Candomblé

Candomblé is an indigenous Afro-Brazilian religion with a strong matriarchal focus that is passed down from mother to daughter, having originated among African slaves brought to Brazil by the Portuguese during the transatlantic slave trade from the 1530s onward. The earliest forms of kandombele, a Kikongo word meaning “prayer,” were unwittingly aided in the mid-1700s when the pope declared that Africans had souls. This strengthened the process of syncretism in which slaves converted to Catholicism but preserved African religion by embedding it within Christian practices. This accounts for the important association of African orishas, or deities, with Catholic saints. Because Candomblé allowed slaves to imagine [Page 225]autonomous identities distinct from their existence as chattel, it subverted the dominance of the slaveholding class by constantly reasserting African culture. Candomblé became the historical backbone of Afro-Brazilian cultura, and its political and social dimensions continue to influence Brazilian society and popular culture; it generated samba, and is a primary influence on Brazilian food, arts, and dance.

During slavery the majority of Africans taken to Brazil were from Igbo, Yoruba, Dogon-Peuhl, Ewe-Fon, Kongo, and Bantu ethnic groups, mainly from Mozambique, Mali, Nigeria, Congo, and Angola. Although deliberately separated from family, kinship, and language communities as a means of limiting possibilities for rebellion, similarities of faith enabled Africans to build new cultural literacies on the foundations of previous knowledge. New World Africans shared belief in an inspirited universe, privileged the remembrance of ancestors, and adapted the practices of their traditions, including music, drumming, song, dance, ceremony, food preparation, healing, herbalism, midwifery, and systems of extended family.

As Candomblé coalesced, it anchored the social organization of the slave community, allowing slaves to imagine a resilient African subjectivity despite being brutally objectified as mere property. As a defiant underground practice that survived European efforts to suppress all vestiges of black social groups, Candomblé supported a libratory politics of preserving African cultural in order to resist slavery and colonialism. Candomblé was the foundation of Brazil's maroon outposts and quilombos, remote villages where escaped slaves, freedmen, Natives, and sympathetic whites organized militant resistance to slavery. Women priestesses and devotees of Candomblé were prominent in such resistance movements.