Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770

Abstract

“The great leaveners of power in the slave societies of the African-Portuguese world were not muscle and might, but rather, African forms of religion and spirituality” (p. 83). With this bold statement, James Sweet concludes the first section of Recreating Africa and announces the thesis of the rest of this provocative book. Rejecting the view that the slave trade so disoriented and dislocated Africans that they could only build creolized African-American cultures in the New World, Sweet argues that in the Portuguese world, “the beliefs and practices of Central African slaves were more than culturally detached or diluted ‘survivals.’” Rather, “an essential character or worldview . . . was transferred to the Americas and survived in large measure” (p. 227).Focusing on the first three centuries of slavery in the Luso-Atlantic world—the period about which we know the least—Sweet offers a rich feast of vignettes of African religious practices culled from Inquisition records, which he juxtaposes with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century missionary descriptions of religious practices in Central Africa. By this means, he shows how Africans’ “core beliefs were not destroyed by the influences of Western Christianity” (p. 103). Rather, the “broad cosmological core” (pp. 116–17) of African religions (explanation, prediction, and control of human affairs) endured under slavery. Chapters on divination, calundú (spirit possession) and other forms of curing, and understandings of witchcraft amply document African practices. Moreover, African culture profoundly influenced Portuguese masters, who routinely turned to African healers and acknowledged the power of African spirits. (In the 1730s, even a priest admitted that exorcism had no effect against African witchcraft.) Other masters resorted to African divination, thereby ceding “judicial power” to their slaves and offering them spaces for resistance.Sweet stresses repeatedly that African religious practices were powerful weapons of slave resistance. To Africans, enslavement was a form of diabolical witchcraft that could best be fought by religious means. “Many masters” lived in constant fear of their slaves’ feitiços (spells), the “stealthy, silent killer[s] of the hated master, and a very real threat to the colonial status quo” (pp. 159–60). Slave diviners employed by masters, he argues, tended to protect their immediate communities by finding outsiders guilty. Others used their divining skills to win economic advantage.Recreating Africa is also an extended critique of John Thornton’s arguments about the strength of Kongolese Christianity and the continuation of Africanized Christianity in the New World. From the early sixteenth century, elites in the Kingdom of Kongo accepted Christianity, and a thin but steady stream of missionaries (to whom we owe most of our knowledge of Central African culture) served there. According to Sweet, however, what Christianity filtered down to the common people of Kongo was thoroughly integrated into African cosmological frameworks, and he finds virtually no evidence that “the so-called Christian beliefs” (p. 196) of Central Africans influenced Brazilian slave Christianity.At times, Recreating Africa is Atlantic history at its best. Sweet is well versed in both African—especially the relatively well-documented cultures of Angola—and Brazilian cultural history, and he deftly weaves his cases together to construct his central argument about African religious practices. He carefully avoids reifying a generic African culture. Occasionally, his evidence allows him to distinguish between West and Central African practice, but given that the majority of Brazil’s slaves came from the latter region, the dominant culture in Portuguese America was “probably Mbundu in origin” (p. 227). Indeed, Recreating Africa makes a useful counterpoint to the essays in Linda Heywood’s Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002).Some portions of the book do not cohere quite as well; early chapters on demography, kinship (including same-sex relationships), and the brutalities of slave life—the latter graphically detailed—are not fully integrated into the discussion of religious practices. Similarly, the chapter that analyzes the determined allegiance of Christian and Muslim slaves to their respective faiths does not advance his argument about African culture. Inevitably, one is left to wonder whether the cases brought before the Inquisition are truly representative of cultural practices in colonial Brazilian society. And, at times, Sweet may be overstating the efficacy of religious resistance. Many slaves, after all, opted to flee to Palmares, the long-lived quilombo (runaway slave community) also profoundly shaped by Angolan culture, which represented a very different response to slavery.