People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

In People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, Mariza de Carvalho Soares introduces readers to two fascinating 1786 documents describing the history, activities, and regulations of a congregation of African freedmen and women based in the Rio de Janeiro Church of Santo Elesbão and Santa Efigênia. These documents, written by a church leader, offer a unique perspective on the construction of identity and ethnicity among Africans in Brazil. The organization was led by Mahis originating from the Mina Coast, but Soares emphasizes that this kind of ethnic label, generally thought of as a nação or nation, only had a specific meaning in the context of the Atlantic slave trade. To highlight her efforts to complicate this ethnic/linguistic/cultural shorthand as well as “the social conditions and geographic routes of the dis placement,” she employs the term provenience (p. 85). Provenience groups might re-form themselves in surprising ways in the New World. She views them as flexible and mutable depending on local conditions, not fixed upon geographic places of origin. Unlike some scholars who have written on Afro-Brazilian religion, Soares is not in search of the “purest” possible manifestation of africanidade or wedded to the unlikely presupposition that displacement did not strongly affect African religion. She is instead very sensitive to the goal of those who composed the brotherhood records: that is, to prove that their strong Catholic faith extended back to Africa.Soares strives to contextualize the African slave experience through a deeper study of African history. To achieve this end, the book begins with a broad Atlantic perspective, stretching back to fifteenth-century Portuguese naval voyages and very gradually focusing in more closely on the Mahi social and religious experience in Brazil. Soares criticizes the older Afro-Bahian-centered scholarship, proposing to redirect the historical focus onto Rio and its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century interactions with the Mina Coast, especially the fact that the first few decades of the Minas Gerais mining boom coincided with “years of intense conflict along the Slave Coast” (p. 53). Because no documents relating to religious organizations survive this era, Soares scoured thousands of infant and adult baptism records from Rio parishes to establish that many Mahis came to Brazil in the 1720s. While Central Africans organized brotherhoods and even founded their own independent churches several decades earlier (not without conflict with clerics), Mina Catholic devotions only grew to popularity and Minas began to build their own chapels in the mid-eighteenth century.The book becomes more engaging when Soares turns to Rio life and brotherhood processions, celebrations, and disputes, which she interprets as “meaningful religious activity” (p. 12). As seen in the documents generated by Mahi leaders, public piety sparked passions and tensions, especially in the planning and carrying out of the folia or revelry done in the name of the brotherhood’s patron saints. Street festivals manifested Afro-Brazilian efforts to speak in a Portuguese hierarchical terminology through the well-known practice of electing kings, queens, and courts representing various ethnic groups, while at the same time promoting their own leadership style and cultural choices. As was also the case in seventeenth-century New Spain, African and Afro-descended women played a powerful, dynamic role as festival organizers, alms collectors, and financial backers. In both colonial settings, these matriarchal traditions led to internal conflicts as male leaders sought to formalize, strengthen, and control the brotherhoods. Soares vibrantly describes Rio city geography and the parade of street life, from the opulence of women’s attire to the elaborate gradations of slave owner retinues, and finally the morose scenes of disposing slaves into mass graves. Her sections on death and burial intersect effectively with A. J. R. Russell-Wood’s classic scholarship on the Salvador Santa Casa de Misericórdia and João José Reis’s studies of death and cemeteries in nineteenth-century Brazil.The author readily acknowledges that this book (published in Brazil in 2000) derives from a 1997 dissertation and thus is not in dialogue with excellent scholarship on Afro-Brazilian brotherhoods or other studies of Africana religiosity published in the last 15 years. The Portuguese version, entitled Devotos da Cor, was a popular success in Brazil and the English edition merits a prominent place in both the literature of Afro-Latin American religious history and the ongoing study of the subtle and changeable meanings of ethnicity in Africa and the Americas. While it is essential reading for scholars of Spanish American confraternities and Afro-Brazilian brotherhoods, its writing style, involving a great deal of very specific detail derived from archival documentation, may offer a significant challenge to many undergraduates in US universities.