The Development of Yoruba Candomble Communities in Salvador, Bahia, 1835-1986

M. Alonso, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137486431
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

This project is an attempt to bring together the many fragments of history concerning the Yoruba religious community and their rise to prominence in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries.

Chapter 1

The African Nations of Salvador

Off in the distance he could hear his children calling him the way they always had. The şire¹ had been played, the doors opened by his faithful messenger, and the rhythm begun to call him closer. It was much further away than usual but distance could not prevent him from hearing it still. Breaking through the mist, he descended into one of his favorite cavalhos,² an old woman long dedicated to his service and as he took control of his ride and looked up for the first time, Oxala had woken up in Bahia.

How the children of Oxala, some of whom he had known for decades, some only recently, had come to call him from such a faraway place is a story not forgotten but rarely told. Gazing down onto the Bay of All Saints from atop the Cidade Alta of Salvador the legacy upon which modern Brazil was built still stands for all to see. The old slave dungeon, the point of entry for countless numbers of enslaved Africans into Brazil, serves as a constant reminder of the brute force with which the Europeans and the Africans were thrust together in a far-off land shortly after the first permanent Portuguese settlements were established in the 1520s.³

As the indigenous population turned out to be a rather unreliable and often times politically incorrect form of slave labor, the Portuguese turned to their long-standing commercial ties with the kingdoms along the coast of West Africa to provide the solution they were seeking.⁴ Beginning in the 1550s, and continuing until the middle of the nineteenth century, the Atlantic slave trade into Brazil would last close to three centuries and result in the importation of anywhere between 3.5 and 6 million captive slaves into the region. Slave ships loaded down with tobacco, sugar, manioc, beans, flour, rum, cloth, and meats made the return trip directly to Salvador loaded down with human cargoes destined for sale on the auction block along with small amounts of dende (palm oil), rice, ivory, gold, and other products from Portuguese trading posts as far away as Asia⁵ (figure 1.1).

Relying almost exclusively on slave labor, Bahia’s burgeoning sugar industry fueled a regional economy where groups of small cane farmers, food producers, merchants, and moneylenders proliferated across the colony leading it to develop into one of the larger slave societies in the world based on the legal distinctions between slave and free and indeed an entire social order constructed principally on the concepts of slavery and race. The construction of that social order on the part of the developing Afro-Bahian population, however, was far from a simple division between white and nonwhite.⁶

Scholars such as John Thornton and Pierre Verger have demonstrated that the Atlantic slave trade was often conducted at very specific ports along the coast of West Africa. While these areas shifted over time, slave traders usually relied on them for many decades at time. According to these theories, the majority of those sold into slavery were most likely done so in large blocs with its victims often sharing a common language or ethnicity. It is also entirely possible, as Thornton points out, that family, friends, neighbors, or those from similar communities were often enslaved, shipped, and auctioned off in rather homogenous groups. This trend had a profound impact on the development of the numerous African-based cultures and institutions in Salvador.⁷

Figure 1.1 Map of Brazil

Pierre Verger notes that the slave trade to Bahia can be broken down into four cycles, each of which brought significant and nearly homogeneous groups of enslaved Africans into the port of Salvador.⁸ The slave trade began with the Guinea Cycle during the second half of the sixteenth century where large numbers of Fon or Jeje as they would come to be known in Brazil were imported into the city. By the seventeenth century, however, the Portuguese established a more permanent foothold in southwestern Africa leading to the Angolan/Bantu Cycle of the slave trade lasting nearly a century. Salvador therefore experienced a massive influx of Angolan- and Bantu-speaking slaves who would comprise the largest homogenous wave of African born yet to arrive. Their cultural expressions and legacies soon expanded alongside their Jeje counterparts as Angolan agricultural techniques and the deadly martial art form of capoeira proliferated across the region while Bantu forms of music and dance slowly evolved into what many now know simply as Samba.

As Brazilian slave traders and merchants emerged as an important social and economic class in the city of Salvador during the eighteenth century the slave trade slowly shifted north to more easily accessible ports opening the Mina Coast Cycle during the first three quarters of the century.⁹ While Bahia began to send more sugar and tobacco to the ports of Grand Popo and Whydah, it was now viewed as more efficient to simply purchase slaves at those same locations for the return trip home. In fact, twice during the eighteenth century, once in 1750 and again in 1795, representatives from the kingdom of Dahomey visited Bahia attempting to negotiate more favorable slave-trading agreements.¹⁰ The fact that they bypassed Lisbon in favor of a direct trip to Bahia is a clear indication of the degree to which the two regions were now indelibly linked together not only economically but increasingly on a cultural level as well.

This cycle of the slave trade was more diverse than the previous two in terms of the captives being imported. Due to the increasingly volatile political climate of West Africa at the time and the historical trading routes linking it to the Muslim world, there was a wide range of slaves available for export. Many Ashante and Akan captives found themselves headed for Bahia, as did increasing numbers of Fon, Ewe, Aja, and Hausa.

Soon, however, events unfolding inside the Yoruba-speaking Oyo Empire changed the course of the history of the slave trade. As Oyo slowly began to crumble under increasing pressure from Islamic jihads and its own internal weaknesses, the city-states of the Yoruba erupted in a series of deadly and often fratricidal civil wars. As many slaves sold into captivity were prisoners of war; the slave markets in the ports of Lagos, Bagadry, and Porto Novo along the West African coast were now flooded with Yoruba-speaking captives setting off the final cycle of the slave trade named for the Bight of Benin. From around 1770 until the closing of the slave trade in 1830 (though it continued clandestinely in a diminished capacity for at least two more decades), Bahia became home to hundreds of thousands of Yoruba-speaking peoples. While smaller numbers of Hausa, Nupe, and Ewe captives were also swept up in the winds of war, their overt cultural impact on the African/Afro-Bahian communities paled in comparison to their Yoruba counterparts.¹¹

While many across Bahia now viewed unfettered access to African slave labor as vital to their personal ambitions for social ascension, Salvador nonetheless developed into a city where the overwhelming majority of the population were of African or biracial descent, and given the varied but still limited opportunities for manumission, by 1808 nearly half of them were living as free people. Given this demographic reality in what was supposed to be an outpost of European civilization, social hierarchies based on status and color became the norm. Yet cultural identities often trumped complexion when it came to opportunities for social advancement. Thus those people of color who embraced a more Europeanized worldview, reflected in everything from one’s choice of clothing to their spiritual identities, were often afforded access to a higher social status than those who tenaciously clung to an African past. Yet despite this obvious reality most continued to identify with an increasingly and highly competitive Africanized vision of the future.

Those Africans living in an urban center such as Salvador of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries surely shared a much different reality than their rural counterparts working on the numerous fazendas dotting the countryside.¹² As even the most minute forms of manual labor were seen beneath free white persons of a certain social standing, there emerged a rather sharp demand for slave labor in areas of work that in other parts of the world were performed by poor or working-class people.¹³ A very unique market thus emerged in places like Salvador where even those of very modest means acquired slaves as a sign of social status and to demonstrate they were free from having to perform such demeaning work. Many Africans that urban dwellers purchased were therefore known as ganhos, or slaves for hire to be rented out or left to their own creativity to find employment.¹⁴ All that was required of them was to return a set amount of their earnings each day to their master leaving the rest up to their own ingenuity and personal support networks.

Their work routine was also more varied than rural slaves, and according to Katia Mattoso, they were found in a wide range of employment working as cooks, coachmen, embroideresses, seamstresses, caulkers, masons, boilermakers, carpenters, and barbers. As the ganho system evolved over time, certain professions came under the domain of specific ethnic groups, known as nações across Brazil.¹⁵

The idea of nação, as it was used by the Brazilian slave state, usually referred to the ethnic or national origins of African-born persons. When used by Africans themselves, however, the definition of nação involved much more than merely one’s place of birth. To the African communities of Bahia, nação spoke to the very essence of what these groups defined themselves to be and centered on a powerful set of values and ideas from which there was no easy separation. Overtime, as many such as Kim Butler have outlined, the concept of nação was expanded to include voluntary associations with particular African-based traditions and was not restricted to those sharing a common ancestry. There were, however, numerous ways in which this concept could be employed.¹⁶

For example, Ganhos, who belonged to the same nação, often congregated on particular cantos or street corners under the direction of a canto-captain. The nineteenth-century ethnographer Nina Rodrigues noted that the Yoruba were often found on the Rua do Comercio while the Jeje preferred Campo Grande for their meeting point. Later he described the Arcos of Santa Barbara belonging to the Gruncis and the Hotel de Nações to the Hausa.¹⁷ On these corners, as Mattoso informs us, Africans, both slave and free, gathered together in the daily struggle to earn a wage. These ethnically based work groups formed the basis for some of the cultural and religious institutions to be discussed later.¹⁸

Other slaves were rented out for a predetermined length of time and some even eventually became wageworkers despite the fact that they had to turn most of their salary over to their owners. As a result of this highly flexible system of slavery, many African slaves in the urban centers were able to avoid excessive oversight on the part of their masters and were thus free to form relationships and associate with others from their same nação in a variety of ways. The Count of Ponte, the former governor of Bahia, complained in 1807, “The slaves of this city . . . gather when and where they please having no regard whatsoever for the laws or policies of the government.”¹⁹

Interestingly, when it came to work or economic competition, Mattoso points out that African women were far less likely to attempt to control a particular canto on the basis of nação. Rodrigues, while not offering a tangible explanation, also noted that same pattern of behavior when he identified the canto of San Miguel and several others as belonging to women but “in general they didnot separate much, like the men, according to their nationalities.”²⁰ When it came to the question of religion, however, it could sometimes be a different story.

Passing though Salvador in 1800, the British traveler John Turnbull was struck by t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction  How the Yoruba Became Nagô
• Chapter 1  The African Nations of Salvador
• Chapter 2  The Dispersal of the Yoruba People
• Chapter 3  The Institutionalization of Yoruba Female Power in Nagô Candomble
• Chapter 4  Self-Defense Strategies in Bahian Candomble in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
• Chapter 5  The Reassertion of Male Participation in the Candomble Priesthood
• Chapter 6  The Popularization of Candomble in the Mid- to Late Twentieth Century
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index