Recreating Africa

Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770

James H. Sweet

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780807862346
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia africana

Exploring the cultural lives of African slaves in the early colonial Portuguese world, with an emphasis on the more than one million Central Africans who survived the journey to Brazil, James Sweet lifts a curtain on their lives as Africans rather than as incipient Brazilians. Focusing first on the cultures of Central Africa from which the slaves came--Ndembu, Imbangala, Kongo, and others--Sweet identifies specific cultural rites and beliefs that survived their transplantation to the African-Portuguese diaspora, arguing that they did not give way to immediate creolization in the New World but remained distinctly African for some time. Slaves transferred many cultural practices from their homelands to Brazil, including kinship structures, divination rituals, judicial ordeals, ritual burials, dietary restrictions, and secret societies. Sweet demonstrates that the structures of many of these practices remained constant during this early period, although the meanings of the rituals were often transformed as slaves coped with their new environment and status. Religious rituals in particular became potent forms of protest against the institution of slavery and its hardships. In addition, Sweet examines how certain African beliefs and customs challenged and ultimately influenced Brazilian Catholicism. Sweet's analysis sheds new light on African culture in Brazil's slave society while also enriching our understanding of the complex process of creolization and cultural survival.

PART ONE
Living and Dying in the African-Portuguese Diaspora

CHAPTER ONE
Demography, Distribution, and Diasporic Streams

In the late 1720s, a young girl was enslaved in the interior of Angola. There, she was separated from her father, Catumbuque, her mother, Matte, and her two sisters, Quilome and Capaco. By the time she was marched to the Atlantic Coast and loaded onto a Brazilian-bound slave ship in 1728, she was ten years old. The young girl arrived in Rio de Janeiro, where she was purchased by a soldier named Manuel Henrique. Henrique took the girl to his local parish church, where she was baptized and given the Christian name, Caterina Maria. Caterina Maria worked in the soldier’s home for only a brief time before he sold her to one Francisco Martinho. The girl spent three years in Martinho’s service, before being sold yet again, this time to a man named José Machado. Machado carried Caterina Maria to Lisbon, where, at the age of fifteen, she was brought before the Portuguese Inquisition to answer witchcraft charges.

Machado testified that when he bought Caterina Maria in Rio, he was told that she had been baptized a Christian, but, he claimed, “she shows herself not to be.” Indeed, Caterina Maria admitted that she “never had feeling or devotion” for the church. She consistently slept through mass. She threw her rosary beads “out the window.” And she never confessed “well and truly.” Nevertheless, Caterina Maria still had a strong belief in the powers of the African spirit world. In her confession before the Inquisition, she revealed that her Angolan father, Catumbuque, “taught her some words in order to do evil to whomever she might want, and the words were—Carinsca, Casundeque, Carisca.” While the rendering in the Portuguese document does not lend itself to precise translation, a rough interpretation of the words might be: “May you be charmed; may you be overcome; may you be eaten.”¹ The effects of the curse certainly reflected this interpretation. In Rio de Janeiro, Caterina Maria used the curse to injure her master Francisco Martinho. On one occasion, she said the words to make him fall down and split his head open. Other times, she claimed that the words made him so ill that he was “not able to get out of bed.” In Lisbon, the oration resulted in a wound on the leg of her master, José Machado. The young Angolan also used these spells to attack rival servants in the home of her Lisbon master. Caterina Maria could spontaneously cause “toothaches, [and] pains in the nose, eyes and ears” of the assistants, Maria Caetana and Barbara Joachina. Then, just as suddenly, she could remove the pains by saying a single word in her language, “Cazamficar.”²

Caterina Maria also claimed that during the night she traveled back to her Angolan homeland, where she spoke with various people, including “the daughter of her master, who had actually been exiled to that state.”³ In many Central African societies, it was believed that the spirit left the body at night and wandered freely. The events of the spirit world (“dreams” in Western parlance) were then interpreted to better understand the person’s real-life experiences.⁴ In the case of Caterina Maria, the people she encountered in her “night flying” to Angola instructed her that she “should make as much evil as she could” in the house of José Machado. Caterina Maria probably took these directives as an affirmation of her persistent attacks against her master and his other servants.⁵

The case of Caterina Maria is a convenient starting point for our study of African kinship, culture, and religion in the African-Portuguese world, because it reveals many of the conflicts and tensions that permeated the lives of African slaves in the broader diaspora. Caterina Maria no doubt felt the deep loss of her family when she was separated from them in the Angolan hinterlands. But their cultural legacy lived on, as Caterina Maria traversed the African-Portuguese diaspora, both literally and spiritually, from Angola, to Brazil, to Portugal, and back to Angola.

As we will see, Caterina Maria’s journeys across the Portuguese world were far from extraordinary; nor was her tenacious hold on her Angolan past. Africans crisscrossed the Portuguese empire with their masters, carrying with them many of the ideas and beliefs that sustained them in their homelands. These specific values often were nourished by contacts with Africans from the same broad cultural/linguistic regions, if not the same “ethnic” groups. And these values were utilized, both individually and collectively, to challenge the power of slaveholders.

But before we delve more deeply into the cosmological and religious worlds of African slaves, we first need a better understanding of who these Africans were. In this chapter, we will examine the demographic contours of the slave trade in the Portuguese colonial world between 1441 and 1770, with a particular emphasis on the ethnic backgrounds of those Africans who contributed to the slave communities of Brazil. Portuguese and Brazilian slavers concentrated their trade on particular African regions for sustained periods of time, resulting in diasporic slave populations that often shared similar cultural backgrounds. While the statistical quantification of the slave trade will play an important role in our analysis, the “numbers” tell us little about how Africans themselves understood ethnicity once they arrived as slaves in the Portuguese world. As we will show, the slave trade itself contributed to important transformations in African understandings of identity and ethnicity.

The Slave Trade in the Portuguese Colonial World, 1441–1770

During the period under study, there were four distinct phases of the slave trade that shaped African culture in the Portuguese colonial world. Each coincided roughly with the turn of a new century. During the initial phases of the Portuguese slave trade, from 1441 to 1521, scholars now suggest that as many as 156,000 slaves were exported from the African coast to Iberia and the Atlantic islands.⁶ The trade experienced a remarkable growth during the period, with the annual volume more than doubling between 1450–1465 and 1480–1499, from 900 slaves per year to around 2,200. The volume doubled yet again in the first decades of the sixteenth century. During the first twenty-five years of the trade the majority of the slaves came from Mauritania, but by around 1465, Mauritania was overtaken by the Upper Guinea coast as the primary source of Portuguese slave labor.⁷

The second phase of the slave trade commenced around 1518, when the trade began to shift from Europe and the Atlantic islands to the Americas. In August 1518, the king of Spain granted Lorenzo de Gomenot the right to transport 4,000 Africans to Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico “direct from the isles of Guinea and other regions from which they are wont to bring the said Negroes.”⁸ Prior to this time, slaves were required to pass through Spain or Portugal to be taxed and “seasoned” before being sent to the Americas. Though the Portuguese would not begin shipping large numbers of Africans to their colony in Brazil until the second half of the sixteenth century, this shift in trade directly to the Americas represented a profitable new focus in the trade in human cargoes, one which would see more than 150,000 slaves arriving in Spanish America before 1600.⁹

Paralleling the rise of slavery in Spanish America was the growth of the slave population on the Portuguese island of São Tomé. Curtin has estimated that more than 75,000 slaves were imported into São Tomé during the sixteenth century.¹⁰ But unlike the slaves arriving in Spanish America, the overwhelming majority of those arriving in São Tomé were from Central Africa. Though slaves from Senegambia and the Upper Guinea coast continued to be prominent in the slave populations of the Portuguese world, increasing numbers of Central Africans also began making their way to Portugal and Brazil. By the last decades of the sixteenth century, Central Africa had overtaken Upper Guinea as the primary source of Portuguese slave labor, especially in Brazil.

This third phase of the Portuguese slave trade, dominated by Central Africans, began as early as the first quarter of the sixteenth century, but took off in the 1580s, continuing well into the eighteenth century (see Map 2). The shift to Central African slaves can be attributed primarily to a series of wars in that region that were first initiated by the Portuguese army and its allies. The first large wave of slave exports from Angola came during Portuguese battles with the Ndongo in 1579–1580, a series of skirmishes that nearly drove the Portuguese out of the region. As the Portuguese established a foothold over the Ndongo around the turn of the century, these wars expanded to the east and eventually included the participation of various combinations of Portuguese, Matamba, Kasanje, Ndembu, Kisama, and Benguela soldiers. Warfare produced large numbers of prisoners of war who were sold into slavery. This eastward expansion continued through the 1680s and eventually included Lunda slaves by the 1700s. In addition to those slaves captured in the Angolan wars, the Kongo civil wars (1665–1718) also contributed large numbers of captives who were shipped to the Americas.¹¹

The impact of these captives on Brazilian society was immeasurable. During the seventeenth century scholars now estimate that 560,000 slaves arrived in Brazil, the vast majority coming from Central Africa, especially through the port of Luanda. Until around 1680, more than 90 percent of Brazil’s slave arrivals came from Central Africa.¹² It was during this time that Brazil emerged as the world’s largest sugar producer. Indeed, the colony’s association with sugar and Central African slavery was memorialized in the common expression, “Whoever says sugar says Brazil and whoever says Brazil says Angola.”¹³ Angolan primacy in the Brazilian slave trade was not threatened until the 1680s and 1690s when the supply of slaves reaching the port of Luanda was slowed by an unusually severe period of drought, famine, and disease.¹⁴ Brazilian merchants from Bahia and Pernambuco reacted by shifting the focus of their trade to the so-called Costa da Mina, centered at present-day Benin. There, they initiated a trade in Bahian tobacco that brought large numbers of Mina slaves to Bahia. This trade became more regular through the first decades of the eighteenth century, as gold was discovered at Minas Gerais and captives were needed to mine the ore. Mina slaves continued to be the preferred labor force in the northeast of Brazil until well into the eighteenth century.

Map 2. Central Africa, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

The introduction of significant numbers of Mina slaves to northeast Brazil beginning in the latter part of the seventeenth century constitutes the fourth phase of the trade and marks an important watershed in the history of Brazilian slavery. Until this time, with the exception of a brief period in the sixteenth century, slaves from Central Africa dominated the servile population in Brazil. During the first two decades of the eighteenth century, imports of Mina slaves outnumbered Central African slaves 153,000 to 129,000, with the majority of Minas destined for Pernambuco, Bahia, and Minas Gerais.¹⁵ In terms of overall numbers of Africans in the Brazilian slave population, Central Africans continued to dominate through 1770 and beyond, especially in southern cities like Rio de Janeiro. Even in northeastern Brazil during the eighteenth century, better than one-quarter of slave imports continued to come from Central Africa.¹⁶ Nevertheless, the Mina stream of the African slave trade would leave an indelible cultural imprint on the Br...