The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  Father João’s temple is one of more than eleven hundred Candomblé shrines in Salvador. I love learning about the Yoruba gods and reading stories about them—stories as rich as the stories we cherish about the Greek and Roman gods—in their various manifestations on both sides of the Atlantic. Whereas Zeus and Jupiter and their compadres live in Western culture through literature, here the gods live through ritual and worship, generally alongside the Holy Trinity and the Christian saints, though the literature of Umbanda and Candomblé, written by initiates, is also very popular in Brazil, as it is in Cuba. I admire Father João, and told him so, for keeping the African gods alive in the New World.

  “It’s very important to me,” he told me, as we sat down to chat, just outside his temple, in a favela, as we waited for his devotees to arrive for a ceremony. “I was born into a religious family. When I was seven years old, the spirit became a part of me. At fourteen it came to me again, and by the age of sixteen I was in charge of a temple. I’m now forty-nine years old, and I never think about stopping. I just think about evolving and growing. We raise our sons in order for them to take over this vivid and true religion from me, when I am no longer able.”

  Father João explained how Candomblé combined African traditions with certain tenets of Roman Catholicism—teachings that some Africans had come across first in Angola, because the Portuguese often baptized captured slaves before shipping them to Brazil, and that others encountered only after they arrived in Brazil. But Thornton and Heywood pointed out to me, however, Candomblé’s African origins are far more complex: “The Portuguese did capture and then baptize African slaves,” they explained to me. “In fact, they usually did, but this misses the point. Christianity was indigenous to West Central Africa, not only in the Kingdom of Kongo where it had been the ‘national’ religion since the early sixteenth century, and where people took immense pride in being Catholic, but in Angola, too, where the colonized population was also Christian and even in places like Matamba and among the Dembos people that weren’t under Portuguese control but accepted the religion anyway.” Though the roots of Candomblé are multiple, then, its foundation is solidly in Angolan Catholicism, as we have seen, and in the Yoruba and Fon religions of the orishas and voduns, as imported from Nigeria and Dahomey. These religions organized around worship of the Orishas are still actively practiced in West Africa today and, in various forms, throughout the New World, as Candomblé in Brazil; Santería in Cuba, and Vodou (also known as Sevi Lwa in Creole) in Haiti. (Oriṣa is the Yoruba word, orixá is Portuguese, oricha is Spanish, and orisha is English. The gods of Vodou are called iwa, rather than orishas.)

  The spread of these religions, and their commonalities, throughout the larger Latin American slave community is one of the great mysteries in the history of religion and one of the most fascinating aspects of the history of African slavery in the New World. How and why the Yoruba gods became the foundation for this truly Pan-African religion is another great mystery, since the Yoruba were not a dominant ethnic group among the slaves. There are many theories about this, including the relative lateness of the influx of Yoruba slaves in certain parts of Latin America, namely, Bahia and Cuba. Despite the considerable geographic, national, and linguistic barriers of Africans living in Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti, for instance, all of the Yoruba-affiliated religions that they created are cousins, as it were, with their gods bearing the same names (save for linguistic differences among French, Spanish, English, and Portuguese) and similar functions and characteristics as deities. It is also true that Candomblé’s precedents among the Ewe-Gen-Aja-Fon ethnic cluster are “just about as rich as its precedents among the ancestors of the Yoruba,” as the anthropologist J. Lorand Matory pointed out to me. Followers of Candomblé, the Brazilian version of this larger panreligion, pray to the orixás, deities that are different expressions of the complex human experience and the natural world. The supreme god, Olodumaré, does not have a place in the rituals, being too distant from humans. He is not even considered an orixá, properly speaking. The orixás form a pantheon of gods that help their devotees to survive and live fulfilling lives; the orixás belong to a problem-solving religion. Somewhat like the Greek and Roman gods and somewhat, perhaps, like Catholic saints, orixás keep lines of communication open between mortals and the divine—existing in a state of being somewhere between man and God.

  Father João described to me his theory of how the slaves’ desperation for relief from the horrendous conditions of their enslavement led to their invocation of the orixás and gave birth to Candomblé. “When the slaves arrived here, they arrived like animals,” he said. “They had no value. People just wanted work from them. If it wasn’t for the orixás that they brought to Brazil in their hearts and in their minds . . .,” his voice trailed off, and he shook his head, seeming to imagine their despair. “I believe that black people here survived, or managed to carry on, because they had a lot of faith in the orixás. The churches could never have replaced African gods. It was a way they had to worship because they didn’t have the liberty to express their religion. The Catholic religion did not provide a path for them. So they used Candomblé in order to communicate with the orixás and ask for protection. This was how they survived.”

  I asked Father João how this unique mixture of faiths had changed over the centuries—and what he saw in its future. “There was a time when Candomblé faced much discrimination,” he said, beaming, referring to opposition from Brazil’s white, elite establishment. “But today the people of Brazil are beginning to give it the respect it’s due. Back then, Candomblé had no way of evolving because black people were not allowed to study. They were oppressed. Today we live in a more civilized society, where people try to understand the religion. I believe Candomblé has everything in its power to grow.” He went on, though, to say that devotees of Candomblé are increasingly subjected to vicious verbal attacks and even physical violence by members of evangelical Christian churches today.

  Following a religious ceremony, which struck me as very similar to ceremonies I had seen in Nigeria and ones I was to see in Cuba and Haiti, I left Father João’s temple reflecting on the fact that as much as the people of Africa were oppressed under slavery, their culture, their energy, and their ways of life and worship could not be extinguished. They took powerful new forms that still endure across Brazil (and, indeed, wherever slaves were taken in the New World). Candomblé is one manifestation of this process. The next stop on my journey was designed to consider another of these Pan-African cultural forms: capoeira.

  Like many art forms, capoeira can be hard to describe in words. It is an extraordinary physical discipline, combining martial arts, dance, and rhythms. Today, its elegance and power can be seen all over the world. But its roots are believed to be traced to urban, nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. In the neighborhood of Vale das Pedrinhas, I sat down with renowned capoeira master Mestre Boa Gente, to be interviewed live on his community radio program. He began to talk about how slaves developed capoeira. “The masters of the house, the barons and the colonels, did not want the black people to organize themselves,” he said, his eyes bright, his entire body engaged in his story. “On coffee plantations, on sugar plantations, weapons were not allowed. But the black people were being tortured. They discovered, in capoeira, a way to strengthen and defend themselves.”

  According to Mestre Boa Gente, slaves began conditioning their bodies through movements and exercises that became capoeira in preparation for self-defense or rebellion (though there’s no evidence that it was ever used for any actual fighting). They couldn’t be caught readying for battle, he said, so they disguised their regimen as a kind of ceremonial, even celebratory, dancing, consisting of well-coordinated and syncopated, almost balletic movements and movements characteristic of the martial arts.

  “They would be there, training,” he explained, “and then they’d hear the cavalry coming. There would be a lookout, a capoeirista, watching, and when he saw them, he’d start playin
g to the sound of the cavalry. And everything would change from a fight to a dance.” Scholars believe that capoeira has its roots in different African martial arts traditions, but no one knows for sure. One version of capoeira is called “Capoeira Angola,” but it originated in Brazil; the reference to Angola no doubt stems from the fact that so very many of the slaves in Brazil hailed from Angola. Capoeira Angola is less popular than Capoeira Regional. As Africans’ lives were transformed by slavery, they transformed African traditions and created entirely new ones. They created a new culture in their new world, and capoeira is one such form.

  “The cavalry would turn up, and they would see all the black people doing their samba,” Mestre Boa Gente went on, laughing. “And the cavalry would say, ‘Oh, the blacks, they are playing around, they are dancing.’ And they’d start clapping. When the cavalry left, they’d continue training.” Today, Mestre Boa Gente helps to keep Bahia’s young people off the dangerous streets of the favela by teaching them capoeira. He gives them a proud black tradition to carry forward—an energy and passion that cannot be denied (indeed, he has more energy than any sixty-five-year-old I’ve ever met).

  Not every historian agrees with Mestre Boa Gente’s story of how capoeira was born. In 1890, two years after the abolition of slavery in 1888, the Republican criminal code introduced capoeira as a specific crime and repressed, persecuted, and exiled its practitioners in Rio. Gradually, capoeira—always vibrantly alive underground—came out of the shadows and was performed as a ceremonial dance in parades and marches. Its military applications, however, are believed by many scholars to be folklore. Still it is hard, in this vibrant man’s presence, not to respect the authority of Brazil’s black oral traditions and accept every word he says. Capoeira certainly has no greater champion. “If everyone did capoeira, there would be no wars,” he proclaimed. “Capoeira is not a sport. It’s something that enters you. With every practice, with every day, you get stronger and stronger.”

  Having caught some of Mestre Boa Gente’s seemingly boundless energy, I hit the streets once again, eager to learn about Bahia’s famous version of Carnaval. Like so many public celebrations, Carnaval combines a great number of traditions. The ancient Greeks staged Saturnalias and Bacchanalias, wild parties that included masters and slaves alike. The Catholic Church later absorbed these sorts of celebrations to create what we now recognize as Carnaval, even before the slave trade to the New World began. In Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans—and in the liturgical traditions of Catholic, Episcopal, and a few other churches—Fat Tuesday (or Shrove Tuesday) is the culmination of these celebrations, the day before Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent.

  Carnaval, like its cousin Mardi Gras, is essentially a joyous annual festival marking the beginning of Lent—one last chance to live it up before embarking on the forty days of this somber fasting period, ending with the feast of Easter. Traditionally, many Catholics and other Christians give up meat or other indulgences for forty days. (In fact, the word carnival derives from the Old Italian carnelevare, “to remove meat.”) In Brazil, Africans added their own traditions to the European traditions. The parades for Carnaval in Rio and São Paulo consist of various samba schools and Blocos Afro and other groups with their respective costumes, bands, and floats. These are akin to “krewes” in New Orleans’s Mardi Gras. At the start of the processions of one of the leading Blocos Afro, Ile Aiye, a figure called the “Mãe de Santo” (the mother of the saints) tosses popcorn to the crowds as a symbolic propitiation to the lord of pestilence, Omolu, asking him to intervene to ensure a peaceful celebration.

  For a long time, what we might think of as Afro-Carnaval, though joyously celebrated, was a relatively simple street party in Bahia, heavily influenced by Yoruba traditions, compared to the national and well-orchestrated event it is today. Indeed, black brotherhoods were banned from participating in the official Rio Carnaval at the turn of the twentieth century because they were so “African,” or “primitive.” In the earliest colonial periods, these brotherhoods played a key role in promoting Afro-Brazilian participation in all of Brazil’s religious festivals, well before the Yoruba became a significant presence in the slave trade there. Though they weren’t banned at this point, there were complaints made that some of their practices were “heathenish.” This ban occurred when Brazil was engaging in an official policy of “whitening,” by encouraging the immigration of millions of European migrants. (In fact, between 1872 and 1975, just over 5.4 million Europeans and Middle Eastern immigrants came to Brazil.) But in the latter half of the twentieth century, black samba groups were welcomed back into official celebrations; later, in the seventies, influenced by the Black Power movement in the United States, reggae, and Pan-African movements on the continent, a variation of these samba groups called Blocos Afro came into being, a testament to black pride and consciousness.

  I traveled to meet with João Jorge, founder of Olodum, one of several principal Blocos Afro. While some of these Afro-Brazilian cultural organizations have a strong cultural-nationalist and activist bent, Olodum is more multicultural than nationalist or traditionally African, as is the Blocos Afro called Ile Aiye (“the world is my house,” in the Yoruba language), headed by the magisterial leader named Antônio Carlos Vovo, a man strikingly regal, with a noble bearing reminiscent of a Benin bronze bust (vovo means “grandfather”). He explained to me that Ile Aiye is dedicated to preserving the traditional forms of Candomblé and is restricted to black members. When I asked him how in the world one determines who is “black” among the rainbow of browns and blacks that is the face of Brazil, he laughed and said that it is up to prospective members to self-identify.

  J. Lorand Matory informed me that “the original entry test in Ile Aiye involved scratching the applicant’s skin with a fingernail. Only if it blanched with ‘ash’ would the applicant be admitted.” With good humor, Vovo added, “We know the difference.” I got the feeling that Vovo’s was a most cosmopolitan definition of blackness: if you say you are black, then you are black. And in Brazil, a huge percentage of the population, through its DNA, would most probably satisfy the US law of hypodescent, reaffirmed by the Supreme Court as recently as 1986 (as James Davis points out in a fascinating book about color classification in the United States entitled Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition).

  I marched along behind Ile Aiye’s remarkably stunning procession, starting from its headquarters in Curuzu, a section of the Libertade district, or barrio, at about 9:00 p.m. and converging on the Campo Grande in the center of the city at about 3:00 a.m. The members were all dressed in crisp white, red, and yellow dresses and robes (the official colors of Ile Aiye) and singing hauntingly beautiful songs. I could just as easily have been in Yorubaland, it seemed. Vovo’s Ile Aiye represents one stream in the politics of culture of the Blocos Afro; João Jorge’s Olodum represents another. Both understand full well the enormous political potential of black culture in Brazil; they just pursue their goals in different ways.

  “Olodum was founded as a Carnaval group, to create art and culture from the black-consciousness movement,” João Jorge explained. “Before, Carnaval was a celebration, purely and simply for fun. The black population participated, but without a black consciousness. The change—the rupture—came when Olodum and other organizations affirmed themselves as black, affirmed that these identities serve political roles. Today, Carnaval in Bahia is an instrument of the black population, a means of social promotion—entertainment through raising awareness.”

  This is a street party and an expertly choreographed parade with a purpose, I thought. But I also recognized the tension between the Carnaval of yesterday and the Carnaval of today. While African religions, ideas, art, and exuberance had found ways to persist and flourish, it was clear that the stamp of “slave” had never quite disappeared from the Afro-Brazilian experience, and connotations of inferiority associated with slavery shadowed the darkest and “most African” of the Brazilian people. Ile Aiye and Olodum and
the other Blocos Afro had to be born, I recognized, as part of a larger effort to restore the legacy of Africa to a place of honor from which it had fallen during Brazil’s period of whitening, the long period following the abolition of slavery in which it was in denial about its black roots.

  As much as I hated to leave this magical center of African culture in the New World, I now felt that it was time for me to travel beyond Bahia. I knew that further inland an even greater genetic mixing of Africans, indigenous peoples, and Europeans had been common. And understanding the many complexities of this mix, I realized, was the only way to begin to understand the complexities of race and racism in contemporary Brazil.

  As I drove into the hills of the interior, watching the landscape steadily elevate as we approached the mining region, it occurred to me that this was the journey many slaves had taken in the eighteenth century. The sugar empire in Brazil was fading then, as global prices fell. But gold and diamonds were discovered in the high sierra. Portuguese investors brought slaves to perform more labor there, in a place called Minas Gerais, meaning “general mines.”

  I soon arrived in the town of Diamantina, where Júnia Furtado, a professor of history, had agreed to meet with me. I was immediately struck by my new surroundings. Diamantina was a Portuguese colonial town, built in 1710, and is preserved to near perfection. You can see drawings of it from three hundred years ago that look almost exactly the same as it does today (though back in the eighteenth century the place would have been buzzing, whereas now it is a rural university town and a tourist destination).

  Anyone could tell Diamantina was different from Bahia—and a long way from Africa—just by looking at it for a moment. But Professor Furtado told me something right off the bat that set the two of them even further apart. In Diamantina, she said, blacks and whites had lived together, side by side, throughout the age of slavery. Indeed, she said, many freed slaves owned property, just as they did in Bahia, Pernambuco, and São Paulo. (Bahia also had a class of urban slaves who could move about freely, earn a living, and pay the owner a regular fee; they were called negros de ganho.) Furtado explained to me, “Sometimes they even came to own their own slaves. We know that white people, freed black people, and freed mulattoes lived on the same streets, all over the city,” she continued. “There were freed black people living on the larger streets in nice houses, with two stories.”