Latin America in Translation/en Traducción/em Tradução

Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil

Luis Nicolau Parés, Luis Nicolau Par?s, Richard Vernon, Richard Vernon

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781469610931
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Interweaving three centuries of transatlantic religious and social history with historical and present-day ethnography, Luis Nicolau Pares traces the formation of Candomble, one of the most influential African-derived religious forms in the African diaspora, with practitioners today centered in Brazil but also living in Europe and elsewhere in the Americas. Originally published in Brazil and not available in English, The Formation of Candomble reveals cultural changes that have occurred in religious practices within Africa, as well as those caused by the displacement of enslaved Africans in the Americas.
Departing from the common assumption that Candomble originated in the Yoruba orixa (orisha) worship, Pares highlights the critical role of the vodun religious practices in its formation process. Vodun traditions were brought by enslaved Africans of Dahomean origin, known as the "Jeje" nation in Brazil since the early eighteenth century. The book concludes with Pares's account of present-day Jeje temples in Bahia, which serves as the first written record of the oral traditions and ritual of this particular nation of Candomble.

1 Between Two Coasts

Nations, Ethnicities, Ports, and the Slave Trade

“African” Nations and “Metaethnic” Denominations

This chapter reflects on the so-called Jeje nation based on an analysis of the context of West Africa and the historiography of this ethnonym in relation to the slave trade. Before evaluating who the Jeje were, however, it is important to understand what the term nation meant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Along with other terms such as country or kingdom, nation was used at that time by slave traders, missionaries, and administrative officials from the European factories along the Mina Coast to designate diverse autochthonous populations. The initial use of nation in the context of West Africa by the English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese resulted from a sense of collective identity then prevalent in the European monarchic states, an identity projected on their commercial and administrative enterprises along the Mina Coast.

These sovereign European states found a strong and parallel sense of collective identity among West African societies. This identity was based, above all, on kinship relationships to certain chieftaincies normally organized around monarchical institutions. Additionally, the collective identity of West African societies was multidimensional and articulated on various levels (ethnic, religious, territorial, linguistic, and political). First and foremost, group identity derived from kinship ties among associations of families recognizing a common ancestry. Religious activity related to the cult of certain ancestors or other spiritual entities was thus the vehicle par excellence of ethnic or communal identity.¹ Belonging to such a group was normally signified by a series of physical marks or scarring on the face or other parts of the body.

Language and city or territory of residence were also important factors and denominations of group identities: in West Africa there exists a nomenclature by which cities share the name of their inhabitants.² Finally, political alliances and tributary dependencies of certain monarchies also formed new and more inclusive “national” identities.

These diverse collective identities were subject to historic transformation resulting from factors such as alliances through marriage, wars, migrations, aggregation of slave lineages, appropriation of foreign religious cults, and political changes. In many cases, groups adopted names used for them by neighboring peoples or external powers. These external names often encompassed multiple, originally heterogeneous groups.

It is from this perspective that one should view the formation of a group of African “nations” in the context of colonial Brazil. In the sixteenth century the expressions “gentio da Guiné” (gentile or heathen from Guinea) or “Negro da Guiné” (black from Guinea) were used to refer generically to all Africans. But even by the first half of the seventeenth century distinctions emerge between the various nations. In Recife, in 1647, during the war with the Dutch, Henrique Dias, head of the Regiment of Black Men, wrote in a letter, “The regiment is comprised of men from four nations: Minas, Ardas, Angolas, and Creoles.”³ The mention of Creoles (crioulos,* referring to descendants of Africans born in Brazil) as a “nation” suggests that as early as the seventeenth century this concept corresponded not to political or ethnic criteria prevalent in Africa but to distinctions elaborated by the dominant classes in the colony, which served the slave-based society.

André João Antonil, a Jesuit priest who lived in the seventeenth century and published Cultura e opulência do Brasil (Culture and Opulence of Brazil) in 1706, wrote: “And because often [the slaves] are from different nations…. Those who come to Brazil are Arda, Mina, Congo from S. Tomé, from Angola, from Cape Verde, and some from Mozambique, who come on ships from India.”⁴ In the eighteenth century the expression “gentio da Guiné” gradually disappears, although “gentio da Costa” (gentile from the Coast) was still common in Salvador, and the classification of Africans according to nation seems to become more common, coinciding with the increase and diversification of slave trading, which came to include a wider variety of routes and ports of origin.

The names of the nations are not homogenous, as seen in the Antonil quotation, and can refer to ports of embarkation, kingdoms, ethnicities, islands, or cities. Slave traders and owners used these names to serve their own interests of administrative classification and control. In many cases, the port or geographic area of embarkation appears to have been one of the principal criteria in the development of these categories (Mina, Angola, Cape Verde, São Tomé, etc.). These denominations, therefore, did not necessarily correspond to the ethnic self-denominations used by Africans themselves in their regions of origin. As Maria Inês Cortes de Oliveira points out, the African nations, “as they came to be known in the New World, did not preserve in their names, nor in their social compositions, a correlation with the forms of self-ascription then in use in Africa.”⁵ It should be emphasized that this process may not have been quite so unilateral or so radical, for in some cases the names used by the slave traders actually corresponded to those of ethnic or collective identities in use in Africa, but they gradually expanded their semantic reach to designate a plurality of groups previously differentiated. This seems to have been the case with denominations such as Jeje and Nagô, among others.

I will analyze the case of the Jeje further on, but in the case of the Nagô, for example, we know that Nagô, Anagô, or Anagonu was the ethnonym or self-denomination of a group of Yoruba-speaking people who inhabited the region of Egbado in present-day Nigeria, but who eventually emigrated and disseminated through various parts of present-day Republic of Benin. At the same time, the inhabitants of Dahomey, a kingdom that existed from the middle of the seventeenth century until the end of the nineteenth, began to use the term Nagô, which in the Fon language was probably derogatory, to designate a number of Yoruba-speaking peoples under the influence of the kingdom of Oyo, their neighbor and feared enemy. Thus, an ethnic self-denomination, restricted to a particular group, came to be used by a group outside this community to designate a more extensive collection of peoples.⁶

The logic of this generalization lies in the fact that these peoples shared many cultural commonalities, such as language, habits, and customs. With time, this group of Yoruba-speaking peoples came to assimilate the external designation imposed by the Dahomeans and, once the name lost its pejorative association, began using it as a self-denomination. For their part, the European slave traders appropriated the local Dahomean use of the term Nagô, which was thus transferred to Brazil, preserving the generic and inclusive dimension established by the Dahomeans.

In order to analyze this type of process, it is useful to distinguish between “internal” denominations, used by members of a given group to identify themselves, and “external” denominations used, whether by Africans or European slavocrats, to designate a plurality of initially heterogeneous groups. In the first case, one could use the term ethnonym or simply “ethnic denomination”; in the second case, one could use meta-ethnic denomination, which, according to Cuban scholar Jesús Guanche Pérez, would be the external denomination used to refer to a number of neighboring groups that shared some linguistic and cultural features, had a degree of territorial stability, and, in the context of slavery, were embarked from the same ports.⁷

It should be noted that metaethnic (external) denominations, imposed on relatively heterogeneous groups can with time, become ethnic (internal) denominations when appropriated by these groups and used as a means of self-identification. The concept of metaethnic denomination is only useful when describing the process by which originally discrete and differentiated identities are included under a broad-reaching denomination to generate new collective identities. Using this terminology, one could claim that a series of metaethnic denominations were elaborated by the slave traders and owners of colonial Brazil (based either on the place of purchase or the port of slave embarkation), while other denominations, such as Nagô, that were already operative in Africa were appropriated and gradually modified in Brazil.

Thus the Africans who came to Brazil encountered a plurality of nation names—some internal and others metaethnic denominations—that allowed them multiple forms of self-identification. Once in Brazil, Africans who were previously unaccustomed to the metaethnic denominations quickly assimilated them and came to employ them because of their utility within the slavocratic society. However, within the more private social context of the black-mestizo community, the Africans generally continued to use the ethnic denominations prevalent in their regions of provenience.

Mariza de Carvalho Soares uses the concept of provenience group (grupo de procedência) to refer to the collection of peoples encompassed under the same metaethnic denomination. She distinguishes between the use of the term nation as an emblem of identity based on geographical provenience (Angola or Mina nation) and the use of nation to refer to an identity based on ethnicity (Ketu or Makii nation).⁸ Essentially Soares employs a different terminology from mine to analyze the same problem. In this study I avoid speaking of provenience groups or provenience identities because it seems to me that the identifying processes constructed around metaethnic denominations (Mina, Angola, Nagô) were not restricted exclusively or primarily to an awareness of a common geographic origin. The place of provenience as a determining factor in the construction of the idea of nation is connected to the so-called primordial theories of ethnicity that privilege origins, while my perspective is closer to relational theories of ethnicity. The formation of African nations in Brazil is understood in this case as an especially dialogic process of cultural contrasts made among the diverse groups encapsulated under the various metaethnic denominations.

The result of this dynamic is that names of nations acquired distinct contents depending on the period and Brazilian region. The case of the term Mina, is illustrative. Like the expression “gentio da Guiné” utilized in the sixteenth century, Mina was a denomination that, over time, amplified its semantic domain until it became nearly synonymous with African. But it was not always so. Initially Mina had a more concise meaning and referred to slaves embarked from Elmina Castle. The Portuguese Crown built this fort on the Gold Coast, in present-day Ghana, between 1482 and 1484 and, until 1637, when it was occupied by the Dutch, Elmina was the most important Portuguese enclave for the commerce of gold and slaves.

Elmina Castle was a center to which slaves from various zones of the West African coast were taken. The correspondence of Duarte Pacheco Pereira, captain of the fort from 1520 to 1522, mentions the presence of slaves from the distant kingdom of Benin, located in present-day Nigeria, in the area that the English were already calling the Slave Coast. Slaves from Congo also passed through the fort before embarking for the Americas. As early as the 1660s, Wilhelm Johann Muller, a clergyman of the Danish African Company, alludes, for example, to the presence of slaves from Allada on the Gold Coast. It is evident, then, that from the beginning “Mina” referred to a port of embarkation and that the slaves bought there came from very diverse areas.⁹

From 1680 the Ga of Accra and the Fante-Ané from Elmina began to arrive in the area of Petit-Popo and Glidji, on the coast of present-day Togo, in order to escape the wars with the Akwamu. Since the fugitive Ga came from the Gold Coast, they were called “Mina” by the Europeans as early as the seventeenth century.¹⁰ This group mixed with the local inhabitants, such as the Hula and Uatchi, and from this confluence emerged the Gen or Genyi kingdom in the eighteenth century. The Gen kingdom, whose largest port was in Petit-Popo (Aného), was involved in the slave trade, meaning that the denomination Mina, principally in the final decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, could also designate slaves embarked in Aného and in other ports of the western zone of the Mono River.

As Pierre Verger noted, the expression “Mina Coast” gradually came to indicate, not the Gold Coast but, more precisely, the Slave Coast, that is, the leeward coast of Elmina Castle, extending from the Volta River delta in Ghana to the mouth of the Niger River (Lagos River), in Nigeria. Consequently, as Nina Rodrigues accurately observed, “Mina” or “Mina black” could refer not only to Africans from the Gold Coast but also to those from the Ivory Coast and the Slave Coast, the latter including Togoland, Benin, and western Nigeria.¹¹ In this way, the term Mina came to include all the peoples from the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• THE FORMATION OF CANDOMBLÉ
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures, Illustrations, Maps, and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 Between Two Coasts
• 2 The Formation of a Jeje Ethnic Identity in Bahia in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• 3 From Calundu to Candomblé
• 4 The Jeje Contribution to the Institutionalization of Candomblé in the Nineteenth Century
• 5 Bogum and Roça de Cima
• 6 Leadership and Internal Dynamic of the Bogum and Seja Hundé Terreiros in the Twentieth Century
• 7 The Jeje Pantheon and Its Transformations
• 8 The Ritual
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index