished in various humiliating ways. One such punishment was that the
class monitor, who kept a register of all those who spoke the vernacular,
stuffed the guilty pupil’s mouth with a piece of paper. The ‘culprit’ kept the
paper in his or her mouth until another unlucky fellow spoke the vernacular, at which time the same paper would be transferred into the mouth
of the new defaulter (no health considerations here). The result today is
that ‘educated’ Africans grow up despising their own language. Few can
communicate effectively in their mother tongues today. And without the
language to communicate it, a culture dies.
All the same, it is this situation of multiple failures—the underdevelopment of the economy, the deepening crisis of legitimacy of its political
regimes, the loss of faith in its own belief systems, the loss of a unifying
language—which has made it difficult for intellectual production in Africa
to percolate into the activities of the masses, the real agents of development. Consequently, an alienated discourse has emerged, which conspires
to hold up the development of the African continent. It is imperative that
solutions to these problems should be found if the Black in Africa is to see
any substantial progress. Before offering some suggestions in this regard, let
me examine how the Black in the Diaspora has confronted this dilemma.
The dilemma of the Diaspora Black began from the day she was merchandized out of the continent into the ‘New’ and equally ‘strange’ World,
where she was stripped of her identity, and so became faceless and nameless,
reduced only to statistics thanks to a trade that became ‘illegitimate’ only
when the physical labour of the Black was no longer needed in Europe.
Culture shock apart, the condition under which she arrived in the New
World was such that she immediately lost her personality, her real self. She
found herself becoming a construct—a Negro. And who was a Negro? The
entry for Negre (Negro) in the French dictionary Le nouveau Petit Robert
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describes her as a person of the black race, a slave; to work like a negre is
to work hard without earning the right to rest; to be a negre in the literary
world is to be a ghost writer for famous authors; to speak petit negre is to
express oneself in a limited and bad French. In other words, a negre is a
person without a soul or a mind; dirty person; opposite of a white person,
of a human being. Her whole world, therefore, changed in line with the
new social construction of her identity.
The result was that, separated by geography and without the benefit of
his/her own ways of doing things and unable to properly ‘merge’ with her
new environment which saw her only as the negative other, the Negro’s personality became a ‘split personality’, an encased but fighting spirit, engaged
in a ceaseless conflict with itself and its inhospitable and hostile environment. Du Bois described this as ‘double-consciousness’: ‘It is a peculiar
sensation, this double-double consciousness, this sense of always looking
at one’s self through the eyes of others . . . One ever feels his twoness, — an
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings;
two warring ideals in one dark body’ (Du Bois [1903] 1969).
The dilemma of the Diaspora African stems, as already noted, from
the fact that her environment is one in which she is relegated to the level
of the subhuman and the bestial, categories in which she loses ‘altogether
the status of human beings’. She typifies the dilemma of Ralph Ellison’s
‘Invisible Man’, who declares: ‘I am invisible, understand, simply because
people refuse to see me . . . because of a particular disposition of the eyes of
those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their
inner eyes’ (Ellison, 1995). Invisibility for the Black in the Diaspora, especially for the African American, springs from two basic facts of American
life: ‘from the racial conditioning which often makes white Americans
interpret cultural, physical, or psychological differences as signs of racial
inferiority; and, on the other hand, it springs from a great formlessness of
Negro life wherein all values are in flux, and where those institutions and
patterns of life which hold the white American’s personality are missing or
not so immediate in their effect.’
The physical ontology of the Black is here not in doubt. The point is
that socially, he is constructed out of existence. ‘Whites do not see him,
take notice of him, not because of physiological deficiency but because of
the psychological “construction of their inner eyes,” which conceptually
erases his existence. He, simply, is not a full person in their eyes, and so
he either is not taken into account at all in their moral calculations or is
accorded only diminished standing’ (Mills, 1998).
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Thus, torn between a present that requires her to carry the burden of
her past all along, a past to which she had been denied access by spatial
and temporal separation, the Black in the Diaspora, like her counterpart
in Africa, lost the self-esteem that she needs to develop her potential and
compete favourably in today’s world. Therefore, even when she is making
progress in virtually all fields of human endeavour, she, like Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man, is still not sure, not convinced. Again, says Ellison, ‘You
often doubt if you really exist . . . You ache with the need to convince
yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the
sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you
swear to make them recognise you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful.’ The
point to note here is that the Black is no longer seeing her success in her
mental and physical exertions, in what she has achieved. She measures
her success in terms of the recognition that she receives from her white
counterparts. The verdict of the whites on her efforts is to her a confirmation of her achievements. As a teacher, she wants to teach in the ‘highly’
rated university, which in most cases means white dominated. She wants
her research outputs published in ‘respected journals’ or by ‘first-class’ publishers. Whiteness, in other words, still remains for her the measure of
goodness and badness, success and failure. Acceptance into a white club, of
any type, regardless of her position within such a club, becomes a mark of
success for the Black. In my university, for instance, to get promoted one
needs to have published in ‘international’ journals or by ‘reputable’ publishers ‘abroad’. It does not matter that some of these ‘international’ journals
are even published by postgraduate students’ associations.
Perhaps nothing better illustrates this longing for ‘white certification’
of Black activities as in the debate that raged for over three decades among
professional philosophers in Africa over the ontological status of African
philosophy. The question was put in the form of a disclaimer: Is there an
African philosophy? Two major schools of thought or so emerged— the
universalists, who affirmed the universality of philosophy, and the relativists, who argued that every philosophy is a cultural enterprise and therefore
a product of its time and geography. The relativists posited that African
philosophy has no business conforming with western philosophy, or any
philosophy for that matter. Inasmuch as philosophy is the criticism of the
ideas by which a people live, that is, a critique of culture, the philosophies
of different cultures need not look alike. The universalists on their part
argued that taking the African cultural world view as philosophy would
amount to debasing philosophy. Thus, African philosophy was derided as
ethnophilosophy, that is, a philosophy lacking universal appeal. We were
quickly reminded here that when Plato or Descartes spoke of justice, law,
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morality or God, they were interrogating the ‘universal’ justice, law, morality and God. In other words, they were not particularistic. But this is not
true. Cartesian dualism, for all it is worth, arose as a way of resolving the
political and social problems of the day. The dualism was meant to resolve
the conflict that had arisen between the state and the church over which of
them had the power to control individual members of society.
At the core of this debate is the question of how a knowledge claim
can be both African and philosophical, and here is philosophy defined as
western philosophy. Of course, a course in the history of philosophy in
a typical African university does not say anything about African philosophical experience. It usually starts and ends with western philosophical concerns. Therefore, the issue more than anything was how to get the
intellectual activities of the African certificated in accordance with western
intellectual standards. It is therefore a question of striving to be ‘recognized’,
to be accepted by the metropole. One of the compromised positions that
emerged from the debate was for the African philosopher to subject the
African world view, which has been dubbed illogical and unreflective, ‘to
systematic scrutiny by rigorous ratiocinative method’ (Wiredu, 1981: 1). By
injecting, as Godwin Sogolo (1988) says, ‘a great amount of philosophical
character into the belief systems’ of Africa, the philosophy that emerges
‘will be uniquely African’. This again is a position of a people who do not
believe that they, on their own, can do it correctly. They, therefore, must
submit to western standards, even in the examination of their own lives.
Conclusion
So far, our discussions have shown some patterns in the generation and
appreciation of the Black dilemma, especially the similarities as well as the
interlinkages between the Diaspora Blacks and those on the continent.
•
•
•
While the Diaspora Black is denied those opportunities that are readily
available to her white counterpart, the Black on the continent continues
to suffer from the lack of the basic necessities of life due largely to the
unfavourable socio-economic linkage forcibly established between the
continent and the West.
The Diaspora Black had the rhythm of her life changed forcibly as she
was uprooted from her familiar cultural environment and moved to a
completely new setting, in the same way as the Black on the continent
lost her world view to the invading colonialists.
Both Blacks on the continent and in the Diaspora suffered the loss of
self-esteem following the humiliation of slavery and the denigration of
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African heritage by pejorative narratives of western scholarship, and in
most cases they have yet to overcome this loss.
Looking at the continent and at what Blacks in the Diaspora have
been doing, the kind of progress that many of them have made, and are
making, in all fields of human endeavour, I am of the opinion that the
problem is not in our abilities but in our inability to take ourselves for what
we are—the question of the demeaning self-esteem of Blacks in the world
today. It is this lack of self-esteem that is making it difficult for her to even
appreciate herself and her numerous achievements. The first step towards
the resolution of the Black dilemma, therefore, should be ‘the recovery of
African pride’. What this implies, among other things, is that ‘we must
recall everything that is good and inspiring in our past. Our arts should
celebrate both our humanity and our capabilities to free ourselves from
backwardness and subservience. They should say to us that if we dare to
win, we will win’ (Mbeki, 1999).
In concrete terms, there is a need to breach the communication gap
between the Blacks in the Diaspora and those on the continent. The kinds
of stories that we read and hear about the continent, stories made up by
the western and racist media, is that of Africa grinding to a halt. Indeed,
a May 2000 edition of the Economist magazine leads with the headline
‘A Hopeless Continent’ in reference to Africa. It is only by breaching such
a gap, by creating opportunities for Africans in the Diaspora to regularly
visit the continent, that they will see that the devil, as they say, is not as
dark as it is being painted.
This is not a task to be left to politicians and business concerns alone. A
lot depends on what the African intellectuals on either side of the divide can
do for themselves. The only intellectual dialogue that we have in Africa is
a vertical one, between African scholars and western scholars in the North.
There is neither a horizontal dialogue among African scholars, nor do we
get to see much of what blacks in the Diaspora write, except by chance.
There should, therefore, be a well-worked out means of reading ourselves.
One effective way of doing this is to establish and help fund journals on
Africa and the Diaspora. I added funding because one of the problems of
sustaining intellectual activities on the continent is the high mortality rate of
these journals. Yet, unless we make sure that there are such openings, some of
the research works from the continent will end up in some obscure journals
where nobody will read them.
There is no doubt that one cannot examine all the different areas that
require attention in the Diaspora/Africa relationship in one paper. The
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point, however, is that the organizers of this conference have done one of
the important things in the rediscovery of Black pride by initiating this
kind of dialogue across the Atlantic. One hopes and prays that it is sustained.
References
*
In spite of the effort of the editors to complete the references, because of the
premature death of Chris Uroh a few references are incomplete.
Appiah, K. A. (1992). In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Basden, G. T. (1966 – originally published in 1921). Among the Ibos of Nigeria.
London: Cass.
Bekker, S. et al., eds. (2001). Shifting African Identities. Pretoria: Human Sciences
Research Council.
Diawara, M. (1998). In Search of Africa. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard
University Press
Diop, C.A. (1974). African Origin of Civilisation: Myth or Reality. Westport,
Conn.: Lawrence Hill & Co.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1969). The Souls of Black Folk. New York: New American
Library.
Ellison, R. (1995). Invisible Man. New York: Vintage.
Gottfredson, L.S. (1994). “Egalitarian Fiction and Collective Fraud.” Society 3,
vol. 31, March/April: 53–59.
Hegel, G. W. E. (1991). The Philosophy of History. trans. J. Sibree, Buffalo, New
York: Prometheus Books.
Hountondji, P. (1983). African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. London: Hutchinson
University Library for Africa.
Hume, D. (1964). “Of National Character.” in: Thomas Hill Green and Thomas H.
Grose, eds., The Philosophical Works, Darmstadt 1, vol. 3.
James, G. G. M. (1992). Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy Is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy. Trenton, NJ and Asmara : African World Press Inc.
Kanneh, K. (1998). African Identities: Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography,
Pan-Africanism and Black Literature. London and New York: Routledge.
Kant, I. (1960). Observation on the feelings of the beautiful sublime. trans. J.I.
Goldthwait, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Lefkowitz, M. (1994). “The Myth of a ´Stolen Legacy´” Society 3, vol. 31, March/
April: 27–33.
Mazrui, A. A. (1980). The African Condition (The Reith Lectures). London:
Heinemann.
Mbeki, T. (1999). “On African Renaissance.” African Philosophy 1, vol. 12: 5–10.
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Mill, C. W. (1998). Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press.
Morrison, T. (1993). Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Nkrumah, K. (1974). Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London:
Panaf.
Porter, R. (1972). “An Overview of Intercultural Communication.” in L. Samovar
and R. Porter, eds. Intercultural Communication: A Reader. Los Angeles,
Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co. Inc.:.
Senghor, L. S. (1976). Prose and Poetry. Nairobi: Heinemann.
Sogolo, G. (1993). Foundations of African Philosophy. Ibadan: Ibadan University
Press.
Thompson, L. (1991). “Origin and Development of the Concepts ‘Culture’ and
‘Civilization.’’ in: Thompson et al., eds., Culture and Civilization. Ibadan:
Ibadan University Press: .
Uroh, C.O. (1996). “Africa in the Philosophy of Culture: Demystifying an Ideology of Cultural Imperialism.” Journal of Philosophy and Development 1-2, vol.
2:
——. (2002). “When Will Tomorrow Come?: Cultural Discontinuity and Africa’s
Desperate Future.” Journal of Futures Studies (Taiwan, China), vol. 7, August
Issue
Volney, C.F. (1787). Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte vol. 1. Paris: Desanne Libraire.
Wiredu, K. (1980). Philosophy and African Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Part II
The
New World
Chapter 7
GLOBAL NAMES,
CREOLIZED IDENTITIES
Alex van Stipriaan
gh
I
have a friend named Gerrit Wassenaar, a typical Dutch name, Wassenaar
being an elite village near The Hague, Gerrit the Dutch equivalent of
Gary, Jerry, or Jeremy. His wife’s name, Yvonne, is an international name of
French origin, while her maiden name, Blokland, is a very common Dutch
name.1 In line with many other ‘modern’ Dutch, they have given their children the ‘international’ names of Valery and Sydney.2 Although this seems
to be a typical Dutch family, they are not, in the sense that they are black,
which still is not typically Dutch, and both parents originate from Suriname,
South America. It turns out that their names and the ways in which these are
used are hardly typically Dutch either. To most (black) friends and acquaintances, Gerrit Wassenaar is known only as Kera or Wassie, and his wife as
Wonny, which are abbreviations or corruptions unknown in Dutch. Their
daughter was named after an aunt of the mother who had died in Suriname
many years before, which ties her to the history of another country, whereas
the son was named after the famous African American film actor Sidney
Poitier. I do not think many white Dutch parents have named their child
after a black role model; therefore this Sydney is also—consciously—tied
to another tradition or history than the other Sydney’s in the Netherlands,
although in itself Sydney, like so many English, Spanish and French names,
has become part of an international, perhaps even global pool of names.
Both parents also have children from previous relationships named Romeo,
Sherida and Michael. The latter—pronounced in the English way—was
A lex van S t ip r iaan
not common in the Netherlands until one or two generations ago, but now
it is (perhaps also thanks to the popularity of Michael Jackson). Among
a list of their classmates, the names of the other two, however, could be
easily recognized as ‘black names’, particularly Romeo; although a classical
European name, even today ‘Romeo’ is much too frivolous for white Dutch
parents to give to their sons. Finally, some of the children of Gerrit/Kera
and Yvonne/Wonny are also known by their (black) peers by ‘street names’,
which are derived from their formal names, or by a nickname. The use of
abbreviated names is very common among Dutch children in general, but
non-pejoratively used nicknames as a first name is not, except perhaps for
small, rather closed village communities.
Ethnically, the children in this family would refer to themselves as
Surinamese, but actually meaning Afro-Dutch, as Suriname is something
they only know about through the stories told by others, and their knowledge of Surinamese (Sranan) is heavily corrupted—or is it creolized?—by
‘dutchisms’ and anglicisms. The parents also refer to themselves as Surinamese, by which they mean being born and raised in Suriname, and which
may also be the place where they would like to be buried. Auntie Valery
probably referred to herself as Surinamese or nengre (negro), the one being
synonymously used for the other, as opposed to Asian and other non-Afro
Surinamese whom she and her peers did not consider ‘real’ Surinamese,
except for Amerindians. Her great-grandparents had most probably been
born in Africa, with names familiar to their culture area only, probably with
a sense of belonging to a certain village or city community, hardly with a
‘national’ identity, and almost certainly not calling her/himself ‘African’.
The—creolizing?—fashion of naming and identification between these
African forbears and the children of Gerrit/Kera and Yvonne/Wonny
today is the subject of this chapter.
Naming and renaming has been an important instrument in the colonization of the world by Europeans. These names and naming practices
differed, of course, between the various colonizers. However, compared
to non-European onomastic practices, they all belonged to one and the
same tradition.2 This common source was tapped by European colonizers
to structure and know the worlds they had conquered. They gave names to
everyone and everything they met, knew of or dreamed about, often using
the names presented to them, which from then on became definite. Often,
too, they imposed their self-invented or traditional names on the peoples
or places they had to deal with. In this way a global network of names and
naming practices came into being, which has been growing ever since and
even seems to be accelerating in post-colonial times, heavily influenced by
global English. And as names of nations, groups or individuals are at least
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partly an expression of their actual identity, the impact of this globalization
of naming can hardly be underestimated. Let us not forget that this has
not been the only globalizing tradition in this respect. Muslim names, in
particular, have been globalizing too, partly autonomously and partly in the
wake of western expansion.
In the following pages I will analyse why the globalization of European names in the (former) slave colony of Suriname (Dutch Guiana) did
not result in a globalized, i.e. Europeanized, i.e. Dutchified identity, but
instead created something creolized, i.e. Afro-Surinamese. Along the way,
I will show what developments could be considered as top-down and what
developments may be characterized as bottom-up.
Dominant culture: Enforcing European
names, or naming as a one-way, top-down
process
Between the middle of the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries
approximately 220,000 Africans were imported into Suriname to work
the plantations. The exact places from where they originated in Africa,
and with which they must have identified, were almost always unknown
to the planters in the Americas. Instead, they were ‘ethnically’ named after
the places along the African coast where they had been forcibly embarked
for the ‘Middle Passage’. In that way, a whole range of ethnic names was
constructed, always accompanied by certain characteristics telling something about the individual’s supposed degree of diligence and ability to
adapt (actually his or her ability to creolize). For example, Coromantins
(from the Gold Coast or present-day Ghana) were generally considered
the best slaves for plantation work, however quick-tempered and addicted
to dancing they might be, whereas Loangos (from Congo-Angola) were
said to be more docile, however much more inclined they were to run away
and lack the ability to learn the (Creole) language quickly (Mullin, 1992:
23–7; Teenstra, 1835 II: 180–4; Van Stipriaan Luïscius, 2000: 12–13).
Eventually, of all the ethnic origins of Africans imported into Suriname,
three or four of the newly constructed ethnicities remained generally in use
by the planters in Suriname: Loango, Papa, a generic name for Africans
embarked on the Slave Coast (South-west Nigeria, Benin), Coromantin
and Mendé or Mandingo (Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea).
Birth place or exact nation of origin were of no concern to the planters as
long as they had a workable instrument to classify their human property
according to their needs. Eventually, these were the ethnic names that survived among the Afro-Surinamese population too.
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Stripping Africans of their African identity was a crucial part of the
enslavement process. As soon as an African arrived in the colony, his buyer
had him/her burned with his initials or those of the plantation. This was
the first and most physical mark of an imposed change of identity. Obviously, for the rest of his or her life s/he was the property of the master.
It is not clear whether these burning practices were also applied to the
enslaved born in the colony, the so-called creole slaves. Generally, they
were considered more trustworthy than the bozales, or salt water negroes,
as they were called in Suriname. I have never come across any indication
that at a certain age these creoles were brand marked too. However, it was
only since the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when imports
of Africans had finally stopped, that creoles became the majority of the
enslaved population (Van Stipriaan, 1993: 341).
At the same time, the newly arrived and branded African was given a
new name by the planter or his representative. This was also a psychological
part of the process of enslavement. As Orlando Patterson puts it: ‘A man’s
name is, of course, more than simply a way of calling him. It is the verbal
signal of his whole identity, his being-in-the-world as a distinct person. It
also establishes and advertises his relation with kinsmen. [ . . . ] Thus it is
understandable that in every slave society one of the first acts of the master
has been to change the name of his new slave’ (Patterson, 1982: 54). A
minor argument for renaming the enslaved might have been that it was
more efficient to rename them in a more familiar language. For example, in
the handbook of Suriname’s most serious planter it was stated that ‘even if
there are two hundred or more negros a fine and capable director will after
a little while know them all and differentiate one from the other by name’
(Blom, 1786: 378).3
A child born in the colony, ‘being ten to twelve days old is presented
to the master, who gives it a name he likes, or he agrees to the name
the mother prefers most’ (Blom, 1786: 394–5).4 Therefore, the names of
enslaved born in Suriname were, within certain limits, probably more often
given according to their (mothers’) own choice rather than those given to
newly imported Africans.
These names were limited to a first name only, because enslaved were
movable goods, not citizens, and in combination with the brand mark
this was more than enough identification.5 Thus, instead of their African
names such as Kwamina, Codjo, Mimba or Adjuba, the majority received
common Dutch or other European (and biblical) names such as Jan (John),
George, Mary or Christina. However, in the eighteenth century, more than
two-fifths of the men and one-tenth of the women received names that
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can be only defined as bizarre.6 These names referred to European history
or mythology, like Waterloo, Apollo, Nero or Xantippe, or they reflected the
hierarchy of the slave system by using aristocratic, military, and clergy
‘ranks’ such as Baron, Lieutenant, or Cardinal.7 And even some biblical
names could be included in this category, as not a single Dutch parent was
likely to call his son Goliath or Samson.8
The most degrading names, however, were those reflecting the mood
the name giver was in when assigning the name: Profit, Champagne, Trousers, Lottery, for men, and Nice Weather, Grapefruit, and Monkey, for women.
If a woman presented her baby to the planter to give it a name and he was
out of inspiration, he could ask her what she thought was a nice name. The
confused woman did not want to offend the master by suggesting a name
he would not approve of and therefore sometimes answered: Mi no sabi,
masra (I don’t know, master), whereupon the master cynically called the
child Minosabi. That is the only explanation I could think of with respect
to the frequent appearance of this insulting name in plantation slave lists.
And insulting it was, because this was one of the few names whose meaning
the enslaved understood; their European names were just sounds which
they could like or not, but which held no meaning for them. Therefore,
these names reveal more about the name givers than about the identity
of the name bearers. This is true also for the fact that bizarre names were
much more often given to men than to women, whereas two-fifths of the
women against one-tenth of the men received a French/Latinized or other
extraordinary and nice-sounding name, i.e. pleasant to European ears. My
guess is that women were presented with these names because they were
looked upon as potential bed partners by white men,9 whereas black men
were not, or even worse, they were considered the sexual competitors of
white men, and therefore they were, in a way, emasculated by giving them
these ridiculous names. In the same manner, we might wonder whether the
bizarre names given to one-tenth of female enslaved were in fact inspired
by the jealous wives of planters. One informant had it that the rococo-like
female names were also inspired by the planters’ wives in imitation of the
names they found in the European belles-lettres of those days. However,
most enslaved received their names on a plantation, whereas most planters’
wives lived in town.
There is at least one observation I should make here. Although these
names sound bizarre to us, and, of course, also to the ‘givers’ who would
have never given these names to their own children, to the enslaved they
were mere sounds of which they did not understand the meaning. And
even if they did, they probably did not always experience them as insulting.
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Otherwise, it cannot be explained why some babies, born in freedom, were
called by their Maroon parents Monki or Profit.10
In short, for the overall majority of the enslaved a new identity was
enforced upon them consisting of a first name that related more to the
planter’s reality than to their own. Sometimes, a sort of surname was also
used, particularly in situations when enslaved were not on the plantation
and had to be distinguished from other enslaved. In that case, the name of
the plantation or of the slave owner was added to the enslaved’s name with
the prefix ‘van’ (property of ), for example, John van Providence, or Harriet
van De la Parra. Again, part of the planter’s reality, or even his identity, was
forced upon the enslaved’s.
Two to three generations distanced from the enslaved found in the
1770s sample of slave names that I have cited here, when imports of Africans had long stopped (1830s), when mortality rates had dropped significantly, and when the abolition of slavery was only a matter of time,
enslaved continued to receive their names from their masters. However,
these were now much more regular European names, and there are some
indications that these names were based much more on the enslaved’s own
choice.
At the end of slavery, two-thirds of the males and almost nine out of
ten females now carried a ‘normal’ European name.11 This increase was
particularly the result of a considerable increase in the popularity of regular
Dutch names not much different from the ones in use among the free
population. This shift in naming practices might be an indication that the
socio-cultural distance between slave owners and enslaved had somewhat
lessened and/or that enslaved were now being treated in a more humane
way. Indeed, since the late 1820s enslaved had been recognized legally as
human beings instead of movables; all kinds of laws protecting the position
of enslaved (at least in theory) had come into being; and their food and
labour conditions had improved (Van Stipriaan, 1993: 347–408). At the
same time, the position of black women as potential bed partners ‘embellished’ with attractive names (still two-fifths of the total), or de-feminized
by bizarre ones (one-tenth of the total), does not seem to have changed
much. Black males, on the other hand, were obviously now considered
less threatening than before as the number of bizarre names had dropped,
from one-third to less than three-tenths, although this level still cannot be
called low.
At the same time, the (limited) use of African names (see below) had
almost disappeared by now. This could indicate that the planters’ attitudes
towards the enslaved had become much more rigid, and hence they did
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not allow the use of these names any longer. However, in the context of all
the other changes then taking place, this development does not seem very
likely. Actually, the opposite had happened. Since the abolition of the slave
trade, another instrument in disciplining the enslaved had gained ground,
namely christening. This was a new strategy in controlling the enslaveds’
identity, and it was quite successful. By the end of slavery, the majority of
the enslaved (or former enslaved) were baptized, and a Christian name was
added to their slave name. They were addressed by these names by the missionaries, and, depending on the ‘thoroughness’ of the conversion and/or
the circumstances such as the venue (whether it was a church service or
other formal Christian gathering), they probably used them among themselves too, perhaps preceded by brada (brother) or sisa (sister), as certainly
became the case after slavery. Whereas formerly all these European names
did not mean much to the enslaved, because they did not speak Dutch,
now it is perhaps likely that they began to recognize many names from the
Bible stories they were told.
Meanwhile, enslaved came from different linguistic areas in Africa, and
therefore names in languages sometimes far removed from one’s own may
have sounded as strange as names in European languages. Moreover, European slave names were the ones used by the planters, overseeers and other
authorities to differentiate one enslaved from another in order to be able
to control and discipline every one of them on an individual level.12 This
means that as long as the authorities were around, enslaved were probably
always addressed with these slave names. They must have got used to these
names in a way, because they had to respond to these names and they heard
each other being addressed by them every day.
Therefore, after some time, it is likely that all enslaved living on the
same plantation must have known each other’s slave names and probably
even used them. This is confirmed by the fact that, contrary to those fugitives who could not remember their slave name, many others were able
not only to tell their own slave names, but also those of their companions.
For example, Africa-born Secondo, who had escaped from the plantation
Mon Trésor and was caught again in 1849, when interviewed, differentiated
between forty-eight of the Maroons with whom he had lived by their slave
names and the names of the seventeen plantations from which they had
once escaped.13 He did not know the slave names of only a few. This indicates that even when the colonial authorities were not around, the slave
names had stuck and had become a part of their identity.
Another example showing that slave names and plantations had
become part of the enslaveds’ identity is again found with the Maroons.
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Many Maroons, even their leaders, despite many years of freedom and carrying one or more non-slave or ‘bush names’, were still known by their slave
names, and not only to outsiders. Some even chose not to change their
name at all after their flight from the plantation. For example, somewhere
around 1815, Sambo and Presto escaped from the plantation Rac-a-Rac
and in the course of time helped escaped slaves from other plantations to
join them in the woods, among whom was Katryntje from the plantation
Groot Chatillon. Presto and Katryntje left their ‘bakra’ names (white man’s
names) at the plantation and renamed themselves Kukudabi and Alathia,14
but Sambo, who later became chief of this clan, decided to stick to his name,
which apparently did not have a negative connotation to him (Hoogbergen,
1996: 42–3). Maroon clan names are another striking example of the plantation identity forming part of an autonomous new Afro identity, as many
of these clan names were and still are based on Afro-Surinamese plantation
names, mainly creolized planters’names. For example, Maroons from the
plantation La Paix (Peace) formed with others the Lapè clan, and planters’
names such as l’ Espinasse, Pater, Nassy or Machado became the clan names
of Pinasi, Pata, Nasí, and Matjau respectively. It seems paradoxical to flee
from a plantation and at the same time name yourself after it. However,
Maroons from the same plantation (area) had suffered together, and had
danced and worshipped together too. In short, the common plantation
experience was what bound them together compared to other fugitives, and
therefore this became a substantial part of their maroon identity.
Summing up, enslaved were identified by a slave name, which was
imposed by the planter, and later a Christian named was more or less forced
upon them, too, by the missionary. They were also identified by the name of
the plantation to which they belonged, or the owner. They even identified
with the plantations’ names as a symbol of common experience, and increasingly also as the place where they were born. When eventually slavery was
abolished in 1863, a final assault was made against an autonomous African
or Afro-Surinamese identity. Contrary to some other slave societies in the
Americas,15 Surinamese enslaved had never been given nor appropriated any
surnames other than the added plantation name or the name of their owner
as a form of distinction from other enslaved, when they were not on the
plantation. Therefore, the more than 6,300 enslaved who were manumitted during the three decennia preceding 1863 as well as the approximately
36,000 enslaved manumitted on 1 July of that same year suddenly had to
be given surnames as part of their new civil status. In 1863 alone, some
10,000 names had to be invented.16 It was decided that no existing Dutch
names could be used, to avoid all kinds of legal problems in the future, and,
implicitly, to accentuate the distance between white and black. The names in
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themselves offer evidence that enslaved had (almost) no say in the construction of this new identity. This, again, runs contrary to other slave societies
in the Americas, particularly Anglophone and Latin countries, which was
probably a consequence of a (much) longer tradition there of christening
and/or not regarding the enslaved legally as mere movables.17
In Suriname, all these newly invented names were in Dutch, a language
that was not spoken by the overall majority of the enslaved, who also could
not read or write. It is still too early to be able to quantify exactly the different categories of surnames.18 However, some general quantifications can
be made. At least one-third and probably even half of the names were place
names found on the map of the Netherlands and the rest of Europe. The
majority of the other half of the names in one way or another are related
to plantation slavery. Most obvious in this category are names reflecting
formal (white) plantation names, names that reflect aspects of plantation
labour and environment (Hammer, Sluice, Sandridge), and names reflecting
local flora and fauna (Mosquito, Rooster, Cedar, or Bush). Together these
counted for about one-tenth of the names. Another one-tenth were names
derived from existing planters’ names by making all kinds of inversions,
anagrams, etc. It is possible that ex-slaves carrying these names had opted
for planters’ names themselves, comparable to practices in other parts of
plantation America (see below), and, as a consequence of the prohibition
on using existing names, they were rewarded with these corrupted forms.
For example, the name of Olsen became Neslo, Keizer became Serkei, and
on the plantation Osembo at least seven variations on the planter’s name
of Wilkens were created.19
An extension of naming practices during the slavery period is seen in
the absurd names imposed on ex-slaves, such as Crisis, Gaslight, Office or
Coal shovel. In the same category, though less absurd, because meaningless,
and sometimes even poetic, are names consisting of the combination of
two words, such as Bullitdance, Steambrook or Oatstongue.20 Almost all of
these names are easily recognizable as names of ex-slaves, and they probably comprise one-sixth of the names constructed in 1863.
Finally, there is a category of names which are closest to the reality of
the enslaveds’ lives as they are related to the abolition of slavery, or because
they tell us something about the person who is thus named by it. The first
group comprises names such as Kingsgift, Kingschange, Neveragain, Surprise, Victory and Grateful Probably no more than 1 per cent of the names
belong to this category. In the second group are names describing specific
physical characteristics of the enslaved (Criple, Healthy), professions (Carpenter, Priest (!)), and all kinds of personality traits (Trustful, Smart, Boast,
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Goodheart or Hero). Some of the names that we have termed absurd actually belong in this category. It is not hard to imagine that the man named
Office worked in the plantation’s office, or that the man named Coalscoop
had enormous hands. Perhaps fellow enslaved suggested these names, but
planters at least must have recognized the description, approved of it, and
eventually named them according to it, in Dutch. Probably 5 to 10 per cent
of all surnames constructed in 1863 were of this personal kind.21
Except for this latter category of person-related surnames, actually all
other surnames imposed on the ex-slaves—and their descendants for that
matter—identify them to this day as being related to plantation slavery,
either because of direct references to it, or because of their degrading absurdity,22 or their unique and thereby recognizable artificiality. It seems as if
even at the very last possible moment slave owners succeeded in imposing
their own preferences and idiosyncrasies on the identity of the ex-slaves.
All in all, enslaved Africans in the Americas, in this case Suriname,
seem to have been robbed of their identity insofar as this was expressed
in names. Planters, missionaries and officials succeeded in imposing their
names on the enslaved, and the enslaved seemed to have internalized
them, because most of these names (except for the bizarre ones) have been
in use ever since, until quite recently or they are even still being used.
And although a substantial number of these names, particularly the surnames, consist of specific references to Surinamese slavery, and, therefore,
are uniquely local, the overall majority of the names, first names as well
as surnames, became part of the Dutch naming repertoire. In particular,
first names were increasingly taken from a pool of names that might be
described as ‘western’, thereby adding to the further globalization of such
names.
Now the question is whether, after the Middle Passage, anything
African was retained at all in the New World, and if so, how Kwame really
became Jan.
Subaltern culture: Retaining African names
In a way, Kwamina did become Jan, and Jaba really became Harriet,
because at the end of slavery there were almost no more African slave
names to be found in Suriname. In the name sample of circa 1770, it
turned out that about one-tenth of the Africans, male as well as female,
were registered in the slave lists with an African name. It seems as if at
least for this small group, their identity remained untouched, or was even
respected, as they were allowed to keep on bearing names such as Kwasi,
Askan, Amimba, or once in a while even Muslim names such as Mustapha
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or Ali. However, in the name sample of around 1855, no more than 2–3 per
cent of the enslaved still carried an African name as a slave name. Africa
seems to have disappeared from naming practices.
On the other hand, identity as expressed in a name was much more
complex and autonomous than just that. First of all, the West African—
actually Akan—tradition of naming a child according to the day on which
it was born was continued in many Afro-Caribbean societies, including
Suriname until quite recently, although eventually in changed forms (cf.
DeCamp, 1967). Thus, in Suriname a girl born on a Sunday was called
Kwasiba, while a boy born on Friday was called Kofi.23 However, these
names did not merely indicate the day of birth, but also the kind of person
the child is, or was expected to be. In this way, Kwasibas were believed to be
ostentatious, while Kofis were supposed to be happy persons. From birth,
therefore, a European slave name was at least balanced (or contrasted) by an
African day name with an African content.
Approximately 5 per cent of the male names around 1770 as well
as around 1855 were the names of the week days or one of the twelve
months. I have counted these under the category of bizarre names, and
probably sometimes they were. However, they may also have been connected—whether consciously intended to or not—to African practices of
calling someone after the day (or month, for that matter) in which s/he was
born, or after a specific occasion connected to that day. For example, why
were only two of the eight enslaved males bought for the Vossenburg estate
in 1760 called June and December, whereas the others were called Sultan,
Cardinal, Adam, David and Damie? And when on the same plantation
Camilla had a baby on 30 December 1830, it was presented to the director
one or two weeks later and (therefore) called January; and October born
on the Duuringen estate in 1827 was indeed born in that month. Furthermore, sometimes an enslaved was called New Year or Easter, a choice
that probably indicated the special day on which he was born. Therefore,
perhaps this category of names actually reflected African naming practices, although the word itself must have meant nothing to the enslaved,
and probably was a translation by the planter, as the enslaved only spoke
African languages and/or Surinamese Creole. Surprisingly, this category
of names—and therefore this naming practice—is not found among the
female slave names.24
Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that enslaved immediately forgot
about their African names the moment they were called Chocolate or Princess. It must have been hard for them to even understand and remember
in the beginning that it was they who was meant when being adressed
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by these strange words. They did not speak Dutch, nor in the beginning
did they understand the creole language spoken by their more seasoned
fellows. Therefore, enslaved did not easily internalize these enforced names
as part of their (new) identity. This is confirmed by the fact that fugitives,
who had stayed in the jungle but were caught after some time, often could
not remember their slave names (Hoogbergen, 1985: 48). Although the
possibility cannot be ruled out that they had deliberately forgotten their
slave names in order to avoid being sent back to the plantation from which
they had fled, it does not seem too wild to suppose that at least those who
had been born in Africa thought of themselves with their African name(s),
and not with the imposed ‘white’ names.
Almost certainly, part of the enslaved’s identity was never known to
the planters, and probably not even to most of the other enslaved, as name
taboos and name avoidance formed an integral part of African and AfroCaribbean systems of name use (Price and Price, 1972: 352–4). Among
the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname, descendants of plantation slaves who
had escaped to freedom during the eighteenth century, at least three types
of names were in use. It turns out that there is a high correlation between
calling one’s name and the intimacy of the relationship with that person.
For instance, a Saramaka’s most intimate name is his so-called ‘big name’
given to him by his relatives at birth, and once an adult, it is only used
freely by his next of kin.25 The second, ‘small’ name consists of all sorts of
nicknames, which may change or vary in the course of time, and which are
given by anyone in the community who feels like doing so, and which are
therefore used freely by everyone around. The third type of name is the
so-called Bakáa né [in Sranan Tongo: Bakra Nen, i.e. white man’s name],
which a Saramaka uses in his contacts with the outside world and which is
the only name he himself has chosen. So there are intimate, inside names
and public, outside names, while generally it is considered good manners
to avoid names and invent more indirect forms of reference and address.
This avoidance behaviour probably has to do with trying to mislead evil
spirits, but it might at least have been reinforced, too, by avoidance behaviour in general during slavery, in order to be left alone by the planters and
to mislead traitors among the enslaved. Indeed, name avoidance formed
an integral part of Afro-Surinamese culture. Only one generation after the
abolition of slavery, ethnographers noted that many among the Afro-Surinamese were afraid of calling out certain names, because this could bring
bad luck to them. They also observed that in former times ‘not one negro
would have had the courage when sailing along a plantation, to speak its
name’ (Benjamins and Snelleman, 1914–17: 502).
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If name avoidance existed with respect to plantations, how much more
likely is it that it existed in relation to people’s names, too? This is particularly so, as, in contrast to European cultures, in African and Afro-Caribbean cultures there is less distinction between the person and his name
(cf. Mbiti, 1969: 118; Alford, 1988: 108–13). One does not carry a name;
one IS a name. Therefore, a name has to be protected, even in the more
delegated sense of keeping up one’s name (Price and Price, 1972: 354–6).
A case in point are the qualities attributed to day names: a boy born on a
Monday was not only called Kodjo, but he was (a) Kodjo, implying that he
was an industrious person, and a girl born on a Tuesday was not just called
Ajuba, but she was (an) Ajuba, i.e. a jealous and curious woman.26 Nicknames obviously enforced this merger of a person and his name, because
it undoubtedly told something personal about him and most nicknames
were unique.
The notion that a man’s name and his soul were one is probably best
illustrated by the rituals surrounding the burial of older Saramakans, in
which the deceased is ritually separated from anyone who had been named
after him (Price and Price, 1972: 350). Although so far no evidence has
been found of any rituals surrounding naming practices among enslaved,
the Saramaka example clearly shows that among the descendants of those
who had escaped from slavery in Suriname names are experienced in a
very different, much more African fashion than in the European tradition.
It is quite tempting to believe that this was also the case with plantation
slaves.
Subaltern culture: Creolized naming
There is some evidence that not all slave names were enforced ones,
but that at least some enslaved adopted European names themselves and
suggested them to the masters when they presented their newborn babies.
For instance, in a sample of the enslaved populations at eight plantations
that could be followed for at least a generation (twenty-five years or more),
almost a quarter of the enslaved carried a name that also was or recently
had been in use by another enslaved at the plantation.27 However, this could
be caused by a lack of names in general and/or the purchase of enslaved
who carried names already in existence on a plantation. This seems to be
confirmed if we look at possible recurrences of names of mothers and
daughters,28 which turns out to be very scarce. However, in a sample of
107 families of which three generations could be traced matrilineally, in
thirty-one families name recurrence occurred.29 The majority of these were
girls named after their grandmothers and girls and boys named after a
sister or brother of their mother. This reveals more than enough evidence
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of the existence of a structural pattern to be discarded as coincidental. This
is especially so if we keep in mind that the names of the fathers are not
known,30 nor often those of uncles and aunts.
This leads to the conclusion that enslaved had probably gained more
freedom to choose or at least to suggest names of their own choice for their
newborns. Furthermore, it indicates that these European and biblical names
were not so strange any more to the enslaved because they had obviously
made them part of their cultural heritage, meaning part of an autonomous,
instead of an enforced identity. The pattern in which these self-chosen
names were used, for example, seems to resemble much more African than
European characteristics (for example, almost never firstborns and always
skipping at least one generation when using a namesake in the family; cf.
Cody, 1987; Handler and Jacoby, 1996). Finally, this pattern indicates that
enslaved constructed family networks in which different generations and
family branches were connected to each other and in which an autonomous
family history was constructed. Re-using the names of grandmothers who
had been born in Africa might even have been a means of symbolically
linking a child to the African motherland. The little research done so far in
this area, particularly on enslaved in the United States, shows that enslaved
in Suriname were no exception to this rule.31
There was also another side to naming practices among enslaved and
their maintenance and innovation of an autonomous identity. Again,
despite little research in this field yet, Suriname plantation slaves seem to
have been exemplary for Afro-America in general. No matter how hard
planters tried to impose their reality on that of the enslaved, from the
beginning the latter created their own reality, too. This indicates that the
enslaved lived in two realities, with multiple identities however integrated
into one personality.32
Part of the general African heritage was a tradition in which people
had several names, reflecting several stages in life (birth, initiation into
adulthood, etc.), life events (migration), and spheres and locations of
life (formal, intimate, family, etc.) (cf. Price and Price, 1972; Thornton,
1993; Handler and Jacoby, 1996). Day names, slave names, bush names
(see above) and Christian names after baptism, all fitted into one of these
categories, be they given by parents, or more or less imposed by dominant
others (planters and missionaries), or self-selected.
A very important, and highly individual, type of name, already
metioned in the African context above, can now be added to these, i.e.
nicknames, mainly given by peers. These names were almost always in
Sranan Tongo or Surinamese Creole and were probably widely used among
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the enslaved. However, they are only seldom found in the archival colonial records. One of the few exceptions is, for instance, when the military
captain Kappler noted that for a long time he was solely accompanied at
his military post in the jungle by a former slave called Liverpool. ‘However,
his negro or common name was Brokkodjokko’, probably meaning Broken
Bottle (Kappler, 1983 [1854]: 53).33 However, if we read the slave stories
gathered by Aleks De Drie from oral tradition, almost no European
slave names appear. Instead, creolized European names are used, such as
Tyadorsi from Theodorus, Weren (Willem/William), Afantiri (Avontuur/
Adventure), Madrentyi (Madeleintje), or Ameria (Amelia). Often a nickname was added to these creolized slave names. A nice example is Syorstina [Georgina?] called Ma Sosi Kasabapan by everyone on the plantation,
‘because everywhere she went, she carried on her head her big kasabapan
[i.e. cassave pan] to bake cassaves’ (De Drie, 1985: 78). Many more such
examples in De Drie’s sample of slave stories show a world that cannot be
detected from the colonial archives and which illustrates the complexity of
slave plantation identities.
Until now De Drie’s sample is the only source of this sort available.
However, unique evidence from the late seventeenth-century neighbouring colony of French Guiana shows that this kind of self-constructed and/
or creolized names and nicknames were not an exception. In 1964, Debien
and Houdaille published part of the diaries of Jean Goupy des Marets,
owner of a sugar plantation called Remire. In these diaries, covering the
years 1687–90, a detailed list is included of all ninety-two enslaved then
living on the plantation, including thirty-six men, thirty women, thirteen
boys, and eleven girls (plus an Amerindian man and woman). Most people
on this list had three names: their official slave name used by whites only;
an African name used only among themselves; and a name by which they
were ‘commonly addressed’.
African names were probably not always the names given to them
by their parents, as some of these can be traced as the names of African
villages.34 This indicates that locality and/or ethnicity was important for
Africans and continued to form part of their identity even in the New
World. A majority of the enslaved were (also) addressed by a ‘common’
name. Some of these were a corrupted form of the slave name. For example,
Anthoine’s African name was Cocoguiou and he was commonly called Thony;
Cathérine’s African name was Simbé and she was commonly called Cathou.
Other enslaved carried a second European name, like Jacques, whose
African name was Gué and his common name Boniface, or Marguerite, also
called Houyo Pajelléhi, commonly called Agnes. However, a great part of the
enslaved’s common names were more like the nicknames we also find in De
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Drie and which tell us something about the bearer of that name, although
in most cases it remains a guess. For example, some nicknames seem to
indicate the skin colour of the name bearer like Jean Fanchon Lorange, or
Ignace Decoua La Violette, or Henry Guiaon Doré (gilded); others indicate
specific abilities like Jean Dangoué Tambour (who actually played drums), or
Jean Olivier Oulé Abaquier, abaque being an old-fashioned sort of counting
frame (abacus). Again, many other nicknames indicated something about
a person’s history, for example his or her former master or place of origin.
Marie Popot, for instance, although born in the colony, was called after the
birthplace of her father (Grand Popot, today: Benin), or Jean Fanchonladé
le Juif (the Jew), who was so called after the ethno-religious identity of his
former master. A glance at the names of enslaved Creoles, that is, those
who were born in the colony, shows that naming practices probably did not
stay unchanged. Of the twenty-nine creoles, mainly children, only eight
were known to have an African name and most did not have a nickname.
However, the latter fact might be attributed to their age, because most
adult Creoles did have a nickname. The disappearance of African names,
particularly if they referred to birthplace, etc., was a consequence of creolization. Remarkably, none of the enslaved were listed with a day name.
This might be an indication that (in the beginning?) this was strictly an
Akan tradition. However, even the Cormantins, who were of Akan origin,
did not carry a day name according to this list. Therefore, this may also
indicate that even for a very well-informed and keen observer like Goupy
des Marets, enslaved were able to keep some aspects of their identity to
themselves.
Debien and Houdaille conclude that the official slave names were no
more than an administrative façade, which mainly masked the daily reality,
African style, which could not or would not always be recognized by the
planters. They even wonder whether there existed ‘two parallel worlds which
could never be penetrated by the other’ (Debien and Houdaille, 1964: 194).
This interpretation is probably much too rigid, as Mintz and Price (1992)
have shown later. Indeed, enslaved and planters lived in different worlds,
but these worlds encountered each other and interacted on a daily basis.
Actually this duality worked by knowing the other to a certain extent, while
leaving the other alone in his own world, also to a certain extent.35 In this
process, a sort of middle ground emerged, which became the most creolized
part of the cultures of enslaved as well as slave owners. There, slave owners
behaved more like Africans—in language, food, music—than they would
being only among themselves, not to mention being back in Europe. And
there, enslaved showed the most Europeanized side of their newly created
culture, for instance, in the matter of using European names.
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Obviously, therefore, part of a enslaved’s identity became Europeanized. However, the way this functioned and the way it was socially and
psychologically embedded could hardly be defined as Europeanized, i.e.
being alienated or culturally/psychologically obliterated, but rather as
effective creolization, meaning in this respect ‘a transmutation or renewal
of identity’ (Burton, 1999: 46). Indeed, enslaved increasingly chose and
used European names themselves and had themselves baptized with a
Christian name. In everyday life, however, these names were creolized into
Afro-Caribbean names and thus became authentic new ones. Even today
in Suriname every Afro-Surinamese Stanley is called Stanga, every Carlos
is Kaya, every Alex is Aleke, every Yvonne is Wonny, to which, of course, a
nickname, in Sranan Tongo (!), might be added. In the same way, having
themselves baptized was a means of creating new social networks, by using
the system of godparenthood as a new system of symbolic kinship. Even
attempts by the planters to come to grips with an enslaved’s identity by
renaming him or her as soon as (s)he arrived, or by having them baptized
with a Christian name, might have been incorporated as belonging quite
naturally to the ‘life events’ that enslaved experienced. Although naming
systems in Africa differed widely, it was common practice for most Africans to have several names, and in many societies changing names, particularly when fundamental changes occurred in an individual’s life, is quite
common (Herskovitz, 1941: 190; Mbiti 1969: 118–19; see also Handler,
1996: note 20).
Part of the explanation for the gradual disappearance of African names,
except for day names, was the process of creolization. Specific ethnicity
could not be reproduced fully, or became diffuse, as a consequence of the
impossibility for an increasing number of enslaved to find partners from
the same ethnic group. It was not only that this confused the selection of
ethnic-specific names, but it also resulted in the disappearance of African
languages as such36 and the emergence of a creole language, which soon
became the primary language for all, and in its simplest form even the
means of communication between enslaved and slave owners. This language as well as the process of creolization in general was not a rejection
of Africa or Africanisms, but it was the blending and adaptation of different African cultures to each other combined with the confrontation with
Amerindian and particularly with European cultures, taking place in an
unknown social and ecological context dominated by violence. As a consequence, everything had to be re-appropriated, redefined and renamed,
which could only be done in this new creole language.
In this same process of inter-African creolization in the New World,
the practice of body incisions as a means of ethnically differentiated per163
A lex van S t ip r iaan
sonal decoration and identification disappeared, probably because this was
practiced by a minority only. Even ethnicity as such was reformulated in
this process. Gradually, the numerous African villages and small nations
to which their forbears had belonged disappeared from Afro-Surinamese consciousness, and instead there appeared three or four new ethnicities, which coincided with the (or perhaps not) white ethnic constructions of Luango, Papa, Kromanti and Mendé/Mandingo or Soko. These
were probably the larger groups. which had formed during the formative
first century of slavery in Suriname, based on (some) cultural-linguistic
kinship—at least more than with the other three. Eventually, even these
ethnic differences dissappeared, although only from physical life, because
in a ritualized form they stayed on in the metaphysical dimension of ethnically differentiated wintis (spirits, gods), each with its own language,
songs, rythms, colours, food, etc. Although what is now called Luango, for
example, is not per definition traceable as a linguistic or musical tradition
from the Congo-Angola region, and might as well be a creolized version of
different ethnic traditions now described as Luango. Probably every plantation, and later every district, had its own mixes of what was Luango, or
Kromanti, etc. However, the appearance of anthropologists, historians and
religious experts who noted down and made public what they saw as the
Afro-Surinamese religious system may have standardized the ethnification of the winti pantheon and rituals.
Post-slavery naming
After the abolition of slavery, a massive campaign of christening and
basic education was launched in order to take over the disciplining role
that the whip had played before (cf Van Stipriaan, 1998).37 Since that time,
making a career in colonial society was no longer a white (or almost white)
monopoly. The most fundamental condition for such a career, however, was
the abandonment of everything considered African, heathen, primitive,
in short, ‘negro-ish’. Even the ‘improvement’—meaning whitening—of
one’s offspring was the ambition of many girls, inspired by their mothers.
Actually, no one escaped the top-down influence of dutchification,38 be it
only for the general compulsion to learn how to read, write and speak in
Dutch—to this day the official language—and not in Creole Sranan. In
that process, particularly those who climbed the social ladder started to
lose touch with Afro-Surinamese Creole culture, although certainly not
completely, as they often found out after migrating to the Netherlands,
where they discovered how different they were (treated) from the ‘ordinary’ Dutch. Nevertheless, they often began to speak more Dutch than
Sranan, even at home; they considered Winti as heathenish; and they
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embraced Dutch Calivinistic norms, logic and practices, including names
and naming. As a consequence, Afro-Surinamese Creole culture became
lower class culture, or to put it differently, the lower class Afro-Surinamese
became the guardians of Creole culture developed during the period of
slavery.
During the second half of the twentieth century, and particularly since
the 1970s, when Suriname became an independent republic, a growing
number of the Surinamese intelligentsia began turning to this lower class
Afro-Surinamese culture in their quest for a post-colonial cultural identity.
This search is reinforced by the numerous Afro-Surinamese migrants to
the Netherlands, and their offspring, who (re)discover their Afro-Surinamese Creole, or even African, roots as a response to living in a society
that is more alien and less hospitable than they had expected, as well as
inspired by the now more easily accessible example of African Americans
in the USA. At the same time, the latter also play a rather prominent part
in the so-called global culture, which has emerged since World War II, and
which is therefore easily adopted by young Afro-Surinamese on both sides
of the Atlantic.
Now what are the consequences of these developments for names and
naming? First of all, African names have disappeared definitively. The adoption of African Muslim names, as some African Americans have done, will
probably not be copied by the Afro-Surinamese as they do not want to be
confused with the Muslim Hindustani (in Suriname), or the Moroccans or
Turks (in the Netherlands). Furthermore, the use of (African) day names
also disappeared at some point during the twentieth century. At the same
time, the dutchification of names seems to have come to an end and the
practice of ‘embellishing’ a child—quite reminiscent of such names during
slavery—with exotic, baroque or completely fantasized names has become
enormously popular. Afro-Dutch or Afro-Surinamese children are also
increasingly named after black (American) entertainers and sportsmen and
women, or even politicians, as a symbol of diasporic pride. The latter two
trends might be a post-colonial response wanting to differentiate between
the (ex-) colonizer’s culture, while not wanting to be associated with Africa’s
image of being a primitive land or being part of ‘the lost continent’ when
adopting an African name, and therefore choosing a name that connects
the child to the supposed progress of a US-dominated global culture, and
particularly its black dimension.
Still, this appropriation of mainly western ‘exotic’ names (Angelo, Jaquil,
Gorgino) is also a sort of attempt at appropriating western power, while
fighting for an autonomous post-colonial (and partly secularized) identity.
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Although living side by side now for five to six generations, no Afro-Surinamese has adopted the names or naming practices of his Asian-Surinamese
compatriots, and vice versa. The only exception to this rule is the relatively
large number of Afro-Surinamese with Chinese surnames. This is the result
of importing solely male Chinese as indentured labourers, the majority of
whom started relationships with Afro-Surinamese women and officially
recognized their joint offspring. This inter-ethnic mixing has been much less
common with the Hindustani and the Javanese, who came later and were
demographically more balanced.
In the Netherlands, the same as well as the reverse can be observed of
what happened to Dutch surnames in Suriname. Substantial intermarriage
between the Dutch and the Afro-Surinamese resulted in the dutchification
of Surinamese surnames as well as in the Surinamizing of Dutch names,
although the effect of the latter must be much smaller because of the imbalance in numbers.39
Meanwhile, other creolized forms of Afro-Surinamese names and
naming, such as particular forms of abbreviations and corruption as well
as nicknames referring to a particular event or particular characteristics of
the name bearer, are still very popular among Afro-Surinamese on both
sides of the ocean, particularly among the lower classes (Cf. Dillard, 1976).
Although such practices might be part of the culture of small communities,
it does not seem to have disappeared in the Netherlands. On the contrary,
it even seems to have been reinforced by (nick-)naming practices in global
African American hip hop and R&B cultures. These names, in particular,
form part of the ethnic identity of the Afro-Surinamese in the Netherlands; they are generally not used by (ethnic) outsiders and certainly not
in professional or formal situations. It is probably too early to conclude
whether this is a structural or a first-generation and/or temporary youth
culture phenomenon. In Suriname, on the other hand, these typically
creole names are used much more generally. Ethnic outsiders often even
know someone only by his nickname, and even in professional situations
nicknames might be used, for example to use nicknames to get certain
things done. The complex and mixed use of such informal and formal
names might even be characteristic of a culture of clientelistic relations
such as exists in Surinamese society.
Conclusion
Now what can be concluded about the history of Afro-Surinamese
naming practices in regard to creolization and globalization? As I see it,
during slavery an intermingling of a top-down process of European and
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African interaction and a bottom-up process of inter-African as well as
African-European interaction resulted in the creation of something virtually new, i.e. a recognizably Afro-Surinamese identity. It is not clear yet
whether within the inter-African part of the creolization process one of
the naming cultures became dominant, although the sequential influx
of different African cultures (cf Van Stipriaan Luïscius, 2000) and the
relatively small social-psychological distance between them could point
at a mixed Akan-Luango dominance. Meanwhile, the great social-psychological distance between the joint African cultures and the European,
i.e. Dutch culture resulted in something genuinely new. The birth of this
(naming) culture (cf. Mintz and Price, 1992) was characterized and influenced by violence and asymmetrical power relations. The outcome was not
a complete merger of several naming cultures, but more of a compilation.
Different names were used for different occasions and situations, with a
rather sharp division between formal (European) names and situations and
informal or intimate (African/Afro-Surinamese) ones. For the upwardly
mobile groups of Afro-Surinamese, this creolization process seems to have
ended during the twentieth century as colonial Dutch culture had become
dominant among them, although after migrating to the Netherlands they
realized that this colonial culture was not synonymous with Dutch-Dutch
culture. Meanwhile, lower-class Afro-Surinamese (naming) culture seems
to have been de-creolizing too, but not as substantially. Mass migration to
the Netherlands during the 1970s and the early 1980s brought this culture
to the mother country, too. Recent interaction with African American
elements of global culture—in itself a mix of top-down and bottom-up
processes—seems to have resulted in a process of re-creolization among
many Afro-Surinamese on both sides of the Atlantic, which may be part
of a more general diasporic Afro creolization process (cf Gilroy, 1993). At
the same time, Afro-Surinamese (naming) culture has always been part
of wider processes of globalization, that is, if it is correct to describe the
transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery as dynamic forces of European expansion as part of a globalization process. Although recognizably
Afro-Surinamese, this (naming) culture shares many characteristics with
other Afro cultures in the Americas. One of these characteristics is that
creolization only occurred among Africans interacting with a dominant
power, and hardly in interaction with other subordinated cultures such as
Asians in the Caribbean and perhaps the Turks and the Moroccans in the
Netherlands.
167
A lex van S t ip r iaan
Figure 1: Enslaved woman presenting her child to the plantation
manager
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G L O BA L N A M ES, C R E O LI Z ED I D EN T I T I ES
Figure 2: Female names on slave list in plantation inventory
169
A lex van S t ip r iaan
Figure 3: Male names on slave list in plantation inventory
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G L O BA L N A M ES, C R E O LI Z ED I D EN T I T I ES
Figure 4: The location of Surinam in the Atlantic
Figure 5: Three maroons who set the city of Paramaribo on fire in
1832: Mentor, Present and Cojo
171
A lex van S t ip r iaan
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Kappler, August. (1854). Zes jaren in Suriname: Schetsen en tafereelen uit het
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Notes
1.
2.
For example, the Amsterdam telephone directory lists some sixty (van) Bloklands. The family presented here does not exist in reality, it is a combination
of names and persons from among my Afro-Surinamese friends.
For example, the Christian roots of many names and patrilineal structures of
naming.
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A lex van S t ip r iaan
3.
4.
5.
6
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
Anthony Blom worked as an overseer, director and administrator on many
Surinamese plantations during the second half of the eighteenth century. He
ended up as a planter himself. This quote is translated by the author.
This quote is translated by the author. Patterson (1982: 54), on the other
hand, gives no credit to the efficiency argument at all: ‘One must reject any
simplistic explanation that this [renaming] was simply a result of the master’s
need to find a name that was more familiar, for we find the same tendency
to change names when slaves come from the identical society or language
groups as their masters.’
Note, however, that before the nineteenth century, the majority of the population in Holland had no surname either. Cf R.A. Ebeling, Voor- en familienamen in Nederland. Geschiedenis, verspreiding, vorm en gebruik. Den Haag:
Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie, 1993.
6. Names and percentages are based on a sample of 548 males and 479
females in the slave lists of seven plantations circa 1770: Alsimo, Bleyendaal,
Duuringen, Groot Marseille, Somerszorg, Vossenburg, Vreeland (and Overtoom).
For example, in the 1760 slave list of the Vossenburg estate I found: Horseman, Soldier, Corporal, Ensign, Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain, Major,
Colonel and General.
Obviously, these rather common names were given to physically strong Africans, which means that these names were of a more personal character, i.e.
connected to the bearer, than most other slave names.
This seems to be also confirmed by the frequent appearance of the female
names Charmantje (charming), or Passie (passion).
Cf. Hoogbergen (1985: 148, 182). For example, a son of the famous Maroon
leader, Boni, was called Profit. Ibid., 363.
Names and percentages based on a sample of slave lists around 1855 of the
same plantations as the 1770s sample (see above).
Blom (1786: 378) ‘al zyn op eene plantagie twee honderd en meer negers,
zal een goed en bekwaam Directeur in weinig tyds hun allen kennen, en by
naame den eenen van den anderen weeten te onderscheiden.’
Wim S.M. Hoogbergen, De Surinaamse weglopers van de 19e eeuw, Centrum
voor Caraibische Studien Rijksuniversiteit, Utrecht BSB 1 (1978: 56–7).
This might have been again a European name.
For the USA, see Gutman (1976: 230–54) and Genovese (1974: 444–50); for
Jamaica, see Patterson (1982: 57) and Higman (1998: 121); for the British
West Indies in general, see Burton (1999: 41–5).
The more than 6,300 enslaved who were manumitted between 1831 and
1863 were given surnames by those who paid for their manumission and/or
under whose guardianship they were placed. The simplest way to create a new
name was to formalize the existing habit of using the name of the former
owner (and/or biological father because a majority of these manumitted
slaves were ‘wives’ and children of those who manumitted them) and add
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the prefix ‘van’—meaning ‘coming from’ or ‘belonging to’—to the name. This
resulted in sometimes beautiful name chains, such as that of a well-known
midwife in the 1820s who was called ‘the free Constantia van Daphina van
Rocheteau’. Contrary to the prohibition, more than a few manumitted slaves
received the existing names of planters, plantation directors, etc. This indicates at least that both parties involved had no trouble using those names
and that perhaps the manumitted slaves themselves applied for them, see
Van Stipriaan (1990: 32–3); see also Ten Hove and Dragtenstein 1997.
17. In the French Caribbean, the situation resembled that of Suriname, cf.
Burton (1999: 46–50). Russell-Wood states in relation to Brazil and other
countries:
Freyre expressed a widely held view that blacks commonly took the
family names of their white owners as surnames, and Sidney Mintz
found that slaves on the sugar plantations of Puerto Rico took themselves the surnames of their owners. Such mimitism was attributable
to vanity, the influence of patriarchalism, or efforts to climb the social
ladder. [ . . . ] [T]here are indications to reinforce the view that by
their own choice of names, blacks in the Americas sought to establish
a relationship to a place (be it the port of arrival in the Americas, a
plantation, or even a township in West Africa, or within a family
lineage, or within an inherited cultural tradition). [ . . . ] In Brazil,
the family name of an owner might well come to be absorbed in the
name of the location and the plantation might carry an indigenous
or African name rather than a European name. From the French
Antilles come names whose origin lay in the contraband trade, and
which had been consciously preserved. By the preservation of such
names, transplanted Africans in the Americas provided themselves with an anchorage or point of orientation, be it to a place, to
a cultural legacy, to a shared experience, or to previous generations.
A.J.R. Russell-Wood, The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom in
Colonial Brazil, Oxford: Macmillan (1982: 194). See the authors
mentioned in note 34 for the practice of self-chosen surnames in
the anglophone Americas.
18.Research by Ten Hove will reveal in the near future more detailed information on this matter.
19. Milkens, Woelkens, Welf, Kensmil, Denswil, Kensie and Kensenhuis.
20. These English names as well as those hereafter have been translated by the
author.
21. Quantification based on a sample of 526 names given to 2,049 enslaved on
ten plantations in 1863, cf Van Stipriaan (1990: 40–1) and on research done
by Ten Hove a.o. to be published in the near future. In the latter case, it
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A lex van S t ip r iaan
turned out that probably most of the incomprehensible names were actually
Dutch geographical names, which, however, were not in use anymore.
22. Actually, the largest group of surnames, consisting of Dutch and European
geographical names, might also be grouped under the heading of absurd
names, as there was no relation whatsoever between the ex-slave and such a
name.
23.
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
24.
25.
26.
27.
Kwassi ♂
Kodjo
Kwamina
Kwakoe
Jauw
Koffy
Kwami
Kwassiba ♀
Adjoeba
Abeniba/Abramba
Akoeba
Jaba
Affiba
Amba/Amimba
(Source: Teenstra 1835 II: 201)
Some authors have suggested that these names certainly reflect the African
tradition of day names (see further on in this chapter) or other indications of
the moment of birth, which would suggest that these names are not bizarre
at all, but on the contrary were self-chosen and were in line with tradition
(cf. Cody, 1987: 576; Burton, 1999: 42). Nevertheless, I have chosen—somewhat hesitantly—to still categorize them as bizarre. Enslaved did not speak
Dutch and therefore could not have suggested these names themselves.
Month names are not an African tradition. Furthermore, in plantation slave
lists containing these week days and the names of the months, all seven
and twelve occurred but only once, whereas African day names sometimes
occurred several times. Moreover, only men received these names, which is
in line with the fact that far more men than women received bizarre names.
The restricted use of this name does not exclude, however, the fact that much
larger groups know someone’s ‘big name’, because during childhood it is
still generally used, and only later does it become exclusive, Price and Price
(1972: 342–3).
‘In an interesting investigation of these beliefs, Jahoda (1954) examined the
Juvenile Court records of 1,700 Ashanti boys, in order to determine whether
day names were related to either property or violent offences. He found that
Monday boys were significantly less likely than all others to have any record
of delinquent offences, while Wednesday boys were significantly more likely
than all others to have a record of violent offences. While it is emic perception that Monday and Wednesday boys differ in the types of soul that
entered them at birth, Jahoda suggests that such beliefs create a self-fulfiling
prophesy.’ Alford (1988: 63).
Sample of 1,161 male and 1,169 female enslaved in the plantation records
of Vossenburg (1822-63), Driesveld (1817–55), Le Mast Rouge (1831–63),
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G L O BA L N A M ES, C R E O LI Z ED I D EN T I T I ES
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
Alsimo (1831–60), Beekvliet (1838–63), Bleyendaal 1838-63), Somerszorg
and Duringen (1817–56), Clifford Koqshooven (1806, 1824–55). See Van
Stipriaan, 1993: Appendix 12 for sources of plantation records.
Fathers were not registered in the slave records.
Sample of 107 three-generation families (i.e. limited to mothers and children) in the nineteenth-century enslaved populations of plantations Bleyendaal, Groot Marseille, Le Mast Rouge, Potribo, Beekvliet, Janslust and
Blokkenbosch, Purmerend, Alsimo, Overtoom, Driesveld, Somerszorg and
Duringen, Vrouwenvlijt and Vossenburg. See Van Stipriaan, 1993: Appendix
12 for sources of plantation records.
Slave registers only give the name of the mother, because only the owner of
the mother could claim the baby as his property. Therefore, administratively,
the father was not important.
See, for example, Cheryl Ann Cody (1987: 595): ‘The slave naming practices
of the Ball family slaves suggest that the system of slave naming evolved from
one based on owner selection, with perhaps some slave participation, to one
in which the slaves chose the names of their own children. In this process,
the slaves turned first to the preservation of kin names. The first generation
of American-born slaves used the names of their children to connect grandparent with grandchild, second generation American-born to African-born.
By drawing kin connections to a wide network of family, slaves developed a
kin-naming system that was distinctive from that of their owners.’
I do not suggest here that the enslaved were suffering from the multiple
personality syndrome, often wrongly called schizophrenia.
Another example was the leader of the Tempati rebellion (1757–60), who
was always referred to in the colonial archives as the slave Boston, but once
with the addition ‘named among them [i.e. the enslaved] Adjaca’ (Van den
Bouwhuijsen a.o., 1988: 101).
For example, the African names of François Aboré, Pierre Questy, JeanTambour Dangoué and Jean-Lorange Fanchon are all names of the villages
in Africa from which they originated, according to Debien and Houdaille
(1964: 167–77).
Of course, this was not equally balanced; planters interfered more in the
lives of enslaved but knew less about them, whereas it was in the enslaved’s
interest to know as much as they could about the planters in order to protect
themselves against them, while trying to avoid them as much as possible.
Although some partly remained as esoteric languages spoken by the ethnically different Winti (spirits) in Afro-Surinamese religion (Cf. Van Stipriaan,
2000).
For example, compulsory education for all children in the age group of 7 to
12 years was introduced in Suriname in 1877, a quarter century before the
same was done in the ‘mother country’.
I am not referring here to the Maroon population in the interior of the
country, who have undergone a different experience.
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A lex van S t ip r iaan
39. In 2004 in the Netherlands, out of a total population of about 15 millions,
about 150,000 people are of Afro-Surinamese origin (that is, they are born
in Suriname or are offspring of a union in which at least one parent is Suriname-born), against approximately 14 millions non-black Dutch citizen and
just under a million residents of other origin.
178
Chapter 8
Ethnic-religious modes of
identification among the
Gbe-speaking people in eighteenth and nineteenth
century Brazil1
Luis Nicolau Parés
gh
“African” identities in contemporary Candomblé
I
n the contemporary Brazilian “religious market”, African-derived cults
(Candomblé and its regional variants) compete with other religious institutions, such as Umbanda, Kardecist Spiritism or the Evangelical Churches.
In this context, Candomblé, despite being a “universal” religion—open to
anybody, and not necessarily confined to a particular ethnic, racial or social
group as in the past—is still closely associated with Africa. The idea of
Africa imagined within Candomblé, despite historical and cultural continuities, certainly has an important mythical component, and yet to a certain
extent it serves Candomblé to project a differentiated identity in the face
of concurrent religious institutions, like Umbanda or Kardecist Spiritism,
which are more readily associated with Western traditions. The Africanness of Candomblé also serves to stress a racial-cultural polarity, working
as a critical referent for Black identity as opposed to a White-Western
hegemonic ideology. In this sense, Candomblé is still an important field for
collective identity processes in which political, ethnic and racial issues are
at stake.
Yet, when we take a closer look at Candomblé and its African-ness, we
may discern behind its apparent homogeneity a new level of contrast and
differentiation, since—at least in Bahian Candomblé—most practitioners
Lu is N icolau Pa r és
identify their cult houses as belonging to particular “African nations”; the
most important being Nagô, Jeje and Angola. By this they mean that they
practice differentiated modes of ritual, characterised by the worship of different kinds of spiritual entities; the Nagô orixás, the Jeje voduns, and the
Angola inkices. Each of these groups of deities is normally praised in the
corresponding ritual language, and each has its own associated ritual practices, drum rhythms, songs, dances and so on. As noted by Vivaldo da Costa
Lima, the concept of “nation” little by little lost its initial political-ethnic
connotations to become an almost exclusively theological concept (Lima,
1977: 21)2. One could question to what extent processes of collective identity
articulated in contemporary Candomblé around the idea of a Nagô, Jeje or
Angola “nation”, necessarily involving a reasonable amount of competitive
contrast among them, are completely deprived of political-ethnic connotations, although in any case the term “nation” also came to serve as a means of
distinguishing different ritual and ideological patterns.
Interestingly enough, as I will examine in more detail below, terms
like Nagô, Jeje or Angola (or others, like Mina) did not correspond to
distinct ethnic-political identities operating in Africa. In other words, they
never were African nations; or more precisely, they only became “African
nations” in Brazil. Although Angola was a Central Africa toponym and
Nagô and Jeje may have originally been West African ethnonyms restricted
to small groups (see below), they quickly became generic labels used by
slave traders to classify their human merchandise. As such, their semantic
domain progressively expanded to include an increasingly heterogeneous
number of ethnic groups, and for that reason I shall call them meta-ethnic
denominations3. Therefore, the “African nations” which divide contemporary Candomblé emerged, not in Africa, but from a classificatory system
imposed by the Colonial powers on the slave population. These meta-ethnic
designations were subsequently appropriated and adapted by Africans and
their descendants as alternative collective identities during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
Nagô, Jeje and Angola are today the most well-known terms for designating the hegemonic “nations” of Candomblé. If we take, however, an
even closer look at this religious reality, we discover behind the apparent
unity of each of these “African nations” a new level of differentiation and
diversity. If we consider the Jeje “nation”, for instance, which is the main
focus of this paper, and ask its religious experts, we learn that Jeje cult
houses are identified as belonging to different Jeje “lands” or “provinces”,
which I shall call “sub-nations”, namely the Jeje-Mahi, Jeje-Mudubi, JejeDagome and Jeje-Savalu. Nowadays, only a few Jeje-Mahi and Jeje-Savalu
cult houses are still active in Bahia, while the Mudubi and Dagomé are
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Et hnic-religio us modes of i dent ificat ion
only remembered in relation to extinct nineteenth century terreiros or cult
houses4.
Thus it is only at this third level of depth, qualifying the Jeje metaethnic denomination, that the “real” African ethnic referents (Mahi, Savalu,
Dagomé) begin to emerge. At the ritual level, the differences between the
various Jeje sub-nations are difficult to establish. Religious experts claim
that each sub-nation has specific prayers, drum rhythms or dance steps.
In practice, what we find is a juxtaposition of ritual elements of different
origins in any single cult house. For example, a Jeje-Mahi cult house would
praise Mahi and Mudubi voduns as well as Nagô orixás5. The Jeje identity
is clearly marked by the praise of voduns, as opposed to only the orixás
as in the Nagô system, but the Mahi specificity with respect to other Jeje
sub-nations is much more vague and difficult to verify. My impression is
that nowadays the use of sub-nation denominations results from actual or
alleged genealogical religious links with cult houses or religious experts
that in the past claimed such identities, and serves above all as a diacritical
marker to establish difference with competing cult houses.
What this brief introduction is intended to suggest is that contemporary Candomblé offers individuals and groups not univocal identities, but
on the contrary, multiple layers or distinct sets of conceptual referents for
simultaneous or alternative processes of identification. A devotee from a
Jeje-Mahi cult house, for example, will claim the African origin of his/her
vodun to an Umbanda practitioner; the Jeje identity to a devotee from a
Nagô cult house; and the Mahi referent to a devotee from a Jeje-Savalu
cult house. These multiple and stratified modes of religious identification
determined by context and the identity of the interlocutor, share the same
relational dynamic operating in processes of ethnic identification based
on contrast and difference with the “other”. At the same time, these sorts
of contemporary religious identities by using ethnic terminology can
easily overlap and be confused with ethnic identifications. Certainly the
Nagô Candomblé community does not constitute an ethnic group in the
conventional sense suggested by the “primordial” theories of ethnicity (i.e.
Geertz). On the other hand, according to “relational” theories of ethnicity (i.e. Barth), the Nagô collective identity defined by dialogic contrast
with the Jeje and Angola groups replicates the same dynamics of ethnic
identities(Geertz, 1963;. Barth, 1969).
What this paper contends is that the multi-layered religious-ethnic
modes of identification operating in contemporary Candomblé may have
been working among Africans and their descendants from at least the eighteenth century onwards. The ethnic referents inscribed in contemporary
181
Lu is N icolau Pa r és
Candomblé discourse, ritual and gesture can be approached as indices or
traces of past ethnic dynamics among the African population and, together
with historical data, would allow us to explore some aspects of the interface
between ethnic identities and religious practices. Which were the African
ethnic identities hidden behind the Jeje and Mina meta-ethnic denominations in colonial Brazil? When did ethnic denominations became restricted
to the religious context? Why did some ethnonyms persist in the religious
field while others disappeared? The aim of this paper is to examine some of
these issues in relation to the Gbe-speaking people in Brazil.
Gbe ethnonyms in eighteenth century Bahia:
the Jeje problem revisited.
The seventeenth century terms by which the slaves from the Gbespeaking area were known in Bahia were the generic Mina (referring to
slaves shipped from the Mina Coast extending eastwards from the Fort
of São George del Mina all along the Gulf of Benin) and more rarely the
more specific Arada or Arda (referring to slaves bought in the kingdom of
Allada). During the first decades of the eighteenth century, the term Arda
progressively disappears from the record, while the Jeje becomes increasingly common. I shall begin with some brief comments about the origin
and etymology of the term Jeje, a matter which has been already addressed
by several authors and still remains an unsolved problem (Rodrigues, 1977:
103; Lima, 1977: 72; Oliveira, 1997: 67-72; Nicolau, 2001: 94-95; Matory,
1999: 62-65).. Rather than review the literature on the subject here, I
would simply like to present my most recent findings on the history of the
term and consider some of its implications.
The oldest recorded use of the term Jeje was until recently a 1739
reference found by Verger in the inventários of São Francisco do Conde in
the Bahian Recôncavo. Following a lead by Bahian historian Maria Inês
Cortes de Oliveira, however, I found in the eighteenth century inventários
at the Arquivo Regional de Cachoeira (ARC) a reference to the slave
“Luiza geige”, valued at eighty thousand Reis, registered in the inventario
of Antonio Sardinha, dated the 3rd of September 1711, in the village of
Muritiba in the Recôncavo6. As far as I know, this is the first recorded
mention of the ethnonym in Bahia, or for that matter, in Brazil. Since the
inventários are written at the death of the slave owner, we can assume that
the term Jeje was used when “Luiza geige” was bought, a few years before
1711, presumably in the first decade of the eighteenth century.
In the same set of documents, other references to “Gege” slaves appear
in 1714, in São Gonzalo dos Campos, and in 1717, again in Muritiba.
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Et hnic-religio us modes of i dent ificat ion
Map of main ethnic groups in the Gbe-speaking area
183
Lu is N icolau Pa r és
From 1719 onwards, the references to Jeje slaves begin to increase, while
the ethnonym Arda completely disappears7. This change most likely
reflects (with a few years delay resulting from the difference between the
slave’s arrival to Brazil and his/her registration in the inventarios), the shift
in control of the slave trade from the kingdom of Allada to the kingdom
of Ouidah, which took place in the first two decades of the eighteenth
century. Starting with the destruction of Offra, Allada’s coastal port, in
1692, and the transfer of European factories to Ouidah, the latter’s rising
hegemony became more noticeable in the following decade. In 1703, the
Dutch estimated 30,000 slaves shipped each year from Ouidah. In 1704,
the French there constructed the Fort of St. Louis de Grégoy. Between
1701 and 1710, 216 ships from Bahia sailed the Mina Coast; most of them
probably stopping at Ouidah. In 1714, Colombier, the French Director,
complains about the commercial damage that the Portuguese traders were
causing at Ouidah (Schwartz, 1999: 282; Verger, 1987: 129-30).
Since the documentation of the term Jeje in the Bahian Recôncavo
was contemporary with these events, it is probable that the appearance of
the term was initially related to the flourishing slave trade at Ouidah.
Yet, when Labat, in his report of the Chevalier de Marchais’ trip in
1725, documents the different denominations used to label slaves in Allada
and Ouidah—aradas, nagô, foin [Fon], tebou [Ijebu], guiamba, mallais
[Malês], ayois [Oyo], minois [Mina], and aqueras8—there is no mention
of Jeje. This suggests two possibilities: either the term Jeje was used outside
Ouidah in other slave ports such as Appa, or the term was indeed used
in Ouidah and perhaps other ports, but mainly by Bahian or Lusophone
traders. The latter hypothesis seems more reasonable if we take into account
that the term Jeje in the Americas is only documented in Brazil, and in the
eighteenth century, as far as I know, only in the Bahian Recôncavo.
If we follow this line of thought and keep in mind that Lusophone
traders in Africa often used onomatopoeic reduplications of monosyllabic
indigenous terms to designate autochthonous people (i. e. Popo in the Gbespeaking area, probably a reduplication of kpo; Quaqua in Ivory Coast, a
reduplication of the local salutation kwa) one could hypothesise that Jeje
or Djedje was one such case. Brice Sogbossi suggests that Djedje could be
the reduplication of the ethnonym Idjè (Idjè>Djè or Idjè Idjè> Djèidjè>
Djèdjè). The Idjè are a group located between Pobé and Ketu, north of
Porto Novo. Idjè is the ethnic self-denomination of this group, while the
Yoruba called them Ohori or Ahori, term that the Fon pronounced Holli.
The colonial French administration ended up calling them by the composite term Hollidjè, which besides an ethnonym became a toponym and
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Et hnic-religio us modes of i dent ificat ion
glossonym. The Idjè are famous for their tradition of independence and
resistance against the French Colonization, yet their origins are obscure.
Oral traditions of the Adja-Wéré (inhabitants of the same area) claim
that the Idjè are descended from a group of Nagô hunters from Méko in
modern Nigéria, who occupied their present habitat between Pobé and
Ketu only after the Adja arrival in the region in 1730. The Idjè, however,
claim to have been the original inhabitants prior to that date, a claim
perhaps reinforced by their distinct phenotypic characteristics as opposed
to the Nagô. Merlo & Vidaud also report the existence of Idjè hunters
further south, in the area of Akron and Adjachè [the future Porto Novo],
before the fourteenth century. Some Hula groups claim Idjè ancestry; a link
corroborated by certain common ritual practices with the Akron people.
This evidence suggests a pre-eighteenth century presence of the Idjè on
the eastern bank of the Ouemé river south of Ketu. Their strategic location
between the kingdoms of Allada and Benin and the emerging Fon in the
north made them vulnerable to slave raids despite the relative protection
provided by the swampy conditions of their territory (Sogbossi, 1999: 48;
Pazzi, 1979: 41, 74; Anonymous, 1993: 17-19, 26; Merlo & Vidaud, 1984:
269-270; Soumonni, 2001: 33-34).
All of these circumstances combined strengthen the possibility that
the Idjè were the original slave group that the Lusophone traders began to
call Djedje. This does not of course constitute conclusive evidence of the
Jeje etymology, and further research is still needed to confirm or refine this
hypothesis9. It is, however, consistent with my argument that the term Jeje
must have originated from a specific local ethnonym which, through the
slave traders’ appropriation and phonetic modification, progressively came
to serve as a generic term referring to all the Gbe-speaking groups. At the
same time, the eighteenth century Recôncavo inventarios show that Jeje
rather quickly became a meta-ethnic denomination in the region, as it is
quite rare to find references to other Gbe ethnonyms.
During the first half of the century, there is only one reference to a
Codavi slave and another to a slave of “nação de fon” in 1746. The meaning
of the Codavi (“child of Coda”?; vi = child) is unclear, while Fon clearly
refers to people from the kingdom of Dahomey. In the second half of the
century, we still find occasional references to Coda and Fom slaves, but references to two other Gbe ethnonyms from hinterland groups, the Sabaru
(Savalu) and the Maquim (Mahi), are more frequent. The first occurrence
of the former is in 1773, and of the latter in 1779. As we will see below,
some of these Gbe ethnonyms, as well as a few others, had previously been
recorded in other parts Brazil. Yet it should be emphasised that the classifi185
Lu is N icolau Pa r és
catory system imposed by the slave traders was pervasive and predominant
in the administrative documentation. For the whole eighteenth century,
alongside 15 references to Fon, Codá, Sabaru and Maquim slaves, we find
737 references to Jeje slaves, and 768 references to Mina10.
What is particularly remarkable is that the use of the term Jeje seems
to have been restricted to the Recôncavo area and to a lesser scale the
city of Salvador. In other regions, such as Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro,
Maranhão or Pernambuco, there is as far as I know no evidence of its use
in that period and it would seem that its introduction only occurred in the
nineteenth century, probably through the internal slave traffic originating
from Bahia. In Rio, the first known reference to a Jeje slave dates from
1835 (Karasch, 2000: 94.). Outside Bahia, therefore, the term Mina was
the meta-ethnic denomination par excellence to classify the Gbe-speaking
people. And yet, behind the generic Mina denomination there are hints
that a much more complex ethnic system was operative among Africans.
Hidden ethnicities behind the Mina and Jeje
denominations
Outside of Bahia, the main classificatory system of slaves in the eighteenth century was based on the Mina-Angola polarity. After 1698, with
the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais, the demand for slaves increased,
and there seems to have been a preference for the Mina as opposed to the
Angola (although, as mentioned by Braz do Amaral, opinions among the
elite in this respect did not always coincide). On November 27th, 1718,
the Viceroy of Bahia, Dom Sancho Faro, wrote to Lisbon: “Os negros da
Costa da Mina são mais procurados para as minas e os engenhos que os
de Angola, pela facilidade com que estes morrem e se suicidam” (Amaral,
1988: 57; Verger, 1987: 63). The increase in the importation of Mina slaves
marks the start of what Verger labelled the “Mina Coast Cycle”, corresponding to the first three quarters of the eighteenth century.
Despite the growth in Mina slave exportation to Bahia, the mixture
of these individuals with Angola slaves was still encouraged (among other
reasons, to prevent the potential subversive union of a single dominant
group). In 1726, for instance, a slave revolt in Minas Gerais failed due to
internal quarrels between Minas and Angolas. In relation to this event,
the Governor of Rio also noted the general preference for Mina slaves: “os
negros mina são os de maior reputação para aquele trabalho, dizendo os
mineiros que são os mais fortes e vigorosos, mas eu entendo que adquiriram aquela reputação por serem tidos por feiticeiros e têm introduzido o
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Et hnic-religio us modes of i dent ificat ion
diabo que só eles descobrem ouro e pela mesma causa não há mineiro que
possa viver sem uma negra mina, dizendo que só com elas têm fortuna”11.
But who were these Mina with a reputation as “feiticeiros” and magical
powers to discover gold? Is there any way to find out about the ethnic
diversity hiding behind such a generic term? The problem is not an easy
one, particularly if we take into account that the Mina semantic-ethnic
domain could vary among diverse regions of Brazil, as well as different
historical periods. Yet we may examine the available documentation with
this objective in mind.
In 1731, António da Costa Peixoto finished the first draft of a vocabulary of the language spoken by the Mina slaves in Minas Gerais (although
the final version was only completed in 1741 under the title Obra Nova
da Língua Geral de Mina). There is a paragraph with a sequence of ethnicracial categories, probably written before 1731, which starts with a series
of terms to designate whites, hierarchically followed by others designating
mulatto (bobi), Creole (vigidode), Indian (melamduto), Mina (guno) and
Angola (aglono). Hence the African population appears at the bottom of
the social scale, segmented into the prevailing Mina-Angola polarity.
Interestingly enough, the Mina informants of Peixoto seem to identify
the Mina Coast with “the country of the Gun” (gutumè) and the Mina
people (“gente mina”) with the Gun people (guno), the suffix tumè (tome)
meaning country, and no (nu) meaning people. In this context therefore,
Mina refers mainly to the Gun; the inhabitants of the Porto Novo region,
where the Adja rulers and Aizo people from the kingdom of Allada, as
well as other groups, like the Hula and Hueda, sought refuge after the Fon
conquest of the coast in the 1720’s. Immediately after the term guno (Mina)
and aglono (Angolla [sic.]) appears the term gamlimno, translated as “gente
cóbù” (Cóbù people)12. My guess is that gamlim could be a phonetic variation of the ethnonym Agonlin. This interpretation takes on more weight if
we consider Cóbù as a possible transcription of Cove, the main village in
the Agonlin region. Given the final position of this ethnonym in the list,
and the fact that it is the only specific African ethnic denomination, we
might further speculate that this was the ethnicity of Peixoto’s informant.
This evidence allows us to begin to perceive how beneath the generic
term Mina there persisted a series of more specific ethnic denominations
not readily acknowledged by slave owners, but operative among Africans
as alternative modes of identification. This idea is confirmed by other mideighteenth century cases that I shall briefly examine in order to illustrate
the recurrence of this same system of multiple ethnic naming and its interface with religious practice.
187
Lu is N icolau Pa r és
Carlos Julião. Negras vendedoras. C. 1776. Watercolor
The first case involves a Catholic brotherhood founded by Mina Blacks
(pretos minas) in Rio de Janeiro. Mariza de Carvalho Soares has thoroughly
studied the documentation on this group, analysing, among others, a document in the form of a dialogue with references to Dagomé, Maqui, [Ianno],
Agolin, and Sabaru. These Gbe ethnonyms were operative in Rio de Janeiro
in the first half of the eighteenth century as the author of the text, Francisco Alves de Souza, reports that when he arrived in Rio from Bahia
in 1748 he already found those groups organised under a Mina Catholic
congregation: “achei já esta congregação ou corporação de pretos minas de várias
nações daquela Costa, a saber Dagomé, Maqui, [Ianno], Agolin, Sabaru todos
de língua geral”13.
All the other groups except for the Ianno can be easily identified. The
Dagome are the Dahomeans or Fon from the Abomey plateau; the Maqui
or Makii are the Mahi from the mountains north of Abomey above the
river Zou; the Agolin are the already mentioned Agonlin from the Cové
region; and the Savaru are the people from the city-state of Savalu, the
western neighbours of the Mahi. As for the term Ianno, which Soares
admits she had difficulty transcribing, this could refer to the Lanu, an
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Et hnic-religio us modes of i dent ificat ion
ethnic designation also reported in Minas Gerais in the same period (see
below). One could further speculate that Lanu or Lanno was a phonetic
contraction of Hulanu (Hula people), the fishermen living in the Gbespeaking area coastal lagoon.
This is an excellent example of how beneath the generic Mina coexisted
a much more complex “internal” ethnic mosaic; an intricate micro-politics of alternating variable relationships of conflict and solidarity. What is
worth noting is that the African appropriation of the Mina denomination imposed by external powers also had a logic of its own, since all the
“nations” mentioned were “de língua geral”. In other words, despite their linguistic specificities they were able to understand one another using “Mina”
as a lingua franca a fact which distinguished and separated them from the
Central Africa groups, or “Angola”. This explains why when writing the
Brotherhood’s Compromisso addressed to the ecclesiastical authorities, they
identified themselves as Mina. Besides being the term that the authorities expected to hear, it had also come to be operative for expressing their
linguistic-cultural collective identity.
Yet, when celebrating the Brotherhood feasts (folias), the Mina divided
into “kingdoms” (reinados) according to the ethnic boundaries of their
homeland. The relative unity resulting from this linguistic inter-communication did not spare the Mina social network a competitive dynamic of
contrastive fragmentation. In 1762, the Makki quarrelled and split from
the Dagome, probably due to a rivalry inspired by memories of their traditional enmity in Africa; the minor groups of Agonli, Savaru and Ianno
joined forces with the Makki and so on (all of this has been studied in
detail by Soares14). In this sense, the tension between two simultaneous
opposing forces; one pushing towards a wider unity and the other towards
fragmentation, seems to have dominated the dynamics of ethnic or collective identity of Africans in Brazil.
The example also confirms our initial argument of the simultaneous
coexistence of several dialogical processes of ethnic identification determined by social context and the interlocutor’s identity. When faced with
civil or ecclesiastical authorities, the slave or freedman was identified as
Black (preto), African or Mina—and in that particular relationship he also
self-identified as African or Mina. When dealing with a Brazilian born
Creole, his foreigner’s African identity probably became more important.
Facing an Angola, whose language he did not understand, he assumed
the corresponding and contrasting Mina identity, but when among other
Mina, he became a Mahi, a Savalu or Dagomé. As suggested above, the
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same multi-layered system of alternative modes of identification, albeit
restricted to the religious context, persists to this day in Candomblé.
It goes without saying that the use of this naming system was and still
is only one aspect of the complex process of ethnic identification, and that
ethnic awareness did not arise exclusively when confronting alien individuals to the group. Ethnic identity could be inscribed and expressed by
many other signs like the use of African personal names, scarnifications,
costumes, hair-dressing, gesture and so on. Furthermore, the sociability
with members speaking the same language, sharing memories of the same
land, cooking food in similar way, were also important means of strengthening collective identity. Yet these were normally implicit forms of ethnic
identification, while when confronting the “other”, identities were often
named and became explicit. In that sense, participation in collective associations—particularly stable institutionalised ones such as African-derived
religious congregations or Catholic brotherhoods—was undoubtedly one
of the strongest means of articulating ethnic identity because it strengthened collective organisation between members of the same group and
contact and confrontation with competing groups.
The religious ceremony known as the dance of Acotundá, celebrated
in the mining village of Paracatu in Minas Gerais in 1747 and first studied
by Luiz Mott, is a good example of this dynamic. Its main actors were
predominantly from the Mina Coast; eight Courá, one Calundá, one Mina,
one Mina-Courá, one Lanu, one Angola, one Creole and six unidentified
individuals. Despite the relative ethnic heterogeneity of the religious congregation, with the presence of even an Angola and a Creole, the Courá
majority is clear, and the fact that the Acotoundá dance was devoted to the
worship of “o Santo de sua terra” (the deity of their land) would indicate
that at this point in time, African-derived religious associations tended to
be ethnically-bounded, or at least that the ethnically gregarious spirit was
reinforced by religious practice and vice versa.
Courana slaves are already reported in 1733 in the inventarios from the
Bahian Recôncavo. Courá or Courana is a phonetic evolution of Kouramo
(variants Coirano or Curamo); a term that appears in seventeenth and
eighteenth century records either as a river, a lake, a sea island or a village
near modern Lagos in Nigeria. The Courá or Courana thus do not strictly
belong to the Gbe area but, as a group from the Mina Coast, they shared
certain key cultural features with the Gbe groups, such as similar traditions
of religious organisation15.
As I have argued elsewhere, Central African forms of religious practice and organisation seem in some respects to contrast with West African
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Et hnic-religio us modes of i dent ificat ion
ones. Despite the risk of excessive reductionism, one could argue, following Janzen, that Central African religious practices consist predominantly
of therapeutic and sometimes oracular ritual activities, often based on
interpersonal interactions between single religious experts and clients, and
supported by the production of medicine-charms. West African religious
institutions, on the other hand, while also including this sort of practice,
are primarily characterised by forms of ritual and social organisation which
I shall call “ecclesiastical”. By this I mean that besides the oracular and
healing domains, West African religious systems often have a devotional
aspect normally structured around the worship of deified lineage ancestors, installed in fixed sacred spaces or shrines, where periodic offerings
are supplied. This deification and worship of ancestor spirits is articulated
with an ideology and ritual of possession that serve to reinforce kinship
cohesiveness and lineage authority, and in which the therapeutic aspects
are only secondary.
In Central Africa the relationship with ancestors or other spirit fields
comprising nature or alien spirits is not so consistently organised in religious congregations associated with kinship collectivities. In some cases, as
in the Nkita cults of the Kongo coast, “a close articulation of emblems of
authority, social renewal and healing is common”, and the cult association
is both centred around the dynamics of lineage conflicts and individual
affliction. More generally, the Central African healing ideology is articulated within the dialectic between diviner-healer versus malign wild spirits
often commanded by a sorcerer. Religious experts who deal with these
spirits seem to operate mainly on their own, and not necessarily supported
by kinship groups, although they may have a few attendants. These are
always recruited through a healing-initiation process by which the sufferer
becomes a disciple of the main healer ( Janzen, 1992: 12; Nicolau, 1997:
47-50).
West African “ecclesiastical” systems, such as the vodun cults, although
they may in some cases present a similar pattern, require the gathering of
a congregation; that is, a complex collective infra-structure, hierarchically
organised according to elaborate initiation processes. This collective and
often kinship-oriented dimension of West African cultivation of deities is
the aspect that matters for our “ethnic” argument.
The Acotundá dance, with its collective spirit-possession performance,
multiple shrines or “casinhas” spread around a sacred space or temple, and
sacrificial offerings devoted to African gods, is one of the most clear eighteenth century antecedents of Candomblé, but not the only one (Mott,
1986: 126-30). In Recife, in a letter dated in 1780, the Conde de Povolide
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Lu is N icolau Pa r és
denounced the feasts celebrated “a escondidas, em Cazas ou Roças com
huma Preta Mestra com Altar de Idolos adorando Bodes vivos, e outros
feitos de Barro”, specifically attributing these practices to the “Pretos da
Costa da Mina”16. Contrasting with the more numerous calundus where
individual religious experts, often Angola, practised healing and oracular activities, the Mina groups like the Jeje and Courá seem to have been
responsible for the introduction of African “ecclesiastical” forms of religious organisation in Brazil. It is precisely in this form of religious association that processes of collective-ethnic identity may have found a fertile
ground.
Our third example concerns one of these incipient religious associations; a domestic congregation from the Bahian Recôncavo with a strong
Jeje ethnic bent. And yet, it is also another good example of “hidden” ethnic
plurality behind a meta-ethnic denomination. The source document, analysed in detail by João Reis, results from a 1785 accusation exerted by civil,
not religious, authorities after the repression of a calundu in the Rua do
Pasto in Cachoeira. In the initial declaration the scriber names the accused:
“Sebastião, e Antonio, e Francisco, e Thereza e Anna, todos jeje” (“all Jeje” my
italics) and a sixth woman, Marcella, Jeje, who was finally not processed. A
month later, in the concluding stage of the judicial process the scriber had
already more information, at least from the men: “Sebastião de Guerra,
Francisco Rodrigues Leite e Antonio Amorim, todos forros, o primeiro
de nação Dagomé, o segundo Marri, o terceiro Tapa, e as pretas Thereza
e Anna”. José Pereira, the African owner of the house where the calundu
took place, provided the information about the accused, even of the women:
Thereza was a “marri” (Mahi) freed-woman; Anna, a Jeje slave, and Marcella a Jeje, freed-woman. Hence, the six individuals initially identified as
“all Jeje” were in fact: 1 Dagomé, 2 Marri, 2 Jeje, 1 Tapa17.
In the wider Cachoeira society the ethnonym Jeje had become a generic
term, like Mina in Rio which could include groups not only from the Gbespeaking area, but from most of the Mina Coast, and as far afield as the
Nupe (Tapa). In 1765, some Jeje founded in the same town a Catholic
brotherhood named “Senhor Bom Jesus dos Martírios dos Homens pretos
de nasção Gege” (Good Jesus of Martyrdom of the Black Men of Gege
Nation)18. According to the data from the Recôncavo inventarios, between
1730 and 1780, the Jeje were demographically the major African group in
the region19. It is therefore not strange that they had the means to organise
their own brotherhood. In the Compromisso, however, they restricted the
membership of Creole men, indicating the existence of a tension between
African and Brazilian born blacks.
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Et hnic-religio us modes of i dent ificat ion
Map of Bahian Recôncavo. Source: João José Reis. Rebelião Escrava
no Brasil. A história do levante dos Malês em 1835 (edição revista
e ampliada), São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2003, p. 15.
Once more we perceive signs of multiple modes of identification,
and see how the Gbe-speaking people in the Recôncavo could assume
the meta-ethnic Jeje as a collective identity when confronting the wider
society; whether the ecclesiastical authorities who had to approve their
Compromisso or the Creole in their “controvérsias”. At the same time, as
the calundu documentation shows, Gbe-speakers among themselves would
clearly distinguish between Jeje proper, Dagome, Mahi, and so forth. This
implies that the term Jeje designated a specific group from the Gbe-speaking area. As I suggest, this group could originally have been the Idjè, but by
the second half of the eighteenth century Jeje probably referred to a wide
range of coastal groups (Hula, Hueda, Gun, Aizo) as opposed to the Mahi
and Dagomé from the interior20.
In all these cases we note how ethnically heterogeneous groups congregate around religious practices or institutions. The Courá from the
dance of Acotundá accepted a Mina, a Lanu and even an Angola; the
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Lu is N icolau Pa r és
Gbe-speaking people of Cachoeira accepted a Tapa. Inter-ethnic sociability and subsequent social alliances were inevitable and were reinforced by
cohabitation and inter marriage. And yet in the eighteenth century religious congregations there was always a predominant group (i.e., the Courá
in Paracatu), or a relative ethnic homogeneity of the various participating groups (i.e., Jeje, Mahi and Dagome in Cachoeira). At the same time,
the continuous arrivals of new Africans through the trade made African
ethnic designations (although invisible in the documentation) effective in
social interactions and critical in determining processes of association and
aggregation. The religious cases we have examined suggest that this was
indeed the case.
Concurrent with these processes of collective identification and differentiation, the multi-ethnic encounter of Brazilian slavery generated parallel processes of exchange and cultural interpenetration. In the Recôncavo
inventarios from the period 1751-1800, I have found references to 52 marriages involving Jeje slaves, corresponding to 14% of the Jeje slave population evaluated, while another 10% appear as single mothers. Of these marriages, 11 were intra-ethnic Jeje couples, while 41 were inter-ethnic couples.
In the latter group, the Jeje comprised 29 women (70%) and 12 men (30%),
indicating that women married more easily than men, probably due to their
relative demographic inferiority among the slave population as a whole.
This fact would also justify the higher number of inter-ethnic marriages.
The Jeje could marry with Creoles, but unions with other Africans were
more common. In this case, the Jeje married with 11 Angola, 8 Creoles, 7
Mina, 7 Nagô, 2 Congo, 2 Sabaru, 1 Codavi, 1 Mossambique, 1 Xamba and
1 not identified. The proportion of Central African (15) to West African
mates (17) is quite balanced, but we may note the high number of Nagô,
taking into account that their relative percentage in the slave population in
this period was only 3-4%. This suggests that despite the traditional African
enmity between Jeje and Nagô, in the New World context, cultural affinities
may have been an important bias favouring of certain kinds of inter-ethnic
marriages21.
This apparent high level of inter-ethnic miscegenation in the second
half of the eighteenth century must have resulted in a strong symbiosis of
heterogeneous African values and practices, which was certainly inherited
by Creole descendants. This data also warns us against any interpretation
over-emphasising the importance of rigid ethnic divisions among the slave
population. If anything, it indicates the co-existence of opposing tendencies or attitudes, which could be characterised as that of the bozales, eager
to maintain their original identities, and that of the ladinos, more prone to
assimilate new values and establish wider alliances as a survival strategy in
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Et hnic-religio us modes of i dent ificat ion
an adverse habitat. Between these extreme attitudes there were most likely
all sorts of intermediate positions. Ethnic processes of identification were
therefore relative not only to origin and context, but also to individual biographies, character and circumstantial interest. How ethnic identities were
transmitted to or assimilated by the Creole population is a subject that
requires further research and which I am not prepared to address here. It is
probable, however, that it encompassed a similar degree of diversity22.
The increasing Creolization of the slave population in the eighteenth
century was counter-balanced by a substantial growth in the importation
of African slaves, starting in the 1780’s, as consequence of the sugar industry recovery. Despite the more assimilationist and integrative attitudes of
the Creoles, the continuous arrival of Africans, particularly in the early
nineteenth century, certainly contributed to strengthen ethnic contrast and
awareness among the black population. The majority of these new slaves,
however, came from the Yoruba-speaking area, thus adding to the MinaAngola (or Jeje-Angola) duality a third meta-ethnic pole: the Nagô.
The Nagô-Jeje-Angola triad in nineteenth
century religious identities
The first records of Nagô slaves in the Recôncavo inventarios appear
in 1734, but their presence was not significant until the last three decades
of the eighteenth century, when they reached a modest 4% among the
evaluated slave population. As already well documented by historians, their
massive importation occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century,
especially from 1830 onwards, and it was not until the 1820s that their
numbers surpassed those of the Jeje23. By that time, it is probable that the
Jeje and Angola had already set the basis for the future institutionalisation
of Candomblé with the organisation of domestic and extra-domestic religious congregations similar to the ones we have examined in the preceding
section. It was not always easy, however, to organise stable “ecclesiastical”
structures, and the slave population more often gathered around occasional
batuques to perform the dances of their homelands. Although these were
not necessarily religious in nature, they had a collective character that
favored ethnic processes of identification.
In the Bahian Police records there is a letter dated January 20th, 1809, in
which such batuques were reported in the Recôncavo town of Santo Amaro
during the Christmas period. What is interesting about this document is
that it explicitly mentions the division of such slave entertainment into
“nations” (naçoens). In three different locations in the town, there were three
simultaneous “corporations” (corporaçoens) or “gatherings” (ajuntamentos),
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Lu is N icolau Pa r és
Jean Baptiste Debret (del.). Marimba – La promenade du dimanche
après-midi. 1826. Watercolor.
of Angolas, Jejes and Nagôs-Haussas (Uçás). These three “groups” (ranxos)
with drum playing, dancing, and communal food, were held in the street or
in abandoned houses, but only lasted one day, although the most important
Nagô-Haussa gathering lasted all night24.
Like the calundu of Cachoeira, therefore, the Jeje, Angola and Nagô
meta-ethnic identities found a means of expression and differentiation in
ritual forms. The division of the batuques into “nations”, was especially significant in the first half of the nineteenth century, and was even supported
and encouraged by certain sectors of the dominant class. Bahian Governor
Conde dos Arcos, for example, allowed slaves to celebrate their feasts as a way
of mitigating their distress, but also to stimulate animosity among different
ethnic groups in order to prevent their potential subversive union in revolts25.
It should be noted, however, that this division by “nation” corresponded to
the “meta-ethnic” system imposed by slavery. It would be interesting to know
whether there were internal subdivisions within the Angola, Jeje and Nagô
batuques corresponding to dances or ritual activities belonging to each of the
less visible ethnic groups composing these generic “nations”. The Nagô and
Haussa gathering would suggest so. One would guess that in these batuques
the various “sub-nations” juxtaposed their dances and drum-playing organis196
Et hnic-religio us modes of i dent ificat ion
ing serial forms of performance that stood at the base of the multi-divinity
cult ceremonies which later would be found in Candomblé.
The record shows that by 1830, if not earlier, there was already an
emergent network of Candomblé religious congregations with both the
material and social resources to guarantee relative stability, and a complex
“ecclesiastical” structure involving both African and Creole devotees. It is
probable that some of these congregations were devoted to single deity
cults while others began to juxtapose the cult of various deities. In 1829,
we know of a candomblé in the Accú in Salvador (probably present day
Acupe neighbourhood), dedicated to the worship of a “vodun god” (Deus
Vodum). The use of the term “vodum” indicates this may have been a Jeje terreiro, while its singular form suggests that it could have been a monotheistic
cult26. It is only in 1858, with the report of a candomblé on the outskirts
of Salvador, where the police found various ritual costumes and emblems,
that we find evidence—albeit indirect—of a multi-divinity cult27. I have
discussed elsewhere the problem of multi-divinity cults, and suggested that
the “principle of aggregation” operating behind the Candomblé juxtaposition of deities was not necessarily a New World innovation, as the literature
has generally maintained. On the contrary, I argue, that multi-divinity cults
were a long-established practice in the vodun religion of the Gbe-speaking
area, and that in a Bahian multi-ethnic social context already favourable
to intercultural contact, the Gbe religious traditions may have furnished
a conceptual referent for the institutionalisation of multi-divinity cults in
Candomblé (Parés, 2005a).
My hypothesis is that the heterogeneous juxtaposition of deities and
ritual elements first occurred within each meta-ethnic-group (i.e., the Jeje
coalesced with the Mahi and Dagomé, the Ketu with the Egba and Oyo,
and so on), and that only in a subsequent stage did the wider juxtaposition
between voduns, orixás and inkices take place. By this I do not mean to
suggest a simple evolutionary process from ethnically-bound monotheistic
cults (i.e., Courá), to meta-ethnic congregations (i.e., the Jeje calundu in
Cachoeira, or the batuques in Santo Amaro), to inter-ethnic “pan-African”
multi-divinity cults (i.e., nineteenth century candomblés). While this may
to a certain extent have been a general tendency, reality never adjusts to
such simplistic reductionist patterns, and it is more likely that at any single
historical period one might find a co-existence of both ethnically bound
cults and more pluri-ethnic ones. With time, however, the pluri-ethnic
multi-divinity cults clearly became the rule rather than the exception.
The rising inter-ethnic process of exchange and aggregation, expressed
by the ritual juxtaposition of multiple deities, was directly related to the
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Lu is N icolau Pa r és
increasing ethnic and racial intermixing in Bahian society. As we see in the
Accú candomblé , the constitution of extra-domestic “ecclesiastical” congregations to some extent depended on the recruitment of Creole devotees,
most of them probably first generation. As Harding’s data shows, ethnicracial heterogeneity within Candomblé increased in the second half of the
nineteenth century (Harding, 2000: 71).
This fact raises certain doubts regarding the persistence of a division
of candomblés according to African “nations”. And yet, it is my impression that despite the increasing ethnic-racial intermixing, kinship social
networks established by Africans and their biological descendants still
constituted the stable core around which other individuals could aggregate. And it was around these kinship alliances and their ritual styles that
certain ethnic-religious identities indeed persisted.
The satirical journal O Alabama28, published in Salvador between
1863 and 1871, while often referring to Africans involved in candomblés,
gives no indication at all that the terreiros were identified with particular
nations29. Ethnic identifications of runaway slaves were reported, and in a
few rare instances we learn the ethnic origin of a candomblé leader. There
is even one reference to a candomblé in which they danced “vudum”, and
whose participants were “negras gèges, crioulas e mulatas”. Apart from
these exceptions, however, it would seem that the African ethnic repertoire
had vanished, or at least was no longer relevant for the literate public of
the journal..
This silence is consonant with the general tendency in the wider
Bahian society after the end of the Atlantic slave trade to avoid African
ethnonyms. As the inventarios (and other records such as wills of Africans)
indicate, from 1850 onwards the generic label “African” becomes the most
common term in administrative documents to designate imported slaves
and freedmen, progressively replacing first specific ethnic denominations,
and ultimately even the meta-ethnic Nagô, Jeje and Angola. This evidence
confirms that the use of ethnic classification by the white elite was closely
related to the traffic and that when this ceased, such “’trade marks” became
irrelevant. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, Africans and their descendants had already assumed and appropriated these
denominations and—despite the documentary silence—continued to use
them in domestic and religious contexts.
It should be noted that the idea of “African-ness” associated with
contemporary Candomblé may have begun to take shape in this period.
This was the moment in which European Kardecist Spiritism was being
introduced into Brazil and the opposition between white and black forms
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Et hnic-religio us modes of i dent ificat ion
of Spiritism began to be elaborated30. This generic “African” identity began
to be associated with Candomblé, thus adding a wider “meta-ethnic” level
of classification, although with a marked race/color connotation. As I have
already argued, however, behind this apparent Black “Pan-African” homogeneity attributed to Candomblé, the other two levels of meta-ethnic and
sub-nation denominations continued to be operative.
We have some evidence of this, for example, on the ethnic identifications assumed by Bahian ex-slaves returning to the Mina Coast in the
same period. In Ague, for instance, it is notable that the Mahi identity
was assumed by many returnees during the entire nineteenth century
(Strickrodt, 2000). The term “Djedje” first appears in the Gbe-area records
only in 1864, in the journal of Francesco Borghero, chief of the Missions
Catholiques de Lyon in Dahomey. As Matory has suggested, this term may
have been introduced in West Africa by returnees from Bahia, although—
in keeping with our previous argument—it might be more appropriate
to say that the term was re-introduced. Between 1864 and 1889, Djedje
was used to designate most of the coastal Gbe groups (Ewe, Gen, Adja,
Fon), while after 1902, and into the 1930s, it seems to have been used to
designate only the Gun inhabitants of Porto Novo. Afterwards, the Djedje
ethnonym was progressively replaced by the term “Fon”. Matory suggests
that the Djedje and Mahi identities were promoted by the French Colonial powers as a strategy to counterbalance the expansionist interests of
their British competitors (Matory, 1999: 63-65). Regardless, this evidence
demonstrates that these identities had initially been used by the returnees themselves, implying that they were still operative among Africans in
Bahia during the second half of the century.
Further confirmation of this is found when relating the O Alabama data
with present day oral traditions in Jeje terreiros. The latter recall a series of
extinct cult houses, like the Agomé, Campina, Kerebetan and Po Zerrem
in Salvador, and the Roça de Cima in Cachoeira, variously identified as
Jeje-Dagome, Jeje-Mudubi or Jeje-Mahi. At the same time, O Alabama,
while not mentioning the Jeje identity of these religious congregations,
confirms their existence in the 1860’s. These data would allow us to affirm
in spite of the journal’s silence, that various terreiros were in fact identified by their members—and probably by the Candomblé community at
large—as belonging to the Jeje “nation”, or at least as practising a differentiated “vudum” cult31. By implication, one might suggest that this was also the
case with the Angola, Tapa or Nagô terreiros.
The association of the Jeje terreiros with “sub-nation” identities, was
very likely the result of the actual presence among its leaders of Mahi,
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Lu is N icolau Pa r és
Mudubi, Savalu or Dagome Africans. In that period, ritual diversity may
have still been associated with the ethnic diversity of its social agents. This
situation slowly changed when the last generation of Africans began to die
out in the second half of the century, and .the significant decrease in their
presence by the century’s end allowed the Creoles to achieve hegemony in
the leadership of Candomblé.
It is from Abolition onwards that the “nation” concept may have been
progressively relegated to the religious field, designating a particular ritual
tradition and no longer an ethnic-political identity. From that moment on,
a devotee became Jeje, Nagô or Angola, depending upon the cult house
into which s/he was initiated and regardless of his/her ethnic origin or
African ancestry. Interestingly enough, it is no longer the devotees, but the
deities who provided the ethnic referent (i.e., it is the vodun who is Jeje, the
orixá who is Nagô, and the inkice who is Angola). With the Creolization of
Candomblé, the sub-nation ethnonyms were perpetuated as memories of
the terreiros’ African founders, and the meta-ethnic denominations are the
ones which were more readily assumed when identifying cult houses.
Nevertheless, some sub-nation ethnonyms, such as Mahi among the
Jeje and Ketu among the Nagô seem to have emerged as “winners” in their
respective contests against competing “sub-nations”. One wonders why out
of the various Gbe ethnonyms recorded in the eighteenth century (Coda,
Fon, Agonli, Lanu, Mina, Gun, Dagome, Sabaru, Mahi and—in the
nineteenth century—Mudubi) only a few (Mahi, Dagome, Mudubi and
Savalu) persisted as ethnic-religious denominations in nineteenth century
Candomblé, and only two (Mahi and Savalu) persisted into the twentieth
century. Was this due to ritual specificities of their particular religious traditions, to demographics, or to competitive micro-politics within the Jeje
religious community? The example of the Catholic brotherhood in Rio de
Janeiro seen above suggests that the last possibility is the most probable.
The emergence of the Ketu identity as the hegemonic Nagô sub-nation
(probably in the final decades of the nineteenth century) and its consolidation as the hegemonic Candomblé nation (probably from the 1930’s
onwards), although a complex subject beyond the limits of this paper, indicates a long and intricate political process involving the legitimisation of
certain religious groups—sometimes with the conscious or unadvertized
collaboration of intellectuals—against competing ones32. The Mahi identity among the Jeje may have followed a similar pattern and chronology.
The dialogic contrast and competitive dynamic established at each
level of classification (i.e., between the “meta-ethnic” Jeje-Nagô-Angola
triad and between the corresponding sub-nation levels) can be seen to
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Et hnic-religio us modes of i dent ificat ion
have persisted throughout the history of Candomblé, although each level
with varying degrees of importance and visibility in each period. As the
Creolization process progressed and Africans ceased to arrive, the subnation level increasingly lost ground and the “meta-ethnic” referents seem
to have become prevalent. And yet, a few sub-nation labels remained as
critical markers. More recently, a wider third level consisting of a Black or
African identity, always latent in Candomblé history, has taken on increasing importance and visibility.
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Andrade, Maria José de Souza. (1975). “A mão-de-obra escrava em Salvador,
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gos críticos luso-brasileiros. Lisboa: Editora Imprensa de Ciências Sociais: pp.
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Lima, Vivaldo da Costa. (1977). A família-de-santo nos Candomblés Jeje-Nagôs da
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Columbia University. PhD thesis.
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Mina: an ethnographic and audio-visual study. London: SOAS, PhD thesis,
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——. (2001). “The Jeje in the Bahian Candomblé and in the Tambor de Mina
of Maranhão.” in Kristin Mann & Edna Bay (eds.). Rethinking the African
Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil.
London: Frank Cass & Co Ltd: 91-115.
——. (2005a). “Transformations of the sea and thunder voduns in the Gbe-speaking area and in the Bahian Jeje Candomblé.” in J. Curto e R. Soulodre (eds.).
Africa and the Americas: Interconnections through the Slave Trade. Trenton NJ:
Africa World Press: 69-93.
——. (2005b). “The Nagôization process in Bahian Candomblé.” in Toyin Falola
& Matt Childs (eds.). The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 185-208.
——. (2005c). “O processo de crioulização no Recôncavo baiano (1750-1800)”,
Afro-Ásia 33.
——. (2006). A formação do Candomblé. História e ritual da nação jeje na Bahia.
Campinas: Editora Unicamp.
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dos africanos na Bahia.” Afro-Asia.19-20: 37-74.
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l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire. Dakar: IFAN. 27: 141-153.
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Cachoeira, 1785.” Revista Brasileira de História 16, v. 8, Mar.-Aug: 57-81,
233-49.
——. (2001). “Candomblé in Nineteenth-Century Bahia: Priests, Followers, Clients.” In: Kristin Mann & Edna Bay (eds.). Rethinking the African
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——. (2002). “Tambores e temores: a festa negra na Bahia na primeira metade
do século XIX”, in Maria Clementina Pereira Cunha (ed.). Carnavais e
outras f(r)estas: ensaios de história social da cultura, Campinas, SP, Editora da
UNICAMP, CECULT: 101-55.
——. (2003—1986). Rebelião Escrava no Brasil. A história do levante dos Malês em
1835. (edição revista e ampliada), São Paulo, Companhia das Letras.
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Brasil escravista. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
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Editora Nacional, (Col. Brasiliana 9).
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Silveira, Renato da. (unpublished). Iyá Nassô Oká, Babá Axipá e Bomboxê Obitikô.
Uma narrativa sobre a fundação do Candomblé da Barroquinha, o mais antigo
terreiro baiano de Ketu. Salvador.
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Brasileira.
——. (2001). O Império de Santo Elesbão na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, século XVIII.
Paper presented at LASA, Washington, 6-8 September.
Sogbossi, Hypolite Brice. (1999). Mina-jeje em São Luis do Maranhão, Brasil: Contribuição ao estudo de uma tradição daomeana. Universidade Federal do Rio de
Janeiro, PPGAS, Master thesis.
soumonni, elisée a. (2001). Daomé e o mundo atlântico. Rio de Janeiro: SEPHISCEAA.
Strickrodt, Silke. (2004). “Afro-Brazilians of the Western Slave Coast in the nineteenth century”, in: José Curto e Paul E. Lovejoy (eds.). Enslaving Connections,
Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of the Slavery. Amherst,
New York: Humanity Books: 213-44.
Verger, Pierre. (1957). “Notes sur le culte des Orisa et Vodun, à Bahia, la Baie
de tous les Saints, au Brésil et à l’ancienne Côte des Esclaves en Afrique”,
Mémoire de l’IFAN 51. Dakar: IFAN
——. (1987). Fluxo e Refluxo do tráfico de escravos entre o Golfo do Benin e a Bahia de
todos os Santos. São Paulo: Corrupio.
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Lu is N icolau Pa r és
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Following Capo’s suggestion, I use the expression Gbe-speaking people in this
paper to refer to the linguistically related Fon, Gun, Aizo, Mahi, Hueda,
Hula, Ouatchi, Adja, Ouemenu, Agonli, Ewe, Gen and affiliated peoples,
usually referred to in the literature as Adja-Ewe. Similarly, I use the term
Gbe-speaking area to refer to the region occupied by them. Capo, Comparative. This paper is based on partial findings of the research project founded by
the CNPq (Brazilian Research Council) entitled “Do lado do Jeje: História
e Ritual do vodun na Bahia”. I would also like to thank Peter Cohen for his
comments and attentive revision of the original English text.
“O conceito de Nação nos Candomblés da Bahia” was first presented as a
communication in the encounter “Négritude et Amérique Latine” held in
Dakar in January 1974 and organized by the Senegalese government and
UNESCO. It was first published in Afro-Asia n.12 in June 1976, with a later
revision published as part of the introductory chapter of his Master’s dissertation “A família-de-santo nos Candomblés Jeje-Nagôs da Bahia: um estudo de
relações intra-grupais” in 1977. This dissertation was republished in 2003.
The term is used by Pérez (1995: 3-4); Sogbossi (1999: 19).
Some religious experts also mention the denominations Jeje-Mina-Santé,
Jeje-Efon or Jeje-Agavi. The Mina-Santé refers to the Mina Ashante, and
do not properly belong to the Gbe-speaking area. Effan or Efon refers to a
Nagô ethnic group from the Ekiti region linked to the Ijexá, but because of
its phonetic similarity with the ethnonym Fon, it is often confused with a Jeje
sub-nation. Agavi probably refers to a Nagô religious tradition as well. A contemporary cult house in Salvador of recent foundation claims a Jeje-Mudubi
identity, and the Poçu Beta founded in the early twentieth century by Manoel
Falefa claims to belong to the Jeje-Mina-Popo nation.
For a detailed analysis of this phenomenon see: Nicolau Parés, 2005a. The
Mudubi voduns are today identified as the thunder or Hevioso pantheon,
Sogbo, Badé, Akorombé, Loko and others. Mudubi (or its variants Mundubi,
Mandubi, Mondubi, Mondobi, Mendobi, ou Modobê) appears as an ethnonym in Bahian inventarios from 1812, and with more prominence in the
1830’s. Although I have not yet found any clear antecedent of this term
in the Gbe-speaking area, it must have referred to a coastal group, as that
is the area where the thunder cult was most prominent. The term Mahi is
first recorded as far as I know in a letter to the Viceroy of Bahia by João
Basílio, Director of the Portuguese Fort in Ouidah, dated September 8th,
1732: “Como o Rey de Daomé teve a fellicidade de vencer o paiz dos Mauis”:
AHU-Lisbon, São Thomé, box 4; apud. Verger (1987: 154). Another reference appears in 1773 in Norris’ work: “The Mahees, as I have before hinted,
are a powerful confederacy of many united and independent states; whose
form of government seems to be of the feudal kind”: Norris, Memoirs, p. 138.
The comment suggests that the term Mahi was a meta-ethnic term used by
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Et hnic-religio us modes of i dent ificat ion
the Dahomeans to designate a plurality of distinct ethnic groups living in the
mountain regions north of the Zou river.
6. Inventário of Antonio Sardinha, Muritiba, 1711-1713, f. 3v; Seção Colonial
Judiciária, 01/56/56/442, Arquivo Regional de Cachoeira (hereafter ARC).
In the “partilha” (f. 10) she appears as Luzîa gege. I would like to thank
Maria Ines Cortês de Oliveira for indicating the Inventarios of ARC as a
potential source of the first records on the Jeje ethnic denomination.
7. Inventários, boxes 1-70, Seção Colonial Judiciária, ARC. With the exception
of Carlos Ott (1952: 141-153), who examined the inventários from Salvador
and the interior of Bahia, and Verger (1987: 669-675) who counted and
listed the data of the “Livro de Tutelas e Inventários da Vila de São Francisco
do Conde”, published at the AAPBa. vol. 37, with 154 inventários from the
period 1739-1800, no author as far as I know has presented information
about the ethnic-color categories of the Bahian slave population in the eighteenth century. To partially solve this problem, I examined a total of 558
inventários dated between 1694 and 1800 housed at the ARC. The majority of inventarios correspond to villages located in the tobacco area of the
Reconcavo (i. e. Cachoeira, Muritiba, Outeiro Redondo, São Gonzalo dos
Campos). Nevertheless, with the addition of the São Francisco do Conde
inventarios examined by Verger and those at the ARC from Santiago do
Iguape and São José de Itapororocas, there is a significant representation of
the sugar area as well. A total of 7.842 slaves were listed according to their
ethnic-color categories and their relative percentage per decade was calculated. These data is analysed in detail in Parés (2006), Here I only present
partial preliminary research findings.
8. “Acquérat” designates slaves attached to the French Fort which could not be
sold because they were part of the “bens móveis”: Verger (1987: 207).
9. In a previous paper, I suggested the possibility of the term Jeje being a phonetic evolution of the toponym Adjache from Porto Novo: Nicolau Parés
(2001). If we consider the term Jeje as a reduplication of a monosyllabic
word, that word might be jè, meaning salt; a commodity produced all along
the Coast, and particularly by the Hula. Could Jeje be a Lusophone term
referring to the Hula salt producers? For other hypotheses see the works
listed in note 5.
10. Inventarios, boxes 1-70, Seção Colonial Judiciaria, ARC. There is a reference
to a slave “nago digo Ofa” in 1784, and to an “ofra” in 1785. Due to doubts
about this transcription, however, I cannot affirm with absolute certainty they
are references to the port of Offra.
11. Lara (2002: 6); cf. “Carta do Governador do Rio de Janeiro ao Rei de 5 de
julho de 1726”, Documentos Interessantes para a História e Costumes de
São Paulo, 50 (1929: 60-61); “Parecer do Conselho Ultramarino de 18 de
setembro de 1728”, Documentos Históricos, 94 (1951: 28-30).
12. Peixoto (1945: 20, 29). There is also a reference to “agudâ” translated as “a
Bahia”.
205
Lu is N icolau Pa r és
13. Soares (2001: 24); cf. “Regra ou estatutos por modo de hum dialogo onde,
se dá noticia das Caridades e Sufragaçoes das Almas que uzam os pretos
Minnas, com seus Nacionaes no Estado do Brazil, expecialmente no Rio de
Janeiro, por onde se hao de regerem e governarem fora de todo oabuzo gentilico e supersticiozo; composto por Francisco Alves de Souza pretto e natural
do Reino de Makim, hum dos mais excelentes e potentados daquêla oriunda
Costa da Minna”, BN (MA) 9,3,11; Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro;
transcription by Luciana Gandelman; revised by Mariza de Carvalho Soares.
Published in SHADD: Studies in the History of the African Diaspora—Documents, York/UNESCO Nigerian Hinterland Project, Department of History,
York University. Also available in <http://www.yorku.ca/nhp/shadd/mahi/
index.asp>. This document is an undated (c.1786) anonymous copy from an
original not yet found. Nor is it clear why it was written in a dialogue form.
14. Soares (2000), chapters 5 and 6.
15. Mott (1986: 129, 134, 136). The Courá and the Gbe-speaking peoples were
neighbours and had occasional contacts and exchange, as shown in a Bahian
document dated 1744 that reports the presence of some Couranos, “enemies
of the king of Dahomey”, in the Portuguese Fort at Uidah: Verger (1987:
204, 207). The reference to a Mina-Courá woman in the Acotundá ritual
also suggests this sort of inter-ethnic alliance.
16. Manuscript letter by Martinho de Mello e Castro, Conde de Povolide, from
10 June 1780, “Correspondencias da Corte, 1780-1781” (fl. 23/23v), Biblioteca do Estado de Pernambuco.
17.Reis (1988: 57-81); cf. Seção Judiciária, Cachoeira, Devassas, 1785, maço
1624, APEBa. Document found and commented on by Patricia Aufederheide: “Order”, p. 164. An integral transcription of this document is available
in the section “Doumentação-Documents” of Revista Brasileira de História 8
(16), 1988: 233-49.
18. “Compromisso da Irmandade do Senhor Bom Jesus com o soberano titulo
de Senhor dos Martírios, erecta pelos Homens pretos de nasção Gege, neste
Convento de Nossa Senhora do Monte do Carmo da Villa de Nossa Senhora
do Rozario da Cachoeira, este anno de 1765”, Lisbon, AHU, Códice 1666.
Document transcribed in Mulvey, “The black”, appendix C, pp. 264-272.
19. Inventários, boxes 1-70, Seção Colonial Judiciária, ARC.
20. The distinction between Jeje and Dagomés seems to persist into the early
nineteenth century. The Conde de Arcos wrote: “os de Agomés vierem a
ser irmãos com os Nagôs, os Gêge com os Haussas...”: 1957, Notas, p. 21.
This point is apparently confirmed by Braz de Amaral, who distinguished
the Gegis from the Coast (Porto Novo and Agué) from the Dahomeyanos
(Dagomé): pp. 53-54
21. Inventários, Boxes 1-70, Seção Colonial Judiciária, ARC.
22. For a more recent and detailed analysis of the ethnic composition of the
Recôncavo slave population and its marriage tendencies see Nicolau Parés,
2006 and 2005c.
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Et hnic-religio us modes of i dent ificat ion
23. Inventários, Boxes 1-70, Seção Colonial Judiciária, ARC; Andrade, “A Mãode-obra”, appendix, table 4 (1 e 2).
24. “Correspondencia de Capitão José Roiz de Gomes ao outro Capitão Mor”,
20 janeiro 1809, maço 417-1, Capitães Mores 1807-1822, APEBa. This
document was analyzed by Reis (2002: 104-109), and Harding (2000 18889).
25. Verger (1987: 334-35); Reis (2003: 82); Silveira, unpublished (pp. 8-21).
26.Reis & Silva (1989: 36, 42, 128-129). The first reference to the term vodun
in Brazil appears in Peixoto in 1741 in Minas Gerais. In the second half
of nineteenth century, Bahian Candomblé, vodum or vudum was the most
widespread generic term to designate African gods and its use was not
restricted to the Jeje cult houses. We do not know if this was already the case
in 1829.
27. “Correspondencia do Secretario de Policia ao Presidente da Provincia”, 13
April 1858., maço 2994-1, Policia Delegados 1842-1866, APEBa, (document found by Alexandra Brown and João José Reis); apud. Harding (2000:
59).
28. The O Alabama was a satirical journal published by pro-Abolitionist Afrodescendants who launched a systematic campaign against Candomblé.
Despite its strong ideological bias, the O Alabama news documented names
of participants, locations of terreiros, African terminology and various feasts
and religious activities that were sometimes witnessed by the journalists, who
provided quasi-ethnographic descriptions. This rich data makes it clear that
by 1860 Candomblé had already attained a level of institutionalization with
levels of ritual and social complexity very similar to those of the present-day.
This material has been examined by Graden, 1998 and Reis, 2001. I also
examine in detail these data in A formação do candomblé.
29. In fact, explicit references to “nations” of Candomble only begin to appear in
the literature in the 1930’s with the work of Edison Carneiro.
30. O Alabama, 23rd June 1870, p. 2. “Spiritismo de branco, spiritismo de preto
(...) a crença da manifestação dos spiritos está bastante adiantada (...) antes
do Luiz Olympio introduzil-a, ja os africanos a praticavam”.
31. O Alabama, 15th May 1867; 11th November 1871, p. 4; 2nd Mars 1867, p.
3; 22nd September 1868, p. 2; 26th September 1868, p. 4; 29th September
1868, p. 3. See also Parés, 2006.
32. For a recent analysis of this theme see Parés, 2005b.
207
Chapter 9
Saint Anthony at the
Crossroads in Kongo and
Brazil: ‘Creolization’ and
Identity Politics in the
Black South Atlantic,
ca. 1700/1850
Robert W. Slenes
gh
I
n the dismembered Kingdom of Kongo in 1704-1706, a prophetess
named Beatriz Kimpa Vita gathered a remarkable popular following.
Representing herself as having died and been reborn as Saint Anthony,
Kimpa Vita promised to reunite the Kingdom, officially Christian since
1491,1 so as to end the constant violence and slave raiding that had beset
it for decades. To this purpose, she worked to restore the Kongolese people
to harmony with the spirit world by destroying sacred charms, including Christian crosses, which could be weapons for witchcraft. Her aims
and actions, particularly her death and rebirth to a new identity by spirit
possession, reflected her movement’s origins in an autochthonous ‘community cult of affliction’ (a cult seeking to restore the ‘health’ of its group
of reference), named Kimpasi. In Brazil a century and a half later, at a
time of intense traffic in slaves from Central Africa, especially from the
Kongo culture area, similar events occurred. In Rio de Janeiro and São
Paulo provinces in 1848 and 1854 political-religious movements among
plantation slaves—the earlier one underlying a major plan for rebellion—
also invoked Saint Anthony, while taking the form of community cults of
affliction reminiscent of Kimpasi.2
These similarities demand an analysis of the understandings and
interpretations of the people involved. Did the ‘Antonians’ (the followers
of Kimpa Vita) and the slaves who cultivated Saint Anthony in Brazil
attribute the same meanings to this holy figure as the Portuguese and
Robert W. S lenes
Luso-Brazilians, for whom ‘Anthony of Lisbon and Padua’ was virtually
the patron saint?3 To what transformations had Anthony been subjected
to make him compatible with the Kimpasi cults? Had a Central-African
Saint Anthony gone to Brazil, along with slaves from Kongo and the Portuguese sphere of influence centred in Luanda?
Saint Anthony, integrated into Kimpasi-related movements on both
sides of the ‘Portuguese Atlantic’, offers a unique opportunity for the study
of ‘creolization’. By ‘creolization’ I mean ‘transculturation’: the selective
appropriation and reinterpretation of the culture of the ‘other’, as engaged
in by all groups involved in a given situation of contact and conflict.4
On the African side, the question has been intensively studied, notably
in recent years by John K. Thornton. I share Thornton’s basic approach:
first, his insistence on the achievement of enslaved Africans in the Americas—as groups of origin—in re-founding and maintaining to a significant
degree their native cultural communities, while engaging in transculturation with other groups from their home continent; second, the idea that
African/European creolization was an active process from the beginning
and commenced, particularly in the Portuguese world, in Africa, not in the
Americas.5
Thornton has shown that a ‘naturalized’ Christianity, reinterpreted
within the matrix of the autochthonous religion, was thoroughly rooted
in the Kongo by the eighteenth century.6 I build on this idea to argue
that European ideas and texts on Saint Anthony had penetrated certain
sectors in the Kongo to a greater extent than even Thornton has suggested.
Indeed, the accusation by Capuchin missionaries that Kimpa Vita was a
heretic was in a sense true; she knew the Catholic tradition so well that
she could radically reinterpret it ‘from within’, even while reading it from
a Central-African perspective.
On the other hand, Thornton has also given considerable attention
to the ‘culture wars’ over Christianity in the Kongo: that is, the contrasting ways of re-signifying Catholic dogmas and icons for different political
purposes.7 I attempt to further sharpen this focus here, on the assumption
that political strategies, elaborated to define contending social identities,
are central to the process of creolization/transculturation. From new data
regarding the clash of missionaries and native authorities at the local level
and a new interpretation of Kimpa Vita’s allegories regarding the different
origins of blacks and (white) missionaries, I argue, more emphatically than
Thornton, that the Antonian movement rejected missionary Christianity
as witchcraft, at the same time that it appopriated Saint Anthony and
other Christian holy figures for the Kongolese peasantry, integrating them
210
S ain t A n t hon y at t he C ross roa d s
in new ways into the indigenous religious system. In addition, it used the
new synthesis to press political leaders to remedy the situation of endemic
instability and re-embrace autochthonous values if they wished to maintain
their legitimacy. In sum, the Antonian cult was both a nativist movement
and a denunciation of the ruling elites’ betrayal of trust.8
In later years, Kimpasi-like movements in Brazil’s South-east incorporated Saint Anthony in a similar manner, as part of the formation of a
Central-African identity among plantation slaves in opposition to that of
their masters. In doing so, these cults probably built on Anthony’s prior
‘naturalization’ in the Kongo, which continued through the eighteenth
and into the nineteenth century. In the political and cultural crossroads
of Kongo and Brazil, Saint Anthony was directed by Central-Africans
and their children down unexpected paths. In both cases, this creolized
holy figure contributed to forming new social identities, often defined in
opposition to those of the people from whom he had been appropriated.
I
In 1968, sociologist Georges Balandier argued that the Kongo king
converted to Christianity in order to acquire a new but not exclusive source
of ngolo, or ‘power’. The idea was developed in depth by John Thornton and
Anne Hilton in their books on the Kingdom of Kongo, published respectively in 1983 and 1985.9 For both authors, Kongo royalty saw in Catholicism the opportunity to build a centralized religious hierarchy under the
control of the state, much as the Portuguese monarch had done under the
padroado, and thereby strengthen their political control over the conquered
provinces. These Central-African rulers never obtained the Pope’s authorization of an African padroado, nor even the permanent establishment
of a Church hierarchy subordinated to Rome, which would at least have
allowed the ordainment of native Kongolese. They did, however, receive
a significant number of secular and regular priests (particularly Italian
Capuchin missionaries, from 1645), adopt Portuguese as the official language of correspondence, encourage the residence of a substantial, largely
Portuguese, trading community in the capital, Mbanza Kongo (also given
the name São Salvador), and embrace Christianity as the state religion,
without necessarily discarding indigenous religious sources of ngolo. As
a result of their efforts, in the beginning of the eighteenth century it was
possible for a female ‘Saint Anthony’ to realize the extraordinary feat of
building a broad-based prophetic movement with strong support among
the peasantry.
211
Robert W. S lenes
By far the most thorough study of Kimpa Vita and the Antonian
movement is Thornton’s The Kongolese Saint Anthony (1998b). For my purposes here, three lines of argument in the book stand out. First, there is the
detailed documentation of the degree to which Christian religious festivals
(for instance, All Saints’ Day and St. James’ Day) took root in the Kongo,
particularly in the capital, the extent to which Christianity was propagated
(largely through lay catechists and preachers—mestres, ‘teachers’—literate
in Portuguese, recruited from the Kongolese nobility) and the fervour with
which this originally ‘imported’ faith was professed by the Kongolese elite.
Second, there is the clear demonstration of how Christianity was ‘naturalized’ by selective reinterpretation, based on autochthonous categories.
(Thus, among Christian celebrations, All Saints’ Day lent itself particularly
to cultivation by people concerned with honouring the recent dead and the
ancestors of their matrilineal clans, or kanda.)10 Third, there is an emphasis
on conflict, arising out of the confrontation of different religious actors
(for instance, Capuchin missionaries and Kitome, or native high priests
who mediated between the human community and the bisimbi, regional
tutelary earth and water spirits) and of Kongolese proposing contrasting
interpretations of Chistianity.
I will attempt to advance further on all three of these fronts, taking as
my starting point one of the high moments of Thornton’s book, his analysis
of the ‘Salve Antoniana’, Kimpa Vita’s reworking of the ‘Salve Regina’.
Thornton notes that a crucial change in the prayer was Beatriz’s assertion
that ‘Gods wants an intention, it is the intention that God grasps. Baptism
[like marriage, confession, prayer, good works] serves nothing, it is the
intention that God takes’. Remarks Thornton: ‘in Kongo … intention is
critical to determining whether the use of kindoki [otherworldly power]
is positive or negative, and hence to be considered helpful or evil, so that
these lines transport the concept of kindoki firmly into the prayer’.11 Yet,
Thornton does not convincingly explain why it made sense, in Kongolese
terms, for Kimpa Vita’s prayer to put Saint Anthony ‘above the angels and
the Virgin Mary’ and recognize him as ‘the second God’, il secondo Dio in
the Capuchin sources. (Anthropologist Wyatt MacGaffey has suggested
that the epithet ‘second God … is strongly reminiscent of the position
attributed to Funza, chief of all … [bisimbi]’; but this still does not tell us
what it was in the Saint that led Beatriz to make this identification.)12 Furthermore, Thornton does not satisfactorily account for why Beatriz ended
her prayer with repeated expressions of ‘mercy, mercy’, indeed, why this
became virtually a cri de guerre of the movement.13 I begin with the problem of Saint Anthony, which requires looking
first, in more detail, at the Kimpasi. These cults have appeared in the
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Kongo historically during times of severe community affliction, attributed
to witchcraft (evil kindoki) run rampant. Typically, they have exhibited the
following characteristics, all part of the effort to place the human community in harmony again with the tutelary earth and water sprits: the holding
in high regard of stones of spherical or other unusual shape, often taken
from watercourses and deemed to be manifestations of bisimbi; the use of
a ‘secret language’ among cult members, consisting usually of the attachment of special prefixes or suffixes to normal words; meetings in clearings
deep in the forest; the inclusion of both males and females as members and
priests, initiated, at least in the twentieth century, as children or adolescents
(but after ‘tribal initiation’/circumcision), or even when older; initiation
through a ceremony of ritual death and rebirth, with the new member
incorporating an individual guiding spirit (from the realm of the bisimbi
or from that of ancient human ‘ancestors’ associated with them) while in
trance and taking its name and identity for the rest of his or her life.14 As
Thornton and Hilton have observed, Kimpa Vita reported her ‘rebirth’ as
Saint Anthony in terms that would have been credible to people raised in
the bisimbi and Kimpasi tradition.
Yet, practically no one who has written about Kimpa Vita’s movement has noticed that there is a remarkable similarity between elements of
Antonian devotion, particularly the ‘Salve Antoniana’, and the traditions
and teachings about the Saint in Portuguese and Italian sources. In sum,
circumstantial evidence suggests that the Antonians, particularly Kimpa
Vita, a member of the nobility, were well-versed in European lore. Yet, at
the same time, the peculiar European configuration of Saint Anthony’s
attributes and miracles lent itself, even more than Thornton suspected,
to reinterpretation by people devoted to the bisimbi and steeped in the
Kimpasi tradition.
Thornton notes that Kimpa Vita’s sermons presented ‘Saint Anthony
… [as] the most important saint’ and that ‘it was not difficult to convince
people of this, for Saint Anthony, as patron of Portugal, was regarded as
being a patron . . . of Kongo as well’.15 Furthermore, Anthony and Saint
Francis were ‘[already] the saints most venerated in Kongo’. To this, it
should be added that Saint Anthony was not only revered by the Lusitanian Court, but was also the saint most often called upon in the devotion of the Portuguese people. Then too, the high esteem given to Saints
Francis and Anthony in the Kongo must, in part, have reflected the fact
that the Italian Capuchins, the major missionary group in the kingdom
and a suborder of the Franciscans (who counted Anthony as prominent
member and Francis as founder), were particularly devoted to these holy
figures. Thus, one might expect that Portuguese and Italian priests would
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have brought to the Kongo books and manuscripts for proselytizing and
teaching that gave a certain pride of place to Anthony. That they did have
texts and valued them highly is beyond doubt; when a mission church in
Soyo province was sacked in 1708, one Capuchin noted that ‘the missionaries … were deprived of everything, even their sermons’.16 That Saint
Anthony figured as author or theme of some of these texts is suggested by
Bernardo da Gallo, the Capuchin missionary who is the main eyewitness
source on the Antonians. Da Gallo wrote that Kimpa Vita ‘had perhaps
heard some sermon of [or about?] Saint Anthony in Portuguese, that was
in the hands of some black man of little account [sic], who knew how to
read a bit’: that is, a mestre, and thus almost certainly a member of the
Kongolese nobility.17
In the light of da Gallo’s statement, the compilation of sermons and
writings attributed to Saint Anthony, most notably the 1641 and 1653
editions in Latin reputed to be the most complete, is the first possible
source of Kongolese knowledge about this saint that should be mentioned.
A second, perhaps even more important, is the Book of Miracles (later, the
Little Flowers) of Saint Anthony, the most famous compilation of the marvellous deeds attributed to the saint, dating from the early 14th century.
Another is Lorenzo Surio’s Life of the Saints, published in Latin in six
volumes between 1570 and 1575, and subsequently in several vernacular
translations, Italian included; Surio’s work recounted many of the stories
about Anthony’s miracles and was ‘an obligatory presence in the library of
every monastery, convent or parish house’.18
A fourth work, or set of texts, includes the nine sermons on Saint
Anthony given by the Portuguese Jesuit preacher Antônio Vieira in various
places between 1638 and 1672.19 Published versions of all nine sermons in
Portuguese could have reached the Kongo by the end of the seventeenth
century in the first edition of Vieira’s collected sermons, prepared by the
author himself.20 Some of them could also have arrived there in Spanish,
Italian or Latin collections.21 Manuscript versions could have reached the
Kongo earlier. One researcher has discovered that a copy of Vieira’s then
unpublished Clavis Prophetarum was circulating amongst Jesuits in Minas
Gerais, Brazil, ca. 1715-1719.22 Another has shown that Vieira commonly
gave his sermons from rough outlines, which he then fleshed out later, in
preliminary versions, attending to the requests of other priests, who naturally were interested in the pulpit speeches of this renowned preacher. First
drafts then apparently circulated (and suffered revisions) in unauthorized
copies, sometimes reaching publication in versions that were repudiated by
Vieira himself.23 Vieira’s seventh and eighth sermons on Saint Anthony
were proffered in Rome in 1670 and 1671; thus, in view of the preacher’s
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fame and the Capuchins’ devotion to Saint Anthony, it is particularly
plausible that preliminary versions of these sermons could have found
their way to the mendicant order’s headquarters in Italy and thence to the
Kongo before their publication in Portuguese in 1682 and 1699. On the
other hand, the fact that five of the sermons and the second half of a sixth
were published in 1696 and 1699 meant that most of Vieira’s preachments
on Saint Anthony would have been relatively ‘hot off the press’—and thus
perhaps still circulating as high-profile novelties among missionaries and
mestres—at the time Kimpa Vita took on the Saint’s identity. In any case,
Vieira’s sermons, while masterpieces of rhetoric, probably articulated the
standard sources on Saint Anthony mentioned above in ways that were
mostly familiar to his European audience; thus, independently of whether
and how long they circulated in the Kongo, they provide us with some idea
of the notions regarding the Saint that priests and missionaries would have
carried with them and propagated in the Kongo, particularly through the
mestres.
W. G. L. Randles was the first (and to my knowledge only) historian
of Africa to speculate that Kimpa Vita might have been inspired by one
of Antônio Vieira’s sermons.24 After quoting the phrase from Bernardo
da Gallo cited above, Randles called attention to Vieira’s 1638 sermon in
Salvador, Bahia (published in Portuguese in 1690) in which the preacher
gave Saint Anthony credit for forcing the Dutch to end their siege of that
city. Vieira calls Anthony ‘Saint of all Saints’, therefore the special protector of São Salvador, Brazil, located on the ‘Bay of all Saints’; furthermore,
to face down the Dutch threat, God had particularly ‘delegated his powers’
to Anthony. Randles cited the last part of Kimpa Vita’s ‘Salve Antoniana’—‘Saint Anthony is the restorer of the kingdom of Kongo, . . . Saint
Anthony is himself the second God’—and then asked: ‘would it be going
too far to imagine that the Kongolese had seen, in the providential deliverance of São Salvador, Bahia … an example permitting the hope that São
Salvador in the Kongo might have an analogous deliverance?’ (He referred
here to Kimpa Vita’s goal of resettling Mbanza Kongo, then in ruins, and
making it once again the capital of a prosperous, peaceful kingdom.)
Randle’s suggestion, while stimulating, remained at the level of speculation, since he called attention to only one of Antônio Vieira’s sermons
on Saint Anthony and made no attempt to put the preacher’s work into a
broader context. In fact, Vieira makes clear that Anthony was the ‘Saint of
all Saints’ because he occupied a place in all the various categories of saints
and stood near the top in many of them; he was martyr among martys (he
once had the intention to martyr himself ), virgin among virgins (he was
known to have a special resistance to temptations of the flesh), etc.25 (It
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has not been noted by specialists on the Antonians that Kimpa Vita’s pregnancy must have been especially embarrassing to her, for she had assumed
the identity not just of any saint but of the quintessential virgen among
them—indeed, as we shall see, one whose purity had been received from
the Madonna herself.) Vieira did not invent these notions with his rhetoric, but took them from popular tradition, the book of Anthony’s miracles
and hagiographic works. Still, he presents Anthony as ‘Great’ in this and
in the other sermons with hyperbole that could strike a listener unfamiliar
with baroque rhetoric as blasphemy. In a 1658 sermon (published 1696)
he compares Anthony to the triune God; Anthony is the ‘imitator’ of the
Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, combining their respective powers
of ‘doing’, ‘teaching’, and ‘calling’. Indeed, Vieira here refers to Anthony
as ‘this Portuguese God, or Vice-God’; ‘just as divine providence made
Moses god of Egypt, with power over the elements . . . , so also He made
Saint Anthony with that same power of doing [fazer], not God of only
one reign, or of part of the world, but of all of it, with universal dominion
over all creatures’.26 The hyperbole here comes even closer to Kimpa Vita’s
‘second God’ than ‘Saint of all Saints’. Developing this notion further, in
the 1670 sermon in Rome (published 1699), Vieira compares Christ’s
miracles to Anthony’s and finds them wanting—as anyone might, when
comparing the respective deeds of these figures in the Bible and in the
Book of Miracles of Saint Anthony.27 Indeed, the Saint was commonly called
the ‘Thaumaturge’, or ‘miracle worker’.
From such ideas as these—ideas that did not originate with Vieira,
but that were inflated by his hyperbole—it was only a short step to the
notion that Anthony could intervene in wars and win them. Historian
Evaldo Cabral de Melo has persuasively argued that Vieira contributed
powerfully to making this tradition; but he also shows that the decisive
intervention attributed to Saint Anthony by the leaders of the successful
uprising against the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco in 1645 was probably even more crucial. Certainly, by the second half of the seventeenth
century Anthony was commonly called upon in the Lusitanian world to
help Portuguese armed forces win battles (often being ‘enlisted’, with a
salary paid to the Franciscan Order, as an officer or common soldier—the
latter, for instance, in the 1685 expedition against the runaway-slave community, Palmares).28 The most famous occurrence of this nature in Brazil
was in 1710, when Anthony was again credited with defeating a foreign
siege: this time that of the French against Rio de Janeiro.29
In 1704, Kimpa Vita probably did not have to learn about Anthony’s
prowess as a ‘warrior’ from Antônio Vieira; acquaintances and relatives
who had been educated as mestres in a mission school most likely could
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claim such lore as part of their culture.30 Thus, it would not have been a
major step for her to conceive of Saint Anthony as ‘the restorer of the
kingdom of Kongo’, particularly given his other attributes. Indeed, ‘restorer’
is a key word. It should be emphasized that long before becoming a warrior
saint, Anthony was appealed to in Europe as a restorer of lost objects. As
Antônio Vieira put it, ‘God, as the author of all things, is the one who
gives them; and when these things are lost, Saint Anthony, as the finder, is
the one who recovers them’.31 Indeed, this is probably the key attribute of
Anthony—in addition to his being the only saint of Portuguese nationality
and the most popular saint in Pernambuco—which led to his ‘appointment’ as the restorer of this ‘lost’ province and subsequently to his military
fame (especially in campaigns against runaway—i.e., ‘lost’—slaves). For
Kimpa Vita, looking backward, it would have been hard to find a better
saint to champion her cause.
Yet, Anthony had additional qualities. If God had delegated His powers
to the Thaumaturge, the Virgin Mary had appointed him her defender and
had given him guardianship over the Christ child. Vieira noted Anthony’s
defense of the ‘purity of her Immaculate Conception’; indeed, Anthony was
particularly known for his many sermons in praise of the Madonna. An
early 18th century oil painting (ca. 1705-1716) by António Pietro de Pietri
expresses the close relationship between the two virgins, the Holy Mother
and the Saint, mediated by the Christ child; it shows Anthony receiving a
sprig of ‘madonna lilies’, simbol of purity and chastity, from Mary through
the hand of the infant Jesus. Another painting from 1729, by Francisco
Vieira de Matos (Vieira Lusitano) shows Mary about to hand her baby to
Anthony’s outstretched arms.32 Finally, innumerable paintings and sculptures complete the sequence, portraying Anthony with the Christ child in
one arm, usually mounted on a Bible, a symbol of the Saint’s knowledge
of holy writ and his prowess as a preacher.33 Christ in these works, as a
child, is portrayed smaller than Anthony; as Antônio Vieira explained it,
‘[Anthony] made himself smaller [he joined a ‘minor’ mendicant order] for
love of Christ, and Christ in payment for this great decision made himself
smaller than the Saint, when in Anthony’s presence’.34 Can there be any
doubt that the European tradition was one of the sources of another line
in Kimpa Vita’s ‘Salve Antoniana’: ‘the Mother with the son on her knees.
If there had not been Saint Anthony what would they have done? . . . Saint
Anthony is above the Angels and the Virgin Mary’?35 In the two paintings
I have referred to, Anthony is portrayed below Mary and Christ; nonetheless, Kimpa Vita’s sentences do seem to resonate with the hyperbole of
European praise for him.
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I do not wish to argue, however, that the leader of the Antonians misunderstood baroque rhetoric. Rather, she actively reinterpreted Christian
hagiography, engaging in a process of ‘transculturation’, that is, a selective appropriation of foreign elements of culture and their subordination
initially—or even, as in this case, after 200 years of conversion—to indigenous conceptual schemes. Kimpa Vita fixed on the hyperbole of baroque
rhetoric about Saint Anthony because it made striking sense to someone
raised in the Kimpasi tradition, as this tradition was formed, or reforged,
under crisis. To understand this, it is worth looking more closely at the
Thaumaturge’s miracles.
The bisimbi spirits were deemed responsible for individual and community health (or the lack of it, if their ire was peaked). Significantly, of the 80
stories included in a modern edition of the Miracles of Saint Anthony36—64
from the original edition, the rest culled from other sources—18 recount
miraculous cures (from diseases and wounds) effected by Anthony, three
display the Saint’s power to counteract nature and rescue people from
disaster (a landslide, a shipwreck, immersion in boiling water), and nine
recount cases in which the Saint resurrects people; i. e, a total of 30 stories,
or 38%, present Anthony as a great healer who even has the power to
reverse death.
The bisimbi were closely associated with water, particularly large
bodies of water (lakes, rivers, the ocean). Significantly, eight of the Saint’s
miracles—several of them among the best known today—take place in
the water, including five of the resurrections, which are of people who had
drowned. One of these water stories, which is set at a point where a river
enters the sea, recounts Anthony’s famous ‘sermon to the fishes’. To confound disbelievers, Anthony preaches to the fish, which come in schools
to hear him, raising their heads above the surface in rapt attention and
arranging themselves in size from little fish in the shallow water to big ones
in the deep. The Kongolese held chiefs who had the power of persuasion in
high esteem. But they also believed that bisimbi spirits revealed themselves
to people in the form of water animals, especially fish, and they told tales
which relate the size of such ‘fish’ to the importance of the spirit that thus
presents itself.37 Someone with Anthony’s attributes, who could enthral
the various ranks of ‘fish’ with a speech in their own language, clearly was a
powerful nganga (doctor-priest): at the very least, similar to the holy men
who called crocodiles and snakes to the surface of the water to negotiate
a pact with them, according to stories recounted by missionary-ethnographer Karl Laman (resident among the Nsundi, a Kongo group, from 1891
to 1919).38 Or, perhaps as MacGaffey has suggested, he was Funza itself,
the biggest ‘fish’ of them all.
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Five of the miracles—some of them, again, among the best known
today—portray Saint Anthony as being in two places at once (evidencing his powers of ‘bilocation’), that is, with his soul separated from his
body; and an additional tale is about a woman whose soul is induced by
the Saint to leave her flesh and experience a vision of the Other World.
Probably Anthony’s most renowned miracle is that in which his spirit flies
from Pavia in Italy across the sea to Lisbon, where it temporarily revives
a murdered man, who then clears the Saint’s father of the charge of assassination.39 Only the greatest nganga or a great spirit from the Other World
itself could combine bilocation with such powerful divining. Finally, other
stories and popular European tradition considered Anthony ‘a protector
of love and marriage’, a quality linked to the promotion of fertility. Kimpa
Vita certainly understood this. Da Gallo reported that ‘she … boasted that
she had the power to make sterile women become fertile’. Her followers were taught—or already had learned—to respond the way Portuguese
women might (albeit, as Thornton notes, for autochthonous reasons). Says
Gallo:
The women who wanted to have lots of children not only asked
her for this, but in addition wound little cords and threads
around her arms and feet, the way the Portuguese would bind
or tie the statues of Saint Anthony as a sign of faith when they
wanted to obtain a favour’.40
It was from this set of miraculous tales that Portuguese and Italian
Catholicism elaborated the figure of the great Thaumaturge and healer, the
promoter of ‘matrimony’, the delegate of the Virgin Mary and the triune
God, the restorer of ‘lost’ Pernambuco, the great warrior, the ‘Saint of All
Saints’, the (Portuguese) ‘Vice-God’. And it was this combination of attributes that lent itself so well to being ‘read’ through indigenous categories,
centred on the spirit world of the bisimbi. In the Kongo in later years,
perhaps also in 1704, Saint Anthony was known as Ntoni Malau. This
translates as ‘Anthony of the good fortune’41 or ‘Anthony of prosperity’,42
meanings which are quite close to his nickname in Portuguese, ‘Antônio
da Boaventura’; or, alternatively, it may be rendered as Anthony the ‘allpowerful’, which is what lau means in the dialect of São Salvador.43
Yet there is one final, quintessential characteristic of the European
Saint Anthony which needs to be examined, for it may have been particularly attractive to the Kongolese. The reader will have noted that Anthony
brought with him to the Kongo a curious set of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ qualities,
combining the power of God the Father with the purity and motherly
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concern of the Virgin Mary. In Antônio Vieira’s sixth sermon on the Saint
(1658, published 1696), the author highlights a peculiar quality of the
Portuguese Thaumaturge which unites these two natures. Saint Anthony
was known in Europe as the ‘hammer of the heretics’; ‘but I do not know
what type of hammer this was’, says Vieira, ‘which did not seem to be of
iron but of wax, because he [Saint Anthony] always reduced the heretics
with gentleness, never with severity’.44 ‘Hammer’ in the Kongolese context
would have suggested ‘blacksmith’, an indigenous mediator with the
bisimbi, who also combined ‘masculine’ with ‘feminine’ qualities (his forge
was likened to a woman’s womb, he promoted fertility, cured people with
air from his bellows, and had the power of reviving people on the edge of
death).45 Indeed, Anthony’s ‘soft hammer’, along with his other attributes,
could easily have been incorporated into the Kongolese linguistic field
around ‘blacksmith’, which included such words (with different ‘melodies’,
Kikongo being a tonal language) as mfula (‘smith’), fula (‘to work at the
forge’), fula (‘to … revive a fire or someone who is sick to death’), futumuna
(‘make [someone] come to life again’, which ‘would seem to be a reinforced
form of fula’), and the contrasting fuula (‘to destroy, exterminate’).46
In this context, the new foundation myth for the Kongo state,
promoted by Pedro IV, the leading pretender to the throne of a united
kingdom, may acquire a hitherto unsuspected significance. A high court
official expressed this new history on Saint James’ day (celebrating the
founding of the Christian kingdom) in 1700, in a speech aimed at obtaining support from other regional leaders for Pedro’s plan to reoccupy São
Salvador. The speech was summarized by a Capuchin missionary and is
reported by Thornton: ‘“the kingdom of Kongo … was founded long ago by
a wise and skilful blacksmith who settled differences among the people”’.
Thornton creates a plausible fiction by attributing the speech to Miguel de
Castro, the court’s royal interpreter and secretary, a mestre and a member
of Kimpa Vita’s kanda (matrilineal clan). Could Kimpa Vita’s new identity
in 1704 and Castro’s initial defence of her before missionary da Gallo be
directly tied to high politics, at a time when Pedro was still casting about
for support for his projects and she was looking for a champion? Did the
Kongolese Saint Anthony believe she could present herself convincingly
as that ‘wise blacksmith’ who might forge a new political unity with her
gently persuasive ‘wax’ hammer?47
Whatever the case, one may conclude that intense creolization, based
on intimate knowledge of European texts, probably had proceeded further
in this instance than even Thornton has argued. Yet, the conclusion that
the original cultural matrix was not much modified by this process still
stands. Indeed, ‘Ntoni Malau’ seems to have significantly reinforced indig220
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enous understandings. The key to appreciating why this happened lies not
just in the ease with which the Catholic tradition (particularly Anthony)
lent itself to Kongolese ‘translation’, but in the fifty-year social and political
crisis that preceded the Antonian movement, stimulated the multiplication of Kimpasi cults and predisposed ordinary Kongolese to appropriate
Saint Anthony for their own purposes. Thornton, despite his attention
to ‘reinterpretation’, his stress on the impact of decades of warfare (and
accompanying slave raids) on the peasantry, and his portrayal of clashes
between missionaries and local religious leaders at the time of Kimpa Vita,
gives relatively little attention to the intertwining of religious conflict and
politics in this previous period of crisis, in his discussion of the origins
of the Antonian movement. Thus, historian Anne Hilton’s focus on this
subject provides important insights: indeed, ones that may allow us to
understand Kimpa vita’s cry of ‘mercy, mercy’.
II
Both Hilton and Thornton in their respective books on The Kingdom of
Kongo have documented the rapacious effort of King Garcia II to extract
revenue from the provinces during his twenty-year reign (1641-1661),
through governors appointed from the capital’s elite. Both also show
how the King into the 1650s and some of the governors into the 1660s
supported the Capuchins’ attempts to stamp out ‘fetishism’ and ‘devil
worship’ by attacking local religious leaders and movements, including the
Kitome and the Kimpasi cults. (The latter flourished in the 1650s and
1660s, Hilton tells us, because of drought, plague, and warfare; I suspect,
on her evidence and Thornton’s, that the excessive taxation of Garcia and
his governors provided another stimulus.) Furthermore, both authors
intimate that the religious struggle contributed to the royal attempt to
break the power of local leaders (the Kitome, for instance, had important political functions and were also supported by ‘taxes’). Only Hilton,
however, develops the argument that attacks on local Kitome and Kimpasi
combined with political dissatisfaction to fuel local revolts. She notes that
‘the indigenous religious revival consciously opposed the Christian cult
and the Mwissikongo [capital-province nobility’s] overlord-ship’. In 1663,
‘nganga burnt churches throughout [several provinces]’. As a result, ‘Both
Garcia II in his later years and António I [1661-1665] found it prudent to
accommodate themselves to the indigenous movements’. The former even
‘publicly associated himself ’ with the Kimpasi.48 As late as 1664, however,
missionary Girolamo da Montesarchio was able to browbeat the governor
of Mpangu province and a local headman to march against ‘a very old and
much respected’ Kimpasi to burn it; they were repulsed by the nganga nkita
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priests of the Kimpasi, who ‘marched against them with bows and arrows
and all sorts of other arms, saying that they, Blacks, would not yield before
other Blacks’.49
At the turn of the century, on the eve of Kimpa Vita’s movement, missionary intolerance had not changed. What does seem different, at least in
comparison to the situation described by da Montesarchio, is that village
headman often gave cover to ‘fetishists’ and Kimpasi members, which suggests that, although they felt the pressure of superiors to respect the persons
of missionaries, they normally no longer had the obligation (in this period
of acephalous central control and relatively weak government at the provincial level) actively to support the persecution of native religious actors.
It is worth looking closely at one confrontation between a missionary and
villagers in 1697 for insight into the tacit protection that local chiefs now
offered Kimpasi adepts and also fully to perceive the impact such encounters must have had on the sensibilities of commoners and headmen.
In 1697, Luca da Caltanisetta visited the village (libata) of Nkasa in
the province of Mpangu, only a half-day’s journey from the provincial
capital.50 There he found that ‘there were very few Christians’, that is, baptized people. Among the 183 persons he proceeded to christen (normally
people turned out for this ceremony, seen as conferring protection against
witches)51 was
a little boy who carried two small bags around his neck, full
of diabolical amulets that had come from fetishists [nganga];
I ordered his old father to take them off him; the latter obeyed
against his will and sought to recover them, but he did not
succeed in the attempt; when he saw me burn them, he almost
began to cry and went away very vexed.
The purses mentioned were probably futu bags—‘small sack[s] made
of European or indigenous cloth if not of animal skin’—described by missionary-ethnologist J. Van Wing among the Mpangu in the early twentieth
century, in what was then the Belgian Congo.52 Van Wing did not indicate
how the futu bag was used, but Karl Laman, active among the neighbouring Nsundi, provided this description:53
In case of [a child’s] illness etc. the father and mother see that
… [nganga] are summoned. But even if the child is flourishing
and comely it must be magically protected . . . through futubags. The medicine in these is taken from venomous snakes .
. . . Other common medicines are put in them. Two or four
futu-bags are made and tied around the chest. These counteract
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the evil intentions of bandoki [“witches”, plural of kindoki] or
nkisi [spirits, acting directly or through charms]. With futubags containing about the same medicine as mentioned above
the grown-up child may also be consecrated to a great nkisi’.
One understands, then, the father’s near tears when his son, having been
presented to da Caltanisetta for baptism, had his health-protecting futubags removed and burned. Here was one father whose native ways must
have been reinforced by the shock of the particular ‘creolization’ promoted
by missionary aggression.
He was not an exception to the rule. In the same village da Caltanisetta found
a bundle of thick half-burned sticks before the door of the
mani [headman], placed on a forked support; I had the question
posed to a relative of the mani about what was the meaning of
these sticks …; he responded that it was a diabolical exorcism so
that the elephants would not come to destroy the palm groves
[a major economic resource], which were very abundant in that
libata, nor the homes of the inhabitants.
The missionary ordered the forked support and the bundle of sticks to be
taken away, but when his translator told him that the job was being done
by a member of a ‘Kimpasi sect’ (clearly operating under the nose of the
headman) whose intent was to hide the objects in a safe place, he had the
‘fetish’ burned in public ‘in front of the people, who had quickly gathered
out of curiosity’. He then planted a ‘holy cross’ on the spot where the ‘diabolical exorcism’ had stood.
The object of da Caltanisetta’s ire was probably the principal nkisi (here
meaning ‘charm, sacred medicine’, a conduit for a particular spirit) that
guaranteed the well-being of the village. In the early twentieth century the
Mpangu called the consecrated object that served this purpose ‘Mpungu’,
a name also reserved for the supreme being, Nzambi.54 Mpungu was also
called Kinda gata, ‘that which makes and keeps the village prosperous’, and
was said to have ‘a hundred eyes’, meaning immense power to see spiritual
forces.55
The emplacement of Mpungu required complex rituals, as befitted an
nkisi that was considered associated with the village’s founding ancestor.
Like the object of da Caltanisetta’s pique, Mpungu was located in front
of the headman’s house. It was not ‘a bundle of thick half-burned sticks’,
but it was something recognizably related: a sack filled mainly with ‘wood
charcoal and white clay’. Mpungu was supported by a tree branch with a
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three-pronged fork, perhaps not dissimilar to the ‘forked support’ described
by the earlier missionary in 1697. Flanked by a banana palm and ‘three
posts about one meter high joined at the top by a liana and surrounded
by palm laths’, Mpungu with its accoutrements was more elaborate than
the nkisi described by da Caltanisetta. The twentieth-century ensemble
represented ‘a sort of throne, and this is the reason that one also gives it the
title of king: Mpungu mayala, the Mpungu who reigns’.
Once consecrated, Mpungu was the centre of village affairs. ‘For
important events all the villagers receive a few lines of charcoal on their
foreheads and temples. This is done especially on the approach of a White
Official of the State [un Blanc de l’État]’, a fearsome event, indeed, during
the early Belgian Congo, when such an authority was called Bula Matadi,
literally ‘break-rocks’.56 People’s faces were also marked with the sacred
charcoal ‘when the chief goes away for an important palaver, or when a villager falls gravely ill’. In addition, ‘in many villages, one addresses solemn
invocations to Mpungu and one makes him resolute at the beginning of
the great hunts, before setting fire to the brush’. Hunters’ faces on these
occasions were marked by charcoal and white clay, the latter also associated
with the spirit world, to guarantee their success.
We do not have to assume an absolute cultural continuity between
1697 and the early twentieth century to conclude that Father da Caltanisetta went straight to the sacred centre of the township’s life and desecrated
it. Indeed, the equivalent in Europe would have been to burn not only
the village church but also the prefecture; for the half-burned sticks (like
the later charcoal in the Mpungu), located on an ‘altar’ in front of the
headman’s hut, surely came from the ‘sacred fire’ kept alive in the latter’s
residence, which was his channel of communication to the ancestors and
bisimbi.57 That da Caltanisetta was not torn apart by the people is a testimony to their recognized kindoki and also to the power of the provincial
Courts and nobility, reaching to the headmen at the village level through
ties of kinship and clientelism. Christianity, after all, was the state religion
and Capuchin missionaries, as recognized chief nganga of the Christian
cult, had the benefit of state protection.
Yet, fifty years of missionary abuse must have left its marks. Surely
one was to alienate local religious leaders, especially those of the Kimpasi
cults. Another was to repulse Kimpasi members as well, who—after several
decades of crisis and the continual existence of the cults—now may have
included the greater part of village elders. (It should be noted that among
the Mpangu in the early twentieth-century Belgian Congo, after another
long period of severe social dislocation under the Congo Free State,
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the great majority of elderly men had been initiated at some point into
Kimpasi.)58 In other words, the missionaries had probably obtained the
enmity of the most prestigious figures of the local religious world, who were
now tolerated openly (or fully supported) by headmen. In Kongo cosmology, individuals with kindoki who worked against the common weal were
deemed witches. Those who openly destroyed community minkisi (plural
of nkisi) would have been so considered, unless they had succeeded in
convincing the people that it was the consecrators of these altars who were
the witches—something that the Capuchins could scarcely have achieved,
if da Caltanisetta’s account (consistent with Hilton’s general analysis of the
missionaries’ arrogance) is any guide.
Thornton’s discussion of missionary intolerance focuses on the actions
of Marcellino d’Atri at the court of Pedro IV, prior to Kimpa Vita’s possession by Saint Anthony. In order to get d’Atri to establish residence
in Kibangu, his capital city, and thereby obtain the Capuchin’s implicit
support for his ambitions, Pedro gave the missionary a relatively free hand
against the Kitome and Kimpasi. Repeating da Montesarchio’s iconoclasm,
d’Atri proceeded to burn Kimpasi and took possession of the Kibangu
Kitome’s sacred stone. According to Thornton, ‘it was not long after the
Capuchins arrived in Kibangu that ‘… Kimpa Vita decided to stop her
practice of nganga Marinda [a Kimpasi-related priesthood devoted to the
bisimbi]. She concluded that the practice was too close to evil kindoki’.59
This interpretation, however, accepts almost to the letter Kimpa Vita’s
statements under duress (after being condemned to death) in her 1706
abjuration before missionaries Bernardo da Gallo and Lorenzo da Lucca,
as recounted by the latter.60 Surely, it is more likely that she stopped practicing because she recognized the danger she faced, not because the Capuchins had suddenly convinced her ‘to renounce the Kimpasi society and
her own calling’.61 By the same token, Thornton’s portrayal of her incipient
‘suspicions about the priests as well as about other ngangas’ and his suggestion that she now began to listen to growing accusations that the priests
were bandoki (witches) are probably much too understated. In the light of
fifty years of Capuchin intolerance, from da Montesarchio to da Caltanisetta, it surely did not take the actions of d’Atri and the pressures of da
Lucca and da Gallo in Kibangu, in whose jurisdiction Kimpa Vita resided,
to wake her to a fundamental fact of Kongo political and religious life.
Further evidence in this direction is provided by Kimpa Vita’s allegories about the contrasting origins of the Kongolese and the missionaries,
recounted by Bernardo da Gallo. Whereas Thornton sees her metaphors as
expressing a rather ambiguous, perhaps inchoate contrast between these
two sides at the religious level, I see them as strong affirmations of a radical
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Robert W. S lenes
opposition. Much of da Gallo’s information on Kimpa Vita comes from
the ‘private abjuration that she made [to him and Lorenzo da Lucca] just
before the unhappy end of her life’, while awaiting execution. Other facts,
however, seem to come from third party sources, and it is difficult to know
the provenance of individual details. In any case, da Gallo was one of the
few missionaries who spoke Kikongo well enough to dispense with interpreters, so that we may be sure that his information was not distorted
by linguistic intermediaries. On the other hand, as we shall see, he does
not seem particularly attuned to the subtleties of Kongo cosmology, which
means that his informants—particularly Kimpa Vita, speaking to him out
of a situation of extreme danger—could have played on his ignorance of
sacred signs and metaphors to conceal details that were essential for a full
comprehension of the Antonian movement.
Da Gallo’s description of Kimpa Vita’s beliefs regarding Christ, the
Madonna and Saint Francis is quite detailed, suggesting that this information came directly from her abjuration. ‘She said that Jesus Christ had
been born in S. Salvador [Mbanza Kongo], which was Bethlehem, [and]
that he was baptized in [Mbanza] Nsundi, which was Nazareth’. Furthermore, she maintained that ‘if Jesus Christ with the Madonna, as well as
S. Francis, had their origin in the [K]ongo, from the race of the blacks .
. . , S. Francis had issued from the House of the Marquis of Vunda, and
the Madonna . . . had been born of a slave woman, who was the servant of
the Marchioness Nzimba npanghi [mpangi]’.62 Both ‘Vunda’ and ‘Nzimba’
were Kitome titles, the Marquis of Vunda (as Thornton notes) being the
Kitome charged with crowning the King of Kongo.63 (Curiously, the idea
that the Virgin and Christ were from a slave lineage on their mother’s side
may be further evidence that Kimpa Vita knew Catholic ‘traditions’ well; in
the seventeenth century the notion became widespread that the Virgin had
replied to the Angel of the Annunciation, ‘Behold the slave of the Lord’. In
a sermon published in the 1680s, Antônio Vieira explained: ‘As the Son of
his Father, [Christ] is the lord of mankind; but as the Son of his Mother,
that very Mother wished that he also be the Slave of mankind’.)64
The next paragraph of the missionary’s account maintains this level
of detail and therefore may also be based on Kimpa Vita’s recantation. In
addition, however, it suggests an incomplete understanding on da Gallo’s
part of Kongo metaphors, or even a deliberate attempt by Kimpa Vita—if
indeed her abjuration is his source—to deceive him. Kimpa Vita, says da
Gallo,
taught that whites originated from a certain soft white stone
called ‘fuma’, and for that reason are white. Blacks had their
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origin in a tree called musanda [nsanda in most Kikongo dialects, a species of fig, Ficus psilopoga Welwitsch], from the bark or
cortex of which they make rope and the cloths with which they
cover and dress themselves, and for this reason they are black, or
the colour of this bark.
Da Gallo adds that ‘from this came her invention of certain things that she
called crowns, made of the bark of this same . . . [nsanda] tree’, which were
worn by her and the leading men in her movement, including the rival
pretender to the throne who was now the defender of her cause.
The two English-language scholars who have analyzed this passage
in detail have regarded it as a direct window on Kimpa Vita’s preachings,
emphasizing the black/white contrast it establishes and not considering
the possibility that da Gallo could have misunderstood his sources or been
misled. Thus, Wyatt MacGaffey (1986) takes da Gallo’s explanation literally and analyzes it with reference to the colour symbolism of the Kongo
and the fact that fuma is a ‘whitish . . . riverine clay’. ‘The symbols are easily
decoded: whites are the dead, whose sphere is the water, whereas blacks
are the living’ (since white symbolizes the realm of the spirits and of the
ancestors, and black signifies ‘This World’). MacGaffey does add, however,
that ‘the fig tree, at least one species of which is propagated only by human
agency, is especially associated with domesticity and kinship’; along this
line, he notes that nsanda bark, according to seventeenth-century sources,
‘provided a kind of natural cloth prescribed as maternity wear to ease childbirth and as swaddling material’, and adds that ‘the connexion was made by
Beatrice [Kimpa Vita] herself ’.65 (Actually, the source he cites—the 1707
account of missionary Lorenzo da Lucca—goes further than this, noting
that for Kimpa Vita ‘[the nsanda bark] Crown … was made from the same
cloth as that with which the [Kongolese] baby Jesus was dressed for the
first time’.66) Furthermore, MacGaffey notes that the name of the nsanda
crown—in da Gallo’s account, ‘ne yari’ (equivalent to ne yadi in present-day
Kikongo)—is also ‘a title that proclaims a governor (n’yaadi)’.67 (Indeed,
Laman’s dictionary—using a slightly different orthographical system—
indicates that ‘ne yaadi’ can be translated as ‘Sir, good ruler’.)68 What this
suggests is a possible relation between nsanda bark and political authority.
Indeed, MacGaffey had noted in an earlier study that the nsanda ‘to this
day is a sign of the authority of the elders in the village’.69 These insights,
however, are not developed, and one is left essentially with the idea of a
contrast between the origins of blacks and whites (This and the Other
World, respectively), which, if it had any political connotations, might well
have denoted white superiority.
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Thornton essentially repeats MacGaffey’s formulation, based on
Kongo colour symbolism: blacks were associated with the world of the
living, whites with the world of the ancestors. He does note in passing that
the nsanda tree ‘was regarded as sacred—a nsanda tree shaded Lusunzi’s
stone [a shrine] at Kibangu’ (the stone apprehended by d’Atri); nonetheless, he interprets nsanda bark cloth as ‘closely associated with the living
and with This World’. As confirmation of this, he paraphrases Lorenzo
da Lucca’s observation (immediately following the passage I have quoted
above) that ‘to those wearing it [the crown of nsanda bark] nothing could
be lacking, gold, silver, silk clothing, and all that they may have thought of
desiring’.70
Other scholars, however, while still taking da Gallo’s account at face
value, have collectively produced a more convincing interpretation of it, or
at least of the metaphor identifying blacks with the nsanda tree. In 1968 G.
W. Randles, writing in French, noted that ‘in Loango [part of the Kongo
culture area] the musenda [nsanda] is planted near the tombs of the kings’,
which suggests that the tree had political/religious connotations; yet he did
not risk drawing any conclusions from this.71 In the same year, however,
the Portuguese scholar A. Margarido wrote of the nsanda that this ‘sacred
tree, connected to royal sovereignty by almost all the peoples of this region
of the Congo, is also considered sacred by practically all Angolan peoples’.
Thus, for him, Kimpa Vita’s ‘imposing [sic] the return to nsanda clothing’
was a nativist political reaction, a way of denouncing ‘the foreign character
of the customs of the court’, just as attributing (holy) nsanda-bark swaddling clothes to the (holy) infant Christ was a way of ‘rescuing him from
the monopoly of the foreign missionaries’.72 In 1972 Portuguese anthropologist José Redinha contributed additional elements to the analysis by
noting that ‘a rite of the ancestor cult that is very widespread in Angola
and much practiced by the peoples who are descended from the ancient
hunters of the savannas [in north-western Angola, including the southern Kongo region] consists in planting living trunks of ritual trees. The
most common is the mulemba [‘nsanda’ in Kimbundu, the language of the
Mbundu, a people from the hinterland of Luanda]’.73
Building on these contributions, another Portuguese anthropologist,
António Custódio Gonçalves, provided the most satisfying explanation of
Kimpa Vita’s nsanda metaphor in a 1985 book on the political dynamics
of the Old Kingdom of Kongo. Gonçalves showed that
The ‘nsanda’ … is a tree with very strong symbolic connotations,
serving on the one hand to indicate the link with the earth
spirits, the principle of authority, … and, on the other, to make
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perceptible the passing of the spirits through the night air by
the movement of its leaves or branches. The connection with the
earth spirits, on whom political authority and the survival of the
community rested, required that migrant groups take with them
the root of a ‘nsanda’ tree: if this took hold, the village could be
founded, since this root assured the protection of the spirits.
Gonçalves also argued that ‘the tree with its latex [the nsanda has a white,
milky sap], the expression of the matrilineal descent group, a symbol of the
mythical origin of the Kongo and of the vertical continuity of the natural
kinship group and of lineage solidarity, becomes the axis of the political
system and the insignia of the Antonians’.74
Indeed, a closer look at Kimpa Vita’s metaphor, as reported by Bernardo da Gallo, reveals that it points directly to the matrilineal principle.75
MacGaffey has called attention to the extensive use of what might be
called ‘serious word play’ among the Kongolese to point to ontological
links between different elements of nature and society. For instance, ‘birds
suggest spirits (mpeve) because their wings (maveve) stir the air (vevila,
“to fan”)’. By the same token, he notes, comparisons between people and
trees are encouraged by the fact that both ‘skin’ and ‘bark’ are expressed
by the same word, nkanda.76 Given this propensity of the Kongolese to
think associatively by linking homonyms or near homonyms, Kimpa Vita’s
simile, asserting the origin of the black skin of indigenous people in the
black bark of the fig tree, would surely have induced native speakers to go
one step further: to kanda, ‘matrilineal clan’, whose emblem was precisely
the bisimbi-blown nsanda. Thus, the play on the double meaning of ‘black
nkanda’, rather than pointing to ‘This World’, establishes the identity of
the Kongolese as an extended matrilineal clan, linked to the land and its
protective spirits. ‘Black’ actually leads to ‘white’: to the milky (matrilineal)
latex of the nsanda and to mother’s milk (both underlying nkanda in its
two meanings, as well as kanda), which in turn embody and reaffirm the
whiteness attributed by the Kongolese to the (bisimbi) spirit realm.
In sum, Kimpa Vita’s nsanda tree metaphor ‘grounded’ the Kongolese
firmly in the Other World, as it was imagined by indigenous Kongo cosmology. ‘Made’ from nsanda bark, the Kongolese had a privileged relationship
with local territorial spirits and with the most ancient ancestors (subsumed
to, or associated with, the bisimbi), who were responsible for community
welfare. Their political institutions, particularly their headmen and their
matrilineal lineages, were assured a divine legitimacy. Within this context,
the redefinition of Christ, the Madonna, Saint Francis and Saint Anthony
(incorporated in Kimpa Vita) as Africans, with the Christ child explicitly
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linked to the nsanda and identified, along with the other holy figures, with
bisimbi-based chiefdoms or clans that were centres of political power, constituted nothing less that the seizure of the essential symbols of Christianity for the Kongolese, as Gonçalves argues.77
But what are we to make of the other part of Kimpa Vita’s reported
analogy, that which traces white origins to the ‘soft white stone called
fuma’? Here, Gonçalves’s argument fails to convince me. He sees the
(nsanda) ‘tree’ and the (riverine) ‘stone’ as the fundamental symbols of traditional Kongo culture. For him, the redefinition of meanings operated by
Kimpa Vita with respect to the nsanda, without a corresponding change
in the significations of the ‘stone’, apparently breaks the harmony between
the two symbols. Following the sentence quoted above about ‘the tree with
its latex’, he writes: ‘The stone, an expression of socio-political solidarities,
of a system of social norms necessary to action and to the future wellbeing of the group, of solidarity with the ancestral spirits, becomes [for the
Antonians] a sign of discontinuity with the “normal” plant world, with the
principle of patrilocality and the system of power’.78
There may be a simpler way of understanding Kimpa Vita’s trope. I
start by observing how strange it now seems, after decoding the meanings
of the nsanda, that da Gallo reports her analogy as one built on an opposition of colours. By now it is clear that what links blacks to the nsanda is
not primarily the similar colour of their respective skin and bark; this is an
incidental feature, or a secondary metaphor. The fact that da Gallo reduces
a complex trope to a simple question of colour indicates that he knew very
little about the central metaphors of Kongo culture. It may also mean—if
his information came from Kimpa Vita’s abjuration—that he was manipulated, in his ignorance, into framing the question in terms of ‘black’ and
‘white’. His description of fuma as ‘una certa pietra bianca molle’ (‘a certain
soft white stone’) is consistent with this hypothesis; in fact, according to
Carl Laman’s early twentienth-century Kikongo-French dictionary, fuma
is ‘red’ (rouge) in colour, perhaps not altogether unlike Europeans’ skin, but
not literally ‘white’.79
Indeed, along this line it is quite possible that Kimpa Vita did not even
say ‘fuma’; or, if she did, that she actually meant something else. MacGaffey’s
observations regarding Kongolese analogies are crucial here. ‘Often a given
plant or creature’, says MacGaffey, ‘has several symbolic values. In practice
it is nearly always paired with another, reptile with reptile, tree with tree,
rodent with rodent, the contrast between the two serving to specify the
value of each …’. Furthermore, ‘so general is the pairing rule’ that ‘one can
be sure that [missionary-ethnographer] Van Wing has mistranslated’ the
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paired pun on nsiki and mbendi in the phrase ‘Who has eaten n’siki, let him
be justified (sikalala); who has eaten mbendi [cf. m’bedi, ‘loser’], let him lose
(bela)’. ‘Nsiki’ is a type of tree, notes MacGaffey, therefore ‘mbendi’ ‘cannot
be the striped field rat (mbendi), as Van Wing supposes, and must be the
tree with striped bark, m’bendi’.80
If this is so, then what tree might have a name that could be confused
with ‘fuma’, yet offer a symbolic contrast to nsanda? The answer is mfuma,
the ‘silk cotton tree’ (Ceiba pentandra). Thornton notes that ‘in regular
spoken Kikongo’ an initial nasal sound before a consonant ‘is often not
pronounced or is pronounced so softly and quickly that it almost disappears’.81 This leads to phonetic variation; in this case, mfuma is pronounced
fuma in the western (Yombe) dialect of Kikongo.82 In sum, it is not at all
implausible that da Gallo confused or was misled into confusing fuma and
its virtual homonym mfuma.
The hypothesis becomes especially compelling when the ethical and
otherworldly connotations of mfuma are taken into account. I follow MacGaffey again: ‘[Mfuma,] the silk-cotton tree …, which so dominates the
forest that vultures . . . perch in it, resembles the chief (mfumu) but also
is a haunt of witches (fumana “to conspire”); like power itself, the tree
is ambivalent’. Note also υanga mfuma, ‘to conspire’, literally ‘to make an
“assembly”’, for the silk cotton tree is a metonym for (unsavoury) ‘meeting’.
Indeed, the tree’s reputation carries over to its vultures, which usually congregate in crowds: ‘the vulture … is a witch … because it is black and white,
perches on the … [mfuma-assembly] tree, and lives on carrion and fish
(the dead)’.83 Finally, John Janzen and Wyatt Macgaffey note that, because
of these connotations, ‘prophets “cleaning up” a village [eliminating bad
kindoki] sometimes decree that one or more such trees be cut down’. These
authors cite verses recorded by Laman among the Nsundi, addressed to an
nkisi to obtain the punishment of thieves: ‘Cut down the mfuma tree, …
where they sealed their agreement’.84
These observations, of course, come from twentieth-century dictionaries and ethnographic research. A glimpse further into the past, however, can
be obtained by looking at Cuba, where Central Africans, particularly from
Kongo, featured prominently among people brought by the nineteenthcentury slave trade. There, under the silk-cotton tree (Ceiba), ganguleros
(priests of the Regla Palo Monte religion, whose origins are in Central
Africa; cf. Kikongo nganga) compose their charms (ngangas y prendas).
‘Indoki es el árbol brujo’—‘an Indoki [cf. Kikongo ndoki, ‘witch’] is what the
witch tree is’—says one of the Palo Monte informants of folklorist Lydia
Cabrera, referring to the Ceiba; ‘whoever wishes to ruin [perder a] a person
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whom he/she hates will go up next to this tree at midnight or midday’
and move around it, singing special songs, ‘mambos’ (cf. Kikongo mambu,
‘words, business, lawsuit’).
The spirits called upon for this witchcraft are apparently those of the
dead, for according to another of Cabrera’s informants the Ceiba ‘attracts
the dead like a magnet’. Indeed, the tree is also called ‘Nfúmba or Fumbe,
“dead person”’, or ‘mamá fumbe’ or ‘mother of the nkitas’.85 The link here
to mfuma is evident, as is the word play with Kikongo mvumbi, ‘cadaver,
dead person’ (Bembe dialect) or ‘the name of a child because of witchcraft’
(western dialect).86 Also clear is the tie to Kikongo nkita, the ‘soul of the
dead person who has established his home in the water or the ravines’
(associating him/herself with the bisimbi), or—among the Mpangu in
the early twentieth century—the spirits of people who had experienced a
violent death, foremost among them (but not exclusively) those ‘ancestors
from the beginning’ who had so suffered.87 Because of these associations
with the dead, ritual baths in the Palo Monte tradition are made with
the Ceiba’s leaves for those wishing to make contact with human spirits.
However, ‘one does not put its leaves on a ntu (“head” or medium [cf.
Kikongo ntu, “head”]), of Baluande, Mamá Fúngue, Mamá Chóya or
Kisimba [my italics], who are Mother of Water [Spanish Madre de Agua]’.88
The reference here is to Kongolese tutelary bisimbi (kisimbi or simbi in the
singular), whose preferred habitat is the water of nature. There could not
be a clearer statement of the opposition drawn by the Kongolese between
the recent dead, who are still interested in the affairs of their living kin and
willing to be called upon by the latter (acting as ‘witches’) to bring woe to
their enemies, and the bisimbi, the tutelary earth/water spirits, who are
offended by witchcraft and concerned with the good of the wider community.89
In addition to these ethical and spiritual contrasts between the nsanda
and the mfuma, there is also an opposition of colours: that between the black
bark of the nsanda and the white ‘cotton’ of the mfuma’s seed pods. ‘When
its seeds burst’, mfuma ‘appears covered in a white cloud’, says MacGaffey.
The mfuma’s ‘bare upper branches, on which the vulture often perches, are
likened in certain conceits and wordplays to a man’s bald or shaven head’,
adds MacGaffey, which suggests that ‘the white cloud’ covering the tree
when its seeds are fully mature might easily be likened to an old man’s
white hair, elder patriarchs being called—along with the dead—bakulu.90
In any case, the tree’s association with the ‘recent’ dead would mean that
its cotton would indeed recall the ‘white’ spirit world, but not that of the
tutelary bisimbi. In sum, Kimpa Vita’s metaphor, by opposing the nsanda
and mfuma trees, drew a clear distinction between the Kongolese, linked
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to the ancient matrilineages and the bisimbi of the spirit world, and the
capuchin missionaries, devoted to conspiring like witches in the human
world—breaking consecrated minkisi and then brandishing the cross, the
object on which a Kongo-born Christ had been crucified. The metaphor’s
colour symbolism also seems to have worked in parallel, with black nsanda
bark ultimately pointing (through the milk of the matrilineage) to the
bisimbi spirit world (connoting good kindoki), while the white silk-cotton
of the mfuma leads to the realm of human patriarchs (the mfumu and his
brothers) and the still all-too human sphere of the intriguing ‘recent’ dead
(who υanga mfuma, ‘conspire’, that is, apply evil kindoki).91
One may conclude, then, that Kimpa Vita’s allegory drew a sharp contrast between blacks and whites, or at least white missionaries, which was
not at all flattering to the latter. Da Gallo may have confused ‘fuma’ and
‘mfuma’ or, alternatively, Kimpa Vita may have misled him into thinking
her reference was to the first, not the second. She would have had good
reasons for doing this, for she knew that the missionary, speaking fluent
kikongo, might have understood enough about Kongo religious culture to
understand the respective connotations of ‘white’ riverine stones and silkcotton trees. Thus, she could have believed it safer, in the dangerous but
perhaps not hopeless moment of her abjuration, to pretend to him that she
traced whites’ origins to the former, rather than the latter.92
This analysis of Kimpa Vita’s allegory permits a further hypothesis
regarding its meaning within the context of Kongolese politics. Anne
Hilton, in reviewing the relationship between political power and kinship
at the beginning of the eighteenth century, notes that ‘the Mwissikongo
[elite] of the centre [of the former kingdom] increasingly used a cognatic
mode of descent reckoning to establish a claim to the throne or to align
themselves to the major contenders.’ Furthermore, ‘the unstable conditions
of the time encouraged people to use the “individual” mode of kinship
reckoning to establish [and use expediently] relationships with powerful
contenders’. As a result of this and other factors,
The … strength of the contending warlords was based, first, on
personal slaves; second on the precarious loyalties of Mwissikongo slaveholders seeking personal advancement; third, on
individuals and groups seeking protection through client status,
and, forth, on traders … who purchased the slaves the wars produced.93
The matrilineal kanda, in other words, were no longer the central
political institutions they once had been, or were thought to have been.
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Within this context, Beatriz Kimpa Vita’s reaffirmation of the kanda
principle seems significant. It suggests that her approximation of the missionaries, the protégés of high rulers, to the mfuma implied a criticism
of the mfumu (from local chief to kanda elder to ‘extra-kanda chieftain’,
in Hilton’s phrase) for having deviated from kanda principles of political succession, or otherwise betrayed his trust.94 In this regard, the name
the Antonians gave to their nsanda-bark crown, Ne yaadi, ‘Sir good ruler’
(close in form to ki-yaadi, ‘ruler, governor’), as well as their rallying cry kyadi, ‘mercy’, are intriguing.95 As Hilton has noted, the nsanda-bark crown
clearly was meant to contrast with the mpu, the traditional bonnet that
was the insignia of the Kongo kings and their appointed provincial governors.96 Thus, the Antonians appear to have been affirming that legitimate
‘ki-yaadi’, wearing ‘ne-yaadi’ would show, above all, ‘ky-adi’ (the quality of
‘mercy’) to their own people.97
This is a set of ideas constructed within the Kikongo linguistic field. Yet,
given Kimpa Vita’s knowledge of Christian texts, it is doubtful that ‘ky-adi’
(present in the ‘Salve Regina’ and ‘Salve Antoniana’) was innocent of the
meanings attached at that time to misericórdia (the word it translated) in
the Portuguese world, as institutionalized in the charitable hospitals of the
‘Santa Casa de Misericórdia’ from Lisbon to Goa and Salvador, Bahia. Likewise, the implicit obligation of powerful ‘ki-yaadi’ to show ‘ky-adi probably
would not have been untouched by the phrase from the Gospel of Mathew,
Beati misericordes, ‘blessed are the merciful [for they will receive mercy]’,
which inspired the noble governors of the various ‘Misericórdias’ and was
used by them (and the Portuguese King above them, the high patron of the
‘Santas Casas’) to justify their stewardship.98 Beati pauperes, Beati misericordes was the theme of a 1647 sermon by Antônio Vieira, who argued
that the poor (pauperes) are blessed ‘because God [Christ] is in them’; yet,
the misericordes are even more blessed because ‘he who gives alms to the
poor … makes himself God’, for ‘Mankind has nothing so divine, and
so peculiar to God, than to do good [to others]’.99 Could this idea have
helped inspire the Antonians to crown themselves with the indigenous
nsanda cloth that had wrapped the native Christ child, thereby ‘making
themselves God’, as an affirmation of what would constitute the base of
legitimacy for an Antonian political leadership? If so, then creolization
in this case involved the appropriation of a ‘naturalized’ foreign tradition
by a Kongolese popular movement to bolster its attempt to hold its own
rulers accountable. In short, Kimpa Vita may have redefined the royalty’s
Christian ngolo as a principle for the people.100
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S ain t A n t hon y at t he C ross roa d s
III
Like Saint Anthony himself, let us now ‘bilocate’ across the Atlantic to south-eastern Brazil.101 On the plantations of this region (in the
Paraíba Valley of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, in central-western São
Paulo, and in parts of southern Minas Gerais) during the first half of the
nineteenth century, commonly 80 percent or more of adult male slaves and
two-thirds of adult females (people over 15 years of age) were African;
the great majority of these were West Central African; and at least a large
minority of the latter—enough to define the cultural matrix of the slave
quarters—were from Kongo, Mbundu and closely related cultures.102
Thus, it is not surprising that a major slave conspiracy in 1848, apparently
centred on the counties of Vassouras and Valença in Rio’s Paraíba Valley,
had Central-African, indeed Kongo/Mbundu roots.103 The vocabulary of
the religious cult around which the movement was organized—cambono,
tate, gola [ngola?], mocamba do anjo, cangeré, ubanda [sic]—is related to the
lexicon of Kimbundu and/or Kikongo, the respective languages of the
Mbundu and Kongo. At the same time, along with the expression ‘filhos
de terreiro’ (‘children of the cleared, ritual circle’), this vocabulary points to
a subsequent link with twentieth-century Umbanda, which suggests that
some form of spirit possession was at the centre of the cult. Both men
and women seem to have been involved. Finally, the lexicon in the 1848
movement, along with the ritual clothing of its leaders (a small cap with
feathers, a white apron), the title attribued to them (tate, clearly derived
from a widespread root in the western Bantu languages meaning ‘father’)
and their individual names in Portuguese, particularly Guieiro, ‘One who
guides’, all suggest a linkage with another cult, also with anti-slavery overtones, which appeared in São Roque in south-western São Paulo province
in 1854.
In the São Roque movement, the religious vocabulary was predominantly Kikongo; for instance, kwenda landa ma-lavu, ‘go get palm wine
[i.e., alcoholic beverage]’, kwiza, ‘come’. Furthermore, the leader, José
Cabinda, used typically Kongo divices for divination: for instance, a ‘vungo’
or ‘ox horn’ (cf. Kikongo υungu, ‘animal horn’) with a mirror on its base.
This was clearly an initiatory cult that met in or near a wooded area and
that involved spirit possession. At its heart was a process of ritual death,
followed by the purification of the initiates and their ritual rebirth. Adepts
took on a new name, receiving the title Pai (Portuguese ‘father’), evidently
a translation of Kikongo taata, ‘father, uncle, chief ’. The new names evoked
power and aggressiveness, or some image of spirits (birds, rapidly moving
wings) or of the spirit world (the ‘Kongo cosmogram’, formed by a four235
Robert W. S lenes
cornered ‘cross’ [‘+’]): for instance, the Portuguese names, Gavião, ‘hawk’
(the leader’s sobriquet), Rompe ferro (‘Break iron’), Chupa-flor, ‘Humming
bird’, and Quatro cantos, ‘Four corners’; and the non-Portuguese name Quinuano (cf. Kikongo ki-nwani, ‘warrior’; ki-nwana, ‘combative spirit’).
The São Roque cult, together with the 1848 movement, points ahead to
the ‘Cabula’, a spirit possession cult in northern Espírito Santo, described
in great detail in 1900 by the region’s bishop.104 ‘Cabula’, which before
abolition was said to have been a movement of slaves and ex-slaves, had an
extensive ritual vocabulary that was clearly derived largely from Kimbundu
and/or Kikongo. It was structured like the São Roque ritual and exhibited
virtually all the major traits of a Kimpasi cult cited earlier. One of its adepts
expressed devotion to a stone shaped like those found in ancient Indian
burial sites, which recalls the association of smooth riverine rocks with
the bisimbi. (Note that Central Africans would naturally have supposed
that the most ancient spirits of the original inhabits of their new land
had been subsumed to, or become associates of, the local bisimbi.)105 The
Cabula’s meetings were held at night in a forest clearing, marked ritually
like a Kongo cosmogram, with an altar on the eastern side in honour of
karunga (cf. Kikongo and Kimbundu kalunga, ‘ocean, death’). As in the
case of Kimpasi, the adepts used a ‘secret’ ritual language (‘ca-’ was frequently attached to words as a prefix). Men and women were initiated in
ceremonies that involved ritual death, purification and ‘rebirth’ through
possession by a ‘guiding’ or ‘protective’ spirit. The latter had the title of
tatá (clearly, like the 1848 tate, reminiscent of Kikongo taata) and aggressive or other-worldly names in Portuguese: Rompe Ponte and Rompe Serra,
‘Break-bridge’ and ‘Break-mountain’ (cf. São Roque’s ‘Break Iron’); Guerreiro, ‘warrior’ (cf. São Roque’s Quinuano); and Flor da Carunga (‘Surface of
Kalunga’).106 The aggressive names here and in São Roque seem significant
in view of the fact than in a Kimpasi among the Mpangu in the early
twentieth century, the possessing spirits were ancient human souls (nkita)
who had died violent deaths (thus were particularly angry), but which had
now become assimilated to, or associated with, the bisimbi.107 In view of
the several ‘break’ names in these cults, I suspect that ‘Cabula’ is derived
from Kikongo bula, ‘break’, with the cult’s ‘secret’ prefix ‘ca-‘ before it. Bula
ntu in Kikongo—literally ‘to break the head’—means ‘to fall into ecstasy’
(to enter into trance).
It would appear, therefore, that Kimpasi-like cults were present among
slaves in nineteenth-century south-eastern Brazil—indeed, omnipresent, given that they have been documented in three far-flung areas of the
region. This conclusion is hardly surprising. Just as Kongolese in seventeenth, eighteenth and early twentieth-century Africa turned to Kimpasi
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S ain t A n t hon y at t he C ross roa d s
community cults of affliction, which often had political overtones, when
they faced conditions of extreme duress—war, enslavement, forced labour,
disease—so too did Central Africans in Brazil, organized around a large
nucleus of Kongo, Mbundu and other closely related peoples, when they
confronted analogous evils.
Where was Saint Anthony when all this was happening? According to
a former judge of Vassouras, who witnessed the trial of the 1848 conspirators in that county, the plan for revolt was drawn up by a ‘secret association
. . . known by the name of Ubanda’, which ‘was of a mystic nature, because,
with its aspirations for freedom, it was devoted to a superstitious adoration of Saint Anthony’.108 Umbanda meant in late nineteenth-century
Kimbundu ‘the faculty, science, art . . . of healing, . . . of divining . . . and
of inducing … [the] spirits to influence men and nature for human weal
or woe’.109 Clearly Anthony, the healer, the diviner, the Thaumaturge, had
been initiated into a Central-African institution. Athough I have found no
further information on the exact place of the Saint in this conspiracy, Saint
Anthony was also present in the 1854 São Roque cult. Two wooden images
of him, made from nó-de-pinho, the hard, twisted knot of the Araucária
pine tree, were present on José Cabinda’s altar. One of these images had
been beheaded: perhaps a literal enactment of ‘bula ntu’ to make sure the
Saint’s spirit would enter it.
Data in any case is not lacking on the broader ‘creolization’ of Anthony
in South-eastern Brazil, particularly from the mid-nineteenth to the early
twentieth century. The American traveller, Thomas Ewbank, visited the
Monastery of Saint Anthony in Rio de Janeiro in 1846 and described
several of its paintings, which illustrated some of the Thaumaturge’s most
well-known miracles: his bilocation to absolve his father, his sermon to
the fishes, and various acts of healing. Clearly, the Book of Miracles of Saint
Anthony was alive and well in Brazil. In addition, Ewbank noted slaveowners’ confidence that the Saint could find ‘lost objects’, in particular runaway
slaves.110 In the Paraíba Valley, the elite’s penchant for the Saint was demonstrated by the considerable number of parishes and plantations that bore
his name. Anthony’s prestige at the Brazilian Court was also high. Since
1814, in keeping with his long tradition as a ‘warrior’, he held a patent in
the army (as liutenant colonel) and the title of ‘Commanding Cavalier of
the Military Order of Portugal and Brazil’; in other words, his position as
a patron saint of the Portuguese Empire and then, after Independence, of
the Brazilian state, had long been formally recognized.111
Ewbank also observed the popularity of Saint Anthony among all
classes in the city of Rio, remarking on the devotional aspect as well on
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Robert W. S lenes
the prevalence of small, inexpensive images representing the Saint.112
Historian Mary Karasch has demonstrated the esteem accorded to Saint
Anthony by the black population of the city in the nineteenth century,113
reinforcing Stanley Stein’s similar comments (based on interviews with
ex-slaves) regarding the devotion to this saint among plantation workers
in the Paraíba Valley:
‘Most preferred’ [of all saints in the slave quarters] was Saint
Anthony, described as ‘always on the table [probably mesa,
“table/altar”] of the quimbandeiros’ [Kimbundu for slave
doctor-priests, who most certainly worked umbanda, a word
derived from the same root]. Saint Anthony frequently held in
his left arm a small Black child who sat upon a peg or nail from
which he could be easily removed. The child played an important role for if a slave wished to obtain a request, he removed
the child while promising to return it only after the request was
performed.114
‘Punishing’ Saint Anthony until he accedes to one’s wishes is a venerable
Portuguese custom that still exists in Brazil today. Yet, the child in Saint
Anthony’s arms, in traditional representations by whites, was the Christ
child. The slaves surely knew this. Thus, their substitution of a black boy
may have been a way of appropriating Christ for themselves, as Kimpa
Vita had done when she preached that Jesus had really been born in the
Kongo.
Stein’s observations, in other words, point not to a passive ‘syncretism’
but to reinterpretation, or transculturation, an argument that Karasch also
endorses. Indeed, other evidence makes it clear that the Saint Anthony of
slaves and free blacks was pressed largely from a central-African mould,
yet with attention to details from the Portuguese tradition. In a criminal
trial record from the interior of São Paulo in 1875,115 we are told that
‘every Friday night’ a feiticeiro, or sorcerer, whose name was José Português
(Portuguese Joe)
held cabalistic meetings, in which the adepts of his fabulous art
twisted and jumped in extravagant dances, to which they gave
the name of cangirês, in front of an image of Saint Anthony,
mutilated all over and with the nose and hands severed; all of
them would look at themelves in small round mirrors, which
they held in their hands, making grimaces and scowls.
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S ain t A n t hon y at t he C ross roa d s
José Português, described as a ‘magician, witch and conjurer [mezinheiro]’,
‘uncovered charm pots [descobria panelas de encantamento]’: perhaps a reference to a certain form of charm prepared in a clay pot and very common
in Kongo and related cultures. Later, José Português was found murdered,
‘lying on his back with a small round mirror over his eyes’. Judging from
his name, José Português probably was not black; neither, apparently,
were his followers slaves. Yet, the word ‘cangirê’—a variant of the ‘cangeré’
(‘meeting’) mentioned by the sources on the 1848 conspiracy—appears
here and in a study of remnants of a largely Central African vocabulary
in Minas Gerais.116 More impressively, the symbolism permeating these
particular cangirês and surrounding José Português’s own death was quite
clearly that of the Kongo and related groups. As we have seen, among the
Kongo and Mbundu ‘kalunga’ meant ‘death’ or ‘ocean’. Among the Kongo,
at least, it also referred to the interface, or point of passage, between the
world of the living and that of the dead, and was often represented as
a reflective surface or a line dividing a round or oval plane.117 The small
round mirrors described in the trial record are like the mirrors on José
Cabinda’s divining horns; explicitly meant to encourage a trip to the Other
World, they are unmistakable symbols of kalunga. Saint Anthony again
was in the middle of all this, with his body mutilated: here, perhaps, in
accordance with the Portuguese tradition of punishing him until he produced the desired results.118
Also indicative of the reinterpretation of Saint Anthony along
Central-African lines are the small figurines representing him that have
been collected in the São Paulo Paraíba Valley and that apparently date
from the beginning of the twentieth century.119 According to the specialized literature on the subject, figurines of other sacred personages also have
been collected, but Anthony is more often represented than any of the
other saints and cedes first place in frequency only to the Virgin Mary.120
These Saint Anthonies are made of wood of various types, horn or other
materials; however, they are most often carved from the same raw material
of José Cabinda’s statues: the extremely hard knot of the Araucária pine
tree, which grows high in the Mantiqueira mountains behind the Valley.
Why would Afro-Brazilian artisans have preferred this hard-to-get and
very hard-to-work material to other woods?
The answer may well lie in the analogy the Kongolese often make
between the ‘force’ (or moral quality) of a person, spirit or charm and the
degree of hardness of a given tree or type of wood.121 (It is exactly this
metaphor that Brazilian slaves used in the jongo, or challenge song, that
compared planters to the soft, no-good embaúba tree—a song registered
by Stanley Stein in the Paraíba Valley: ‘with so many trees in the forest,
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Robert W. S lenes
[how is it that] embaúba is the colonel [big man, or local political boss]’?)122
Especially appreciated by the Kongolese for making a charm was wood
that was not only hard, but also twisted, or with gnarled veins, as in the
case of certain roots. Twisted objects were another form of ‘crossroads’: such
conjunctures, just as in West Africa, formed a sacred point that provided a
more ready access to the spirit world. Ewbank was witness to the fact that
this preference in charms had crossed the Atlantic. According to him, ‘the
first money that a slave [in Rio de Janeiro] earns is spent on the purchase
of a figa [a representation of a fist, with thumb placed between index and
forefinger], which sometimes is made from the root of the [very hard] rosewood tree [jacarandá]’.123 It is within this context that one should interpret
the use of nó-de-pinho (not only very hard wood, but also gnarled, like a
root) in the confection of the Saint Anthony figures. The material required
considerably more effort from the artist or ritual expert who carved it, but
the power of the charm was correspondingly much greater—as befitted the
‘Saint of All Saints’, the bilocating miracle worker who constantly crossed
back and forth between This World and kalunga.
Once the choice of material was made, the confection of the Paraíba
Valley Saint Anthonies may well have followed Kongolese (or broader
Central African) patterns. Many of these small Saint Anthonies (generally
from five to fifteen centimetres tall) resemble the tiny anthropomophic
figures included as ingredients in a Kongo nkisi, as illustrated in Karl
Laman’s study of the Nsundi.124 The very simple nature of the carvings in
both cases reflects their small size; that is, there is not much scope here
for detail. Within this simplicity, however, there are resemblances between
the Brazilian and African figures, particularly with respect to their caps
and the way their hands are crossed, usually over the stomach, which
may be more than casual.125 In any case, the day-to day use of these Saint
Anthony images seems to have been similar on both sides of the Atlantic.
The copper Ntoni Malau from eighteenth century Kongo, photographed
and described by art historian R. Wannyn, shows severe signs of wear from
‘rubbing’, just as many of the pine knot Anthonies from the early twentieth
century.126 Probably on both sides of the Atlantic these figures were used
as instruments to rub (and cure) the body.
In South-eastern Brazil in the mid-nineteenth-century, at the height
of the slave trade, Central Africans had formed a creole culture through
close encounters with Luso-Catholicism, particularly with Saint Anthony.
As in the Kongo of the early eighteenth century, however, Anthony had
largely been configured by a Central-African matrix; in the 1848 and 1854
episodes, he appears to have been inducted into the Kimpasi tradition,
as he had been in the Kongo by Kimpa Vita. John Thornton and Linda
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S ain t A n t hon y at t he C ross roa d s
Heywood (the latter writing about the Angolan ‘connection’ with Brazil)
have rightly warned us not to see such Brazilian transculturations as entirely
a New World process. Indeed, historian Hein Vanhee has demonstrated
that the Christian lay catechists—the mestres—continued to exist in the
Kongo into the second half of the eighteenth century. By 1760, they continued to be ‘quite numerous’, but most were now ‘initiated by chiefs and
noblemen on behalf of local interest groups’, rather than being selected, as
before, by missionaries, whose numbers had dwindled.127 Thornton cites a
Capuchin source for 1781, which reports that the mestres and their helpers
still maintained well-kept chapels in Kongo and that many high nobles
still held titles such as ‘Master of the Church’.128 In 1816, the English
explorer of the Zaire River, J. K. Tuckey, described a man who was surely
one of the indigenous mestres. Tuckey took on board a group of African
Christians from Soyo, a former Kongo province, among them a priest or
lay preacher who could ‘read the Romish litany in Latin’ and ‘write … [his
own name] and that of Saint Antonio’. Here we have proof, then, that at
least some active devotion to Saint Anthony continued in the region of
the former Kingdom into the early nineteenth century.129 Thus, it is likely
that among the thousands of Central Africans who poured into Brazil in
the decades before 1848—at least a large minority of them Kongo and
Mbundu—there were many who brought with them a significant familiarity with a transculturated Saint Anthony, even if this latter-day Ntoni
may have been less engaged in dialogue with the latest European texts and
sermons than he had been in 1704.
In any case, it seems likely that cosmological orientations that were
common to Kongolese, Mbundu and other peoples would have predisposed most Central Africans, once in Brazil, to follow paths traced earlier
in the Kongo: on one hand, the forging of community cults of affliction
aimed at coping with the crisis of enslavement; on the other, the creation of
a transculturated Central-African Saint Anthony, similar in many respects
to Ntoni Malau. Indeed, the joining together in a new Antonian devotion of people who brought Ntoni Malau with them and persons who had
never met him in Africa may have been facilitated by Anthony’s status in
Brazil as a patron saint. The bisimbi spirits, after all were local territorial
genii who were arranged in a hierarchy with Funza on top, as the supreme
lord of all the land. Who else in Brazil could hold that title, if not Saint
Anthony himself? How could slave revolts—or strategies of assimilation,
which may have been more common in non-plantation contexts—not be
successful, if Anthony, the ‘Saint of All Saints’, the Brazilian ‘Vice-God’,
could be persuaded to lend his support?130
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Robert W. S lenes
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Notes
1.
2.
3.
Or continuously from 1509, after a civil war between a Christian and a
supposedly non-Christian pretender. (I use Thornton’s dating, after F. Bontinck: Thornton, 1984: 148, note 7.) In 1704, the dismembered kingdom
was located in the lower Zaire basin, almost entirely south of the River, in
what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Angola, and
extended from the ocean almost to Malebo Pool. The larger Kongo culture
area reached somewhat further east and considerably further north.
On Kimpasi-like cults in Brazil and their relation to the Kimpasi and similar
cults of the Kongo, see Slenes (2006, forthcoming).
Saint Anthony (ca. 1195-1231), born in Lisbon, spent most of his life in
Padua. He was canonized in 1232.
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4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
‘Transculturation’ was first coined by Fernando Ortiz, in opposition to ‘acculturation’, i.e., to emphasize the two-way nature of cultural exchanges: Ortiz
(1970), ‘introduction’ and pp. 97-103. Pratt (1992), ch. 1, placed ‘political’
struggle, particularly over the formation of contrasting social identities, at the
heart of the concept. ‘Creolization’, a more familiar word, but one that has
acquired many significations, can perhaps be given a more precise meaning
by equating it with ‘transculturation’, as redefined by Pratt.
Both sets of themes are particularly developed in Thornton’s articles: for
instance (1988), (1991), (1998c). Thornton’s book, Africa and Africans
(1998a), also looks at both, but in separate chapters and (perhaps because
it is a general textbook) with less attention to Africans’ strategies in specific
contexts. Thus, it has been criticized as too Afro-centric or, alternatively, as
too much concerned with the creolization (indeed, acculturation) of Africans to European standards. See, respectively, Price (2003) and Sweet (2003),
especially ch. 5. On creolization in the Luso-Angolan-Brazilian world, see
Heywood (1999), (2002).
See especially Thornton (1984).
He takes this approach in The Kongolese Saint Anthony (1998b), but much
less so in his earlier The Kingdom of Kongo (1983), as I show below. Note,
however, Thornton’s own assertion (1998b, p. 6) that his interpretation of the
Antonian movement did not change between the two books.
I use ‘nativist’ advisedly. I believe that in Kongolese (1998b) Thornton moves
away from his rejection of an earlier historiography in Kingdom (1983)—
e.g., Balandier (1968) and Filesi (1972), who saw the Antonians as a protonationalist movement—despite his own affirmation of continuity between
his books (1998b: 6); compare Kongolese, pp. 138-9, with Kingdom, pp. 1069. I go one step further in this direction.
Balandier (1968: 47), Thornton (1983, ch. 5), Hilton (1985, chs. 2-3). Hilton’s
and Thornton’s works were originally doctoral dissertations, Hilton’s from
1977 and Thornton’s from 1979.
For the orthography of Kikongo, the language of the Kongo, I follow Laman
(1936), except in quotes from other authors; however, I drop Laman’s diacrital (tonal) marks.
Thornton (1998b: 117, 215-6). On ‘Kindoki’ among the Kongo today: Bockie
(1993, ch. 2).
MacGaffey (1986: 211). Thornton (1998b: 117), simply notes that Anthony,
the Virgin and the other saints were viewed as powerful (ba)nkita (the
seventeenth and eighteenth-century word for ‘bisimbi’ in the São Salvador
dialect).
He notes only (1998b: 117) that appeals for ‘mercy’ figure in the Salve
Regina and were made by earlier prophetic voices in the Kongo. On Antonians crying ‘mercy’ as a badge (and as an affront to missionaries), see the
eye-witness accounts of da Gallo, 1972 (ms. 1710: 59), p. 59, and da Lucca
(1972 [ms. 1707]), pp. 95, 103.
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Robert W. S lenes
14. See Slenes (2006, forthcoming), for sources and a fuller analysis. These characteristics are a composite of details recorded by missionaries in the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. Movements inspired by Kimpasi ideals
did not necessarily espouse Kimpa Vita’s extreme iconoclasm; early twentieth-century Kimpasi, for instance, used man-made charms in their rituals.
On cults (or ngoma, ‘drums’) of affliction in central and southern Africa, see
especially Janzen (1982), (1992), and Van Dijk, et al., eds. (2000).
15. Thornton (1998b: 112-3).
16.Da Lucca (1953 [ms. 1709]), p. 290.
17.Da Gallo (1972 [ms. 1710]), p. 76, my translation (here and in subsequent
citations from foreign-language sources): ‘forse haveva udito qualche
sermone di S. Antonio in portughese, che stava nelle mani di qualche bagattello negro, che sapeva leggere alquanto’. Editor T. Filesi suggests in a footnote that ‘bagattello’ probably means ‘uomo di poco conto’. See Thornton
(1984: 155-6), on King Afonso I (reigned 1509-1543) as an avid reader of
Christian texts and on the 1555 Kikongo catechism, elaborated with input
from mestres.
18. Neotti (1997: 19-20), for sources and quote.
19. I use ‘Antônio’, the usual way of writing the name in Brazil, but respect
citations that use ‘António’, the Portuguese spelling. The first version of this
article was written in 2002, following my earlier attempt to compare Saint
Anthony in the Kongo and in Brazil in a 1991-92 article, published later in
English: Slenes (2000). Since then, Ronaldo Vainfas (2003) anticipated part
of my argument regarding Saint Anthony’s importance in the Luso-Brazilian world, emphasizing Antônio Vieira’s sermons in constructing the saint’s
image as warrior and ‘restorer’ of lost things.
20. In the collected sermons, first Portuguese edition: António Vieira, Sermoens
do P. Antonio Vieyra, da Companhia de Jesu ..., 15 vols. (1679-1748). The
Saint Anthony sermons, numbered as follows according to the dates of their
deliverance, are spread over five volumes (‘Parts’), all published in Lisbon by
Miguel Deslandes: Vol. II (1682), sermons 4 and 8 (first part); III (1683),
sermon 5; VI (1690), sermon 1; XI (1696), sermons 2 and 6; and XII (1699),
sermons 3, 7, 8 (2nd part) and 9. By order, place and year of deliverance,
the sermons are: 1) Salvador, Bahia, 1638; 2) Lisbon, 1642; 3) São Luís do
Maranhão, 1653; 4) S. Luís, 1654; 5) S. Luís, 1657; 6) S. Luís, 1658; 7)
Rome, 1670; 8) Rome, 1671; 9) Rome, 1672 (prepared but never delivered).
Sermon 2 was also published separately in several editions between 1642
and 1672; see Paiva (1999), p. 271 ff. I use Neotti’s edition of these sermons:
Vieira (1997).
21. See the list of volumes in Paiva (1999: 327-31); (with no indication of the
sermons included).
22.Romeiro (2001: 151-3).
23. Castro (1997: 79-94).
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S ain t A n t hon y at t he C ross roa d s
24.Randles (1968: 159), this was my point of departure for studying Vieira’s
sermons. A specialist in Brazilian history, Ronaldo Vainfas (2003: 37), has
recently suggested (without citing Randles) that Luso-Brazilian ideas about
Saint Anthony, influenced decisively by Vieira, may have had an impact on
Kimpa Vita.
25. Vieira (1997), sermon 1 (Salvador, 16 June, 1638; published in Vieira, Sermoens, Vol. VI [1690: 34-9]).
26. Vieira (1997), sermon 6 (São Luís, 13 January, 1658; published in Vieira,
Sermoens, Vol. XI [1696: 211]).
27. Vieira (1997), sermon 7 (Rome, 13 January, 1670; published in Vieira, Sermoens, Vol. XII, [1699: 251-77]).
28. Melo (1997: 306-12, 317-8).
29. Fazenda (1920: 379).
30. Thornton (1998b: 28), for a description of one prominent mestre, Kimpa
Vita’s kinsman.
31. Cited in Melo (1997: 311).
32. For reproductions of these paintings, see: Various authors (1996: 88, 91).
33. Neotti in Vieira (1997: 192), observes that the book appears in Anthony’s
iconography from the 14th century, while the Christ child and the sprig of
lilies dates from the 16th.
34. Vieira (1997: 274), sermon 7..
35. Thornton (1998b: 117).
36. Gamboso (1995).
37. Vaz (1970: 331-3, Vol. II); for a similar tale from the Mbundu, Chatelain
(1969 [1894]), story IV, p. 83.
38. Laman, (1953-1968: 38, 40; Vol. III).
39. This story could have marked Anthony as a nganga of atombola, a cult that
resurrected lineage elders, made them talk and then reburied them. See the
description of atombola in Hilton (1985: 11, 196-8).
40.Da Gallo (1972 [ms. 1710]), p. 68). Thornton (1998b: 133), observes the
indigenous meanings of ‘kanga’, ‘tie’; but he notes neither Saint Anthony’s
link with fertility in Portugal, nor da Gallo’s comment on the similarity
between coeval Portuguese and Kongo practices of tying cords around Saint
Anthony’s limbs.
41.Randles (1968: 151).
42. Filesi (1972: 34, note).
43. Balandier (1968: 241), following Laman (1936).
44. Vieira (1997: 212-3), sermon 6.
45. MacGaffey (1986: 65-9, 196), in the twentieth century (p. 65) smiths were
initiated through a community cult of affiction. See also Herbert (1993),
especially chs. 3, 6.
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Robert W. S lenes
46. Laman (1936: 458), Van Wing (1959:458, Vol. II), for futumuka and its relation to fula.
47. Thornton (1998b: 77, 120-3).
48. Hilton (1985: 197). Compare Thornton (1983), ch. 5, particularly p. 65,
where the conflict between ‘priests … [and] local nganga’ (as if Kitome and
Kimpasi were not involved) is isolated from politics—it becomes ‘a struggle
between rival religious actors for control of the same religion’—even though
the priests were ‘fully supported by Kongo’s ruling class and nobility’.
49. Bouveignes and Cuvelier (1951: 164), I use Thornton’s dating of this episode
(1983: 61).
50.Da Caltanisetta (1970: 70-1) for the discussion that follows. Da Caltanisetta
was convinced he had been poisoned several times by ‘fetishers’ (e.g., Ibid.,
pp. 22, 25, 32); if so, this was another sign that many people rejected his
presence.
51. Hilton (1985: 98, 101-02).
52. Van Wing (1959: 386).
53. Laman. (1953-68: 20, Vol. II).
54. Van Wing (1959: 400-05, Vol. II), for what follows. Mpungu means ‘the
highest, greatest’; Laman (1936).
55. See MacGaffey (1977: 188), and (1986: 132), on the idea that diviners have
extra eyes to see the Other World. The notion seems to carry over here to
minkisi (plural of ‘nkisi’).
56. Axelson (1970: 203, 251).
57. See the review of the evidence on this custom in Slenes (1999: 249-52).
58. Van Wing (1959: 429, Vol. II). The same seems to have been true in the
Kimpasi-related Bakhimba cult among the Yombe; see Bittremieux (1936:
14).
59. Thornton (1998b: 74).
60.Da Lucca (1972 [ms. 1707]), p. 97: ‘ma che conoscendo esser [l’Arte Magica]
cose diaboliche, haveva traslasciato quell’esercizio’.
61. Thornton (1998b: 74), for this and subsequent quotes in this paragraph.
62.Da Gallo (1972 [ms. 1710]), p. 78, for this and subsequent quotes.
63. Thornton (1983: 108-9, Marquis of Vunga: title, role); Hilton (1985: 23,
Nzimba: title).
64. Souza, Juliana (2001: 393), citing the 20th Maria Rosa Mística sermon, published in 1686 or 1688.
65. MacGaffey (1986: 210), for this and subsequent quotes.
66.Da Lucca (1972 [ms. 1707]), p. 94.
67. MacGaffey (1986: 210), da Gallo (1972 [ms. 1710]), p. 78. Note that Jadin’s
French translation of da Gallo’s manuscript attributes the correct date to
it (17 December, 1710), but gratuitously inserts ‘c’est à dire la miséricorde’
(not in the original Italian) after ‘Ne Yari’; Jadin (1961: 517). See Thornton
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S ain t A n t hon y at t he C ross roa d s
(1998b: 117), on the replacement of intervocalic r by d in the Kikongo of the
eighteenth century (yaari becoming today’s yaadi).
68. Laman (1936): ne or (southern dialect) na (pp. 296, 362), ‘a title of respect’;
yaadi (p. 1110), ‘one who reigns well, ruler’.
69. MacGaffey (1977: 187).
70. Thornton (1998b: 12, 161), da Lucca (1972 [ms. 1707]), p. 94.
71.Randles (1968: 158).
72. Margarido (1968: 546-7), cited in Filesi (1972: 30, note 33).
73.Redinha (1972: 757), cited by Gonçalves (1985: 177, note 34).
74. Gonçalves (1985: 167). See also Abranches (1991: 83), (1993: 69, 71-2). On
the similar significations of the mulemba (Kimbundu for nsanda) among the
Mbundu, see Miller (1976: 48-53).
75. I borrow here from the analysis in Slenes (2006, forthcoming).
76. MacGaffey (1986: 132, 127).
77. Gonçalves (1985: 164-5).
78. Gonçalves (1985: 168).
79. Laman (1936); but note what MacGaffey’s informants say (1977: 187, note
23).
80. MacGaffey (1986: 133-4).
81. Thornton (1998b: 9).
82. Laman (1936: 161). In Laman’s ‘SB’ dialect in the area of Mbanza Kongo (p.
lix) the prefix mu- always replaces that of ‘n’; indeed Gallo gives musenda for
the fig tree, not nsanda. Conceivably this was the case with the other nasal
prefix ‘m’, in which case mufuma would have been the southern version of
mfuma. (Swartenbroeckx [1973: 336], gives mufuma as a variant of mfuma,
but does not indicate its regional use.) Mufuma is still close enough to fuma,
however, for the hypothesis of error on Gallo’s part or deception on Kimpa
Vita’s to remain plausible.
83. MacGaffey (1986: 130, 133). See also Pierre Swartenbroeckx (1973: 336,
mfuma), which gives ‘ganga-mfuma’, also ‘to conspire’. This combines mfuma
with nganga, the ‘priest doctor’ who normally works to solve an individual’s
problems; it is tempting to speculate that this may have been Kimpa Vita’s
private name for the Christian priests, who were commonly called ‘nganga’.
I could not find this expression, however, in Laman (1936). Other relevant
words from Laman are: mfuma avondwa, ‘to combine to kill, assassinate’;
mfumbi, ‘assassin.
84. Janzen and MacGaffey (1974: 7).
85. Lydia Cabrera (1983: 150, 158, 166, 175, 177).
86. Laman (1936). Note that Swartenbroeckx (1973) gives mvumbi, ‘cadaver,
deceased’ as standard Kikongo, common to all dialects.
87. Laman (1936: 638). Van Wing (1959: 292, Vol. II). In the bibliography on
the Kongo, the status of the oldest nkita—as a separate spirit group or as one
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Robert W. S lenes
subsumed to the bisimbi—is unclear; see Slenes (2006, forthcoming). In any
case, in Kongo (Thornton, 1998b: 117), these nkita had ‘lived long ago but
were the ancestors of no one in particular. … They were positive, even stern,
moral figures who were nevertheless non-partisan and protecting’. In this
Cuban source, however, ‘nkita’ seems associated with the recent dead, which
is consistent with the ambiguity in Van Wing’s account.
88. Cabrera (1983: 175).
89. See Thornton (1998b: 117), on ‘the petty concerns and willingness to do
evil on behalf of their descendants’ which characterized ‘the recently dead
ancestors’.
90. MacGaffey (1986: 133). Laman (1936), entry for nkulu (singular). Bakulu
can also mean ‘the oldest ancestors’, i. e. presumably those who eventually
become associates (or a subclass) of bisimbi.
91. The opposition between nsanda and mfuma brings to mind the one noted
by MacGaffey (1986: 178), between ‘charms of the below’, ‘associated with
terrestrial waters, women’s activities, healing and fertility’, and ‘charms of the
above’ (of ‘land, with respect to water, or sky with respect to earth’), which
‘are associated … with men’s affairs’ and ‘are used primarily in combat with
witches’. This opposition is also central to Hilton’s analysis of the ‘sky-spirit’
and ‘water-spirit’ dimensions, the Christian priests being primarily associated with the former, but also seen as having qualities related to the latter (at
least before the Capuchins began truly acting like witches). The opposition
was first stated in Dupré (1975: 12-28).
92. Kimpa Vita’s analogy is so consistent that I believe my argument stands,
even if she did say fuma (‘white/red riverine stone’); for fuma (according to
MacGaffey ‘associated with the dead’), would still have led Kikongo speakers
to mfumu, mfuma, fumana, υanga mfuma and other words cited in the notes
above, thereby establishing a set of meanings/connotations in contrast to
that of nsanda.
93. Hilton (1985: 200-01).
94. Note that ‘mfumu’ can also mean ‘king, noble’; ki-mfumu is ‘reign’, also
‘authority, nobility, royalty’, among other meanings. Laman (1936).
95. See note 70, and Laman (1936): ki-yaadi (p. 296) and ky-adi (p. 362). See also
Thornton (1998: 117, note 5); 219, note 16), who translates Italian misericordia (‘mercy’) as kiyadi (or kiyari, at the time of the Salve Antoniana).
96. Hilton (1985: 209).
97. See Thornton’s hypothesis (1998b: 44), that commoners increasingly believed
the high nobility was acting with evil kindoki.
98. Sá (1997: 210-221).
99. In: Vieira (2000-2001: 78, 89).
100. Why Kimpa Vita, a member of the nobility, would have taken this stance is
probably in good part explained by Thornton (1998b: 14, 54-6): her material conditions of existence were not radically different from those of the
252
S ain t A n t hon y at t he C ross roa d s
majority; her practice as Nganga Marinda brought her closer to the people.
I suspect that one may add to this something that is implicit in both Thornton’s and Hilton’s analyses: the severe loss of material benefits by the greater
part of the nobility over the previous several decades because of shrinking
possibilities of royal patronage, in the context of economic decline and the
shattering of centralized control.
101. In this section, I borrow and add to material in Slenes (2006, forthcoming)
and Slenes (2000). Since the publication of the latter (the original Portuguese version of 1991-1992), other important studies have appeared on Saint
Anthony in Brazil: Mott (1996); Souza, Marina (2001); Vainfas (2003).
102. See Slenes (2000: 223); the strong presence of Kongo and related cultures
after ca. 1810 (following the massive shift in the focus of the trade away
from ‘Benguela’ and toward ‘Congo North’—the mouth of the Zaire and the
coastline above it) is emphasized in Slenes (2006, forthcoming).
103. This and the following paragraphs are based on Slenes (2006, forthcoming).
104. The main document on Cabula has been published several times: see, in
English, Bastide (1978 [1960]), pp. 202-4.
105. Cabula is clearly related to the present-day possession cult, Umbanda. Thus,
in view of its connection to Kimpasi, it is significant that one of the most
commonly called-upon group of spirits in Umbanda is that of the Caboclos
Velhos (‘Old Indians’). See Slenes (2006, forthcoming).
106. Laman (1936), entry for bula. Note that Saint Anthony entered Kimpa Vita
through her head; Thornton (1998b: 10).
107. See Slenes (2006, forthcoming), which also notes that the ‘Caboclo Velho’
spirits in present-day Umbanda are considered powerful and aggressive.
108. Siqueira (1975 [1852]), p. 109.
109. Chatelain (1969 [1894]), p. 268.
110. Ewbank (1976 [1856]), pp. 250-1.
111. Fazenda (1920: 379).
112. Ewbank (1976 [1856]), pp. 188-9.
113. Karasch (1987: 266-7, 277, 282, 284).
114. Stein (1985: 203).
115. O Direito (1880: 12, Vol. 21, year VIII), January/April.
116. Machado Filho (1985: 67-8, 129): canjira, canjerê, meaning ‘charm’, also the
name of a dance; perhaps from Kimbundu ka- (diminutive particle) + njila
(cf. Kikongo nzila), ‘path’.
117. MacGaffey (1986: 146), Thompson (1985: 121-5).
118. See Neotti,’s note in Vieira (1997: 190). José Português had been hired by
a planter to obtain the marriage of a spinster daughter. This case allows a
glimpse into a world of transculturated meanings where social actors of all
types found some common ground.
119. I draw here on my observations regarding these figurines in Slenes (2000);
see also the recent article by Souza, Marina (2001).
253
Robert W. S lenes
120. Etzel (1971: 152-6), Lemos (1988: 192-7).
121. Volavkova (1972: 52-89), Thompson (1985: 138-9), MacGaffey (1977: 12731).
122. ‘Com tanto pau no mato / Embaúba é coronel’; Stein (1985: 208).
123. Ewbank (1976 [1856]), p. 187.
124. Laman (1953-1968: 93, Vol. III, figure)..
125. The hands on the stomach could represent the Kongo gesture of simbidila
(‘holding firm’), a form of prayer and meditation ‘to prepare the ground’ for
further action. See Thompson (1981: 75-6).
126. Wannyn (1961), plate xxiv (unpaginated) and p. 79.
127. Vanhee (2002: 243-64).
128. Thornton (1984: 165).
129. J. K. Tuckey (1967 [1818]), pp. 79-81. Tuckey’s observation is much stronger evidence of this than the very small number of carved statues of Saint
Anthony found in the possession of elite Kongo families at the end of the
nineteenth century, who regarded them as ancient heirlooms. For two such
figures, see Bentley (1900: 39, 259; Vol. I).
130. Manumission rates appear to have been much higher in small properties,
even for Africans; thus, in these properties, processes of transculturation and
identity formation may have been different from those sketched here. See
Slenes (2006, forthcoming).
254
Chapter 10
The Construction of a
Black Catholic Identity in
Brazil during the Time of
Slavery: Saints and Minkisi
a Reflection of Cultural
Miscegenation1
Marina de Mello e Souza
gh
T
he research presented here is part of a field of study concerned with
the creation of Afro-American communities in the Americas. Scholars such as Nina Rodrigues, Edison Carneiro and Roger Bastide in Brazil,
and Melville Herskovits, Richard Price, Sterling Stuckey and Monica
Schuler in the United States, have made valuable contributions to this
field.2 The work of some of these authors made me realize the importance
of understanding African societies and cultures from the inside to better
comprehend the processes of creating new cultures and societies in the
Americas.
Along with this perspective—which tries to understand African
societies that were the origins of a large part of the humanity forming
the base of many American societies—I have adopted another one that
seeks to understand how different cultures interact in situations in which
previously unfamiliar peoples are placed in contact with one another. This
question, present in the work of many historians and anthropologists at
different moments and in various contexts, occupies a unique place in the
thinking of Fernando Ortiz, Marshall Sahlins, Carlo Ginzburg and Serge
Gruzinski (Ortiz, 1940; Sahlins, 1990; Ginzburg, 1991, 1989, 1988; Gruzinski, 1996). The concern uniting such diverse scholars who have focused
on very different realities is about interpreting the mechanisms of contacts
that resulted in certain cultural products and social formations. When we
analyse the phenomena connected with the Diaspora that the slave trade
M a r ina d e M ello e S o u za
imposed on many African groups, these discussions can be useful insofar
as they help us understand how certain combinations of cultural elements
came to be, as well as what they meant for those who used them to organize and express themselves and to relate to the world around them.
One of the many consequences of the African Diaspora is the presence
of Black kings in the Americas, representatives of specific ethnic groups
present inside the quilombos and Catholic brotherhoods of ‘black men’.
The study of the situations in which these kings existed sheds light on
how Africans and Europeans interacted within the context of American
colonization under a slave regime.
In my book Reis negros no Brasil escravista (Black kings in slavery Brazil)
I offer some interpretations of these Black kings in Brazil during the time of
slavery, paying special attention to the adoption of Catholicism or some of
its elements by both African communities in Africa and Afro-Americans
in the Americas (Souza, 2002). According to my interpretation, because
of its presence in the region of the former Kingdom of Kongo beginning
at the end of the fifteenth century, Catholicism in Brazil occasionally
functioned as a link to an African past that was an important element
in the composition of the new identities of Afro-American communities
within the context of the Diaspora. In Brazil the celebrations connected
with the king of Kongo’s coronations were demonstrations understood in
different ways by those who created them—members of the black community—and by those who identified with the Luso-American masters.
For some black community, they were related to African chiefs (the rites of
enthronement, the performance of loyalty), while for the euro descendents
they were related to the notion of an empire that extended it power to the
four corners of the world—Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia—and
which prized the so called conversion of the former Kingdom of Kongo
as one of the most emblematic moments of Portugal’s evangelical efforts.
According to the thesis that I develop in my book the adoption of these
celebrations by many black communities in Brazil, principally from the
end of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, occurred
due to a combination of factors. These factors gave the commemorations
involving the king of Kongo particular meanings important for both the
black community as well as the slave masters, who retained the power to
allow or repress the demonstrations of the Afro-Brazilian community.3
Once they were yanked from their place of origin and enslaved—no
longer belonging to the social groups from which they derived their identities, having undergone experiences with enormous possibilities of inflicting
both physical and psychological trauma, having travelled the Great Water,
256
The Construction of a Black Catholic Identit y
and having bent themselves to the yoke of their American masters—the
Africans were compelled to integrate in one way or another into the societies in which they now found themselves. New alliances were made, new
commonalities were perceived, and new identities were constructed upon
different foundations such as ethnic and religious similarities, or around the
spheres of work and home. In this way ethnic regroupings formed ‘nations’;
fishermen and porters organized themselves around their activities, neighbors consolidated ties with their children’s godparents, and members of
the orixás cults banded together, as did those who made offerings to their
ancestors and those who were possessed by supernatural entities while
accompanied by the beating of drums. In this context, the Black kings
present in quilombos and work groups, but especially in Catholic brotherhoods of ‘black men’, served as important catalysts in some communities
and were central to the construction of their new identities.
While some activities carried out by Afro-Brazilian communities were
prohibited, persecuted, and demonized by Christian teachings, others were
accepted because they adopted Iberian and Catholic forms, or forms that
were perceived as such by the masters. In this first instance were the calundus, whose rituals took place around altars that housed magical-religious
objects, offerings of animal blood, and food and drink accompanied by the
beating of drums and those who were possessed by supernatural entities.4
In the second instance were the processions and dances that accompanied
the priest’s coronation of a black king on the festivals of the brotherhoods’ patron saints around which the black community organized itself.
Although the former were seriously persecuted, just like the quilombos and
rebellious uprisings, the latter were accepted and often supported, since
they were seen as a means of integrating the black man into colonial slave
society.
The dances that can be associated with calundus are described by the
Count de Povolide in a letter dated 1780, in which he explains the difference between ‘superstitious dances’ and ‘dances which although they
are not the holiest’ were not considered by him to be ‘worthy of total
contempt’. The latter were dances often known as jongos or batuques (; in
the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century these dances
were called batuques,) and they still exist among some black communities.
The Count de Povolide tells us that on this occasion ‘the blacks divided
themselves into nations and each with his own instrument dances and
twirls like Harlequin, and others dance with different body movements
that, while not the most innocent are similar to the fandangos of Castela,
and the fofas of Portugal, and the lundus of that country’s white and dusky
peoples’. The first, which he calls ‘superstitious’, should be prohibited, he
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M a r ina d e M ello e S o u za
declares. Explaining the difference between the two kinds of dances, he
writes:
The dances that I understand to be completely contemptuous
are those that the blacks of the Mina coast do in private, either
in houses or in the fields, with a black mistress and an altar of
idols, worshipping live goats and others made of clay, anointing their bodies with different oils, rooster blood, eating corn
cakes after various superstitious blessings, making the simple
folk believe that using bread in blessings brings luck, making
women love men and men love women (Apud, 2002: 232).
Before the Count de Povolide, Antonil, an Italian Jesuit who lived in
Brazil from 1681 until his death in 1716, had already defended a position of tolerance in relation to certain festivals celebrated among the black
communities. Writing to the masters about the slaves, he said:
To completely deny them their amusements[,] which are their
only relief from their imprisonment, is to wish to see them disconsolate and melancholic, depleted of life and health. Therefore, sirs, let not their creation of kings bewilder you. Let them
sing and dance honestly for a few hours on some days during
the year. They will innocently make themselves merry in the
evening after having participated in your morning celebrations
for Our Lady of the Rosary, Saint Benedict and the patron saint
of the sugar mill’s chapel (Antonil, 1966: 164).
These positions of the administrators and thinkers connected with the
Portuguese colonial government in the Americas shows that there was
tolerance of manifestations of African origins when these were similar
to, or mixed with elements of the Luso-American colonial community.
But many of the motives that led people to become involved in certain
festivities, to unite around a symbolic king in celebration, went unnoticed
by those who did not belong to the same cultural background. In this way,
the king’s authority over a group was scorned and the union of such (scuh)
group was not seen as threatening, principally because it happened within
the brotherhoods of cults formed around certain saints that were approved
by the church and watched over by the priests and the local parish. The
same was not true with regard to religious rituals of African origin, which
only ceased being openly persecuted at the twentieth (end of the nineteenth) century and which maintained a greater degree of cultural and
organizational autonomy.
258
The Construction of a Black Catholic Identit y
But even in Catholic celebrations within the black community, there
were elements that shocked and bothered the masters and especially some
foreign observers, who were not used to the racial and cultural miscegenation they found in Brazil, which had begun with the first contact in Africa
and had intensified in colonial American society. For example, this was
the case with the religious images that Madame Otille Coudreau found in
a black village on the banks of the Pacoval River in Pará, in the Amazon
forest region.
When she documented the hydrographic research that she had conducted deep in the Amazon forest at the dawn of the twentieth century,
the French scientist expressed the most stereotypical, preconceived notions
about Afro-Brazilians, attributing savage and barbarous behaviour to
them, accusing them of lying and laziness, and finding them physically
degenerate. She disapproved of the way the village was constructed, with
cabanas thrown up here and there on the banks of the river, without any
order or the drawing of property lines, some planted on the doorsteps of
others. In this village of approximately fifteen straw-covered huts—whose
residents did not recognize privately owned land, which the community
used communally—there was a small church with a rammed-dirt floor and
clay walls, but with a tiled roof with a wooden cross in front.
What caught the Frenchwoman’s attention were the multicoloured
saints she found around the church. She does not say if these were placed
on altars or not, but does state that some were white, others were mulatto,
and many were black, ‘all with abominable appearances’ that reminded her
of a meeting of Quasímodos. According to her, they were dressed in the
remnants of old petticoats, flashy coloured pieces of fabric, and wore glassbeaded or seed necklaces. In her opinion, it was a sacrilege that each one
of these statues bore the name of a saint: St. Peter, St. Lucia, St. Rose, St.
Sebastian , and a black Our Lady. Coudreau also states that she had the
desire to destroy all those ‘unartistic horrors’, ‘those statues that reflected
the customs of those people condemned to the lowest rung on the social
ladder’(Coudreau, 1903: 19).
According to such foreign observers, contributing even further to
the deformation of Catholic traditions and the debasement of European
aesthetic sensibilities were the mocambeiros’ prayer sessions and religious
festivals, which were always accompanied by profane dances; these took
place in a dwelling next to the church present in all the mocambos that the
French researcher saw in the region.5 This combination of religious rituals
and ‘profane dances’ is the pattern followed in the majority of popular Brazilian religious festivals; these celebrations emerged at the beginning of the
259
M a r ina d e M ello e S o u za
period of Portuguese colonization of the territory, where the colonists met
the indigenous peoples and brought over the Africans. In this meeting of
different peoples, cultures, and religions, and various ways of dealing with
the things of this world and the things of the other world, there was an
enormous variety of combinations. The festivals around the black kings,
including those that took place at Pacoval, are one of the results of these
combinations, also present in the making of magical-religious objects such
as the saints that Coudreau found sacrilegious.6
In the same way that they elected kings inside the Catholic brotherhoods and created calundus and candomblés in sanctuaries far removed
from the universe of their masters, Afro-Brazilian communities also made
objects, used in this or that ritual, in which they incorporated elements of
their traditional cultures. The saints that Coudreau had compared to Quasímodos were certainly carved using the techniques and aesthetic criteria
of the mocambeiros themselves, who were, as Eurípedes Funes has shown,
the descendants of slaves from West Central Africa, from the region near
Angola and the former Kingdom of Kongo.7 The images made by the
inhabitants of the Curuá River banks, described by Coudreau and called
saints by the mocambeiros, combined elements of Afro-Brazilian Catholicism and could be connected with minkisi, objects used in religious rituals
by the people of the Lower Kongo region.
One of these mocambos, that of Pacoval, was studied by Eurípedes
Funes, who observed and documented a festival there in honour of St.
Benedict in which the dances followed the ceremonies that took place
inside the church. Called the Cordão do Marambiré, its members form a
court around the king of Kongo, which comprises auxiliary queens, dancers
(valsares) and lieutenants, who assume specific roles as the choreography
unfolds. The king of Kongo is the highest authority, allowing this dance
to be associated with the congada festivals. His clothes are different from
those of the others, and he wears a crown made of cardboard, natural fibres,
or tin, and carries a sceptre, symbol of his power. The queens have headdresses made of the same materials and decorated with coloured-paper
flowers. Macaw feathers also decorate the king’s crown and the dancers’
headdresses. A photograph taken by Eurípedes Funes shows us an image
of St. Benedict adorned by a headdress similar to that of the dancers, with
feathers on top.
Feathered headdresses were also singled out by those who observed
the congadas performed in the nineteenth century in various locations in
Brazil, principally in Minas Gerais. See, for example, the following part
260
The Construction of a Black Catholic Identit y
of a description by Francis Castelnau of a congada that he saw in Minas
Gerais in 1843:
The court, whose clothing combined every color and the most
extravagant decorations, sat on either side of the king and queen.
Next there came an infinite number of other characters. The
most important were without a doubt the big captains, famous
warriors, or ambassadors of faraway powers, all adorned in the
style of Brazilian savages, with large, feathered pompadours,
cavalry sabers at their sides, and a shield on their arms (Castelnau, 1949: 172).
However, contrary to what the French consul thought, in this dance
the head feathers should not be attributed to the ‘Brazilian savages’, but
instead to the Africans.
A photograph taken in Angola or in the Belgian Congo before 1922
shows us an nganga, or priest, with an imposing crown of feathers.8 The
minkisi also frequently used feathers on their heads. As Zdenka Volavkova tells us, the making of an nkisi went through two stages: in the first
stage the wood was carved by a craftsperson; and in the second stage the
nganga, priest or religious specialist, turned the sculpture into a carrier of
supernatural forces, inserting in it, according to specific rituals, a series of
substances from the vegetable, animal and mineral worlds through which
the supernatural forces (supposedly) acted.9 It was at this moment, in
which magical-religious powers were given to an object, that the feathers
were put on the heads of the sculptures. Théophile Obenga says that the
feathers decorating the hairstyles of some figures associated with religious
functions meant that the object had been blessed by an nganga. (Obenga,
1988 : 23). According to John Janzen, the use of feathers on top of the head,
or sticking out of gourds or vessels (many minkisi were not carved figures
but vessels that contained substances that gave the vessels supernatural
powers), is the most common indicator of a closeness to the spirit world. In
addition, according to him, many mediums used feathered headdresses to
represent their connection to the spirits ( Janzen, 1988). Wyatt MacGaffey
also tells us that the minkisi were sometimes equipped with feathers that
formed headdresses similar to those used by the nganga because spiritual
forces are associated with birds (MacGaffey, 1988: 193).
With this information in hand, we can see that the addition of these
feathers to the sculptures offers new evidence of an African connection in
the production of cultural artifacts, which resulted from the meeting of
Catholicism and traditional Bantu religions. The dances that accompany
261
M a r ina d e M ello e S o u za
the feasts of Catholic saints are not restricted to black communities, as
they are a pronounced characteristic of the colonial Catholicism practised
in Portuguese America. They are present even today on many occasions,
but restricted to the expression of so-called popular religiosity. In the case
of the congadas and the Cordão do Marambiré, they involve people who
made promises to the saints, and as payment promised to dance every year
on their feast days. But specific to the dances that took place in the AfroBrazilian communities are their African elements, such as the rhythms, the
steps, and the lyrics filled with words of African origin and symbols, which
although transformed (and) exposed their roots, in the same way that the
head feathers indicate a connection with the world beyond.
The theme of domination cannot be left out when we talk about AfroAmerican societies in the Americas. Certainly, we need to pay attention to
the attitudes of representatives of the slave owners’ society, among them
agents of the Church, who played a fundamental role in the process of
constructing new identities and new cultural forms that began with the
African Diaspora. However, it was the adjustments made and the options
chosen by the recently arrived Africans and their descendants that defined
the traits of the new cultures that were created in the Americas. In this
process, the saints—images of Catholic cults—absorbed the meanings and
roles associated with the images and objects used in traditional Bantu religions. This change had already occurred in Africa itself, beginning with the
activities of Roman Catholic missionaries and the conversion of members
of the ruling elite in the former Kingdom of Kongo at the end of the
fifteenth century. With the Portuguese occupation of some areas that later
became known as Angola, missionaries continued with their activities in
those regions, introducing some elements, especially objects used in religious cults, which were incorporated by the native population in their own
rituals. To these elements the native people attached meanings pertinent
to their own traditions.
If in African territories, where the space occupied by the Portuguese
and their agents (among them the missionaries) was small, Catholicism
did leave discrete traces of its influence in the pre-colonial period in
Luso America. Africans often gave themselves over to Catholicism, but
not without filling it with things from their traditional religions. These
additional elements almost always went unnoticed not only by the ruling
groups, but also by scholars who, because they had no knowledge of African
cultures, did not see how they contributed to the cultural mixtures resulting
from colonial contacts. Untangling these mixtures makes us appreciate the
vast African contribution to the formation of American societies, much
greater than what is generally acknowledged.
262
The Construction of a Black Catholic Identit y
Coudreau was in perfect harmony with the thinking of her time when
she associated the images that she saw in the mocambo church on the banks
of the Curuá River to Quasímodos. They were aberrations that wounded
her aesthetic sensibility, formed in Europe, and the only source of references
that oriented her in the world. Long before her, other Europeans had had
very similar reactions to the minkisi, which they called ‘fetishes’ or ‘demonic
images’, as Olfer Dapper (whose book was published in 1676) referred to
them; ‘crudely carved in wood and covered with dirty rags’, as J.K. Tuckey
said in 1816; and with ‘a ferocious appearance’, as H.M. Stanley described
them in 1895. Lieutenant Tuckey compared these images to scarecrows,
and Catholic and Baptist missionaries at the end of the nineteenth century
called them indecent and frankly obscene (Volavkova, 1972: 52).
A century after Coudreau and some missionaries who lived in the
region of the former Kingdom of Kongo had encountered these images in
Brazil and Africa, we can try to dismantle the ethnocentrism that exists in
all cultures and times, and try to understand the probable motives behind
the choices made by peoples and groups. In this sense, studies about
Central African minkisi cast new light on the saints wrapped in worn
fabrics, with necklaces of seeds or beads and feathered headdresses. Using
the nganga and minkisi styles of placing feathers on the head, St. Benedict’s
headdress, photographed in the Pacoval mocambo, also exposes the connection between this world and the other, with man’s relationship to the
beyond. Prior to this, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the
twentieth century, images of Catholic saints worshipped by Afro-Brazilian
communities that lived in a significant degree of isolation, preserving the
traditions and ways of thinking and feeling of their original cultures, must
have maintained even greater proximity to the minkisi.
If we remember that since the sixteenth century Catholic missionaries had lived among the people of Angola and the former Kingdom of
Kongo, where African forms of Catholicism were developed and where
Christian objects were incorporated into traditional religions (such as the
nkangi kiditu, toni malau and nsundi malau), we perceive that the cultural
miscegenation in Afro-Brazilian worship, even when Catholicism was the
dominant element, might have been underway prior to enslavement and
the crossing of the Atlantic. With this in mind, it is not difficult to accept
that the cloths and necklaces wrapped around the saints surrounding the
mocambo church visited by Coudreau were closer to equivalent elements
that comprised the minkisi, attributing certain powers to them, than the
clothing and jewellery wrapped around the saints that dwelled on the
masters’ altars. Add to this the differences between the sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious sensibility, which were much
263
M a r ina d e M ello e S o u za
closer to magical and marvelous thinking, and what Thornton shows us
was accepted by the nineteenth-century Romanized church, and it is easy
to discern the similarities between saints and minkisi, both objects connected to the world beyond, where the solutions to the problems of this
world come from.10
In popular Iberian culture, where Catholicism mixed with pagan traditions, the saints were invoked to keep pests and plagues away from plantations, bring rain, and cure people. In a similar way, the minkisi, divided
into various categories and with their own specializations, were called on
to identify evil-doers, cure or cause sickness, and guarantee the fertility
of both women and the land. Comprising sculptures, vessels, or bundles,
employed in rituals conducted by the nganga, they received ingredients
making them carriers of the powers of natural or ancestral spirits. They
were associated with the Catholic saints that the missionaries brought to
Africa. In the Americas, when they reconstructed their forms of organization and relationships with earthly and supernatural objects, Africans
and Afro-Americans turned to Catholic saints, imprinting upon them elements of their traditional beliefs, and making use of the spaces permitted
by slave society to build their feasts around a black king.
If those who study Afro-American cultures need to search for information on African cultures that can offer a broader understanding of
its objects, the collaboration of those who study African cultures is also
necessary. When entering into contact with American social and cultural
realities, they could offer another perspective on interpretations of these
contacts. As for Brazil, it is more than time for disciplines belonging to
the so-called social sciences to enter into contact with systems of African
thought, which will certainly yield other possibilities of understanding the
processes that took place in the Americas beginning with the Diaspora
imposed by the slave trade and the resulting cultural contacts.
264
The Construction of a Black Catholic Identit y
Figure 1: Image of St. Benedito photographed
by Eurípedes Antonio Funes, and published in
his PhD thesis in history at the University of
São Paulo “Nasci nas matas, nunca tive senhor.
História e memória dos mocambos do Baixo
Amazonas”.
Figure 2: Feast of Nossa Senhora do Rosário by the German artist
Johann Mauritz Antonio Rugendas (1802-1858)
265
M a r ina d e M ello e S o u za
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Marco Zero 16, vol. 8: 57–81.
——. (1989). “Nas malhas do poder escravista: a invasão do candomblé do Accu”
in Reis, João J. Negociação e conflito. A resistência negra no Brasil escravista. São
Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 32–61.
Rodrigues, Nina. (1945). Os africanos no Brasil. 3rd Edition, São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional.
Sahlins, Marshall. (1990). Ilhas de história. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor.
Schuler, Monica. (1980). ‘Alas, Alas Kongo’: A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841–1865. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Souza, Laura de Mello e. (2002). Revisitando o calundu. mimeograph.
Souza, Marina de Mello e. (2002). Reis negros no Brasil escravista. História da festa
de coroação de rei Kongo. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG.
——. (2001a). “Santo Antonio de nó de pinho e o catolicismo afro-brasileiro.”
Tempo, Revista do Departamento de História - UFF 11, vol. 6, July: 171188.
——. (2001b). “História, mito e identidade nas festas de reis negros no Brasil
- séculos XVIII e XIX.” in István Jancsó and Iris Kantor (eds.). Festa Cultura
e sociabilidade na América portuguesa. São Paulo: Hucitec/Edusp: 249–60.
Stuckey, Sterling. (1987). Going through the Storm: The Influence of African American
Art in History. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thornton, John. (1992). Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World,
1400–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——. (1984). “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom
of Kongo, 1491–1750.” Journal of African History, vol. 25: 147–67.
——. (1981). “Early Kongo–Portuguese Relations: A New Interpretation.” in
David Henige (ed.). History in Africa: A Journal of Method. Massachusetts:
Brandeis University, African Studies Association 8: 183–204.
Volavkova, Zdenka. (1972). “Nkisi Figures of the Lower Kongo.” African Arts 2,
vol. 5, Winter: 52–9.
267
M a r ina d e M ello e S o u za
Notes
1.
I am grateful to FAPESP for giving the financial support necessary for the
essence of this article to be presented as paper at the colloquium ‘The Transatlantic Construction of Notions of ‘Race’, Black Culture, Blackness and
Anti-racism: Toward a New Dialogue among Researchers in Africa, Latin
America and the Caribbean’, November 2002, Gorée, Sénégal.
2.Rodrigues (1945), Carneiro (1962), Bastide (1960, 1974), Herskovits (1990),
Price, (1990) Price and Mintz (1992), Price and Sally Price (1980), Stuckey
(1987), Schuler (1980). (The complete references to the works mentioned
are listed in the bibliography.) This article was translated into English by
Barbara Harrington.
3. In Souza (2002). I use the notion of the ‘king of Kongo’ as an element that
unites different African and Afro-Brazilian groups in the process of constructing new identities. A movement that gained strength among Bantu
groups, the festivals of the kings of Kongo brought Africans the memory of
the land of their birth in a mythicized form, and reminded the colonizers of
an empire that dominated the seas and commerce and that had exerted itself
in spreading the word of Christ.
4. See, in addition to other texts, Reis (1988, 1989), Mott (1988), Souza
(2002).
5. Here mocambo is a black village, often what remains of quilombos (maroon
communities), which were also known as mocambos. For the specific case of
the Pacoval mocambo, see Funes (1995, 1996).
6. In (2001a), I offer an analysis of other images from this same perspective.
7. According to Funes, in the work cited above, p. 34.
8. See MacGaffey (1993: 56).
9. See Volavkova (1972: 56). For an explanation of the minkisi, see MacGaffey
(1993, 1974).
10. Thornton has made a valuable contribution to the study of Catholicism in
West Central Africa. His positions, frequently illuminating, can be found in
various articles on this theme. See, for example, 1984, 1981 and 1992.
268
Chapter 11
From ‘Near White’ to ‘Almost
Black’: Racial Classifications in Eighteenth- and
Nineteenth-Century Brazil
Jocélio Teles dos Santos
gh
T
he analysis of the system of racial classification constitutes a popular
subject among the social sciences in Brazil. Since the second half of
the twentieth century, there have been many comparative analyses that
have sought to study the subtle undertones of our multipolar system under
which various racial categories are employed on a daily basis (mulatto, lightskinned [near-white], dark-skinned, creole, coloured, black, light-skinned
moreno), comparing them with what obtains within the American racial
classification system, where the tendency is towards a bipolar categorization of blacks versus whites.1
In the last decade of XX century beginning with the inception of the
policy of affirmative action in Brazil, the issue of how to define a ‘coloured
person’ has gradually shifted its centre of gravity from the university campus
into the arena of government/official policy making. In other words, the
colour issue has suddenly become a recurrent problem in view of the fact
that the general classification associated with racial miscegenation is perceived to have become a kind of Achilles heel of Brazilian society.
In the heated academic debates that ensued, various arguments were
advanced pointing to the nineteenth century as the period that could
best reveal the origins of the system of racial categories and its effects on
Brazilian society. The major supporting evidence for such a claim is to be
J oc élio Teles d os S an t os
found in the historiography of the nineteenth century, something that is
particularly abundant in the literature of the social sciences in Brazil.2
My intention in this article is to demonstrate that the system of colour
classification in colonial Brazil had been even more multipolar in nature than
has hitherto been imagined, suggesting that one could view the construction of local classification systems as being in consonance/ dissonance with
that of the transatlantic metropolis. Our investigation is based on the Santa
Casa da Misericórdia, a charity organization within the Catholic Church,
and its Roda dos engeitados, a kind of collection centre for unwanted children. The period under study covers the years between 1760 and 1820.
My argument is that one can notice in the racial classifications of
the abandoned children over 1760-1820 the use of some categorizations
reflecting the social practices of a given moment in history—that is, from
1763 to 1805—during which scientifically defined racial practices were not
very evident. One can also perceive in the classification of the abandoned
children a local ethno-genetic classification that differs from the standard
that was then being used at the Santa Casa da Misericórdia headquarters
in Lisbon. This ever-present anguish over racial classification is still with
us at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Colour Classification in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries
The terms negro, mulatto and creole had already entered common usage
in the seventeenth century. Studying the wills of many slave owners who
donated significant sums to the Santa Casa da Misericórdia, one notices
the use of terms that were indicative of the ‘colour’ reference. In the will left
by Belchior Fr. Queimado on 30 January 1637, he described his slaves in
the following terms: my slaves ‘Jacinto, a sixteen-year-old mulatto’, ‘João, a
mulatto worth 32$rs’, ‘Angella, a mulatto, and her six-year-old son, Lazaro,
and Eva, her two-year-old daughter worth 35$rs, as well as a creole woman
called Ana’.3 Another slave owner, André Fernandes de Bastos, and his
wife, Catherina de Azevedo, left a will that was read on 23 November
1652, in which it was recorded that João Alves da Fonseca, a landowner
indebted to the couple, had left an ‘escripto’ (a will) in which he claimed to
have had a son, described as a ‘mulatinho’ (little mulatto) from a relationship that he had with a ‘black’ slave woman.4
It is probable that the two terms had the same meaning as that contained in the eighteenth-century dictionary entry, since the term negro,
according to Antonio Moraes Silva, (Silva, 1813) could be employed not
only to describe a sad, hopeless, unfortunate individual, or someone ‘whose
270
From ‘Near White’ to ‘Almost Black’
skin color is black like writing ink or as charcoal’, but could also refer to a
Blackman, be he a slave, a freeborn, or a simple ‘captive’. The term mulatto
was used to refer originally to the offspring of a horse with a she-donkey,
in the same way as such an offspring is viewed as ‘an ass’, and hence any
child born of an interracial relationship is considered imperfect. Thus the
term was extended to cover ‘any child issuing from a relationship between
a Blackman and a Whitewoman, or inversely, or even the fruit of the
union of a mulatto and a Whiteman up to a certain degree’ (Silva, 1813)
The linguistic system of the slave period permitted conceptual rearrangements and indicated some flexibility in the use of linguistic categories in
the Brazilian colony. The oldest will found in the Santa Casa belonged
to a bachelor named Francisco Diaz and was dated 22 September 1632.
The will clearly reveals that a classificatory term could be substituted for
another without losing its original meaning. In the same will, Francisco
Diaz’s slaves Leonor and Britey, whom he initially called mulattoes, were
referred to as Blacks a few paragraphs later.
With regard to those classified as creole, Antonio Moraes Silva argues
that such a term was used to refer to slaves born into the house of the master
and that their status was similar to that of young animals born ‘within one’s
jurisdiction’ (Ibid) The ambiguity of such a description—referring both to
the skin colour as well as the ‘place of birth’—had already become apparent
in the seventeenth century. For instance, in the will left by Fr. Francisco
d’Araújo, he claimed to have willed to the Santa Casa da Misericórdia one
‘Rufina crioulinha’ as well as one ‘Cecílio, a creole who claims to have won
his freedom’.5 It is common in historiographical texts to find the term
creole being employed to designate slaves born in Brazil; but, from the way
it was used in the will of this reverend gentleman, the term creole could
be said to apply also to a mulatto.6 If the term creole only covered Blacks
born in captivity, how does one justify its use by Diogo Fernandez in 1632
when he recorded that he possessed a ‘mulatto born in his house by a slavewoman named Izabel ( . . . ) whom I set free and liberated’? Mulatto, thus,
seems to have been accepted as meaning also creole.
The meaning accorded to the term creole indicates that the word was
now used less often to designate a ‘national’ slave (a slave born into captivity) and more often in the sense of a ‘colour’ reference used to describe
the descendants of slaves, or even those coming directly out of Africa. An
important piece of evidence that corroborates this shift in meaning can be
seen in the will left by André Fernandes de Bastos and his wife Catherina
de Azevedo, who claimed on 23 November 1652 to have in their possession twenty-three ‘slaves from Guinea, creoles, whose names are as follows
. . . ’7 If, during the first phase of the slave period, ‘slaves from the Guinea
271
J oc élio Teles d os S an t os
coast’ was a generic expression that was used to refer to slaves of diverse
ethnic backgrounds,8 the term creole could also be a generic name for
slaves speaking the creole language or having the skin colour of creoles.
If it is true that the sixteenth century ushered in the social ethnogenesis
of our system of colour separation, then the seventeenth century can be
said to have originated and consolidated one of our greatest dilemmas. The
second half of the eighteenth century revealed a classificatory continuum,
while at the same time introducing new meanings into the system. In 1772,
the system of demographic classification of a captaincy in the North-eastern
region, the captaincy of Piauí, revealed the existence of nine categories:
whites, blacks, reds (Indians of any origin), mulattoes, half-castes, mamelucos (blend of white and Indian), caful, goat-coloured (cabra), and curiboca.
If the term mulatto maintained the same meaning as it did in the previous
period, the term ‘Goat-coloured’ came to be employed for children born of
the union between Blacks and mulattoes, while caful was applied to the offspring of Blacks and Indians. The oddest case is the use of the term mestiço
(half-caste) to mean one who ‘shares the attributes of Blacks, Whites and
Indians’, which apparently served as a catch-all category to describe the
various mixtures, including those that the colonial system found difficult
to classify. This appears to have been the case when the chairman of the
captaincy, Antonio José de Morais Durão, discovered the use of such terms
in describing groups in the records of the captaincy of São José do Piauí and
its environs. He commented, ‘Whenever it becomes impossible to distinguish [between] the various mixtures, the term half-caste is used to describe
the resulting individual as it has been done here, encompassing within its
folds the categories of ‘Goat-coloreds’ and ‘curibocas’, the latter being, in
principle, an offspring of a mestiço with an Indian.’ (Apud Mott, 1985).
The mestiço thus becomes a possible semantic reference given that it could
be employed to mean he/she that issued from the union of various races or
groups or one whose origins are varied.
Observing the designations employed in Salvador, we find that the
categories applied to describe Africans went pari passu with their national
origins. One notes, for example, that multiple racial references were used
in the records documenting the discharge of patients from the Hospital of
the Santa Casa da Misericórdia. In such records, apart from the name of
the patient, his social status as well as his residential address and his ethnic
origin were also given: ‘Agostinha da Penha, liberated creole, residing in
the district of Nossa Senhora de Santa Glória’; ‘Antonio da Trinidade, liberated negro, born at the Príncipe Island’; ‘João de Moraes, liberated halfcaste, born in Cape Verde’; ‘Theodozio Pinheiro, light-skinned, resident of
Cabulla, District of Santo Antonio’.9
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From ‘Near White’ to ‘Almost Black’
The different nuances of this classification system cannot but have a
multiplicity of meanings and implications when one looks closely at the
records of the Roda of abandoned children.
Racial Classification in the Roda Dos Expostos
The Roda dos Expostos (collection point for unwanted children), first
established in Salvador in 1726, was very similar to the Lisbon model. The
abandoned babies were picked up and handed over to a nursing mother
under the supervision of a matron. The role of this matron was fundamental since she was the one who would receive the child as soon as it
was picked up, study its features, and record the time at which it had been
picked up. She would then supply the treasurer with various details about
the child, such as sex, colour, birthmarks, clothing type, and also indicate if
any notes had been found on the newborn so that the latter could record
all the information in the Register of Abandoned Babies.10
The records of the Rodas of abandoned children of Bahia in the
1860s reveal that they followed the models used in Lisbon at the time
when the details of colour and objects found on the abandoned child were
recorded:11
Em 1 º de Mayo de 1766, se lançou na Roda dos Engeitados,
uma mulatinha, e trouxe consigo um coeyro, de linho de Colordão, cozido em hum pedaço de linho azul, e white, e hua
camiza de pano de linho, já roto, e no cinteyro huma fitta desbotada de seda.12
(On the 1st of May 1766, a baby mulattress was put on the
abandoned children’s shelf. The baby was wearing a shawl made
of coloured linen sewn onto a piece of blue and white linen, her
linen shirt was already torn, and on her waist, she had a worn
silk band.)
The above-cited example shows the precision with which the information about the type of clothing and the colour of the abandoned child
was recorded. These two elements were usually used to classify the baby.
However, one should not presume that the clothing items found on the
abandoned children indicated an immediate inference about the colour
classification of such children since old and worn-out clothing was not the
exclusive preserve of poor coloured children, nor is the quantity of clothing
the exclusive privilege of the offspring of white gentlemen.
Em 12 de Setembro de 1776 se lançou na roda hum menino a
parecer white, e trouxe duas camizas, hum coeiro de baeta ver273
J oc élio Teles d os S an t os
melha novos hum pano da costa muito velho, e na cintura hum
cadaço, e na cabeça hum lenço de cassa.13
(On the 12th of September 1776, a near-white baby was put on
the shelf for abandoned children. He was wearing two shirts: one
was a new[,] red[,] dyed shawl while the other was of old African
hand-woven material. The child was wearing a shoestring under
these shirts, and on his head, he was wearing a simple scarf.)
Pelas 10 horas da noite foi exposto na Roda do Asylo de N.Sr.
da Miz ª um menino crioulo de idade de um anno doente
trouxe uma camisola de chita Half-indian. Este Menino trouxe
4 camisas e uma camisola de chita desbotada uma touca encarnada. O Menino veio embrulhado em um cobertor de linhagem.
Em 17 de de Outubro de 1871.14
(Around 10 o’clock in the night, a sick creole child was found
on the shelf of the abandoned [children] of Our Lady of Mercy.
The child was about a year old and was wearing a dress made of
Indian chita material. The child also had with him four white
shirts and a chita headdress whose carnation colour had faded
almost completely. The child was found wrapped in a linage
blanket. The date was 17th of October 1871.)
Obviously, certain objects such as clothing items and/or dresses are
signs of the social background from which the children came. rather, they
revealed the social background of at least the mother, if not the father This
factor probably made an impression on the matron and influenced her
judgement. There were many abandoned creole children who were found
with rough woollen dresses, rich calico materials, belts of roses, or headdresses with chita frills. I therefore believe that clothing items should be
considered an important element in the system of race/colour classification of the abandoned children. One could even go as far as arguing that
the clothing enshrined some colour definitions.
It is evident from the records studied that it was not always easy to
define the colours of the abandoned children. It is clear that there were
many instances when the matrons were in doubt as to what colour an abandoned child really was. This appears to be true in the case of a child who
was initially classified as ‘white’ when he was picked up on 7 April 1776,
but further down on the description page, his records reveal the confusion
in the mind of the officer-in-charge, reflecting a certain ambiguity on his
part; he noted that the child ‘looks a bit more like a (Dove-complexioned
pardo) than a brown-skinned.15 How could the officer have confused a
Brown-skinned child for a near-White one?
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From ‘Near White’ to ‘Almost Black’
The term pardo as entered in Moraes’s dictionary is defined as a ‘shade
between white and black, as in the color of a dove’, thus making it possible
to refer to a mulatto as ‘appearing brown in the early hours as well as in the
twilight moments’ (Silva, 1813). However, if in the eyes of the scribe of the
Santa Casa da Misericórdia, the colour of a child could be less an indication of a European exclusivity and more of an indication of the resulting
relationship involving Blacks and Whites, then there should also have been
a category that indicated a linguistic differentiation between the terms
Black and White, while at the same time reserving a shade exclusively
for the term pardo. By this, I am referring to the term ‘pardo disfarçado’
(disguised brown skin), which was first used in the 1770s in reference to
a child described as ‘pardinho disfarçado’, handed over to Anna da Conceição, also referred to as Dove-Brown-complexioned herself, a spinster
who lived in the district of Our Lady of Nazareth.16
Up until the end of the seventeenth century and the early years of the
eighteenth century, the colour classification system employed by the Santa
Casa da Misericórdia was limited to eight colour categories, including the
so-called pardo disfarçado and Indian colour. This is what is shown in the
table below covering the period from 1763 to 1805.17
Color
White
(Dove) Brown
Mulatto
Goat-colored
Creole
Half-caste
Black
Total
Abandoned children (1763–1770)
Number
454
78
74
16
08
01
01
632
Percentage
71,8
12,4
11,7
2,6
1,3
0,1
0,1
100
Source: ASCM, Register No. 4 of Abandoned Children (1763–1770)
Abandoned children (1770–1777)
Color
White
Mulatto
(Dove) Brown
Goat-colored
Creole
Disguised Dove-Brown
Total
Number Percentage
429
71,7
76
12,7
64
10,7
20
3,3
09
1,5
01
0,1
599
100
Source: ASCM, Register No. 5 of Abandoned Children (1770–1777)
275
J oc élio Teles d os S an t os
Abandoned children (1777–1783)
Color
White
Dove-Brown
Mulatto
Goat-coloured
Creole
Black
Disguised Dove-Brown
Total
Number Percentage
320
54,0
213
36,0
27
4,6
16
2,7
11
1,9
03
0,5
02
0,3
592
100
Source: ASCM, Register No. 6 of Abandoned Children (1777–1783)
Color
White
Dove-Brown
Creole
Goat-colored
Mulatto
Half-Indian
Amerindian
Total
Abandoned children (1796–1805)
Number Percentage
422
56,1
248
33,0
29
4,0
27
3,7
23
3,0
01
0,1
01
0,1
751
100
Source: ASCM, Register No. 7 of Abandoned Children (1796–1805)
However, the register shows the possibility of the existence of some
doubt regarding the terms used in the classifications. Two examples are
striking. The first has to do with a boy who was taken to the Santa Casa
da Misericórdia by a liberated Blackwoman named Thereza de Jesus Maria
on 4 October 1783; he was classified as ‘looking white’.18 This phraseology,
which betrays the hesitation of the scribe in defining the colour of the
child, appears in many records and indicates the scribe’s uncertainty as to
what colour to ascribe to such children.
This doubt about the classification system demonstrates the scribe’s
careful attitude of not wanting to confound the social colours in use at that
time. If in the eyes of the scribe of the Santa Casa in the first case, there seems
to be no social naturalization of the colours, the second example shows that,
by the end of the seventeenth century, the concern over following a rigid
colour classification system was commonplace. And this rigour in imposing
the colour system was clearly indicative of the people’s convictions and wishes.
On 21 September 1792, a girl child identified as a mulatress was handed
over to Mrs Ana Barbuda Lobo, wife of Joaquim J. Coelho da Fonseca. It is
interesting to note that D. Ana later returned the child on the ground that
276
From ‘Near White’ to ‘Almost Black’
she found her to be a white child. The case had special repercussions because,
apart from returning the child with the following comment—‘I accepted to
adopt the child because I believed she was a mulatress but I have decided to
return her to the Santa Casa so that she could be exchanged . . . ’—D. Ana
even insisted that the Santa Casa give her a refund of the expenses that she
had incurred on maintaining the white girl given to her in error.19
The final years of the seventeenth century and the early years of the
eighteenth century witnessed a system of social differentiation based on
biological characteristics related to a spectrum of colours. The children
placed on the shelves of the Santa Casa were already branded with the
mark of rejection and abandonment, regardless of the colour of their skin.
Nevertheless, if the record of their skin colour reflects some kind of social
ranking, this was not taken as mere racial conformation as would be the
case in subsequent decades.20 The most interesting fact to note is that this
depended on the moment of studying the features of the child to determine its colour, whether it was done initially by the matron and the scribe
or later when the colours were confirmed, in which case the social colours
acquired and incorporated new meanings. It was precisely at the moment
of confirming the colours that were indicated in the classification system
that one discovers how weird some combinations could be.
The two Records of Confirmation of the Colour of the Abandoned
Children studied belong to the period between 1815 and 1832, and in
both documents one finds details of the moment of examining the child,
which was usually a few months after they had been picked up and given
to a hired nanny:
quando se fizer o pagamento das mezadas, as quaes engeitadas,
serão apresentadas infalivelmente para se fazerem as necessárias
averiguações todas as vezes que as Amas virem receber o pagamento da criação dellas e qualquer mudança que pelo decurso do
tempo hajão de ter nas feições, se fará a competente declaração
na sua respectiva folha que todas vão numeradas e rubricadas
por mim Escrivão atual da Meza, para que não haja engano,
ou duvida de ser o próprio, que a Caza alimenta, e para constar
mandei fazer este termo. Bahia, e Secretaria da Misericórdia, 09
de agosto de 1815. Eu, Francisco Belens.21
(Each time a payment is made for the upkeep of any abandoned
child entrusted to a hired nanny, the child in question must be
presented for inspection so that any claims brought by the nanny
could be verified and any change in the physical development
of the child since the last inspection will be noted and recorded
in the appropriate register maintained by me as the scribe of
277
J oc élio Teles d os S an t os
the house so that no error nor equivocation could occur as to
the identity of the child being maintained by the Santa Casa.
It is to this end that I had this register opened this 9th day of
August, 1815. Signed by me, Francisco Belens, in this city of
Bahia, Secretariat of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia.)
Unfortunately, this kind of register does not exist for the period of the
eighteenth century, which makes it impossible for us to discover whether
the practice of interchanging classificatory terms that was noted in the
1810s was already in vogue during that period. The scrutiny involved in
this confirmation exercise was usually a rigorous one since it was essential
that any doubts as to the colour identity of the child should be cleared at
all costs. Thus, the colour of the skin as well as other biological features
such as hair, mouth, chin, cheek, forehead, nose and ear were all carefully
studied, forming a system of classification whose terms, when added to
the already established social condition of the child in question, could be
interpreted in various ways. This must have been what happened in the
case of a child named Constancia who, after he had been confirmed and
pronounced by the scribe as having ‘brown eyes’, was entrusted to a certain
Manoel Pinto to raise on 16 August 1814.
The more intriguing phenomenon is the use of a double combination
of colours when describing a child’s skin colour. One such instance was the
case of Anna, who was initially registered as ‘brown-skinned white’, but
who was later confirmed as ‘known to be light-skinned’ with big eyeballs
that appeared to be a ‘little on the blue side tending towards brown’, in
spite of her ‘being fairly colored’.22 Another Anna, who was handed over
to a hired nanny on January 05 of 1814 was described in her confirmation
records as a ‘White brunette’, that is, having the colour of ripe wheat that
tended towards brown.23 In some cases, the scribe highlighted the use of
the term ‘brunette’ by putting it in italics. It must be noted that in this complicated system of classification ‘brunette’ was made distinct from brown,
since a child originally registered as brown was reclassified as follows at the
confirmation meeting held on 3 November 1816, ‘confirmed as being dark
brunette’.24 The scribe usually underlined a term to indicate his intention
of reinforcing its application, while he would show his doubts about any
term by crossing it out and replacing it with another term before or after it.
This was evident in the case of a child whose initial identification as ‘brown’
was crossed out and the term ‘goat-colored’ was written above it. The same
thing happened in the case of a boy named João, who was entrusted to
a certain Joanna Maria. The colour ‘brown’ initially entered for him was
crossed out and replaced with ‘white’. To avoid any interrogation of this
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From ‘Near White’ to ‘Almost Black’
substitution, the scribe added a note that read as follows: ‘While verifying
the traits of this child, he was found to be white.’25
These records of the confirmation exercise turned the longstanding
multipolarity that has become our national hallmark. In the eyes of our
eighteenth-century compatriots, goat-coloured and, more especially, white
and brown-coloured acquired possible combinations of our social miscegenation, as can be clearly seen in the table below:
Register No. 1 of Confirmation Records of the Abandoned Children
(1815–1824)
Color
White
Bright white
Brownish-white
Fairly brownish-white
Fairly wheat-brownish-white
Wheat-brownish-white
Pale-brownish-white
Bright-livid-white
Quite-livid-white
Plain white
Plain and pale white
Pale-white
Livid-white
Goat-colored
Dark-goat-colored
Goat-colored brunette
Goat-colored black
Creole
Dove-brown
Light-brown
Bright-brown
Brownish brunette
Fairly brownish brunette
Light-brown
Dove-colored not very brown
Dark dove-colored
Dove-colored not very light
Fairly light dove-colored
Near-white dove-colored
Brunette
Total
Number
189
32
20
4
3
3
2
2
2
1
1
1
1
30
1
1
1
11
158
16
8
5
4
3
2
2
1
1
1
1
507
279
Percentage
37,3%
6,3%
3,9%
0,8%
0,6%
0,6%
0,4%
0,4%
0,4%
0,2%
0,2%
0,2%
0,2%
5,9%
0,2%
0,2%
0,2%
2,2%
31,2%
3,2%
1,6%
1,0%
0,8%
0,6%
0,4%
0,4%
0,2%
0,2%
0,2%
0,2%
100,0%
J oc élio Teles d os S an t os
Register No. 1, which we consulted, made it possible for us to verify
the existence of thirty categories of colour for a total of 507 children registered. It also shows the extent of the possibilities of the colour classification system. The basic categories are four, viz., white, Goat-coloured, creole
and dove-brown; the categories white and dove-brown correspond to 68.5
per cent respectively. The categories bright, brownish, light, pale, brunette
and dark are actually secondary or complementary terms since they can be
added to any of the three basic categories. With the exception of creole, all
the other categories could fall into any category within the classification
scale.
While this volume of the register contains only the records of the
confirmation exercise, Register No. 2 allows us to see the two systems of
classification and to compare their contents. The first register contained
more varieties of combinations—119 terms—while the second register
had 44. The logical explanation for this is the perspective of each individual
scribe, indicating that it is not just a matter of individual classification,
but rather an interpretation reflecting the social practices of the period.
Close observation, and a comparison of the first register and the records
of confirmation of the same with the contents of the second register, show
that there existed the possibility of introducing some changes in certain
categories and/or in adding other categories.
Color
Whites
Dove-colored
Creole
Goat-colored
Total
Number
306
224
24
22
576
Percentage
53,1
38,9
4,2
3,8
100
Source: Register No. 2 of the confirmation of the status of the abandoned children
(1824–1832), ASCM.
Classification in Register
No. 1
White
White
White
White
White
White
Dove-brown complexioned
Dove-brown complexioned
Classification after confirmation
Brownish-white
Dove-brown complexioned
Fairly pure-white
White and light
Fairly light dove-brown complexioned
White and brunette
White
Light dove-brown
280
Total
number
of cases
03
02
02
01
01
01
03
02
From ‘Near White’ to ‘Almost Black’
Dove-brown complexioned
Goat-colored
03
14
Dove-brown complexioned
Dove-brown and light complexioned
Fairly brownish-brunette
01
Dove-brown complexioned
Fairly dark brunette
01
Dove-brown complexioned
Fairly light dove complexioned
02
Dove-brown complexioned
Creole
Goat-colored
02
Goat-colored
Light Goat-colored
01
Goat-colored
Creole
01
44
Total
Source: Register No. 2 of the confirmation of the status of the abandoned children
(1824–1832), ASCM.
Defining the linguistic and social combinations
The data presented above suggest many distinct but related points. The
symbolic language employed in the classification effected by the scribe of
the Santa Casa da Misericórdia reveals the use of some social markers in
colonial Brazil based on a formal model created in the Portuguese metropolis (the categories used by the Santa Casa da Misericórdia in Lisbon to
describe abandoned children were Negro, Black, and White), but which
differs from the latter in its use of a range of local ambivalent categories. If,
according to Homi Bhabha,26 fixation is a sign of cultural/historical/racial
differences in colonial discourses, then the meanings implied in the combination of colour terms indicate new forms of the construction of alterity
by local elites. It is possible to argue that the linguistic/social constructions
used in the classification of abandoned children were not restricted to the
perspective of the members of the elite class on the board of the Santa
Casa, but that the same linguistic arsenal was ‘obtainable’ in other circles
of the city of Salvador.
One track that would be interesting for us to follow is the characterization of the term disguised dove-brown (complexion). This category
whose first appearance was noticed in 1770 spread to other regions in
the following century. This can be seen in the correspondence sent by the
head-captain of São Cristóvão [present state of Sergipe to the Governor
of the state of Bahia on 7 May 1825, in which the captain reported having
arrested some troublemakers among whom were some youngmen of a disguised dove-brown complexion difficult to place, apart from a few youngmen of European origin. As Luiz Mott has argued so well, the distinction
between disguised dove-brown complexion and a mixed white complexion,
or that between a plain dove-brown complexioned and a Goat-coloured
complexion, as contained in this document was very delicate, showing that
both the physical (not just skin colour) as well as the social attributes (the
281
J oc élio Teles d os S an t os
identification of parentage into the whites-controlled world) reflect the
modus operandi of the classification system of colonial Brazil (Apud Mott,
1986: 54).
If these affirmations were pertinent in the universe of adults, in what
way was their use extended to the descriptions of the abandoned children
under the care of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia? After all, the children
were just newborn babies stealthily abandoned on the shelf of the Santa
Casa at dawn, without any possible identification that might indicate who
their parents might be, and in most case without any apparent identification with regard to their affiliation and place within the social structure
of the colonial world. There were very few cases in which an abandoned
child bore some identification mark indicating the social background of its
parents. Some notes or letters attached to the neck of the newborn were
the only signs hinting at the social status of the child’s mother and/or
father. Moreover, this practice was not exclusively followed by the parents
of children classified as being white, since it often happened that children
with dove-brown complexion also bore such notes.
There were even some notes that did not offer any hints as to the
colour or social status of the abandoned child. Such was the case with a
note found on a girl child with dove-brown complexion, which read: ‘This
girl should be called Amancia, she will later be looked for and the person
who can present this note (as proof of having taken care of her) shall be
handsomely rewarded.’ The mother could barely restrain from giving away
her social status. Instead, she mentioned her emotional turmoil: ‘She was
born on the 16th of October 1872, of an unfortunate mother.’
Other such notes even went as far as revealing a direct relationship
between the child and certain members of the local elite. On 2 May 1876,
a white baby boy barely eight days old was dropped off with a note on him
stating, ‘We request that this child be given the utmost care and attention, for it is born of a rich and important family. The father will recover
him in due time and will certainly repay generously any expenses incurred
on his upkeep.’27 If the case of this white baby showed the existence of
relationships considered illegitimate by the local society, possibly involving
members of the local elite, there was another interesting case involving a
dove-brown, half-caste baby, later baptized as Xavier Joaquim de Mattos,
who bore a note that read:
Someone whose condition does not permit [he or she] to raise
a child due to special reasons and especially because he cannot
afford to meet the expenses has decided to drop the child at this
Santa Casa informing that the child has not yet been baptized,
282
From ‘Near White’ to ‘Almost Black’
but has been given the name Joaquim. And, since the parents
could come for him at any moment if their situation improves,
we have left on the child as a mark of recognition a yellow band
tied to its left leg. The child was born on the 22nd of August
1872.28
A question that one cannot refrain from asking is whether Joaquim
was a child born of a relationship that was considered ‘racially’ illegitimate.
All we know is that Joaquim stayed at the Santa Casa for fourteen years.
The strangest note ever was the one found on a baby boy with dovebrown complexion on 17 October 1866. The note, written in French, read:
‘This small boy is hereby left in the custody of this orphanage today, 17th
October, 1866 because the mother is poor and the father is dead. The boy
is already baptized and his name is Emmanuel François. Dear Daughters
of Charity, I implore you to have pity on him.’29 If the child came from
a poor background, as the note claimed, then how did he come to bear a
note written in French? Who could have composed the note? After all,
the knowledge and use of French were the exclusive preserve of the elite.
One can only speculate on this puzzle. The number of notes found with
the abandoned children was unfortunately too small to reveal the social
background of most of them.
Even in the absence of any identification of the parental status of most
of the abandoned children, I believe that the elite who composed the core
of the reception committee at the Santa Casa were never entirely disinterested in defining the colour of the children foisted on them. However, the
most revealing aspect was that other defining elements presented in the
descriptions of the children, such as their physical attributes, never constituted the defining factor of their social colour. In other words, biological
traits such as the mouth or the nose, which found such a prominent place in
the scientific racism of the nineteenth century, were less indicators of social
colour, but were circumscribed all the same in the categories comprising
the actual criteria for such definitions by the Santa Casa da Misericórdia.
One can easily see this in the definitions provided for each of the four basic
colour categories: white, goat-coloured, dove-brown and creole.
White
‘ . . . the abandoned child Crescencia entrusted into the care of Rosa
Maria de Viterbo on 29th March 1819 . . . is White – big head – chestnut hair – high forehead – black eyes – long and pointed nose – smallish
mouth – thin lips – full cheeks and chin – rounded snobbish ears – (he) is
about a month old, and very thin.’30
283
J oc élio Teles d os S an t os
Dove-brown complexioned
‘ . . . (this child) is dove-brown complexioned – big head – flowing
black hair – high angular forehead – well-proportioned black eyes – big,
long nose – rounded cheeks, well-proportioned mouth and lips, normal big
ears, the child is about a year old and is well fed.’31
Goat-colored
‘ . . . the child entrusted into the care of Maria Francisca on the 3rd
March 1819 . . . has Goat-colored complexion – big oblong head – kinky
hair – high forehead – black and big eyes – short, snobbish nose – wide
cheeks – well-proportioned mouth – thin lips – small snobbish ears, the
child is thin and appears to be about a year old.’32
Creole
‘ . . . (this child) is creole – big head – black weedy hair – angular
forehead – simple, dark eyes – long, big nose, a little rounded at the edge
– rounded, well-proportioned mouth and lips – same with the chin – small,
twisted ears.’33
These terms present approximate characteristics. In the areas of similarities shared by the children, they are described as having big oblong
heads, high foreheads and black eyes. The distinctive feature of the White
child that differentiated it from the non-white (dove-brown-complexioned, creole and goat-coloured-complexioned) child is shown by the
description of the nose as ‘long and pointed’, which appears to be an
expressive feature. On the other hand, the distinctive features of the nonwhite children are presented in terms of curly hair (goat-coloured) and
nose (big thick nose—dove-coloured; long nose a little rounded at the
edge—creole; short, snobbish nose—goat-coloured). The cheeks format
seems to be identical for both white and goat-coloured children (oblong)
and dove-coloured and creole (rounded).
Even though these features were presented as distinguishing between
the above-classified groups of White, dove-coloured, creole and goatcoloured children, the contour of the nose did not present any conclusive
evidence as a distinguishing factor in the colour classification system of
colonial Bahia. When compared with the descriptions as contained in the
register of the confirmation of the social status of the abandoned children,
it becomes evident that the nose format is a feature that can apply to any of
the four colour shades, given that it is precisely at the moment of confirmation that the possibilities of combination between the different categories
and their interrelationships with one another were detected. Bernardino,
284
From ‘Near White’ to ‘Almost Black’
‘after examination on the 28 March 1820’, was defined as pure White with
‘pointed nose’, and later, at the conference held on 26 July of the same year,
‘was seen as having dove-colored eyes’. Two other children were also classified in the following manner. The first child, initially classified as White,
later at the confirmation exercise was classified as light-skinned White,
having chestnut hair and a ‘short and thick nose’. The other child, first
classified as White, was later at the confirmation found to look White,
having a ‘big, long nose’.34
The children classified as Brownish White were those having a nose
described as ‘long and a little snobbish’. This was the case with Anna
Joaquina, who also had ‘curly chestnut-colored hair’. Manoel, who was
‘entrusted into the care’ of Ignacia Maria dos Anjos on 6 October 1813,
had a ‘thick nose’ and curly hair. Martinha had dark hair and a ‘rather
snobbish nose that was (too) close to the eyes and a little rounded at the
edge’.35
Those classified under the category of dove-brown complexioned were
also described in a similar manner. A light dove-brown-complexioned child
with ‘curly, black hair’ had a nose that was described as ‘long and pointed’.
Another darkish dove-brown child with ‘blond hair a little bit curly’ was
said to have a ‘slim nose’, while another child of disguised dove-brown
complexion was described as having ‘curly chestnut hair’ and a ‘smallish
nose a little rounded at the edge’. At the last confirmation conference of 18
August 1817, ‘this abandoned child was discovered to possess brown eyes
that were rather bulged, a mouth bigger than normal, thick lips, [a] chin
that is a little clefted as well as big, flat ears’.36
The same long nose, ‘thick and pointed at the edge’, identified in a
creole child was also the distinguishing feature of a certain Domingos classified as light dove-complexioned.37
The classification of a child as brownish white recorded at the conference of 6 August 1824 described him as ‘white, brownish, goat-colored
with short forehead, wide forehead eyes, thin lips, short, thick nose, small
mouth, short, twisted ears’. At another conference held two years later, the
same child was described as having chestnut hair that was also ‘curi’. It is
thus safe to conclude that it was not the physical attributes like the nose
that determined the social characterization of the abandoned children, but
rather it was the system of colour separation that led them to be sorted
into different categories. For how else can one explain the fact that on 7
July 1824 a child with a short, thick nose was classified as light, near-white
dove-colored? It did not seem to matter so much if a child had round
cheeks, black, bulging eyes and big ears. What determined his classifica285
J oc élio Teles d os S an t os
tion was the combination differential of his terms That is the only plausible
explanation for the case of a child initially classified as dove-brown, who
then suddenly became white, ‘with a snobbish nose close to the eyes’, at the
confirmation conference of 1 July 1825.38
A similar situation can be seen in the case of a creole child given out
to a nanny on 19 January 1820: ‘This child is creole – oblong head – black
hair – high, angular forehead, dark eyes – big, thick nose, a little rounded
at the edge – well-proportioned mouth and lips, rounded cheeks and chin
– small, twisted ears.’39 This particular shape of the nose does not appear
to have been the exclusive feature of any particular colour, for another
Record about a little creole boy and a goat-coloured boy described both
of them as possessing a similar nose format: the nose of one boy was ‘big
and snobbish’, while the other’s nose was ‘short and snobbish’. Similarly,
a dove-coloured boy was described on 8 May 1819 as having ‘curly, black
hair, big and thick nose, rounded cheeks, high, angular forehead’.
Conclusion
The colour register analysed in this article has thus shown itself to
be a kind of ‘stamp’ grammatically inscribed on the very structure of our
colonial social relationships. It is not fortuitous that the category of creole
is entirely absent as a combination possibility. The operational system of
colour combinations intentionally omitted categories such as Black and
White, making Creole the repository of these two categories. Even though
the children foisted on the Santa Casa da Misericórdia did not carry with
them any formal indication of their parents’ social status within the hierarchy of slave society—after all, they were mostly abandoned on the shelf of
the Santa Casa under cover of night—their colour attribution automatically placed them in a socially pre-determined position that was probably
open to transformation. In this respect, the observation of a scribe during
a confirmation exercise is revealing. A child originally represented as being
‘pure White, with a big, almost hairless blond head . . .’ was, the scribe
discovered at the confirmation exercise, actually of ‘brownish, wheat color .
. . it appears that the action of time has affected the skin color’.40 After all,
if a White child could become fairly light-skinned dove-coloured, could
not the same transformation happen to a blond White girl, turning her
into a wheat-brown-complexioned child all of a sudden? As it is, the path
of our contemporary dilemmas of ‘racial’ classification was already marked
out a long way back.
286
From ‘Near White’ to ‘Almost Black’
Figure 1: Altar of the main chapel of the Misericordia Church. Source:
Misericordia Database Project.
287
J oc élio Teles d os S an t os
Figure 2: Abandoned child register, July 17, 1783. Source: Santa casa
da Misericordia Archive.
References
Banton, Michael. (1977). A idéia de raça. Lisboa: Perspectivas do Homem, Edições
70.
Butler, Kim D. (1998). “Freedom given, Freedoms won: Afro-Brazilians in postabolition São Paulo and Salvador.” New Jersey: New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press.
Degler, Carl N. (1976). Nem preto nem branco: Escravidão e relações raciais no Brasil
e nos EUA. Rio de Janeiro: Editorial Labor do Brasil.
Fry, Peter. (1989). “O que a cinderela negra tem a dizer sobre a política racial no
Brasil. Revista USP 28: 122–35.
Guimarães, Antonio Sérgio. (1999). Racismo e anti-racismo no Brasil. São Paulo:
Editora 34.
Hanchard, Michael. (1989). “Americanos’, brasileiros e a cor da espécie humana:
uma resposta a Peter Fry.” Revista USP 31: 164–75.
288
From ‘Near White’ to ‘Almost Black’
Inventário da Criação dos Expostos do Arquivo Histórico da Santa Casa da
Misericórdia de Lisboa. 1998.
Maggie, Ivonne. (1996). “Áqueles a quem foi negada a cor do dia: as categorias cor
e raça na cultura brasileira.” in Marcos C. Maio e Ricardo V. Santos (orgs.)
Raça, Ciência e Sociedade, Rio de Janeiro: Fio Cruz/ Centro Cultural Banco
do Brasil, 210-225.
Mattoso, Kátia de Q. (1988). “O filho da escrava (em torno da lei do ventre livre).”
Revista Brasileira de História 16, vol. 8: 37–55.
Marcílio, Maria Luíza. (1998). História social da criança abandonada. São Paulo:
Hucitec: 146.
Monteiro, John M. (1996) “As ‘raças’ indígenas no pensamento brasileiro do
império.” In Marcos C. Maio e Ricardo V. Santos (Eds.) Raça, Ciência e
Sociedade, Rio de Janeiro: Fio Cruz/ Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 1254.
Mott, Luiz. (1985). Piauí Colonial. População, economia e sociedade. Teresina:
Projeto Pertrônio Portella
——. (1986). Sergipe Del Rey: População, Economia e Sociedade. Fundesc.: 54.
Oliveira, Maria I. Côrtes de. (1997). “Quem eram os ‘negros da Guiné’?: A origem
dos africanos na Bahia.” Afro-Ásia 19/20: 37–74.
Pierson, Donald. (1971). Brancos e pretos na Bahia. São Paulo: Cia. Editora Nacional.
Queiroz, Delcele M. (2001). Raça, gênero e educação superior. Ph.D. thesis, Faculdade de Educação, UFBA.
Russel-Wood. (1981). Fildagos e Filantropos: A Santa Casa da Misericórdia da Bahia,
1550–1755. Brasília: Editora da UnB.
Sansone, Livio. (1996).“Nem somente preto ou negro: o sistema de classificação
racial no Brasil que muda.” Afro-Ásia 18: 165–88.
Schwartz, Lílian. (1993). O espetáculo das raças. São Paulo: Cia. das Letras.
Seyferth, Giralda. (1996). “Construindo a nação: hierarquias raciais e o papel do
racismo na política de imigração e colonização.”In Marcos C. Maio and
Ricardo V. Santos (eds.), Raça, Ciência e Sociedade. Rio de Janeiro: Fio Cruz/
Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil: 41–58.
Silva, Antonio Moraes. (1813). Diccionario da Língua Portugueza . Lisboa: Typographia Lacerdina.
Viana, Luís. (1988). O negro na Bahia. São Paulo: Nova Fronteira
Vilhena, Luís dos Santos. (1969). A Bahia no século XVIII. Salvador: Itapuã.
Notes
1.
2.
See Sansone, 1996, pp.165–88; Degler, 1976; Fry, 1989, pp.122–35; Pierson,
1971; Hanchard, 1989, pp.164–75.
There were many contemporary works that in analysing different problems
and periods of the twentieth century fell back basically on the studies pro289
J oc élio Teles d os S an t os
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
duced in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially on the postabolition period. See, for example: Seyferth, 1996, pp. 41–58; Monteiro,
1996, pp.15–22; Maggie, 1996, pp. 225–34; Guimarães, 1999; Queiroz,
2001; Butler, 1998.
Livro 1 º do Tombo (Escrituras, aforamentos e testamentos), 1629–1635
Livro 2 º do T ombo (1652–1685), p. 16.
Livro 2 º do Tombo.
Even though eighteenth-century literature shows that such uses were acceptable, one notices that the term crioulinho (little creole) came into more frequent use in the nineteenth century. See Mattoso, 1988, pp. 37–55 .
See Mattoso, 1988.
See, for instance, Viana, 1988 For a more detailed discussion of the imprecisions of racial terminologies during the slavery era, see Oliveira, 1997, pp.
37–74.
Recibos de Despesas (1751–1752).
See Inventário da Criação dos Expostos do Arquivo Histórico da Santa Casa da
Misericórdia de Lisboa, 1998; Marcílio, 1998, p.146. The importance of the
posts of treasurer as well as that of the secretary, and the highest authority,
the chairman, could be noted in the report of Vilhena, 1969, which, referring
to the wealth of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia at that time pointed out that
the number of candidates vying for these posts exceeded those of the Senate
(p.125). As Russel-Wood observes in his book, 1981, members of the Santa
Casa in Bahia were from the landed class, being owners of plantations and
cattle (p. 90). The colour politics reflected in the record of the Santa Casa was
thus essentially from the perspective of this ‘noble’ class of Bahian landowners.
The data used here are taken from the period of the 1860s since previous
records (from the first register to the third) found in the Archives of the
Santa Casa da Misericórdia have been completely destroyed by the effects of
time.
Livro 4 º dos Engeitados (1763-1770)p. 120.
Livro 5 º dos Expostos (1770–1777).
Livro da Roda, no. 5.
Livro da Roda, no. 5...
Livro 6o dos Engeitados (1770–1777).
The higher percentage of White children among those abandoned during
the seventeenth century has been discussed by Russel-Wood, op. cit., p. 247.
He tries to show that a significant number of illegitimate children were
rejected by White families, also that some liberated families tended to decide
to accept such children under the ‘compadrio’ system as well as the fact that
coloured children born to slave women tended to be kept by white masters
within their plantations. See also Kátia de Q. Mattoso, op. cit.
7th register of the abandoned children (1796–1805), p. 15.
290
From ‘Near White’ to ‘Almost Black’
19. 7th register of the abandoned…
20. The general consensus among scholars is that the concept of race indicates
the existence of permanent physical hereditary features among the human
species. This concept was introduced into Brazil at the end of the first half of
the nineteenth century. See Schwartz, 1993; Banton, 1977.
21. 1st register of the confirmation of the status of the abandoned children (1815–
1824).
22. 1st register of the confirmation of the status of the abandoned children…, p. 3.
23. 1st register of the confirmation of the status of the abandoned children… The definition given to the term ‘moreno’ by Antonio de M. Silva, op. cit., was ‘having
dark-brownish dove color’.
24. 1st register of the confirmation of the status of the abandoned children…
25. 1st register of the confirmation of the status of the abandoned children…
26.
27.
28.
29.
Homi Bhabha, O local da cultura, Editora UFMG, 1998
Livro 6 º, p. 93.
Livro 6, p. 58.
Livro 2 º das Confrontações...
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37
38.
39.
40.
Livro 2 º das Confrontações... ...p. 160.
Livro 1 das Confrontações, p. 179.
Livro 1 das Confrontações p.159.
Livro 1 das Confrontações , p. 179.
Livro 2 o, p. 186, 88, 155.
Livro 11 º, p. 14 213, 268.
Livro 11..., p. 382, 370, 166.
Livro 11., p.210.
Livro 2 o....
Livro 1....
Livro 1 º, p. 50.
291
Chapter 12
‘Terras de Quilombo’: Land
Rights, Memory of Slavery,
and Ethnic Identification
in Contemporary Brazil
Hebe Mattos
gh
I
n 1998, a joint programme involving the Fundação Palmares [Palmares
Foundation], a semi-autonomous division of the Brazilian Ministry of
Culture (MinC), and the Instituto de Terras [Land Institute] of the State
of Rio de Janeiro brought together a team of anthropologists and historians under the direction of anthropologist Eliane Cantarino O’Dywer to
conduct a series of anthropological surveys to identify which of the state’s
black peasant communities could be officially designated as ‘remanescentes
de quilombos’ [descendants of maroon communities] under the criteria
established by the Brazilian Anthropological Association (ABA). I participated in this project, co-writing the report about São José da Serra, a small
rural community located in the municipality of Valença, state of Rio de
Janeiro. This article presents some reflections drawn from that experience.
In 1988, Brazil commemorated the centennial of the definitive abolition of slavery. At the same time, abertura, a slow process of re-democratization following the prolonged military dictatorship of 1964–85, was
drawing to a close with the consolidation of civilian governance and the
ratification of a new federal constitution. Thus, one hundred years after the
end of slavery (1888) and the promulgation of the first constitution of the
Brazilian Republic (1891), the meanings of abolition and Brazilian citizenship were once again being discussed simultaneously. The memory of
slavery, property rights, and racial ideology once again intermixed, as new
H ebe M at t os
disputes arose regarding the possibilities for Brazilian society to consider
compensating the descendants of slaves.1
The debates surrounding the constitutional provisions for true universal suffrage (overturning a long prohibition of suffrage for illiterates),
and the demarcation of indigenous lands, took place within a context of
intense political mobilization among varied segments of Brazilian society.
The so-called movimento negro [black movement] took an active part in
these debates. Its greatest victory came with the approval of Article 68 of
the Transitory Constitutional Rulings of the 1988 Constitution. Similar
to provisions regarding constitutional protections for indigenous lands,
Article 68 authorized the demarcation of lands held by black communities
that were ‘descendants of the quilombos’.2
A complete overview of the paths that led to the formulation and
approval of this constitutional clause would fill the pages of another article.
In summary form, one may attribute the clause to the concerted efforts of
intellectuals affiliated with the most organized factions of the movimento
negro, who, throughout the 1980s, were able to effect a significant dislocation of images related to slavery and abolition in the public mind. The
image of the kind white princess (Isabel, the so-called Redeemer) liberating
by decree Brazil’s submissive and well-treated slaves, which had hitherto
been the dominant paradigm in Brazilian school textbooks, now began to
be replaced by an image of a cruel and violent system against which the
black slave had resisted, using various strategies, including flight and the
formation of quilombos [maroon communities]. In this process of inversion, Zumbi dos Palmares, the last leader of the great seventeenth-century
quilombo of Palmares (situated near the border between the present-day
states of Alagoas and Pernambuco in the Brazilian north-east) became,
in place of the princess, the true hero of the Brazilian people who had
descended from Africans. Throughout the 1980s, 20 November, the anniversary of Zumbi’s death (in 1697), was declared a municipal holiday in
Salvador (Bahia) and Rio de Janeiro. The content of textbooks that dealt
with slavery in Brazil was also substantially changed during this decade,
and certain isolated rural black communities became notorious as possibly
being the descendants of quilombolas [maroons]. This process of ethnic
affirmation culminated with the adoption of Article 68.
The practical application of Article 68, however, soon revealed itself to
be extremely complicated, initially provoking divisive controversies among
anthropologists and historians. There was no historical phenomenon in
Brazil whose dimensions could be compared to the Saramaka of Suriname
or the former maroon communities of Jamaica, with historical territories
294
‘ Terras de Quilombo’
defined by colonial treaties. How, then, could the government define and
regulate those rural groups that might be descendants of the quilombos?
The expression ‘quilombo remnants’, defined strictly as historic continuities
of communities established by escaped slaves, could be applied to only a few
select groups, principally those found in the Amazonian region. Richard
Price strongly criticized the first anthropological surveys with which Brazilian anthropologists had attempted to identify remnant quilombo areas.
Price stressed that these reports were based on a superficial and imprecise
characterization of certain contemporary black peasant groups as being
descended from quilombola communities (Price, 1999: 239-65).
On the other hand, within the context of the many land tenure disputes then active in Brazil, many people considered it a grave error that the
so-called Terras de preto [Blacks’ Lands] were not included in the constitutional ruling. The memory of slavery served as an axis around which
many black peasant groups organized their demands for legal land tenure.
This phenomenon was especially common in the north-eastern state of
Maranhão, but could also be found under other names throughout Brazilian territory (Almeida, 1989; 2002). Additionally, the approval of the
constitutional ruling obviously produced an extraordinary reinforcement
of black identity among rural Brazilians. This, in turn, exerted a noticeable
influence upon many agrarian conflicts already underway.3 Today, hundreds of communities throughout the nation are asking that their lands be
recognized as remnants of quilombos.4
From an academic and juridical viewpoint, the path to a resolution
of the controversy appeared with the publication of a document that
operationally defined ‘remnants of quilombo communities’.5 It claimed
that the terms ‘quilombo’ and ‘remnants of quilombos’ had undergone a
true ‘semantic shift’ based on the mobilization of black rural communities
that had begun to call themselves by these names. From an operational
viewpoint, the legal expression ‘remnants of quilombo communities’ was
used to generically designate rural black communities that had been established without land titles in determined areas based upon a common origin
linked to the experience of slavery. This use legitimized collective rights to
occupied land, and configured certain ethnic groups as being referenced to
determined territories (O’Dwyer, 1995).6
The ‘quilombo communities’ of the State of
Rio de Janeiro
What is today the state of Rio de Janeiro in the south-east of Brazil was
at the end of the nineteenth century the principal slave-holding province
295
H ebe M at t os
of the Brazilian Empire (1822–89).7 A productive regime of small- and
medium-sized slave holdings dominated the lowlands surrounding the
imperial capital city of Rio de Janeiro, producing food and farm goods. To
the north, there was an important sugar-producing complex dating from
the eighteenth century. Crossing over the coastal mountain range known
as the Serra do Mar, one encountered an expansive frontier of intense
coffee cultivation in the Paraíba River Valley, which has been dated from
the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the 1930s, coffee had become
the country’s primary export. Until the definitive abolition of the transatlantic African slave trade in 1850, Bantu-speaking African slaves brought
over from Angola had principally worked the Paraíba Valley plantations.
In the frontier areas, these slaves formed up to 90 per cent of a typical
plantation’s labour force (Slenes, 1991-1992). After this date, the coffee
plantations continued to buy captive labourers from the less prosperous
areas, acquiring them from the owners of small- and medium-sized properties. This commerce formed an immense internal slave-trafficking chain
that involved several Brazilian provinces.8
Even though Rio de Janeiro contained the majority of the last slaves
to be liberated in Brazil in 1888, only six small rural black communities
were officially identified as quilombo remnants in the state. The first two
communities were Sant’ana (in the municipality of Quatiz) and São José
da Serra (in the municipality of Valença) in the western Paraíba Valley, a
pioneering area of coffee planting in the state, which had suffered a great
economic blow after the abolition due to the high indebtedness of the
property owners and soil exhaustion.9 The other four communities were
Santa Rita do Bracuhy (in Angra dos Reis), Rasa (in Búzios), Caveira (in
São Pedro da Aldeia), and Campinho da Independência (in Paraty). The
latter four are situated along coastal areas near ports that had been involved
in the illegal African slave trade during the period 1831–50.10 Today, the
local economies of these port cities are heavily geared towards tourism.
Starting with their geographic identification and demarcation, there
are certain basic similarities among these communities. They are all in
areas that received a great inflow of Bantu-speaking Africans during the
illegal phase of the transatlantic slave trade. This phase also coincided with
the expansion of coffee cultivation in the state.
In the social memory of the four coastal communities, the clandestine slave trade is emphasized along with the differences between the
recently arrived slaves and those slaves who were already established on the
coastal properties that received this traffic. From there, the new captives were
sent into the coffee and cane fields of the province’s interior. This practice is
296
‘ Terras de Quilombo’
confirmed by written sources, at least in the cases of the fazendas of Floresta
and of Santa Rita do Bracuhy, both owned by Joaquim de Souza Breves, in
Mangaratiba and Angra dos Reis, respectively (Abreu, 1995; Breves, 1966).
According to Eliane Cantarino O’Dwyer, Praia da Rasa, in Cabo Frio, played
a similar role in the clandestine slave trade to the sugar regions of the north
of the province. A man called José Gonçalves controlled this trade at the
old Jesuit fazenda of Campos Novos (O’Dwyer, 1998). Memories of the
clandestine slave trade appeared spontaneously in the testimonies of several
members of the aforementioned black coastal communities.
The other two identified communities were situated in Paraíba Valley,
outside of the coastal region where large numbers of slaves from Bantu
regions arrived in the 1830s and 1840s. At the time of abolition, established
communities that had descended from these Bantu slaves predominated in
this region.
A significant economic decline followed the abolition of slavery in both
these areas and continued well into the twentieth century. In the absence of
strong local market forces, the communities of the formerly enslaved and
their descendants managed to enjoy a certain degree of communal stability
and autonomy. This equilibrium endured until relatively recently when the
growth of tourism began to destabilize traditional land-tenure patterns. A
period of conflict followed, resulting in substantial loss of customary rights
and a greater or lesser degree of destruction of the traditional ways of life.
Different processes of disputes and quarrels occurred in each case.
Since the end of the 1980s, after many struggles in the recent past,
the demands for land and the identities of these groups were reshaped
by the claims pertaining to terras de quilombo. At the same time, the
numbers and influence of their allies substantially increased (among these
was the MinC, via the Palmares Foundation). The communities recuperated Bantu cultural practices, especially the musical practices known as
jongo and caxambu.11 In the new context which favoured legitimizing land
rights, elements that reinforced the groups’ ethnic boundaries in relation
to the wider society (such as the valorization as differential marks of such
cultural practices as jongo and the maintenance of an exclusive cemetery
in Santa Rita do Bracuhy) were emphasized. Two of these communities
have since been titled as ‘quilombo descendants’ (Quatiz and Campinho
da Independência).
The São José da Serra Community
For some time now, anthropology and social history have made evident
the political meanings of notions of ethnic belonging and social identity.
297
H ebe M at t os
The São José da Serra community is paradigmatic in this sense, constructing the cultural heritage of its ancestors and its relation to the lands it
has occupied for over a century based upon its relation to the memory of
slavery and abolition.
Negro no cativeiro. Passou tanto trabalho. Ganhou sua liberdade.
No dia 13 de maio [Black in captivity. So much work endured. Won his
liberty. On 13 May.] is sung each year to the sound of the timbus [handmade drums constructed from hollow tree trunks and covered with animal
skins at their extremities], while jongo is sung and caxambu is danced in
celebrations of 13 May, which can last a number of days.
When I first contacted the group in 1998 through the Palmares
Foundation Project/ITERJ, it had already obtained widespread public
recognition, and even a certain notoriety, as a community descended from
ex-slaves. One of its members (Antônio Nascimento Fernandes - PFL)
had beenre-elected in 1996 as a city councilman, obtaining a public school
and a church for the community’s use, both situated on the lands of the old
fazenda. This councilman also helped in transforming the 13 May celebrations into full-blown jongo festivals (as well as extending them to other
important dates of the abolitionist calendar), attracting the attention of
journalists, researchers, and lovers of traditional black music in general.
São José da Serra consists of a privately owned fazenda located some
13 km. from the district seat of Santa Isabel do Rio Preto, in the municipality of Valença, state of Rio de Janeiro. In 1998, seventy-seven people,
including children and adults, lived in this community of sixteen houses,
most of them made of mud and sticks, roofed with straw and with beaten
dirt floors. Despite the arrival of electric energy, the style of the houses
had not changed even in 2004, when the final version of this essay was
written. The fazenda’s owner has a house located at some distance from
the community, which principally functions as a country retreat. It is of
relatively recent construction, typical of vacation homes built in the state
after 1970. In 1998, the community did not have electricity, and even the
lights of the landowner’s house were produced by a generator. Water comes
from nearby springs and outhouses serve as privies, as is traditional among
the rural populations of this region. The fazenda is 2.5 km. away from
the nearest highway, where public transportation is available. Around the
houses, corn, beans, fruit, legumes, and greens are cultivated. There is some
small-scale animal husbandry (chickens and pigs). Most people manage to
make ends meet by working as day labourers in the corn and bean plantations of the landowner, receiving around US$2.50 per day for their labour
(in 1998), or in urban activities in Santa Isabel, Conservatória, or Valença.
298
‘ Terras de Quilombo’
Within the community, Manoel Seabra and ‘Dona’ Zeferina, the group’s
elders, act as religious and political leaders. They speak for the whole, and
describe themselves as Catholic and umbandista [practitioner of umbanda,
an Afro-Brazilian religion], according to Manoel Seabra. ‘Dona’ Zeferina
is a respected mãe de santo [literally: saint-mother; female spiritual leader,
common to umbanda cults]. She runs an umbanda centre that is attended
by people from as far away as Valença and even Rio de Janeiro, according
to the community residents. Her brother, Manoel Seabra, who also runs a
spiritual centre in the community, assists her. According to him, Pedro, their
paternal grandfather, came from Africa and was of the Cabinda nation. In
Brazil, he was purchased by a farmer, who mistreated him. In his words, he
‘was punished a lot and ran away to here’,12 ‘here’ being the Ferraz fazenda,
today’s Fazenda São José da Serra. In this place, the grandfather lived until
the end of his life because, according to Manoel Seabra, Dr Ferraz was very
strict, but he didn’t hit, he didn’t punish very much . . . Poor man. In the
other place, he’d been tied up and punished a lot.’ His grandfather no longer
wanted to leave this place. There, his sons, grandsons, great-grandsons, and
great-great grandsons were born. ‘We also don’t plan on leaving here, no
way. We like it here a lot. Born and raised here, I ain’t leaving’ (Manoel
Seabra).13
In Manoel Seabra’s narrative, we see the figure of the benevolent slave
owner, a recurrent character in many of the so-called ‘origin myths’ of
‘Negro lands’ in Brazil (Baiocchi, 1983; Bandeira, 1988; Monteiro, 1985;
Queiroz, 1983) becoming one who takes in runaway slaves. According to
him, Ferraz’s fazenda came to be popularly known as a quilombo.
They said: the quilombo’s here, at Fazenda São José . . . that’s
what my father said, yes. My father, grandfather. . . (I asked:
what did quilombo mean to them?) Quilombo was why they’d
run away, right? It was in a hidden place. Grandpa that this,
here, was a quilombo. It was a quilombo. ( . . . ) They would
only say quilombo, they kept on saying quilombo. The quilombo
fazenda. That’s what my grandparents said ( . . . ) my grandparents on my father’s side, who ran away to here, too (Manoel
Seabra).
Manoel Seabra’s testimony is clearly structured in such a way as to legitimate the community’s quilombo condition. We can especially see this
in the interesting alterations of meaning that transform the Fazenda do
Ferraz into a true quilombo. In fact, the community of São José is today
more and more identified as ‘the quilombo of São José’.
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H ebe M at t os
In the last eight years, a series of modifications in the group’s internal
organization and political representation have occurred. There has been a
continuous process of increasing the number of the group’s allies, directly
associated with a reinforcement of the group’s ethnic identity. This process
has led to the configuration of a new quilombola identity. Some years ago,
Valença’s parish priest, Father Medório, began working to recover the community’s cultural traditions. He respected the traditional leadership and
brought the drums and ‘black songs’ into the local church. He encouraged
the community to construct a church within the grounds of the fazenda.
Before him, the Catholic priests had always rejected the group’s traditions,
calling them ‘macumba stuff ’ (a depreciative name for umbanda religious
practices). In 1995, Father Medório conducted a mass in the Santa Isabel
church, at which he called on the whites who were present to kneel down
and ask for the forgiveness of the blacks.
. . . it was such a beautiful mass! . . . Father Medório put the
whites on their knees to ask the Blacks for forgiveness for what
their great-grandfathers had done to ours . . . he asked that
everyone kneel down and raise their hands to us for forgiveness
. . . it was a very enchanted moment! It was a mass that lasted
four hours, everyone in the church kneeling . . . it was beautiful!
It was a very important and beautiful thing . . . he asked everyone who was white, everyone from the community and these
parts around here.14
It is not difficult to imagine the symbolic strength that this kind of public
display had in reinforcing the ethnic boundaries of the group with regard
to the larger society around them.
Today, there is a church built on fazenda lands for the use of the community. Inside, a monthly mass is held on an altar whose decoration shows
a Black Jesus as a child learning carpentry from a black Saint Joseph. The
current community priest, Francisco, is also Black. When we visited São
José, the whole community was involved in a thanksgiving mass for the
ordination of yet another Black father in the Valença diocese, invited to
play drums and sing during the ceremony, led by Mrs. Zeferina.
The community’s principal cultural manifestation is the 13 May
holiday, which celebrates the members’ identity as descendants of ex-slaves
commemorating liberation. On this day, all the residents pitch in to prepare
for the event, whose high point is the caxambu dance, which involves many
of them. The entire affair is carried out to the sound of drums, the only
musical instrument that accompanies the singing and dancing. According
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‘ Terras de Quilombo’
to Mrs. Terezinha, up until 1998 the celebrations generally lasted from
May 1 to May 13.
In many of the Black/quilombo communities in Rio de Janeiro, the
practice of jongo and caxambu, referred to only in the group’s memory,
are now being reborn under the actual conjuncture of ethnic affirmation.
In the case of São José, however, as far as we were able to confirm, jongo
songs, caxambu dancing, and the festivities of the abolitionist calendar are
old community practices, never effectively interrupted, which have only
become more solemn and intensified over the recent years. The lyrics of
the jongos are quite varied and often improvised by the singers. Some traditional songs that reinforce the community’s black identity were sung for
the anthropologist Lídia Meireles (co-author of the demarcation report)
and were written down by her during the time when she lived in the community in 1998.
Nasci em Angola
Congo me criou
Eu sou lá de Moçambique
Sou negro sim, senhor
Lê, lê, lê, lê, lê...
I was born in Angola
Congo created me
I am from Mozambique
I am Black, yes sir
Lê, lê, lê, lê, lê...
The Historical Problem15
How did the São José da Serra community arrive at their present form
of organization and status? Responding to this question does not mean
looking for ‘truths’ and ‘untruths’ in the community’s memory. On the contrary, it means trying to understand the historic process and specific social
and political relations that developed and transformed the internal relations of the community until it achieved its present configuration. It also
means understanding the relations that the community maintains with
the land and the owners of the Fazenda São José as well as the group’s
collective memory.
We will begin with Manoel Seabra’s testimony, taken by Lídia Meireles and me. It is characterized by a firm determination to convince us
to classify the group as the remnants of a quilombo. It emphasizes, in
particular, his paternal lineage. According to Manoel Seabra, his paternal
grandparents were married on a fazenda called ‘Boca do Túnel’, where they
were harshly punished. They ran away to the Fazenda do Ferraz, whose
owner took them in. From that point on, the fazenda became known as
the ‘Quilombo do Ferraz’.
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H ebe M at t os
It is worth cross-checking this testimony with the first interview
given by Dona Zeferina, his sister, and which was carried out in a different
context, a point at which the new concept of quilombo had not been so
widely and deeply elaborated. This interview was conducted by Ana Maria
Lugão Rios on 15 May 1995, and was deposited in the Memória do Cativeiro [Memory of Captivity] archives of the Oral History and Image Lab
at the Fluminense Federal University. It was developed as a part of several
oral testimonies to be used in her doctoral thesis in history (Rios, 2001).
There are some basic coincidences in the two testimonies. Dona Zeferina
and her brother Manoel Seabra were born around 1920.16 Both talk about
their father’s generation, which was born shortly before or after abolition at
the end of the nineteenth century (the so-called ‘free womb’ children), and
their grandparents, born before 1871, when the Rio Branco Law [Law of
the Free Womb] was passed.17 When they refer to the legal owners of the
Fazenda São José, the first name they cite is that of ‘Dr. Ferraz’.
It is not a coincidence that the newsmagazine Isto É, in a brief overview of the community’s collective memory, affirmed that ‘with the Golden
Law, the community’s ancestors were graced with a chunk of the Ferraz
family lands, the Ferraz being the owners of a coffee-producing fazenda’.18
There is a record of a certain Coronel Fernando Antônio Ferraz in the
Valença registrar’s office, the husband of Vulcana de Araújo Leite Ferraz,
who bought and sold lands in Santa Isabel do Rio Preto (including the
Fazenda São José) from 1895 until 1940, when he sold the Fazenda da
Empreitada, one of Dr. Ferraz’s fazendas cited in the testimony of Mrs.
Zeferina and her brother Manoel. In spite of this, no episode of land donation can be found (at least originally) in the main collective memory of the
community. In the testimony of both Mrs. Zeferina and Mr. Manoel, the
relationship of the community with the Fazenda São José lands is organized chronologically around two variables: the type of produce grown
on the fazenda, and who was its owner during each phase. In this way,
we are presented with the following chronological organization of the
community’s history:
Phase 1: Coffee/ Dr Ferraz (c. 1888– c. 1940)
According to D. Zeferina, Dr Ferraz owned a complex of fazendas
(Aconchego, Empreitada, São José). He had bought them all together,
leaving lands at São José ‘to the people there, he bought them and left
them alone’. They lived at São José and had free use of the land to plant
corn and beans and to raise goats, pigs, chickens, and even horses. The
heads of households also had, according to Mr. Manoel Seabra, the obligation to work from Monday to Saturday on Dr. Ferraz’s orders in the coffee
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‘ Terras de Quilombo’
fields of all his fazendas. This was basically during the life of the parents
and the infancy of the interviewees.
Phase 2: From coffee to cattle/ Dr Ferraz/ his son Armando/ his sonin-law Benedito Pinho (c. 1930–c. 1950)
This phase marks the passage of the interviewees to adulthood. The narratives are marked by the association of two different processes: the withdrawal of Dr Ferraz and his substitution as administrator by his heirs, first
his son and then his son-in-law, and the decrease in the necessity for labour
on the fazendas as coffee was substituted by grazing land. Arbitrariness and
a loss of customary rights marked this period. The community was confined
to a determined area of the farm, and even the use of this part was threatened from time to time. Mr Manoel relates that Dr Armando frequently
threatened to burn down the community’s houses unless the residents
agreed to give him services in the coffee fields or pastures, according to the
needs of the administrator. All of the community’s horses were taken away
and sold, and the raising of large animals was banned. Both interviewees
related the story of the loss of the horses. It is in this context that both Mr.
Manoel and Mrs. Zeferina relate that Dr Ferraz exercised his will for the
benefit of the community for the last time, having previously retired from
Santa Isabel to Rio de Janeiro (‘Don’t you kick my little darkies out of São
José’). His wishes were partially fulfilled by his son-in-law, who nevertheless
confined the community to a restricted area (which everything indicates to
have been around 35 hectares, while the historical fazenda encompassed
more than 100 hectares) and banned the husbandry of large animals.
Phase 3: Cattle/ ‘Seu Suinte’ Leite Pinto Ferraz (c. 1940–c. 1970)
Despite the attempts to restrict land use during the preceding phase,
the community continued to freely plant fields of corn, rice, and beans for
themselves on the ‘restricted’ land, as well as raise pigs and chickens. The
men, in particular (but not exclusively), dedicated themselves to ‘herding’ on
the lands of the fazenda and its neighbours for wages. The coffee cycle had
reached an end and job opportunities in that field around São José visibly
retreated, being substituted with grazing. Many people left the community, heading off in particular to the orange plantations in the Fluminense
Lowlands. In the testimony of both interviewees (but particularly in that
of Mr. Manoel), there are clear indications that the landowner’s family had
suffered a relative impoverishment or loss of status. They came to reside
in a small stone house on the farm, losing the title ‘Doctor’ (becoming
instead ‘Seu Suinte’) and establishing godparent relationships with the
community’s most important personages (like Mr. Manoel Seabra).
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Beginning in the 1940s, the old fazendas of the Ferraz family began
to be sold one at a time: Empreitada (sold by Fernando Ferraz in 1940),
Aconchego, and then São José. Informally talking to Lídia and me, Mrs.
Zeferina complained, still surprised years after the fact: ‘Mr. Suinte’s son
sold the land without even consulting us!’
Phase 4: Corn, beans, leisure/ the current owner (c. 1970– )
This is, to a certain degree, the contemporary phase, with the current
owner of the lands. For the first time, the residents lost the right to freely
plant their own corn and beans. The crops passed under the control of the
owner, and the community was restricted to the use of the lands immediately adjacent to their houses. In 1998, in order to plant a coffee patch on
a hill, Seu Manoel Seabra had to ask for the landowner’s authorization,
which was only given on the condition that he pay over a third of the
produce. Despite this, by the end of the 1980s the community had grown
in social and political importance, establishing strong alliances both inside
and outside of the municipality, while constructing a public school and
a church for their own use. They also had become a tourist and cultural
attraction for the Santa Isabel district and, indeed, the municipality of
Valença.19
The community’s oral history is certainly in harmony with recent historical research regarding the social history of slavery and the immediate
post-emancipation period. Even so, we are left without an explanation
as to what conditions produced the historic organization of the Fazenda
São José and its identification as a slave-descent kinship group linked to a
determined territory to which they, contradictorily, recognize an ‘owner’.
Actually, Fernando Antônio Ferraz was not the first owner of the São
José da Serra old coffee plantation. A more complete genealogical research
based on new interviews and birth and marriage ecclesiastic data20 showed
that all the current residents of the São José da Serra community were
descended from only one slave couple called Tertuliano and Miquelina,
married ‘according to the Roman rite’, and residing on the Fazenda São
José da Serra, José Gonçalves Roxo, owner, during the 1860s, as the following diagram shows.
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‘ Terras de Quilombo’
TERTULIANO and MIQUELINA (slaves of José Gonçalves Roxo)
baptized
Dionísio
(20/05/1866)
married as
Dionísio Crioulo
(25/5/1889)
to
Zeferina Crioula*
PARENTS
of
Brandina Maria
married in 1903 to
Manoel Pereira do
Nascimento
son of Pedro
Costa Seabra and
Militana Maria de
Jesus**
Geraldo Preto
(03/4/1870)
married as
Geraldo Fernandes
(28/9/1889)
to
Apolinária da
Conceição*
PARENTS
of
José Geraldo Fernandes (Fernando)
married to
Maria Crescença
PARENTS
of Sebastião
Antônio Fernando,
PARENTS
married to the
of the interviewees interviewee
Zeferina on
Manoel and
2/6/1942
Zeferina
*
**
João e Maria
(17/4/1881)
Maria married as
Maria Francisca
Miquelina da
Conceição
to
José Sarapião
Ferreira*
Vitalina Preta
(20/10/1885)
married as
Vitalina Miquelina
da Conceição
(12/2/1912)
to
José Roberto*
PARENTS
of Maria Vitalina
PARENTS
da Conceição,
of the interviewees married to the
interviewee
Maria Santinha
and Joana Sarapião Manoel Seabra on
21/12/1940
Zeferina, baptized on 27/8/1870, was the daughter of Paulina, slave of Francisco Antônio Martins; Apolinária da Conceição is stated to be the natural
daughter of Francisca Rosário da Conceição upon the occasion of her marriage in 1889; information about the marriages of Maria Francisca and José
Sarapião comes from interviews with Manoel Seabra and Maria Santinha;
João Roberto (no surname) is stated to be, upon the occasion of his wedding
in 1912, as the natural son of Tereza de Jesus, born in Niterói; upon the occasion of the wedding of João Roberto and Vitalina, the ex-slaves Tertuliano
and Miquelina were named as Tertuliano Fernandes and Miquelina Maria
da Conceição.
Manoel Pereira do Nascimento was baptized on 16/5/1869 as Manoel, son
of Pedro and Militana, slaves of José de Oliveira Marques. Upon the occasion of his wedding in 1903, his parents were named as Pedro Costa Seabra
and Militana Maria de Jesus.
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H ebe M at t os
Tertuliano and Miquelina were slaves of José Gonçalves Roxo until his
death in 1871. After this time, they and the fazendas of São José da Serra
and Empreitada belonged to his heirs collectively until at least 1877.21
Tertuliano and Miquelina registered five children in the baptism records
of Santa Isabel do Rio Preto Parish: Dionísio (20/5/1866), Geraldo
Preto (3/4/1870), João and Maria, twins (17/4/1881), and Vitalina Preta
(20/10/1885). Dionísio married Zeferina (daughter of Paulina, slave of
Francisco Antônio Martins, baptized on 27/8/1870) on 25/5/1889. Both
were already free but were cited without a surname. The couple’s firstborn
child, Brandina, was Seu Manoel and Dona Zeferina’s mother.
Geraldo Preto also married in 1889, on 28 September, using the
surname Fernandes. His wife was Apolinária da Conceição, the natural
daughter of Francisca Rosário da Conceição. This couple then became the
parents of José Geraldo Fernandes, who married Maria Crescença, becoming the father of Sebastião Fernandes (Sebastião Zequinha), who would
later marry his cousin Dona Zeferina.
Seu Manoel Seabra was baptized with his father’s name (Manoel)
and his grandfather’s surname (Pedro Costa Seabra), which, according to
the interviewees, belonged to his first master and was given to him upon
his arrival from Africa. Manoel married Maria Vitalina, daughter of José
Roberto and Vitalina Miquelina da Conceição, also known as Black Vitalina, the youngest daughter of Tertuliano and Miquelina.
Among the current residents of the community, aside from the descendants of Brandina and Manoel and José Geraldo and Maria Crescença, we
also find the sisters Santinha and Joaninha Sarapião, today in their eighties,
and their descendants. These two are the daughters of Maria Francisca and
José Sarapião Ferreira. According to the testimony of Mr. Manoel Seabra
and Maria Santinha—unconfirmed by parish records, as we could not find
any mention of the wedding of Maria Francisca and José Sarapião in the
Santa Isabel archives—Maria Francisca was the twin Maria, daughter of
Tertuliano and Miquelina, born in 1881.
In this way, the children of Tertuliano and Miquelina, all born on the
Fazenda São José (as Zeferina explains it, I think Grandpa Dionísio was
born in São José because he had a bunch of brothers here) when it was the
property of José Gonçalves Roxo, are the direct ancestors of all the residents
of the community today. They took the surname of Fernandes (occasionally
written as Fernando) after abolition, and we find the first mention of this
surname in 1889, in the wedding records of the ex-slave Black Geraldo.
Upon that occasion, Tertuliano and Miquelina were themselves registered
as Fernandes. In this sense, the first Fernandes, the ex-slave Tertuliano, was
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‘ Terras de Quilombo’
already living on the lands of today’s Fazenda de São José da Serra during
the 1860s, then the property (slaves and land) of José Gonçalves Roxo.
The first Fernando, Antônio Ferraz, was Portuguese and arrived in the
Santa Isabel Parish during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. As
scribe and commissioner of the coffee planters who had established themselves in the region, he settled down and married into the powerful Fortes
Bustamante family, owners—among other properties—of the Fazenda
Santa Clara along the Rio de Janeiro/Minas Gerais divide. Known as Major
Ferraz, Fernando Antônio became a ‘capitalist and planter’ in the Santa
Isabel do Rio Preto Parish, according to Amanack Laemmert (1885). He
had five children, and his firstborn son carried his name. Young Dr Fernando
Antônio Ferraz graduated in medicine in 1880 and a few years later married
Vulcana de Araújo Leite, member of a planter family from Barra Mansa.
Around this time, he became the owner of some of the fazendas cited in the
will of José Gonçalves Roxo (Empreitada and São José da Serra) and also
of a house in the village of Santa Isabel, where the young couple established
their residence. As a much-respected planter and doctor in the parish, he
became a local political boss, being several times elected to the position of
state congressman (Kastrup, 1985: 13-29). Based upon this information, we
can advance a possible hypothesis to explain the specific community and territorial forms that shaped the lives of Tertuliano and Miquelina’s descendants
during the abolition process. The long period during which the Fazenda São
José da Serra was administered as part of the territories covered by the will of
José Gonçalves Roxo seems to have reinforced the ties of the fazenda’s slave
community to their plots and customary practices.22
According to Mrs. Zeferina:
[An old aunt] told me that when the captivity was over, the owner
over there rang the bell, calling everybody, and when they all
arrived here, he cried: ‘From now on you’re all owners of your own
destiny, you don’t need to work for me, you can work for who you
want’ . . . and then he went back inside his house, crying, leaving
them out there like fools, wondering what had happened to the
master, ‘cause the only thing they knew was that he was crying.
The narrative makes sense and is corroborated by recent historical research.
This was indeed the paternalistic tone adopted by those who attempted to
maintain their ex-slaves on the coffee plantations between January and July
of 1888. The majority of the slaves left the fazendas en masse, both before
and after 13 May 1888, right in the middle of the coffee harvest. To maintain
the slaves on the land, or at least in the vicinity, was an objective that many
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H ebe M at t os
ex-masters pursued for several years. This was especially the case in those
areas of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais that were not able to compete with
São Paulo for the new waves of European immigrants then arriving.23
In the months immediately before and after 13 May 1888, the work
forces of the fazendas were completely disorganized as the old slave labourers moved about and an intense competition began among the property
owners for the now free labour force. Within this context, many ex-masters
attempted to exploit community ties within the old slave communities to
convince the ex-slaves to stay on the land. Those who were better able to
succeed at this tended to attract the slaves of others, who, in their turn
(especially after 13 May), resorted more and more to police violence to try
and constrain the freedmen’s movements, making the ex-slaves even more
dependant upon their ‘protectors’.24
At this point, some plantations were more successful than others in
attracting the slaves who had been fleeing en masse since January 1888. In
this context, the testimonies of Mr. Manoel and Mrs. Zeferina regarding
their grandfather’s arrival at the Fazenda São José can be seen as complementary and not contradictory. According to D. Zeferina and Seu Manoel
Seabra, Grandfather Pedro, African, Grandmother Militana, and his father
Manoel, had really come to Santa Isabel after having been sold in Bahia.
There is a difference between the two narratives, however. She tells us only
that they had been sold from Bahia, while he claims that they had been
sold to another coffee plantation, not the São José one. From there, they
ran to São José, where they were ‘taken in’ by the fazendeiro, an act that
allows the association of the fazenda São José with the idea of quilombo.
This was not masterly ‘generosity’, but a possible strategy aimed at
maintaining a ‘colony’ of free workers on his lands in a situation in which
the traditional forms of labour control were breaking down completely and
in which the expectations and concepts of freedom held by the ex-slaves
were to play a fundamental role. In Mrs. Zeferina’s words, ‘He left the
lands at São José to the people there. He bought them and left them alone.’
The freedom to leave and re-enter the community and the guarantee of
traditionally recognized rights would have a dramatic appeal when we take
into consideration what we know about the expectations of the last slaves
regarding liberty. The narrative about the ‘Quilombo do Ferraz’ by Mr.
Manoel Seabra dealt with these expectations. These were directly related
to the freedom to come and go and to a ‘peasant project’ based on a strong
communal base (Mattos, 1998:339-355; Machado, 1994).
It is worth noting that Coronel Fernando Antônio Ferraz had a long
and active presence in the local land market, appearing as a seller or buyer
308
‘ Terras de Quilombo’
13 times between 1895 and 1940 in the Valença notary public alone. Beginning with the retirement of Fernando Antônio Ferraz, an event which
coincided with the elimination of the coffee fields and the generalization
of livestock breeding, other conflicts occurred that progressively reduced
the customary rights of the community, the loss of the right to raise large
animals being the most important of these.
Despite this, it was only after the Ferraz descendants had taken over
the land that the group began to live with an effective threat of mass expropriation hanging over their heads. They also had to deal with the radical
loss of their customary right to the partial use of the fazenda lands. Though
their customary practices were progressively reduced, the relations that the
Fernandes family maintained with the Ferraz family guaranteed a common
field of negotiations for the following half century.
The definitive sale of the lands by the descendants of Fernando Ferraz
coincided with an acceleration in the process of modernization of labour
relations in Brazil as well as a growing valorization of the land in the region
as a leisure and tourist destination.
It is at this point that the history of São José effectively differentiates
itself from that of other colony groups in the same context. Confined to their
thatched houses and gardens since the coffee crisis, the residents of São José
began to count on their celebrations and their old ties to the land, proving
that they are the descendants of the slaves who had once laboured there in
order to maintain themselves in the area. Even so, many left the São José
lands in search of better opportunities, returning only during the periods of
celebration in order to reunite with their families. The men and the youth
would leave, and the women and the children would stay, thus guaranteeing
the continuity of a well-connected, but invisible, kinship-based community.
The Ethic of Silence and Invisible Groups
In the first general census in 1872, people of African descent constituted 60 to 70 per cent of the population of the province of Rio de Janeiro.
However, this ‘Black’ homogeneity was only apparent. This population was
divided almost equally into enslaved and free. While the majority of the
slaves were recently arrived Africans and their direct descendants, most
of the free men and women of African ancestry lived as peasants, with or
without property titles. In some cases, the members of this second group
had lost any direct contact with Africa and enslaved peoples.25
After abolition, large numbers of former slaves abandoned their plantations in search of a peasant’s life of family, work and autonomy. However,
living and working conditions did not necessarily change, as the family
309
H ebe M at t os
plots established by the transient population were not unlike the plots
found on the old plantations. Former slaves who lived in communities
structured along kinship lines, with access to their own fields and sometimes even horses and livestock, tended to prefer staying on the plantations
where they had laboured during the period of slavery.26 In spite of these
continuities, the former slaves encountered great difficulties in securing
permanent access to certain resources once claimed under the rules of
customary rights. The majority of the post-abolition conflicts regarding
resources between landowners and ex-slaves on the coffee plantations
revolved around this issue.27 These conflicts implied the maintenance of a
structured communal identity in negotiation with landowners and at the
same time (at least from a formal viewpoint) an approximation with the
status of freeborn peasantry.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the use of racialized language
continued to mark the stigma of slave descent, as had been the case since
the end of the colonial period. However, an ‘ethic of silence’ had been
shaped throughout the nineteenth century, with the notion of Brazilian
citizenship rights as a sign of equality (Mattos, 1998: 275-290).
Two different cases illustrate this point. In 1894, a police report from
the municipality of Campos in Rio de Janeiro describes a so-called ‘citizen’,
Manoel Castro, deputy and plantation owner in the region, another
‘citizen’, Joaquim Araújo da Silva, also a plantation owner but described
as a ‘mulatto’ by his enemies, and a woman referred to as ‘Black Matilde’,
accused of robbery on the plantation where she worked. In the report’s
language, the colour of the involved parties went unrecorded. In the testimony of the witnesses, however, the ‘citizens’ are not identified by colour,
but the accused thief had ‘black’ attached to her name, clearly marking her
condition as a former slave.
On the other hand, in the same year and place, another report detailing
a conflict between sharecroppers registered no mention of colour or race at
all, even in the witnesses’ testimonies. A peasant identity was predominant
among all the witnesses and nothing more than the condition of ‘farmer’
or ‘sharecropper’ was necessary to identify the people involved. Some testimonies, however, which related what was happening outside of the house
where the conflict occurred, mentioned a group of kids playing jongo.
In the first decade following emancipation, references to the status of
ex-slaves or mention of a person’s colour continued to cast suspicion upon
individuals. However, the more common strategy of silence on the issue
of colour did not necessarily equal ‘whitening’, as the literature addressing
this issue often asserts. The apparent invisibility of blacks in documentary
310
‘ Terras de Quilombo’
sources after 1888 came about in large part due to the fact that, after just
a few short years, most former slaves had managed to achieve sufficient
social resources as peasants and sharecroppers to integrate themselves into
the former free Brazilian population.
The basic hypothesis of this article is that many of the oldest, most
structured slave communities continue to internally organize themselves
as invisible groups (Cohen, 1978: 115-47) in their attempts to guarantee
in liberty the community resources that they controlled as slaves. In this
sense, in order to understand the specific conditions of the São José da Serra
community and other groups identified as quilombo residents in the state
of Rio de Janeiro, it is necessary to understand that they have not merely
given new meaning and visibility to ancient ‘African’ cultural practices. The
true differentiating factor of these communities lies in the fact that they
had activated the memory of slavery in order to legitimate the possession of
their lands before the constitutional ruling in their favour. As I have tried to
illustrate above in the case of the São José da Serra community, the groups
that sought recognition as ‘former quilombo community’ in the state of Rio
de Janeiro are today, basically, renewing and giving visibility to old informal
organizations based on kinship. These organizations had guaranteed customary rights of land access to their ancestors when they were still slaves.
The Constitution of 1988 and the polemics surrounding the quilombo
remnants give visibility to a pre-existing organization that enables the
group to maintain its linkages, even though these are limited to the spaces
surrounding their small thatched houses, their gardens and their festivals.
This visibility, in turn, brings the group allies and gives them a new sense
of identity, based on ethnic claims and kinship. The discussions regarding
the ‘former quilombo communities’ bring the memories of the stories of
escape to the fore and push those of harmony—earlier privileged—into the
background. This is a meaning shift that turns the traditional patriarchal
master in dispute for labour into the protector of the quilombolas: ‘Ferraz’s
quilombo’. And it is as the quilombo de São José da Serra that they are
known today throughout the region. At a moment in which jongo is enjoying a rebirth, with growing interest among artists and intellectuals in the
song form, at a time when it is being taught by the old to the young in other
rural Black communities throughout the state, the spontaneity of jongo in
the São José community constitutes a true trophy of ‘authenticity’. This is
symbolic capital of inestimable value in the struggle for the legitimization
of tenure over the fazenda. Redefining the meanings passed down from the
memory of the slave past, they have substituted the old invisibility of days
gone by for a decisive reaffirmation of their ethnic difference.
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H ebe M at t os
The depth of the transformation that had occurred during this process
of ethnic affirmation and cultural innovation based upon old traditions
becomes clear if we compare a poem written about abolition in 1888 with
the lyrics of a jongo sung today in the new quilombo of São José da Serra.
I went to see blacks in the city
Who wanted to hire themselves out
I spoke in humbleness:
—Negroes, do you want to work?
They looked at me askance
And one of them, ugly, bowlegged
Puffed up his chest and answered
—There’re no more Negroes here
Today we’re all Brazilian Citizens
Let the white man work on the gang.28
(Satirical poem published in the
newspaper O Monitor Campista, 10
March 1888)
I was born in Angola
Congo created me
I’m from Moçambique
I’m black, yes I am
Le le le le
Poor black man
By the white man was beaten
They promised many things
To the black they didn’t give anything
Le le le le
What’s the black man to do
On the master’s plantation
The master ordered him to go away
Why did the black man come back?
Le le le le29
( Jongo sung in São José da Serra, a
Black community in Valença, Rio de
Janeiro, 1998)
Inside the quilombo chapel
312
‘ Terras de Quilombo’
Mr. Seabra
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——. (1996). “Quilombos: sematologia face a novas identidades.” in: PVN, ed.,
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——. (2002). “Terras de Preto no Maranhão: Quebrando o mito do isolamento.”
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Brasiliense.
Breves, Armando de Morais. (1966). O reino da Marambaia. Rio de Janeiro:
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Chalhoub, Sidney. (1990). Visões da Liberdade: Uma história das últimas décadas da
escravidão na Corte. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Cohen, Abner. (1978 [1969]). O Homem Bidimensional: A Antropologia do Poder
e o Simbolismo em Sociedades Complexas. Tradução de Sônia Correa. Rio de
Janeiro: Zahar Editores.
Conrad, Robert. (1978). Os Últimos Anos da Escravatura no Brasil, 1850–1888. [The
Abolition of Slavery in Brazil]. Translated by Fernando de Castro Ferro. Rio
de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira.
Costa, Emília Viotti da. (1966). Da Senzala à Colônia. São Paulo: DIFEL.
Gomes, Flávio dos Santos. (1996). “Ainda sobre os quilombos: repensando a construção de símbolos de identidade étnica no Brasil.” in: M.H.T. Almeida, P.
Fry, e E. Reis, eds., Política e cultura: visões do passado e perspectivas contemporâneas. São Paulo: AM: 97–221.
Kastrup, Gilka Ferraz. (1985). Coronéis, Caciques e Doutores. Rio de Janeiro: Published by the author
Machado, Maria Helena. (1994). O Plano e o Pânico. Os movimentos sociais na década
da abolição. Rio de Janeiro/S. Paulo: UFRJ/EDUSP.
Marc, René. (1999). A Formação da Identidade Quilombola dos Negros de Rio das
Rãs. Ph.D. thesis, Universidade Federal da Bahia.
Mattos, Hebe. (1998). Das Cores do Silêncio: Significados da Liberdade no Sudeste
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——. (2000). “Les combats de la mémoire: esclavage et liberté dans les archives
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Hommage à Katia de Queirós Mattoso. Paris: L’Harmattan: 463-478.
——. (2003). “Terras de Quilombo: Citoyenneté, Memoire de la Captivité et
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de negros. Recife: Instituto Joaquim Nabuco.
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O’Dwyer, Eliane Cantarino (ed.). (1995). “Terra de Quilombo”. Publication of
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——. (1976). The Demography and Economics of Brazilian Slavery: 1850–1888.
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Notes
1.
2.
The legal act that abolished slavery in Brazil was signed into law by the Princess Regent Isabel (daughter of Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II and heir
to the Brazilian throne), who unilaterally declared slavery to be abolished
within Brazilian territory, overturning all legal dispositions to the contrary,
on 13 May 1888. For some years after this law (known as the Golden Law,
or Lei Áurea) was passed, ex-slave owners politically organized to demand
indemnification for their lost slave property. The question of reparations for
ex-slaves was rarely discussed. In the final months of the Empire, however,
the question of ‘rural democracy’ was raised by abolitionist sectors as being
the necessary corollary to abolition. This discussion included proposals that
would cede some kind of access to land for the ex-slaves. Santos (2000).
The entire text of Article 68 of the Ato das Disposições Constitucionais Transitórias [Act of Transitory Constitutional Dispositions] states: ‘To the descendants of quilombo communities which occupy their lands, it is henceforth
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recognized definite property rights, being the duty of the State to give them
the respective titles.’
3. The most well-known and studied case is that of the Rio das Rãs community,
in the Bahian sertão, which has recently been entitled. The process of political
mobilization and the construction of a quilombola identity have been studied
in detail from different angles in two doctoral theses: Marc (1999); Veran
(2000).
4. Cf. map showing the localization of these communities, elaborated by the
Fundação Palmares (Veran, 2002: 20-25).
5.Document written for the Seminário das Comunidades Remanescentes
de Quilombos, [Quilombos’ Communities Colloquium] organized by the
Fundação Palmares of the Ministry of Culture (MinC), responsible for the
identification of ‘quilombo lands’. The seminar took place in Brasília, 25–27
October 1994.
6.Regarding the concept of resemantization, see also Almeida 1996; Gomes,
1996; O’Dwyer 2002.
7. According to the Diretoria Geral de Estatística [The General Statistics Directory], the province of Rio de Janeiro contained 301,352 slaves in 1874, being
the second largest province in terms of absolute numbers of slaves and the
first in terms of relative numbers: 39.7 per cent of the population. According
to a report by the Ministry of Agriculture, dated 14 May 1888, 162,421
people were freed under the Golden Law in the province of Rio, 22.4 per
cent of the total number of slaves freed across the country. See Conrad
(1978: 345; 359).
8. The theme is widely dealt with in Brazilian historiography. Cf., among
others, Costa (1966), Slenes (1976) Mattos ‘(1998).
9.Regarding demographic decline in the western Paraíba Valley, cf., among
others, Costa (1966) and Stein (1975).
10. Brazilian law prohibited slave trafficking between Brazil and Africa in 1831.
However, smuggling and lax enforcement meant that the trade continued,
dramatically increasing in intensity in the 1840s. In 1850, the Parliament,
under intense pressure from British diplomatic and naval forces, put a definitive end to the transatlantic slave trade. A small number of slaving ships
landed in Brazil after 1850.
11. Singing and dancing in circles to the sound of hand drums. A more detailed
description of the analysis of the São José da Serra community appears
further on.
12. Many of the testimonies translated here are in rustic Brazilian Portuguese. I
have tried to capture some of that feeling without exaggerating the dialect to
the point of distracting the reader.
13. Interview with Manoel Seabra by Lídia Meireles and Hebe Mattos, deposited in the ‘Memory of Captivity’ archives of the Oral History and Iconography Laboratory (LABHOI) of the Universidade Federal Fluminense
(UFF).
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‘ Terras de Quilombo’
14.Testimony of Mrs. Therezinha, daughter of Mrs. Zeferina, to Lídia Meireles
(Mattos & Meirelles, 1998: 18).
15. This part of the text incorporates the results of research undertaken in 2004
into the original text presented at the Gorée Workshop.
16. The testimonies of Manoel Seabra and D. Zeferina, given to Lídia Meireles and Ana Lugão Rios, respectively, were taped and are deposited in the
Memory of Captivity archives of the LABHOI of the UFF [www.historia.
uff.br/labhoi].
17. The law that liberated the children born of slaves starting on the date of its
promulgation (28 September 1871), being that these still had to serve their
masters until twenty-one years of age or until the state gave indemnity for
them until eight years of age. The law also gave the slaves the right to possess
individual savings independent of the master’s control and the right to buy
their own freedom, with the price to be decided by independent arbitration.
The law also created a state fund for emancipation and declared that all the
country’s slaves were to be registered in a special program so that they could
be progressively liberated via indemnity payments to their masters. There is a
vast Brazilian historiography regarding the impact of the ‘Free Womb Law’.
See, among others, Conrad 1978 , Chaloub 1990. Regarding the expression
‘Free Womb’ in the traditions of the families of former slaves in Brazil, see
Mattos (2000).
18. Cf. Revista Isto É, 21 May 1997.
19. Though officially recognized as ‘former quilombo community’ since the
approval of the identification report, at the time this article was concluded
(2004) no formal process for the appropriation of the fazenda lands had yet
been launched. The situation is complex in that the landownership itself is
not in doubt. This means that the owner will have to be compensated. Aside
from this, the historical dimensions of the old São José fazenda were mentioned in the report, involving neighbouring properties that are no longer
disputed by the community. Due to this situation, an ever more tense informal
accord exists between the community and the fazenda’s current owner. The
São José community continues to reinforce its political and cultural presence
on fazenda lands and the owner seeks to affirm his economic control over the
productive areas of the same lands.
20. Cf. Acervo Memórias do Cativeiro (LABHOI-UFF) - Antônio Nascimento,
Manoel Seabra (2004), Maria Santinha Sarapião, Elizabete Seabra Procópio,
Florentina Seabra, Maria do Carmo do Nascimento Máximo, Maria Isabel
Caetano, Terezinha Fernandes Azedia, Maria Joana Sarapião. The interviews
in question may be accessed via www.historia.uff.br/labhoi; Livros de Batismo
e Casamento da Paróquia de Santa Isabel do Rio Preto (Birth and Marriage
Books of the Santa Isabel do Rio Preto Catholic Parish) for the indicated
years (see diagram) and the Conta Testamento de José Gonçalves Roxo (Will
Acount of José Gonçalves Roxo), in the Arquivo do Museu da Justiça [ Justice
317
Museum Archive - Give English translation] (Rio de Janeiro), Valença,
1877, Register n.º 16500, box 1729.
21. Conta Testamento de José Gonçalves Roxo, in the Arquivo do Museu da Justiça
[Will Account of José Gonçalves Roxo in the Justice Museum Archive
- Give English translation] (Rio de Janeiro), Valença, 1877, Register. n.º
16500, box 1729.
22. The existence of a system of land donation for freed people at the Fazenda
Cachoeira near the São José da Serra plantation may also have exercised some
influence upon the group’s formation as an autonomous unit. However,
the identification of José Gonçalves Roxo’s ownership led us to discard
the hypothesis that São José da Serra must have been a part of the Fazenda
Cachoeira as we had initially thought. This hypothesis is developed in Mattos
(2003).
23. Aside from Rio de Janeiro, the cultivation of coffee expanded into the neighbouring provinces of Minas Gerais and São Paulo. This last province became
the most dynamic frontier of coffee expansion in the later nineteenth century,
attracting the majority of Italian immigrant workers, whose travel to Brazil
for work in the coffee fields was subsidized by the Brazilian state beginning
in 1889.
24.Regarding this theme, cf., especially Mattos 1998 (Parte III – O Fantasma
da Desordem [Part III - The Ghost of Disorder]).
25. Cf. Graphic I: 1872 Census. Population by colour and condition (Fluminense municipalities considered: Campos, São Fidelis, Cantagalo, Vassouras
and Paraíba do Sul) (Mattos, 1998:59).
26. For a quantitative analysis of this tendency in the context of a sugar-producing municipality in northern Rio de Janeiro state, cf. Mattos (1998: 30721).
27. For a more detailed analysis of these conflicts in some south-western coffee
fazendas, cf. Mattos (1998: chapter 14).
28. [Fui ver pretos na cidade/Que quisessem se alugar/Falei com esta humildade/Negros, querem trabalhar?/Olharam-me de soslaio/E, um deles, feio, cambaio/
Respondeu-me arfando o peito/- Negro, não há mais, não/Nós tudo hoje é cidadão/
O Branco que vá para o eito.]
29. [Nasci na Angola/congo que me criou/Eu sou lá de Moçambique/Sou negro sim,
senhor/Lê, lê, lê, lê, lê . . . /Pobre do negro/Do branco foi judiado/Prometeram
tanta coisa/Pro negro não deram nada/Lê, lê, lê, . . . /O que é que faz o negro/Na
fazenda do Senhor/O senhor mandou embora/Por que é que negro voltou?/Lê, lê,
lê, lê . . . ]
Chapter 13
The Atlantic Connection:
History, Memory
and Identities
Ubiratan Castro de Araújo
gh
I
n order to understand the permanent elaboration of black identity in
this African country called Bahia, one must not forget the umbilical
cord by which the people of Bahia firmly believe themselves to be still
definitely linked to Africa—The African Utopia. All along the dark corridors of history, since the period of slavery, this myth of origin has been
circulating among the blacks of Bahia, constantly undergoing adaptations
and transformations, changing its masks and garb as occasions dictate; this
origin myth plays the magical role of a horsetail seeking to chase away the
ever-present flies of white temptations patented by the white elites trying
to convince the blacks to accept the fact that the black Brazilian was a mere
product of the luso-tropical experience of a slave society. The blacks of
Bahia were thus determined to trace their roots beyond slavery, back to the
pre-slavery period. In that way, they sought the symbolic time and place
of original freedom beyond the confines of Brazil. Utopia or anachronism,
whatever one chooses to call this sentiment does not really matter. What
matters is that this absolute refusal to recognize the cultural heritage of
slavery is the hard core of Bahian black identity.
The temptation to reduce this process to a question of mere anachronism was particularly present in the period in which Brazil pursued integration into the world economy. During this process, significant efforts
were made towards the modernization of Brazilian society, changes that
invariably affected race relations within the country. However, the failure
Ubi r atan Cas t ro d e A r aú jo
of all these sincere efforts to develop new black identities, as it were, within
the modernization of Brazil explains twhy the proponents of Black emancipation had to fall back on the politics of affirmative action towards African
tradition such as it is preserved within the Black religious communities.
The Nagos and the Sabinos: Towards the Formation of a Brazilian Nation
Towards the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the western world was shaken by the first wave of
liberal revolutions that followed the independence of the United States
of America, the French Revolution, and the revolution of the Negroes in
Haiti, as well as the revolutions brought about by the Napoleonic wars
in Europe and also the revolution that happened within the Portuguese
empire itself. At the dawn of a new era of globalization, built upon the
principles of ‘free trade’ and universal human rights, two challenges were
thrown up in Brazilian slave society: first, to put an end to the colonial pact
that it had with Portugal, and, second, to put an end to the ignominious
trade in African slaves.
With regard to the first challenge, it fell on the colonial elites to form
an independent state, equipped with new institutions, a national ideology,
and new criteria for the inclusion of all inhabitants of this new (Latin)American state. The million-dollar question, however, was: who are those
who qualify as Brazilians? Would Brazilian nationality be extended to all
the various groups, ranging from the white Portuguese minority and the
handful of ‘whites born in the colony’ to the vast majority consisting of
African slaves, native-born Creole slaves, liberated Africans, and freeborn
Negroes? Would a regime that extolled the liberalism that was then in
vogue in the international arena be capable of accepting the necessity
of extending the principles of universal human and citizenship rights to
persons of colour within its territory? We must not forget that even the
French Revolution was not radical enough to accept and recognize the
rights of citizenship for slaves within its overseas territories, as shown in its
refusal to extend the same universal rights to Blacks on the slave island of
Saint Domingue under the Black leader Vincent Ogé, a decision which led
to the Haitian revolution. The same sentiments were present in the Brazilian case as well; the Brazilian Independentists needed men who would
take up arms for them against Portuguese colonialism, but they did not
want to share their citizenship rights with blacks.
In this tense situation, the black population in Bahia was divided into
two movements. The blacks who were born on Brazilian soil, referred to at
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the time as creoles (freeborn, slaves and liberated slaves), decided to join in
the process of the formation of a Brazilian nation, while at the same time
fighting for a new national identity for themselves as had happened in the
Hispanic American colonies under the Bolivarian movement. According
to Baron Aramaré, a Bahian general, these blacks were individuals without
a homeland, wanting to obtain some national affiliation that would suit
them, as against what the Portuguese descendants, the true Brazilians,
wanted to offer them. This creole mass constituted the base of the rebellious armies, and led the popular revolts starting with the ‘cowries’ revolt
of 1798 and continuing to the events of 1838, during which the federalist
troops nicknamed the sabinada were entirely crushed. However, the results
of this Black political participation were generally negative: the continuation of Black slavery, political exclusion instituted by the adoption of
segregationist voting rights, and the subsequent discrimination practised
against Blacks because of their skin colour. Instead of a liberal republic,
what came about was a Brazilian slave empire. Beaten down and humiliated, these Black Brazilians realized that they had failed woefully in their
bid for the affirmation of a separate identity within the Brazilian republic.
On their part, the Blacks born on African soil (slaves and freed slaves
alike), rejected by all, white and black Brazilians alike, were forced to
engage in a slave revolt. The years between 1811 and 1835 saw the historic revolt of African Muslims in Bahia, referred to as the Revolt of the
Malês, and their revolutionary ideas were put into practice. As far as these
revolutionaries were concerned, the idea was not to create a new American
state, but simply to end slavery and establish a black state founded on
the values of African traditions. Though vanquished like the other Blacks,
these African revolutionaries at least had the satisfaction of knowing that
they had fought the good fight. Their heroic acts formed the basis for the
myth of African resistance equal to that of the Gaules in France, and this
storied heroism later became a strong rallying point of ethnic identity for
Brazilian Blacks in general.
The Republic and the Abolition of Slavery
By the end of the nineteenth century, at the time scientific racism and
imperialism were at their peak, Brazilian elites were once again induced
to embark upon the modernization of Brazilian society. Brazil being the
last western country to do away with slavery and the last to put an end to
monarchical rule in the American continent, it became a matter of honour
and urgency to abolish slavery and proclaim Brazil a republic. But what was
the opinion of the great mass of Black Brazilians caught up in these abrupt
changes? Obviously, they wanted an end to slavery, but they preferred that
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the much-desired abolition be accompanied by access to land and job opportunities. They were not opposed to the institution of a republic either, but
they still insisted that such a republic should guarantee citizenship rights
to all Brazilians. Unfortunately, for the Blacks, they were considered by the
positivist republicans imbued with Darwinist ideas as not being sufficiently
civilized to be granted the benefits of employment and freedom. Therefore,
the new republican regime decided to replace the labour force that used to
be offered free by the slaves with a policy of European immigration. With
regard to the right to equal citizenship, the 1891 constitution decided that,
due to the political incapacity of the great majority of Blacks, recently freed
from slavery, they should be shielded from active citizenship and that, due
to the fact that they were mostly illiterate, they should be relieved of their
voting rights. As far as the elites were concerned, in the matter of culture,
Brazil was populated by two sets of people with distinct cultures: the ones
who were civilized and the others who were barbaric. The republic thus
ended up turning itself into a kind of internal colonial state under which
the true Brazilians were those who maintained in their cultural practices
constitutive evidence of European civilization.
The immediate task at hand, then, became the civilization of the savages
through the use of force and guns. This new order was finally put in place
in 1897, when the Brazilian Army, under the command of the ‘enlightened’
republic, undertook an expedition of total extermination into the village
of Canudos in the interior of the state of Bahia, mercilessly killing thousands of black and mulatto inhabitants whom they accused of barbarism,
resistance to modernization, sympathy for monarchism, etc. While still
at the scene of the merciless massacre, Dantas Barreto, the commanding
colonel of the republican army, wrote a letter to his family expressing his
impatience to return to civilization, meaning Rio de Janeiro, because he
felt he had been forced to remain for too long in the midst of the ‘Tuaregs’
in this backwoods Bahian desert. After this episode, all black movements
of political integration were effectively silenced and all their members successfully incapacitated, including those of the Black republican movement,
the Black royal guards, and even the Black workers’ party of Bahia, which
used to be headed by old Black abolitionists.
Hungry for a taste of colonial power, the Brazilian elites and their
republic adopted racist ideas that had been developed in Europe under the
guise of modern science. They evolved the so-called system of scientific
representations under which they lumped together all the Blacks in Bahia
and all traditional African cultural expressions into one homogeneous
Black, that is, African race. According to these racial scientists, it was
not necessary to understand the cultural differences between the diverse
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African ethnic groups represented in Bahia in order to better comprehend
their criminal tendencies and the hidden dangers that they might pose to
the maintenance of civilized order in the new republic. They considered
the barbarous practices of the Blacks even more dangerous because of the
religious practices and folkloric customs under which they were shrouded.
The Faculty of Medicine in Bahia became one of the most prestigious
centres in Brazil in the area of legal medicine, criminology and criminal
anthropology. It was in this institution that the racial fate of the Bahian
people was sealed. Those were the days of the famous doctor and self-trained
ethnographer Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, who, very much in line with his
contemporary Fernando Ortiz in Cuba, was inspired by physiognomics
and the peculiar form of raciology developed by Cesare Lombroso.
From theory to practice, the new regime went on to consider any kind
of public manifestation of black culture of African origin to be a shameful
matter for a civilized Brazil. Capoeira was the first to be declared a criminal offence. Then came the turn of Candomblé, the traditional African
religion. The carnival groups formed by blacks—who used to take African
motifs like the royal court of King Menelik of Ethiopia to the streets during
the popular carnival festivities—were banned by the police. The authorities were bent on making sure that Bahia would lose every resemblance it
shared with Africa.
And that was how the Blacks of Bahia began a forced return to Africa
to save their cultural and ethnic identity. However, the religious practitioners of Candomblé resisted the onslaught of the police, who persecuted
them relentlessly, managing to survive in spite of all efforts to snuff them
out. Also, in spite of all the difficulties that confronted them, black intellectuals like Prof. Martiniano do Bonfim established direct contact with
the Agudas (the community created by former Brazilian slaves and their
descendants in several coastal cities of the Bight of Benin starting from the
1840’s) of the West African coast. African purity then became the core of
Black resistance to internal colonialism in Brazil. Manoel Querino, a black
activist who was a self-taught ethnographer and former abolitionist, even
developed certain ideas regarding the role of a ‘Black colonist’ within the
formation of the Brazilian nation. In his opinion, instead of being ashamed
of his African origin, the Brazilian Black should be proud of his Africanness because it was the Black colonist who had brought to Brazil the
virtues of labour, discipline, sociability, spirituality, and the civilizing force.
All that the Portuguese had handed down to the Brazilian nation were the
diseases of their civilization, the scum of their society in the person of their
condemned criminals, the violence of conquest, and the domination and
laziness of the slave masters.
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The Myth of Racial Democracy
After the 1930s, following the revolution that proposed the modernization of the older Brazilian Republic, the racial question once more
came to occupy the centre stage in Brazilian national affairs. The necessities of industrialization coupled with the emergence of a new working
class required a new structural alignment of the Brazilian masses. The big
question that demanded an answer once again was: Who are the Brazilians? To this old question, a new answer was now given. The famous myth
of Brazilian racial democracy was invented to replace the former racial
scientific racism that had once been in vogue.
This new clash of modernity imposed on the Brazilian elites a major
challenge: how to integrate the popular masses into the processes of development and nation building without running the risk of stoking a social
revolution and without tearing the social fabric, which was already too
thinly stretched, due to the racial diversity of the population. The two great
models presented to the world immediately after the Second World War
were that of communism and social revolution under the Soviet Union,
on the one hand, and, on the other, that of American democracy, which
was twinned with segregation and permanent racial conflict. How then
were the elites going to align the Brazilian blacks without instigating racial
anger?
Against this backdrop of the danger of revolution, the elites managed
to put in place a structure of social dynamics based on the pillars of national
union, the search for economic development, and, under the control of a
populist State, mediate for the softening of the class struggle between the
bourgeoisie and the working classes.
With regard to the black population, efforts were made to establish a
solid national ideology whose basic element was the negation of the racial
question. This new consensus tried to anchor itself on the convergence of
the two powerful theoretical schools of the time, the leftist and the rightist
schools. First and foremost, there was the development of Marxism as an
instrument of analysis and political action. This school took its cue from
the works of Caio Prado, Jr., who brought up the racial question within
the domain of the history of slavery during the colonial period as a direct
result of the expansionist policies of the capitalist regimes of Europe and
later of the United States. In his opinion, the racial question was really
a secondary one, since the descendants of the slaves of old are now the
same slaves being exploited under contemporary capitalism. Of the former
system of exploitation, some traits still survive in the area of culture, which
has become a real epiphenomenon of the social superstructure. According
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to this Marxist analysis, the real problem of the exploited peoples was their
lack of class consciousness, a tool indispensable for the realization of a
social revolution, and not the identities constructed on the basis of cultural
affinities. Following this tradition, the leftist group in Brazil started to
think that questions of race and cultural identities were not relevant to
the Brazilian condition, considering them to be external, a kind of wicked
importation or an idea unwittingly introduced into Brazil from the United
States. This school of thought, therefore, believed that raising such questions in Brazil could only interest a fraction of the Brazilian proletariat.
The rightists on their part reasoned along the lines of the ideas propounded by Gilberto Freyre, whose work, well known within intellectual
circles, formed the basis for the negation of the racial question in Brazil,
replacing it with an affirmation of so-called racial democracy in contemporary times, supposedly a direct and historic result of the adaptation of
Portuguese patriarchal societies in the tropics. This apology for the mixture
of the three races—white, Amerindian and black—was to develop into a
state ideology that was used to demonstrate the harmonious and frictionless development of the Brazilian people into a ‘new race’, as conceived
in the contemporary version of the theory developed by Darci Ribeiro.
According to Gilberto Freyre, a kind of ‘meta race’ was in the process of
emerging in Brazil, a race of ‘morenos’. In view of the fact that Brazil did
not suffer the affliction of a system of racial segregation like the one in the
United States, racial issues were therefore not among the problems facing
the Brazilian nation. In brief, the ideas of this school of thought were then
that racism was native to the United States and that Brazil, in its underdevelopment, was proud of its ability of having sidelined this problem, which
was a real plague faced by its rich American neighbour to the north.
For the black Brazilians, the greatest obstacle to the formation of black
identities in an autonomous and anti-racist society was the removal of the
racial question from the Brazilian thought system. It is widely held that
the worst characteristic of Brazilian racism was its insistence on believing
and making believe that there is no racism in Brazil. To make this process
of denial even more complex, the globalization of cultures and information
that makes possible the exchange of ideas among the various black movements all over the world was not able to find a way around this problem
such that it would make possible the emergence and the stabilization of
new identities and social practices born out of such contacts. As a result
of this incapability, black movements like pan-Africanism, black power,
reggae and hip hop are all reduced to the level of mere ephemeral events
within international circles.
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The only refuge that the Blacks found for the affirmation of their identity, and which served as a liberating force from the remnants of the slave
society in Bahia, was African tradition, jealously guarded within religious
communities called Candomblé. Nobody would say that Candomblé was
imported into Bahia, the Blacks having conserved their African roots so
well! That explains why all the Black Marxists of Brazil, beginning with
Edson Carneiro under the New State dictatorial regime of 1937 and
down to leftist movements inspired by the theories of ‘aggiornamento’ à
la Gramsci and Thompson, regarded Candomblé as the bedrock of the
ancestral identity of Brazilian blacks. The unique cohabitation that was
produced between materialism and Candomblé was described by the
famous novelist Jorge Amado as ‘magical materialism’.
Material Support for the Brazilian Utopia
That was how it became possible in the history of independent Brazil
for communities consisting of indigent men and women, condemned to
live in the backwoods and the outskirts of cities and bent under the weight
of racism, to create for themselves a locus of a collective African memory.
Ask the adepts of this religious movement how this was possible, and they
would probably inform you right away that it is all due to the force of
the ancestral spirits, the miracle of the Orishas. The more fervent of the
practitioners always affirm that the customs and rituals of African religions, built around the worship of ancestral spirits, have to be observed
in strict accordance with the collective memory of the original cultural
roots, without which the Orishas would be lost in their new home. That
explains the rigidity of such communities with respect to the preservation
of African traditions in their purest forms, the Yoruba language, and the
refusal of any attempts at nationalizing the Orisha tradition as was done
in the case of Umbanda.
However, the religious motives alone are not enough to account for
the phenomenon of the preservation of the African collective memory. The
Candomblé practice itself, like any other tradition, has had to suffer the
inevitable influences of modernity. This challenge has forced it to undergo
all sorts of adaptations in order to maintain and protect the internal
solidarity within the communities and to open negotiations and establish
exchanges with the ‘others’, especially those others who look to Candomblé
for their material and spiritual well-being. A perennial question therefore
is how to make sure that the successive adaptations do not bring about
any deformation of the original tradition, and consequently a loss of this
stronghold of the African collective memory, the only surviving mark of
the black identity in Bahia.
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Over the years, Candomblé devotees have developed some strategies
for the survival of the community while at the same time protecting and
reinforcing the corpus of collective memory, having recognized the absolute
necessity of being in permanent contact with the ‘origin’, that is, Mother
Africa. During the long period of its operation, the transatlantic slave
trade had woven its malevolent web, like a ravenous giant spider, between
and around the two coasts of the Atlantic, forming a veritable territorial
complex of lands and waters within which circulated millions of men and
women, as well as various degrees of knowledge, power and property. That
was the flux and reflux between Bahia and the Gulf of Benin of which
Pierre Verger wrote so much in his works. This transatlantic connection
created a system of circulation of goods and products, particularly articles
used in ritual and cult practices, as well as those of priests and priestesses
of the Orisha tradition—iyalorishas, babalorishas and babalawos. This
constant back-and-forth movement of goods and individuals was what
nourished the African traditional religions, and consequently ensured
the almost permanent flow of political and cultural information between
Africa and Bahia. It is almost certain that the revolts of African-born
slaves that occurred in Bahia at the beginning of the nineteenth century
were influenced by information reaching the Bahian blacks about social
movements back in Africa.
From the end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1850 up to 1889,
movement from the African coast to Bahia virtually ceased. But in spite
of that the old links still continued with the passage of descendants of
former slaves to the African coast. These Afro-descendants called Agudas
embarked upon a reversed trip undertaken centuries earlier by their
African ancestors. Even today, there exists a living connection between
these Aguda families and the relatives they left behind in Bahia.
After the end of slavery in the nineteenth century, the inception of
the Brazilian Republic and the colonial occupation of Africa led to the
distancing of the two coasts of the Atlantic that had hitherto been so
close to each other. However, during the first half of the twentieth century,
some Orisha priests such as Babalawo Martiniano Bonfim and Iyalorisha
Aninha succeeded in making the journey between Bahia and Africa. But,
in spite of their heroic efforts, that period remains the most difficult in the
history of the preservation of African memory in Brazil.
The year 1959, which saw the founding of the Centre of Afro-Oriental Studies at the Federal University of Bahia, also witnessed a renewed
attempt at re-establishing linkages and bilateral exchanges between Bahia
and Africa. Through the efforts of this university centre, a new diplomatic
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Ubi r atan Cas t ro d e A r aú jo
policy was developed in Brazil towards Africa. Within the first decade,
many Brazilian professors and researchers were sent on academic and cultural missions to Africa, and their African counterparts reciprocated in
the same manner. This was the period when adepts of the Orisha religion
in Bahia discovered that the Yoruba they speak in Bahia is already old
compared to the one spoken in present-day Nigeria. Even today, Nigerian
professors of Yoruba from the University in Ile-Ife continue to make efforts
at reconciling the two versions in the language courses they teach at the
Centre of Afro-Oriental Studies at the Federal University of Bahia. After
1970, with the renewed interest of Bahians in Africa, many more notable
black personalities from Bahia undertook trips to West Africa under the
sponsorship of UNESCO and other international organizations.
Today, it has been observed that the possibilities of contacts between
the two communities in Africa and Bahia, through purely individual
efforts, are almost impossible. On the other hand, even public institutions,
such as universities, without the necessary support from their respective
Federal governments, have not been very successful at bridging the gap
and promoting the necessary circulation of persons and ideas that would
revitalize the collective African memory between the two coasts of the
Atlantic. It is thus a matter of the utmost urgency that all hands be on
deck for the renewal of these ancient transatlantic links that constitute an
indispensable condition for the reinforcement of black identities and the
collective esteem of the people of African descent in Bahia. This, in turn,
is a desirable development in the wake of new conceptions of modernity
and interracial relationships that were highlighted at the Third World
Anti-racist Conference held in South Africa in 2001. The rise of a leftist
government in Brazil makes room for the renewal of these aspirations as
it is hoped that the demands and the quest for identity of Brazilian black
people will be part of a national debate.
References
Araújo, Ubiratan Castro de. (1998). “1846: um ano na rota Bahia-Lagos. Negócios, negociantes outros parceiros.” Afro-Ásia 21–22: 83–110.
Araújo, Ubiratan Castro de. (2001). “A política dos homens de cor no tempo da
Independência.” Recife: CLIO/UFPE:7–28.
Araújo, Ubiratan Castro de. (2000). “Sans gloire: le soldat noir sous le drapeau
brésilien, 1798–1838” , in François Crouzet, ed., Pour l’ histoire du Brésil:
Hommage à Katia Mattoso, Paris: Harmattan : 527–540
Amos, Alcione M.. (1999). “Afro-brasileiros no Togo: a história da família
Olympio, 1882–1945.” Afro-Ásia 23:175–97.
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Bacelar, Jéferson. (1996). “A Frente Negra Brasileira na Bahia.” Afro-Ásia 17:
73–85.
CEAO – Centro de Estudos Afro-Orientais da UFBA. 1984. “Encontro de
Nações de Candomblé,” Salvador, Ianamá/CEAO-UFBA.
Mattoso, Kátia M. de Queirós. (1982). Ser escravo no Brasil. São Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense.
Mestre Didi, Deoscóredes Maximiliano dos Santos. (1994). História de um Terreiro Nagô: crônica histórica. São Paulo: Carthago e Forte.
Oliveira, Maria Inês Côrtes de. (1997). “Quem eram os negros da Guiné?: A
origem dos africanos na Bahia.” Afro-Ásia 19–20: 37–73.
Querino, Manoel, (1980). “O colono preto como fator da civilização brasileira.”
Afro-Ásia, 13: 143–58.
Reis, João José. (1986). Rebelião escrava no Brasil: A história do levante dos malês
(1835). São Paulo: Brasiliense.
Rodrigues, João Jorge (ed.). (2002). A Música do Olodum: A revolução da emoção.
Salvador: Olodum.
Soumonni, Elisée. (2001). Daomé e o mundo atlântico. Amsterdam/Brasil: SEPHIS/
CEAA- Universidade Cândido Mendes.
Verger, Pierre. (1987). Fluxo e refluxo do tráfico de escravos entre o Golfo do Benin e
a Bahia de Todos os Santos,dos séculos XVII a XIX. São Paulo: Editora Corrupio.
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ANNEX
1.
Atrás do cordão umbilical
Enterrado lá no Senegal
E em toda a África negra gritando
O Atlântico ouça um conselho
Que se abra como o Mar Vermelho
E a Bahia, o Olodum n’lar adentro voltando.
(Translation: Behind the umbilical cord
Deeply buried somewhere in Senegal
And screaming all over Black Africa
Listen, O Atlantic, to this piece of advice
Open your doors like the Red Sea
For, to Bahia, great Olodum homebound returns)
(Artúlio Reis, ‘Tambores e cores’, In J.J. Rodrigues (org.), A Música do Olodum,
Salvador: Olodum, 2002: 153.)
2. Twenty-three Years of Olodum Music
A poderosa música do Olodum é acima de tudo a música dos
Yorubás, dos Ibos, dos Gêges, dos Ijexás, dos Kimbundos, dos
Umbundos, dos Macuas, negros africanos que vieram do Golfo
da Guiné, da costa dos escravos, eda baía de Luanda (Angola)
em tamanha quantidade que fizeram de Salvador da Bahia a
Roma Negra, a terra dos Gladiadores da Negritude. É também
a música do fenômeno religioso chamado por todo o povo de
“Olodumaré”, o nome de Deus em Yorubá, o nome da rosa,a
explosão que criou o mundo, e fez os homens e as mulheres,
criou a terra e o mar, o sol,e a lua, separou a noite do dia, e deunos a capacidade de pensar, sonhar e fazer músicas.
(Translation: The powerful music of Olodum is, above all,
the music of the Yorubas, the Igbos, the Jejis, the Ijeshas, the
Kimbundus, the Umbundus, the Macuas. It belongs to all the
Africans that came from the Golf of Benin, from the Slave
coast, from the Bay of Luanda (Angola) in such overwhelming
numbers that they turned the city of Salvador, capital of Bahia
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The Atlantic Connection
of All Saints, to the Black Rome, the land of Gladiators of the
Negritude movement. It is equally the music of that religious
phenomenon called ‘Olodumare’. It is the name of God in
Yoruba. It is also the name given to the radiant rose. It symbolizes the original explosion that brought about the creation
of the world, the essence that made all men and women, that
created the earth, the sea, the sun and the moon, separating the
night from the day, the essence that equipped us with the capacity to think, dream and make music.)
( João Jorge Rodrigues, A Música do Olodum: A Revolução da emoção, Salvador:
Olodum, 2002, p.____ [give page number].)
3. Communiquè
We, the undersigned, gathered today at the Ile Ashe Opo Afonjá to
mark the silver jubilee anniversary of the installation of Mãe Stella de
Oshossi as the iyalorisha of this religious community, hereby declare as
follows:
• In every age, countries, peoples and communities that have been made
to suffer the unjust effects of wars have always demanded for compensations afterwards for the losses suffered. Frequently, such demands
were accepted and such nations have received some form or another of
material or moral compensation.
• In the case of Africa, many have been the voices deploring the innumerable years of exploitation that the peoples of this continent have
suffered under the unjust regimes of slavery, slave trafficking and colonialism, which have been identified as being directly responsible for
the poverty, underdevelopment and social disintegration that are the
daily scourges of the African continent.
• In the case of Afro-descendants all over the world, most especially
of Afro-descendants in Brazil, the poverty, racial discrimination and
social exclusion of which they are victims are the undeniable consequences of the obnoxious crime of slavery committed against our race
in the past.
We therefore herewith proclaim our right to reparations for the effects
of slave trafficking and slavery that our race has suffered, taking this reparation as a general and collective right to which each and every black
Brazilian citizen is eligible. We therefore demand the following from the
Brazilian Government:
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Ubi r atan Cas t ro d e A r aú jo
•
•
•
•
That human trafficking and slavery be recognized through legislation
as crimes against humanity.
That moral reparations be paid to the descendants of those who were
the victims of slavery in the past and racial discrimination in the
present such that the full right of Brazilian citizenship be recognized
and accorded to all Afro-descendants within Brazilian territory.
That social policies with immediate impact be instituted forthwith
with the objective of changing, within the shortest period possible, the
imbalances and racial inequalities in Brazil.
That long-term programmes be put in place to eradicate the social and
cultural mechanisms that produce racial inequalities so as to ensure
conditions favourable to equal opportunities among all Brazilians irrespective of colour, race or cultural tradition as stipulated by the terms
and spirit of the Brazilian Civil Constitution of 1988.
For the effective realization of these objectives, we hereby demand as
follows:
• That a National Commission for Reparations with ministerial power
be set up to cater to the demands of the black populations in Brazil
with a strong representation from the Black Movement, civil society
as well as political organizations.
• That a National Reparations Fund be put in place dotted endowed
with fixed resources established by law and controlling a percentage of
the funds to be disbursed to the Federal Organs, the State and Municipal governments within a period of ten years for the sole purpose of
financing special reparations projects.
• That at all levels of government (Federal, State and Municipal), priority and specific programmes and projects be put in place for the
promotion of the black populations of Brazilian society.
• That a reparatory convention be negotiated at the international level
to compensate the black peoples for the losses they have suffered as a
result of slave trafficking and captivity. The convention must include as
beneficiaries all African peoples as well as all Africans in the American Diaspora. Also, in this respect it is proposed that an International
Reparations Fund be set up under the auspices of the UNO with the
sole objective of financing projects and actions aimed at promoting
black populations. This fund must be responsible directly to the local
communities and not to governments and governmental agencies.
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It is only by meeting the foregoing demands for reparations that a
new pact of social understanding, backed by a comprehensive programme,
national and long lasting, can be obtained and which shall show the commitment of the Brazilian Federative Republic towards the total eradication
of racial inequalities and of racism in Brazil.
Salvador, June 8 2001.
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The Contributors
gh
Valdemir Zamparoni concluded his PhD at the USP, S. Paulo in 1998
with a thesis on Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique (1890-1940). For
several years before that he was associated fellow at the Centre of African
Studies of the Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique. Presently is
associated professor of history at the Federal University of Bahia, where he
is also part of the Graduate Program in Ethnic and African Studies. He is
the co-editor of the journal Afro-Ásia (www.afroasia.ufba.br) and the head
of the South-South Translations and Publication Project Historias ao Sul,
which is hosted by the Centre of Afro-Oriental Studies and financed by
the Sephis Program. He has published widely on gender, ethnic formation
and colonialism in Portuguese Africa. [email protected]
Ibrahima Thiaw is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the Institut
Fondamental d’Afrique Noire, University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar,
Senegal. His research interests concern the long-term impact of the transSaharan and Atlantic trade, craft production, culture contact, the archaeological study of identity and cultural heritage management. He conducted
research in the Middle and upper Senegal River, and since 2001, his work
focus mainly on Gorée Island and Coastal Senegambia.
Daniel A Yon is Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Programme in Social Anthropology at York University, Canada. He is jointly
appointed to the Dept of Anthropology and the Faculty of Education. His
book, Elusive Culture (SUNY 2000), explores the dynamic of race in/and
the complexities of youth making identities in a racially and culturally
diverse Toronto high school. His ethnographic film (2006) explores social
memory and landscape, race and citizenship, through a study of agricultural
workers from the Island of St Helena in post-war rural England. This
The Con t r ib u t o r s
latter work is part of his on-going project on Atlantic World Cosmopolitanisms. [email protected]
Paul E. Lovejoy FRSC, Distinguished Research Professor, Department
of History, York University, holds the Canada Research Chair in African
Diaspora History and is Director, Harriet Tubman Resource Centre on
the African Diaspora. His recent publications include (2001): The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in
Africa and America (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publisher) (co-edited and
introduction, with Robin Law); (2002), A escravidão na África. Uma história
de suas transformações (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, ); Pawnship,
Slavery and Colonialism in Africa (Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 2003,
co-edited with Toyin Falola); Busah’s Mistress, Or Catherine the Fugitive.
A Romance Set in the Days of Slavery, by Cyrus Francis Perkins (Brantford, Ontario, 1855), co-edited with introduction, Verene Shepherd and
David Trotman (Kingston, Jamaica, Ian Randle, Publisher, and Princeton,
Markus Wiener, Publisher, 2003); Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity
in the African Diaspora, London: Continuum, Black Atlantic Series, 2004,
co-edited with David Trotman; Enslaving Connections: Western Africa and
Brazil during the Era of Slavery (Amherst NY: Humanities/Prometheus,
2004) (co-edited with José Curto); Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publisher, 2004) (edited); The Second Expedition into
the Interior of Africa of Hugh Clapperton in the Years 1825-27 (Leiden: Brill,
2005) (co-edited with Jamie Bruce Lockhart); Slavery, Commerce and Production in West Africa: Slave Society in the Sokoto Caliphate (Trenton NJ:
Africa World Press, 2005); and Ecology and Ethnography of Muslim Trade
in West Africa (Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 2005). He is a member of
the Executive Committee of the UNESCO “Slave Route” Project, is coeditor of African Economic History and Studies in the History of the African
Diaspora – Documents (SHADD), and is Research Professor, Wilberforce
Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE), University
of Hull (UK). See www.yorku.ca/nhp.
Denis-Constant Martin is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for
International Research and Studies (National Foundation for Political
Science), Paris, where he works on the relationship between culture and
politics and the construction of identities in politics. He teaches the sociology of popular music at the University of Paris 8-Saint Denis. He has done
research on East and Southern Africa, the Commonwealth Caribbean,
and African American cultures in the United States. He has authored a
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The Con t r ib u t o r s
great number of articles and published: Aux sources du reggae, musique,
société et politique en Jamaïque, Marseille, Parenthèses, 1982; Tanzanie,
l’invention d’une culture politique, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale
des Sciences Politiques/Karthala, 1988; L’Amérique de Mingus, musique
et politique: les “Fables of Faubus” de Charles Mingus, Paris, P.O.L., 1991
(with Didier Levallet); Les démocraties antillaises en crise, Paris, Karthala,
1996 (with Fred Constant); Le gospel afro-américain, des spirituals au
gospel-rap, Arles, Actes Sud/La Cité de la musique, 1998; Coon Carnival, New Year in Cape Town, Past and Present, Cape Town, David Philip,
1999 and La France du jazz, identité et modernité dans la première moitié
du 20ème siècle, Marseille, Parenthèses, 2002 (with Olivier Roueff ). He
has also edited: Les Afriques politiques, Paris, La Découverte, 1991 (with
Christian Coulon); Cartes d’identité, comment dire “nous” en politique?
Paris, Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1994 and
Sur la piste des OPNI (Objets politiques non identifiés), Paris, CERI/
Karthala, 2002.
Luis Nicolau Parés was born in Barcelona and has a PhD by the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Resident
in Salvador since 1998, he is currently professor in the Anthropology
Departament, at the Universidade Federal da Bahia. His research interests
are the history and anthropology of African and Afro-Brazilian religions,
and he has done fieldwork in Bahia, Maranhão and the Republic of Benin.
His latest publication is “A formação do candomblé: história e ritual da
nação jeje na Bahia” (Editora Unicamp, 2006). [email protected]
Alex van Stipriaan is curator Culture and History of Latin America and
the Caribbean at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam which he combines
with a professorship in the same field at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Most of his research focuses on the history and cultures of Suriname
as well as on processes of creolisation in the Black Atlantic in general.
His study on Surinamese slave plantations (Surinaams contrast, Leiden
1993) is recognized as a standard in Dutch-Caribbean historiography. He
furthermore published among other things on Afro-Surinamese music,
religion, marronage, Emancipation, education and art. ([email protected].
nl or [email protected])
Marina de Mello e Souza is professor of history at the University of São
Paulo. She is the author of Reis negros no Brasil escravista. História da festa
de coroação de rei congo (Black Kings in Brazil at Slavery Time. History of the
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The Con t r ib u t o r s
Festival of the King of Congo Coronation) and has published extensively on
Afro-Catholicism in Central Africa and Brazil.
Hebe Mattos is Professor of History at University Federal Fluminense in
Brazil. She is the author or co-author of numerous books and articles on
Brazilian slavery, memory of slavery and racial relations in Brazil, including
Das Cores do Silêncio. Significados da Liberdade no Brasil Escravista, séc.
XIX, (Nova Fronteira, 1998) for which she received the Brazil National
Archive Research Award (1995) and The Abolition of Slavery and the
Aftermath of Abolition in Brazil (with Rebecca Scott, Seymour Dresher,
George Reid Andrews and Robert Levine, Duke University Press, 1988).
Her most recent book is Memórias do Cativeiro. Família, Trabalho e
Cidadania no Pós-abolição with Ana Lugão Rios, (Civilização Brasileira,
2005). Presently she is developing research on slavery, manumission and
the creation of racial categories in the Atlantic Portuguese empire in the
modern age.
Robert W. Slenes received his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University
in 1976, with a dissertation on ‘The Demography and Economics of Brazilian Slavery: 1850-1888’. He has been a professor at the Universidade
Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil since 1984, having taught
previously at the Universities of New Mexico and Colorado and at the
Universidade Federal Fluminense. He is the author of a book on the slave
family in southeastern Brazil during the nineteenth century (Na Senzala,
uma Flor: Esperanças e Recordações na Formação da Família Escrava … [Rio
de Janeiro: Ed. Nova Fronteira, 1999]) and of other studies in demographic,
social and cultural history, regarding slavery and slave society. His recent
publications have focused on Central-African culture and slave identity in
Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo; the early nineteenth century Bavarian artist
J. M. Rugendas and his favorable representations of Africans in the formation of the Brazilian nation; and Brazil’s internal slave trade, 1850-1888.
Jocélio Teles dos Santos teaches Anthropology and is director of the
Center of Afro-Oriental Studies at the Federal University of Bahia. He
has written several articles on Afro-Brazilian religion and public policies
for the Afro-Brazilian population. He is the author of O poder da cultura
e a cultura no poder. A disputa simbólica da herança africana no Brasil,
of O dono da terra. O caboclo nos candomblés baianos, and co-author
of Ritmos em Trânsito.Sócio-Antropologia da música baiana. At present
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The Con t r ib u t o r s
he is coordinating a research on the impact of affirmative action in public
universities in Brazil. [email protected]
Ubiratan Castro de Araújo received his PhD in history from the Sorbonne in 1992 and has published on slavery in Bahia. He was director of
the Centre of Afro-Oriental Studies in Bahia and, since 2002, he has been
the President of the Palmares Foundation of the Ministry of Culture in
Brasilia.
Dr Chris Okechukwu Uroh (PhD) was a lecturer in the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Before His sudden death
in 2003, he published widely and edited a book with Samir Amin entitled
“Africa & the Challenge of Development: Essays”.
Boubacar Barry is profesor of history at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop
in Dakar – Senegal. He has taught in a number of universities in the US,
Germany, France and, thanks to the Sephis Program, at the University of
Campinas, Brazil. He is the author of several publications, among others:
- Le Royaume du Waalo, Maspero 1972
- Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Cambridge University Press
1998.
- Senegambia o Desafio da História Regional, Centro de Estudos AfroAsiáticos, Universidade Candido Mendes, 2000.
Elisée Soumonni (Ph.D History, University of Ife, Nigeria) has research
and teaching experience at the Universities of Ife and Zaria in Nigeria and
at the Université Nationale du Bénin, Abomey-Calavi. He was Fulbright
Research Scholar at Emory University, Atlanta, 1997-1998, Leverhulme
Trust Visiting Research Fellow, University of Hull, UK, 2001 and Visiting
Professor at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niteroi, Brazil, 2003.
His research interests are the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the African
Diaspora, with specific reference to returnees from Brazil to the Bight
of Benin. His publications include, in addition to articles in journals, a
dozen of contributions in collective works, among others: ‘Afro-Brazilian
Communities of the Bight of Benin in the Nineteenth Century’; ‘Some
reflections on the Brazilian Legacy in Dahomey’ and ‘Lacustrine Villages
in South Benin as Refuges from the Slave Trade’.
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The Con t r ib u t o r s
Livio Sansone was born in Palermo, Italy, and received his PhD in anthropology in 1992 from the University of Amsterdam with a thesis on the
making of a black culture in Amsterdam, based on longitudinal research
from 1981 to 1991. He was the Scientific Director of the Centre of AfroAsian Studies and the editor of the journal Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, both
in Rio de Janeiro. He is presently associate professor of anthropology at
the federal University of Bahia and Head of the Graduate Program in
Ethnic and African Studies as well as of the Factory of Ideas Program.
He has published extensively in the field of race relations, globalization,
youth culture and work or unemployment among lower-class people in
Suriname, the Netherlands, England, Italy and Brazil. He is the author
of Blackness Without Ethnicity. Creating Race in Brazil. New York: Palgrave, 2003. [email protected]
340