Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora

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Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora sets out a new paradigm that increases our understanding of African culture and the forces that led to its transformation during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and beyond, putting long-due emphasis on the importance of Central African culture to the cultures of the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Focusing on the Kongo– Angola culture zone, the book illustrates how African peoples reshaped their cultural institutions, beliefs, and practices as they interacted with Portuguese slave traders up to the year 1800; it then follows Central Africans through all the regions where they were taken as slaves and recaptives. Here, for the first time in one volume, leading scholars of Africa, Brazil, Latin America, and the Caribbean have collaborated to analyze the culture history of Africa and its diaspora. This interdisciplinary approach across geographic areas is sure to set a precedent for other scholars of Africa and its diaspora. Linda M. Heywood is an Associate Professor of African History and the History of the African Diaspora at Howard University in Washington, DC. Previous publications include Contested Power in Angola, 1840s to the Present (2000), and Black Diaspora: Africans and the Descendants in the Wider World, Parts One and Two (1988), which she coedited.

Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora

E DITED

BY

LINDA M . HEYWOOD

Howard University

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, VIC 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org C

Cambridge University Press 2002

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2002 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge System LATEX 2ε [TB]

Typeface Bembo 11/13 pt.

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Central Africans and cultural transformations in the American diaspora/ edited by Linda Heywood. p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-521-80243-1 (hardback) – ISBN 0-521-00278-8 (pbk.) 1. Africans – America – History. 2. Africans – America – Cultural assimilation. 3. Africans – America – Ethnic identity. 4. America – Civilization – African influences. 5. Africa, Central – Civilization. 6. African diaspora. 7. Slave trade – Social aspects – History. 8. Slavery – Social aspects – History. 9. Africans – Migrations. I. Heywood, Linda Marinda, 1945– 973 .0496 – dc21

E29.N3

C46

2001 2001025471

ISBN 0 521 80243 1 hardback ISBN 0 521 00278 8 paperback

Contents

List of Contributors Foreword

page vii xi

Jan Vansina

Acknowledgments Introduction PART ONE

1 2 3

xv

CENTRAL AFRICA : SOCIETY , CULTURE , AND THE SLAVE TRADE

Central Africa During the Era of the Slave Trade, c. 1490s–1850s Joseph C. Miller

21

Religious and Ceremonial Life in the Kongo and Mbundu Areas, 1500–1700 John K. Thornton

71

Portuguese into African: The Eighteenth-Century Central African Background to Atlantic Creole Cultures Linda M. Heywood

91

PART TWO

4 5 6

1

Linda M. Heywood

CENTRAL AFRICANS IN BRAZIL

Central Africans in Central Brazil, 1780–1835 Mary C. Karasch

117

Who Is the King of Congo? A New Look at African and Afro-Brazilian Kings in Brazil Elizabeth W. Kiddy

153

The Great Porpoise-Skull Strike: Central African Water Spirits and Slave Identity in Early-Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro Robert W. Slenes

183

v

vi

Contents PART THREE

7 8 9 10

CENTRAL AFRICANS IN HAITI AND SPANISH AMERICA

Twins, Simbi Spirits, and Lwas in Kongo and Haiti Wyatt MacGaffey

211

The Central African Presence in Spanish Maroon Communities Jane Landers

227

Central African Popular Christianity and the Making of Haitian Vodou Religion Hein Vanhee

243

Kongolese Catholic Influences on Haitian Popular Catholicism: A Sociohistorical Exploration Terry Rey

265

PART FOUR

CENTRAL AFRICANS IN NORTH AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

11

12 13

Index

“Walk in the Feenda”: West-Central Africans and the Forest in the South Carolina–Georgia Lowcountry Ras Michael Brown

289

Liberated Central Africans in Nineteenth-Century Guyana Monica Schuler

319

Combat and the Crossing of the Kalunga

353

T. J. Desch-Obi

371

List of Contributors

Ras Michael Brown is an Assistant Professor of History at Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana. His teaching interests include African diaspora studies, African history, and world history. Professor Brown’s research interests focus on the interaction between people and the natural environment in the shaping of culture, as well as on language and music in the diaspora. Outside of academia, he is a poet and musician. T. J. Desch-Obi holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of California Los Angeles. He currently teaches African history at Baruch College in New York City. Linda M. Heywood holds a Ph.D. in African history from Columbia University. She began her career at Cleveland State University (1982–84) and has been in the History Department at Howard University since 1984. She has published a book, Contested Power in Angola, 1840s to the Present (University of Rochester Press, 2000), and several articles on the modern history of the Ovimbundu of Central Angola. She has also published on the African diaspora and on Afro-Brazilian culture. Professor Heywood has worked on several museum exhibits, including African Voices at the Smithsonian Institution. She is currently coauthoring a book on the first generation of Central Africans in the Dutch- and English-speaking Americas. Mary C. Karasch is a Professor of History at Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. Her principal book is Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), translated as A vida dos escravos no Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850, by Pedro Maia Soares and published with a new preface (São Paulo: Companhia das letras, 2000). She also served as the associate vii

viii


editor for Brazil for the five volume Encyclopedia of Latin American History, ed. Barbara A. Tenenbaum (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996). Her current research and writing focus on Central Brazil in the late colonial period. Elizabeth W. Kiddy is an Assistant Professor of History and the Director of the Latin American Studies Program at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania. She received her doctorate from the University of New Mexico in 1998. She is currently working on her first book on lay religious brotherhoods of Afro-Brazilians in Minas Gerais. In addition to her academic work, she has been a practitioner of the Afro-Brazilian art form capoeira since 1984, and she continues to teach and give workshops in capoeira. Jane Landers is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: 1999), editor of Colonial Plantations and Economy of Florida (Gainesville: 2000) and Against the Odds: Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas (London: 1996), and coeditor of The African American Heritage of Florida (Gainesville: 1995). She has published essays on the African history of the Hispanic Southeast and of the circumCaribbean in The American Historical Review, Slavery and Abolition, The New West Indian Guide, The Americas, and Colonial Latin American Historical Review. Her work also appears in a variety of anthologies and edited volumes. Wyatt MacGaffey earned his doctorate in anthropology from UCLA in 1967. He then taught at Haverford College, where he became John R. Coleman Professor of Social Sciences, retiring in 1998. He has written extensively on the history, social structures, politics, and art of Central Africa with a particular focus on the BaKongo and a special concern with theory in anthropology. In 1993 he was awarded a Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Joseph C. Miller is the T. Cary Johnson, Jr. Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has written Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola and Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830, and numerous shorter studies. Way of Death won the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association and received a Special Citation from the AHA’s Bolton Prize Committee. Miller compiled a definitive bibliography of slavery and slaving in world history and plans to write a historical inter-pretation of this ubiquitous strategy of human domination. He presided over the American Historical Association in 1998.


ix

Terry Rey is an Assistant Professor of African and Caribbean Religions at Florida International University in Miami and a former Professor of Sociology of Religion at Université d’Etat d’Haiti in Port-au-Prince. Monica Schuler was born in Guyana. She has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She was a Research Assistant in the Caribbean History Project at the University of the West Indies, Mona, from 1965 to 1966. In 1973, she began teaching at Wayne State University, where she holds the rank of Professor. She has published on Caribbean slave resistance, Jamaican religion, and post-emancipation African laborers in the Caribbean and Guyana, including the book, “Alas, Alas, Kongo”: A Social History of Indentured Africans in Nineteenth Century Jamaica (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). She is currently writing a biography of the Jamaican healer Alexander Bedward. Robert W. Slenes has been a Professor in the Department of History at Unicamp, Brazil, since 1984. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. His book, Na Senzala, Uma Flor, was published in 1999. His work focuses on the cultural recollections of Central Africans in Brazil. John K. Thornton has a Ph.D. in history from UCLA (1979) and is a Historian of Africa and the African Diaspora. He is currently Professor of History at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. He is a specialist on the precolonial history of West Central Africa. Thornton is the author of nearly fifty articles and four books, including The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718 (Wisconsin: 1983); Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: 1992, 2nd edition, 1998); The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge: 1998); and Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800 (London: 1999). Hein Vanhee holds an MA from the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and is currently working in the Department of Modern History at Ghent University (Belgium). His current doctoral research looks at the development of early colonialism in Mayombe (Lower Congo, RDC). His main focus is on the impact of the nineteenth-century trade in slaves and palm products on local mechanisms of power and on the process whereby these mechanisms were colonized and transformed to the advantage of administrative control (indirect rule) and missionary action. He undertook two research trips to Mayombe in 1998 and 1999.

Foreword

“Forgotten ancestors” could well be the title for this book about Central Africans in the American diaspora. They are indeed the hitherto forgotten ancestors in the genealogy of the cultures in the diaspora of the New World, because the magnitude and ubiquity of their contribution have thus far been so overlooked or neglected as to become nearly invisible. Hence, this book opens new vistas and will be an eye opener to many of its readers, as they begin to realize the implications of the demographic size, the geographic ubiquity, and the common cultural background that many of those Central Africans already shared before they even arrived in the Americas. These implications force such a revision of received views concerning the formation and evolution of creolization that this book will leave its stamp on the whole field. It begins to provide answers as to how it all began and how it developed while giving rise to even more questions. Almost half of all Africans who crossed the Atlantic came from Central Africa. They went everywhere in the Americas, from Buenos Aires to Columbia and Peru, to the wider Caribbean, including Suriname and the Guianas, to the coasts of the United States, from New Orleans to New York; eventually some even reached Nova Scotia. This contrasts to some degree with West Africans, who tended to be settled in discrete clusters, such as those of Bahia and Haiti by people from the Lower Guinea Coast or Jamaica for people from what is now Ghana. But even in such places, large numbers of Central Africans also settled. Kongo is still much remembered in Jamaica, Haiti, Brazil, Colombia, New Orleans, and the Carolina Lowlands. It is my contention that Central African emigration, more than any other, has provided the common glue, the cultural background common to African American communities everywhere, that explains their similarity. These common elements have prevented the emergence of local xi

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Foreword

or regional cultures in America derived from this or that particular cultural group in Atlantic Africa. This is so because most Central Africans already shared a single overarching culture before they arrived in the Americas, in contrast to West Africans, who divided in several major groups of different cultures. Most Central Africans left the harbors of the Loango Coast and Angola, places that pertained to only three regional cultures: those of Kongo, Mbundu, and Ovimbundu. These cultures were not only interrelated but continually interacted with each other. This is not to say that all the emigrants were from Kongo, Mbundu, or Ovimbundu – far from it. But they were all speakers of fairly closely related languages, the West Bantu languages, which meant that they could communicate somewhat with each other from the outset. What data exist show that between the time of their capture and the time of their embarkation, indeed the time of their landing, most emigrants from the interior did learn Kongo, Kimbundu, or Umbundu, and with the acquisition of the language came some degree of familiarity with coastal culture as well: a single coastal culture, for during these years Kongo and Kimbundu strongly influenced each other, as did Kimbundu and Umbundu. The result was that by the time America was reached, the emigrants shared a common language. The Portuguese in Angola were so well aware of this dynamic that by the middle of the eighteenth century they called Kimbundu the lengoa geral: the general language of the country. This commonality of language again included many common cultural attitudes, including a repertory of common knowledge about Europe and Europeans. In addition, many slaves who originated in the Kongo realm were Catholics from the middle of the seventeenth century onward, and the religion of many from the Mbundu realm was based on a synthesis of the umbanda healing cults and Catholicism. To say that Vodou existed in Kongo and Angola even before it existed in Haiti is only a small exaggeration. Its Catholicism, its beliefs about zombies (zumbies), and its understanding of the spirits of saints were all present in Central Africa. As to umbanda in Brazil, it developed first from umbanda in Angola, while later the Angolan and Brazilian varieties influenced each other continuously since about 1700. Much of this transcultural coastal worldview was also absorbed by other slaves from the time they began their march to the coast, but mainly while they were waiting to be shipped, especially on the coast of Angola. Hence, Central Africans did not only go everywhere in the Americas but everywhere too they brought this rather homogenous coastal culture with them, which had already in Africa borrowed from mostly Mediterranean European practices and thoughts.

Foreword

xiii

This common culture facilitated their cultural incorporation to some extent, especially in the Latin parts of America, probably more so than was the case for various groups of West Africans. This common worldview, and its religious expression, encompassed underlying values including crucial notions about the nature of humanity and community. Communities should consist of equals – at least as far as men were concerned – and hence cooperation and association were crucial to social life. The rise of the African American church groups is an expression of this set of values, including the role attributed to women as spirit vessels and as healers. Yet hierarchy, based in part on leadership ability and in part on age, was also deemed to be essential for a community. Hence we see in Brazil attempts to re-create Central African kingdoms or Palmares, the memories and re-creation of a notional Central African kingship in Brazil’s pageants as well as Haiti’s fourth Vodou. Age as a quality of leadership was ubiquitous and became a striking feature of African American communities, for example, in Baptist churches. It is not surprising then to find the Patton cane as an emblem of eldership in an Arkansas church, an emblem that was carved in the purest style of the Loango coast. This book opens the doors: Ranging over both Americas, it explores cultural legacies of Central Africa about creolization, in particular about identity, religion and spirituality, social leadership, attitudes toward natural environment similar to those in Central Africa, and even martial manhood. But it is only a first exploration, a book that sows the seeds of discovery for its readers. Jan Vansina Formerly of the University of Wisconsin

Acknowledgments

The articles in this collection were initially presented at the conference “Bantu into Black: Central Africans in the Atlantic Diaspora,” which I organized at Howard University and the Smithsonian Institution in 1999. The major part of the funds for the conference came from Howard University. Thanks go first to the Fund for Academic Excellence, Howard University, whose competitive grant provided the initial financial support for the conference. I acknowledge also the additional financial support that the Office of the President and the Office of the Provost at Howard University extended. The Departments of History, Fine Arts, Political Science, African American Studies, and African Studies; the Cobb Biological Anthropology Laboratory; the Graduate School of Arts and Science; and the Ralph Bunche International Center at Howard University were all important contributors as well. Thanks also go to the Anacostia Museum and Center for AfricanAmerican History and Culture (the Smithsonian Institution), the National Museum of American History (the Smithsonian Institution), and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, whose financial and other support made the conference a success. My deepest gratitude goes to the contributors whose faith in the project never wavered. Ibrahim Sundiata, the Chairman of the History Department at Howard University, was from the beginning a solid supporter of the conference, and his efforts are gratefully acknowledged. A special acknowledgment is due to Wendy Manuel-Scott, who helped make the conference run smoothly. Thanks also to Cambridge University Press for allowing me to make my vision of the Central African diaspora a reality. I am deeply indebted to John K. Thornton for his collegial support. – Linda M. Heywood

xv

Introduction LINDA M. HEYWOOD

1

2

Introduction

In 1658, an enslaved African by the name of Ignacio Angola appeared before a Holy Inquest held in the city of Cartagena. The Inquest was collecting evidence to be presented to Rome for the process that would attest to the sanctity of Pedro Claver, a Jesuit priest who had labored among the Africans of the city from 1616 (he was finally sanctified in 1896). The details Ignacio gave about his life reveal a range of cultural familiarity with Christian beliefs and European cultural traditions that were common to many enslaved Central Africans coming into Americas, but were rare among their counterparts originating from West Africa. Ignacio testified that he had been baptized in the kingdom of Angola, and had been purchased, along with a companion, Alonzo Angola, and taken to Cartagena. On his arrival, he received further religious training in “prayers and mysteries,” and was confirmed in the cathedral. Thereafter he spent the next 30 years laboring among enslaved Central Africans as a translator of the “language of Angola,” alongside the saintly Pedro Claver.1 This ease of Ignacio’s integration into the European world in both Africa and Cartagena characterized the experiences of many Central Africans in the Americas, and it helps to explain, in part, why details on Central African cultural traditions in the Americas may have escaped detection by scholars. This book is a corrective to this neglect, as it as it argues for an early and continuing Central African cultural presence in the American Diaspora. This introduction is divided into three sections. In the first section, I survey the general direction that the scholarship on the African Diaspora has followed from the first set of studies that appeared in the early years of the twentieth century to those appearing at the century’s end. The purpose here is to show how the collection fits into the still-growing field of African Diasporic studies, yet offers a new perspective to the concepts, foci, and debates of earlier works on the African Diaspora. The new perspective makes two points. It puts culture as a dynamic element in the study of the African Diaspora, and it shifts the focus from an overemphasis on the West African experience to include Central Africa. The second section provides a demographic picture of the Central African Diaspora, and it argues the case for the necessity of the Central African focus that the book takes. The last section guides the reader through the various parts of the book and highlights the main themes and issues that tie it together. HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THEORY IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

Scholarly works on the African Diaspora has a long and interesting history. Unlike African history, the earliest scholarly works of the African Diaspora 1 Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia (Bogotà), Process of Saint Pedro Claver, fols. 133–135.

Introduction

3

were either written by African Americans or were published in journals founded by African Americans. The African American scholar and racial theorist W. E. B. Du Bois can be considered the founder of the field with the publication of his “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States,” which appeared in 1896 as the first volume in the Harvard Historical Studies series. Two decades later, the founding of the Journal of Negro History (1916) by the African American Carter G. Woodson provided the first forum for scholarly works dealing with the history of Africans and their descendants. Woodson, the journal’s editor until 1950, made a concerted effort to publish and promote the history of all aspects of the African and African American experiences in the Americas from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. Indeed, before the appearance of the journal Slavery and Abolition (1979), the Journal of Negro History remained the only academic journal devoted exclusively to research on the African Diaspora. The journal, accepting works from scholars from different racial and national backgrounds, presented a wide range of articles that profiled the still-vibrant cultural traditions of African-descended populations in the Americas. Moreover, the lead that Howard University took from the 1920s in teaching courses on the “Negro in Ancient Civilization and the Negro in Modern Civilization” also helped to institutionalize the field of African Diasporic history.2 Despite being a pioneer in encouraging research on the history of Africa and its Diaspora, the Negro History School eventually concentrated more on the United States experience, and it did not have as visible an impact on the later research trends and the theoretical models that came to define the African Diaspora as a field of study. A later generation of scholars, many working in fields other than history and representing many races and nationalities, played a more direct role in shaping the concepts and issues that came to dominate the writing of African Diaspora history. The works of this new generation of scholars began appearing during the 1930s to the early 1950s. Among the most important of these scholars were Rodrigues (1905 [1945]), Ramos (1934 [1940]), Querino (1932 [1988]), Herskovits (1941) Carneiro (1948 [1986]), and Bastide (1960 [1978]), who primarily focused on Afro-Brazilian culture. Others, including Ortiz (1906 [1973]), Price-Mars (1938), Beckwith (1929), Herskovits (1933, 1941), Lachetenere (1938, 1940) Beltrán (1946), Turner (1949 [1973]), and Maya Deren (1953 [1970]), explored the African presence in the culture of communities of African descent in the 2 Michael Winston, Howard University: Department of History, 1913–1973 (Washington, DC: Department of History, 1973).

4

Introduction

Spanish-, English-, and French-speaking regions of the Americas.3 These studies had several major shortcomings, however. For one, most of the scholars were ethnographers and anthropologists, and (aside from Herskovits) they had little or no training in the history of the African slave trade or in African history. Moreover, they failed to consult the available works on African history or those that focused on the slave trade that were available at the time. Thus, one finds no references to the works of French scholars such as Maurice Delafosse, Charles Monteil, and the German Adolph Ihle, or of the African Americans, Dubois and Woodson.4 Furthermore, most of the works focused on what the authors at the time believed were the more important Yoruba and Dahomey (West African) manifestations, to the neglect of the more elusive Central Africa elements. Scholarly publications that revolutionized the field of African Diaspora studies beginning in the 1960s into the 1980s brought attention to the strong demographic contribution of Central Africans to the slave trade. Philip Curtin’s path-breaking study, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1961), which was the first serious attempt to give a rough estimate for how many enslaved Africans left Africa for the Americas, was the first work to reveal this strong Central African presence. Nevertheless, this did not lead to more research on Central African cultural traditions, as economic historians interested in the study of the slave trade and its impact on the economies of Europe and America came to dominate the field. Thus, following Curtin’s study, other works in the genre stressed the economic organization of the trade, investment patterns and profitability, slave demography, mortality, and 3 Nina Rodrigues, Os Africanos no Brasil, 3rd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1945 [1905]); Arthur Ramos, O Negro Brasileiro, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro, 1940 [1934]); Manuel Querino, Costumes Africanos no Brasil, 2nd ed. (Recife: Editora Massangano, 1988 [1932]); Melville Herskovits, “On the Provenience of New World Negroes, Social Forces, 12 (1933): 247–262; Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper & Bros., 1941); Edison Carneiro, Candomblés da Bahia, 7th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizaç a˜ o Brasileira, 1986 [1948]); Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil, trans. Helen Sebba (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1978 [1960]); Fernando Ortiz, Los Negros Brujos: La Hampa Afro-Cubano (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1973 [1906]); Martha Beckwith, Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929); Jean Price-Mars, Ainsi Parle l’Oncle (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de Compiègne, 1938); Rómulo Lachatañere, !!Oh m´ıo, Yemayá (Manzanillo, Cuba: Editorial El Arte, 1938); El Sistema Religioso de los Lucum´ıs e otras Influencas Africanas em Cuba (Havanna, 1940); Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La Populacion Negra de México (Mexico: Ediciones Fuente Cultural, 1946); Lorenzo D. Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973 [1949]); Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New York: McPherson & Co., 1970 [1953]). 4 See, for example, Maurice Delafosse, Haut-Sénégal-Niger, 3 vols. (Paris: Elarose, 1912); Charles ´ Monteil, “Les empires du Mali: Etude d’histoire et de sociologie soudanais,” B.C.E.H.S.A.O.F., XII, (1929): 291–447; Adolphe Ihle, Das alte Königreich Kongo (Leipzig: Verlag der Werkgemeinschaft, 1929), W. E. B. Du Bois, “The suppression of the African slave trade in the United States,” in Harvard Historical Studies, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1896); Carter G. Woodson, The Negro In Our History, 8th ed. (Washington, DC: The Associated Press [1945]).

Introduction

5

the economic impact of the trade in Africa, Europe, and the Americas.5 The best of the studies provided elaborate tables and graphs that estimated the number of enslaved Africans who came into the Americas, debated the profitability (or absence thereof ) of the trade, and provided a range of demographic tables portraying the degradation and death connected with the Middle Passage and the plantation systems in the Americas. Other studies covering various aspects of plantation organization and management that focused on social rather than cultural history also appeared during the 1970s and 1980s.6 The emphasis on the demography of the slave trade continued into the 1990s with works by David Eltis, Martin Klein, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database CD-Rom, and the Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy. In addition, the score of scholars that Paul Lovejoy has brought together for his Nigeria Hinterland Slave Trade Project (York University, Canada), and the ongoing UNESCO-sponsored Slave Trade Project, promised to provide an even more richly textured profile of the demographic make-up of the Africans involved in the Atlantic slave trade.7 Although these works have brought the study of the Atlantic Slave Trade and the African Diaspora into the academic mainstream, the emphasis on demography moved the field away from the earlier ethnographic and anthropological studies. Thus the opportunities of dealing with the cultural dimension, with themes such as resistance, contestation, creolization,8 and 5 Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Joseph Inikori and Stanley Engerman, eds., Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies (London: Hutchinson, 1981); Joseph Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental Oriental, and African Slave Trades (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 6 See, for example, Richard Sheridan, The Development of the Plantations to 1750: An Era of West Indian Prosperity 1750–1775, Chapters in Caribbean History, 1 (Barbados: Caribbean University Press, 1970). 7 David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-Rom Set and Guidebook (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Gwendolyn Midlow-Hall, ed., Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Geneaology: A Compact Disk Publication (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1999); David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 8 The term Creole has a variety of meanings. In English, Creole refers to both a descendant of European settlers in the West Indies or Central America as well as a person of mixed European and African descent. In Portuguese, the term “Crioulo (Creole)” refers to a person of European descent born in the Americas, an African born in Brazil, and a Portuguese dialect spoken in America and in some regions in Africa, for example, Cape Verde. For a thorough discussion of the term Creole, see Philip Baker and Adrienne Bruyn, St. Kitts and the Atlantic Creoles (Westminster: University of Westminster Press, 1998).

6

Introduction

the transformation of African beliefs and cultural practices in the Americas, received relatively little attention. Not all the studies that appeared from the 1960s to the 1980s concentrated on economic issues, as some works did wrestle with issues of politics and culture. Among the themes highlighted were African Maroon communities, African returnees to Africa, African elements in African Diasporic religions, anthologies and regional surveys of African cultural continuities in the Atlantic world, Afro-Americans in the antebellum South, and concepts of creolization. The research on slave cultures and their African antecedents that appeared during these two decades relied mainly on American-derived sources (in the case of North America, most of this came from the records of the Works Project Administration, or WPA), while works on Caribbean slave culture came mainly from nineteenth century sources. Brazilian researchers also relied mainly on nineteenth century sources or on fieldwork undertaken in the early twentieth century.9 These research strategies tended to highlight the more visible West African cultural practices than the hidden Central African ones. New studies with a cultural emphasis appearing in the past decade have been much more thorough, and they have paid much more attention to the African background of Afro-Diasporic cultures. Indeed, they have given the appearance of a virtual “gold rush” in the field of African Diasporic History. These studies have signaled a crucial shift of the pendulum, from an overemphasis on slave trade and plantation studies to an interest in the comparative linguistic, religious, political, archaeological, and music and performance arts traditions that are the legacy of African Diasporic communities in Africa and the Americas.10 Among the most important concepts 9 R. K. Kent, “Palmares: an African state in Brazil,” Journal of African History, 6:2 (1965): 161– 175; Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973); Pierre Verger, Flux e Refluxo de Tráfico de Escravos entre o Gulfo de Benin e a Bahia de Todos os Santos dos Séculos XVII a XIX (São Paulo: Currupio, 1987 [1968]; Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil, trans. Helen Sebba (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1978 [1960]); Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976), Michael L. Conniff and Thomas J. Davis, eds. Africans in the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 10 See, among others, Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736–1831 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Gwendolyn Midlow-Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Luiz Mott, Rosa Egipc´ıaca: Uma Santa Africana no Brasil (Brazil: Editora Batrand, 1993); João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes, eds. Liberdade por un Fio: História dos Quilombos no Brasil (Saõ Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996); Robert Slenes, Na Senzala, uma Flor: Esperanças e Recordaço˜es na Formaça˜ o da Fam´ılia Escrava Brasil Sudeste, Século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Nova Fronteira, 1999); Maureen Warner-Lewis, Trinidad Yoruba: From Mother Tongue to Memory ( Jamaica: The University of the West Indies Press, 1997); Jay Haviser, ed., African Archaeological Sites in the Caribbean (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1999); Sylviane A.

Introduction

7

emerging from these studies are the notions of a “South Atlantic system,”11 the idea of the “Black Atlantic” (African American contribution to the development of the modern industrial world and the appearance of many of the ideas associated with westernization and modernity).12 In all of these studies, however, Africa remained on the fringes. The most exciting of the contributions do focus on Africa and the dynamic role of African-born slaves in the creation and development of AfroDiasporic cultures in the Americas. Some of the scholarship, such as that of John Thornton, for example, that deal with the manifestations of African political ideology and cultural institutions in the making of the “Atlantic World” have gone so far as to link key events involving enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas with particular ethnic groups and events in Africa. In particular, what these studies all suggest is a revamping of existing modes of analysis of African Diaspora studies, especially the cultural dimensions.13 Other studies, such as Michael Gomez’s portrayal of how Africans became Afro-Americans (an approach inspired by the earlier work of Sterling Stuckey), and J. Lorand Matory’s penetrating analysis of the transculturalization process in Brazil and West Africa, have provided us with the first sustained examination of how various cultural dynamics coalesced to influence identity formation and cultural traditions among Afro-Diasporic populations in the Americas and Africa. Matory, in particular, argues that Black Atlantic travelers, traders, and priests played a crucial role in the construction of national identities in both Africa and Brazil. By situating his research on Afro-Brazilians in a larger Atlantic context, he has gone a long way to address the issue that Paul Gilroy articulated concerning the role of Africans in the formation and transformation of Atlantic culture. His research offers a model for anyone attempting to understand the process of culture formation and adaptation in the Atlantic world during the era of the slave trade.14

11 12

13 14

Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); William S. Pollitzer, The Gullah People and their African Heritage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999). Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Here Darrity’s and Bailey’s work extended the role of the slave trade in contributing to the industrialization of Europe that Eric Williams first raised. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). See, for example, John Thornton, “I Am the subject of the King of Congo”: African political ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History, 4:2 (1993): 181–213. See, for example, “The English Professors of Brazil: On the diasporic roots of the Yoruba nation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41:1 (1999): 72–103.

8

Introduction

Although the interest in the West African background is still evident, several scholarly works highlight the Central African dimension. Among these are those by Mary C. Karasch (1987), Winnifred Vass and Joseph Holloway (1979), Robert Farris Thompson (1983), and John K. Thornton.15 CENTRAL AFRICA AND THE ATLANTIC DIASPORA

General interest and knowledge of the history and cultural impact of Central Africans in the Atlantic Diaspora lag far behind that of West Africa. The main problem that faces anyone trying to identify the Central African input is the fact that during the course of the slave trade, different regions had different percentages of African ethnic groups, and as yet, no one has attempted the time-consuming and difficult task of identifying the different ethnic mixes for the whole trade. In any case, as the research on the demographics of the slave trade had demonstrated, Central Africans were ubiquitous in all regions. Indeed, they comprised nearly 45% or around 5 million of the 11 million Africans imported as slaves into the Americas from Africa between 1519 and 1867.16 Some regions far exceeded others in the number of Central Africans they received. Brazil, for example, led the way in importation of enslaved Africans from Central Africa. During the period when the slave trade between Africa and Brazil was legal, Brazil imported between 3.5 and 3.6 million slaves from West and West Central Africa. Studies by David Eltis (1995) and Joseph Miller (1992) and rough estimates from the recently available Harvard Database suggest that more than half the number of slaves – 15,000 a year by the 1790s – who reached Brazil’s southern region between 1595 and the early 1800s came from West Central Africa. The Harvard Database, however, is not an exhaustive source for the overall trade or for populations. The demographic importance of enslaved Africans and their descendants from the Kongo–Angola region in Brazil was matched by their dominance in the emerging social, religious, and cultural practices among the African population in some parts of the colony. For example, before 1820, free and enslaved Africans and their descendants from Central Africa provided most of the leadership of the black and mulatto brotherhoods, the only legal organization that catered to this population, and one that served as the 15 Winnifred Vass and Joseph Holloway, The Bantu-Speaking Heritage of the United States (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies, 1979); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983); Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); John K. Thornton, “I Am the subject of the King of Congo.” 16 See Joseph Miller’s article in this collection.

Introduction

9

incubator for several religious and other cultural traditions that came to be associated with Afro-Brazilians. Despite such an overwhelming presence of Central Africans in colonial Brazil and the fact that early Afro-Brazilian culture was largely Central African, very few studies have thoroughly traced this process.17 The works that deal specifically with culture highlight the West African contribution, as the attempt here is to account for the ability of West Africans to preserve African elements in the Creole culture of Brazil. Moreover, many of the anthropological studies focus almost exclusively on Afro-Brazilian religious practitioners who practice Yoruba Orisha religion in Bahia.18 The 1965 study of Raymond Kent on Palmares and the more recent studies of Mary C. Karasch (1987), Stuart B. Schwartz (1992), Robert W. Slenes (1995, 1999), and Robert Anderson (1996) were the first works in English that examined the crucial role of Angola–Kongo slaves in Brazil up to the nineteenth century.19 Kent, Schwartz, and Anderson specifically linked key political and religious features associated with Palmares, the largest and most successful Maroon (quilombo) settlement that thrived in northeast Brazil for most of the seventeenth century, to Central African antecedents.20 Although stimulating, these are not comprehensive studies, and they fall short of accounting for the Central African contribution to Afro-Brazilian history and culture. The collaborative effort that is required to advance the field is still only now beginning. Such collaboration would allow us to account for the “continuity and elaboration of Central African cultural forms,” not only in the maroon settlements, but also in colonial society at large. Gerhard Kubik, a cultural anthropologist who conducted fieldwork in both Brazil and Angola, is one of the few researchers with training in Central Africa who focused on Central African continuities in a range of Brazilian cultural institutions. He has identified several Central African and Angolan traits in contemporary Brazilian music, games, and dances.21 Other works published in the 1980s and 1990s have pointed out the Central African 17 See, for example, Patricia Mulvey, “Black brothers and sisters: membership in the black brotherhoods of colonial Brazil,” Luso-Brazilian Review, 17:2 (1980): 253–279. 18 See Footnote 9. 19 Kent, “Palmares, an African State in Brazil”; Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Stewart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants and Rebels: Reconstructing Brazilian Slavery (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Robert W. Slenes, “Malungu, Ngoma Vem!” Africa encoberto e descoberto no Brasil.” Cadernos do Museu da Escravatura, 1 (Luanda: Ministerio da Cultura, 1995); Robert W. Slenes, Na senzala, uma Flor (1999); Robert Nelson Anderson, “The Quilombo of Palmares: A New Overview of a Maroon State in Seventeenth Century Brazil,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 28:3 (1996): 546–566. 20 See Footnote 19. 21 Gerhard Kubik, “Extensionen afrikanischer kulturen in Brasilien,” in Wiener Ethnohistorische Blätter, Heft 21 und 22 (Wien: Institut f u¨ r Völkerkunder, Universität Wien, 1981).

10

Introduction

influences on contemporary Brazilian music, urban art forms such as capoeira, theatre, carnival, language, folklore, and popular festivals such as the congadas (Schreiner, 1977 [1993]). Several of these studies, however, focus on the twentieth century, with more of an aim of responding to a growing consumer interest for Brazilian popular culture than a concern with the more serious issues of the roots of this culture transformation. Recent studies of Central Africans in other areas of the Americas have highlighted several themes. Among the most important are ethnicity, identity, and the issue of the extent to which African culture shaped AfroDiasporic and American cultures. In the Louisiana Slave Database and the Louisiana Free Database for 1719–1820 that Gwendolyn Midlow-Hall recently published, for example, the author noted that of the 8,840 Africans of identified ethnicities (of which there were 18 listed), the highest cluster was for Congo, which accounted for 3,035 or 34.3% of the ethnicities listed.22 Data for the South Carolina Lowcountry for the period between 1730 and 1744 demonstrate that Central Africans accounted for 73.7% of the founding slave population in this region.23 The fact that many of these slaves went on to form the founding generation for many areas of the Lower South suggest a significant Central African cultural presence. Despite this, however, as yet there is little work available that examines the Central African cultural impact in North America.24 The demographic importance of the enslaved Central Africans in the Spanish-speaking Americas was second only to their importance in Brazil. Enslaved Central Africans dominated imports to mainland Spanish America in the first part of the seventeenth century, and they comprised a significant percentage of enslaved Africans coming into Cuba in the period from 1817 to 1843.25 Yet here again, studies of the African cultural contributions and the ways in which ethnicity and identity transformed are rare. Where such studies do exist, as in the case of the Afro-Cuban religions Santeria, the emphasis has been on the more visible and popular Yoruba elements.26 22 Gwendolyn Midlow-Hall, The Louisiana Slave Database and the Louisiana Free Database, 1719–1820 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992). 23 See the article by Ras Brown in this collection. 24 For some more focused studies see, for example, Robert Farris Thompson and Joseph Cornet, The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1981). This study went a long way in alerting popular and scholarly attention to this Central African presence, but it makes no pretense of being history; Margaret Washington Creel, A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community Culture Among the Gullah (New York: New York University Press, 1988), has made a persuasive case for the ties between Gullah culture and its Sierra Leone antecedents. 25 See Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, p. 113 and p. 247. 26 See for example, the relevant articles in Margaret Fernández Olmos and Lisabeth Paravisini-Gebert, eds., Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santeria Obeah, and the Caribbean (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997).

Introduction

11

Lydia Cabrera did write a great deal about the Central African roots of Palo Mayombe, albeit without any knowledge of the African background.27 The recent two-volume work by Armin Schwegler on the Central African roots of the language and ancestral rites among descendants of the maroon settlement of San Basilio in Columbia demonstrates the rich potential of the linguistic approach for the historian.28 Haiti also received a large percentage of enslaved Central Africans. Their presence was particularly noticeable during the eighteenth century, when, on the eve of the Haitian Revolution, Central African slaves accounted for a little over half of the over 400,000 enslaved Africans in the colony. The African input into Haitian culture, has, like Brazil, been the subject of extensive popular and scholarly investigation.29 Yet here again, despite a spate of recent works by Africanists30 about the deep interpenetration of Central African cultural elements and beliefs in Vodou, the Yoruba and Dahomey cultural elements in Haitian Voudou stand out.31 The contributions of Wyatt MacGaffey, Hein Vanhee, and Terry Rey in the collection provide a corrective to this view. Interestingly, several recent works by scholars working on the Englishspeaking Caribbean have focused on identifying African cultural retentions in the region. The large number of enslaved Africans that the British imported into the Caribbean, and the existence of African maroon communities in places such as Jamaica, have allowed significant amounts of easily recognizable African linguistic, religious, and other traits to become commonplace. This situation has meant that the Caribbean has been an attractive area for scholars doing work on African cultural continuities in the Americas.32 Furthermore, the fact that British planters recruited a significant number of liberated Africans as indentured labor after 1840, whose descendants re-Africanized the emerging Creole cultures in places such as Guyana, Trinidad, and to some extent Jamaica, has also worked to keep 27 Lydia Cabrera, Reglas de Congo: Paolo Monte Mayombe (Miami: Florida Peninsular Print, 1979). 28 Armin Schwegler, “Chi ma “Kongo”: Lengua y Rito Ancestrales en el Palenque de San Basilio (Colombia), 2 vols. (Madrid: Iboamericano, 1996). 29 See for example, Melville Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (New York: Knopf, 1937), and David Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (London: Oxford University Press, 1982). 30 See the various publications of John Thornton, esp. “Les racines du Vaudou: Religion Africaine et société Ha¨ıtienne dans la Saint-Domingue prérévolutionnaire,” Anthropolgie et société, 22:1 (1998); see also Luc de Heusch, Le roi de Kongo et les montres sacrés: Myths et Rites Bantous 111 (Paris: Gallmard, 2000); John Jansen, Lemba, 1650–1930: A Dream of Affliction in Africa and the New World (New York: Garland, 1982). 31 See, for example, Karen McCarthy Brown, “Systematic remembering, systematic forgetting: Ogou in Haiti,” in Sandra T. Barnes, ed., Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 64–89; Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985). 32 See, for example, Melville Herskovits, Trinidad Village (New York: Harper & Bros, 1947).

12

Introduction

many African customs alive. Central Africans, who accounted for 15.4% of enslaved Africans who were imported into the British Caribbean, and who comprised the majority of the liberated Africans who remained in the Caribbean, left descendants with vivid memories of life in Africa, capture, Middle Passage experience, and traditions of cultural adaptations that are still in African-descendant communities throughout the British Caribbean.33 It is this legacy that anthropologists, archaeologists, music historians, linguists, and historians have tapped into to highlight the Central African presence in the Caribbean.34 Here, the Central African emphasis provides an opportunity for scholars to apply the concept of “re-Africanization” to areas that received a large influx of African-born slaves whose cultural traditions absorbed those of the founding generation. One of the major shortcomings of the available studies is that they still tell us little about how African identities and ethnicities were transformed in the Americas, and they have yet to resolve the issue of the extent to which African culture shaped Afro-Diasporic and American cultures.35 In the first place, much work still has to be done on African ethnicity and culture change in Africa during the period of the Atlantic slave trade. For example, besides the pioneering works of Joseph Miller and John Thornton, most histories of Central Africa during the period of the slave trade have not gone beyond the earlier studies that examined the Portuguese role in destroying African societies as a result of slave-trading practices.36 Most studies of the period of the slave trade are still largely concerned with African leadership, mechanisms of enslavement, and political and economic changes,37 and they pay little attention to the cultural history of the region. This is surprising, considering that by the end of the Atlantic trade (1867), a significant percentage of the Central Africans who left the region as slaves had participated in, or had least had been influenced by, the AfroPortuguese culture (Creole) that had emerged in and around the Portuguese settlements. 33 David Eltis, David Richardson, and Stephen D. Behrendt, “The structure of the Atlantic slave trade, 1595–1867,” Paper presented at the Social Science History Meetings, Chicago, 1995, p. 33. 34 See Monica Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo”: A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841–1865 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1980. 35 Ibid. 36 See, for example, James Duffy, Portuguese Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 49– 58; Basil Davidson, Black Mother (Boston: Little Brown, 1961), pp. 116–50; Basil Davidson, Angola’s People: In the Eye of the Storm (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 80–92. 37 Joseph Miller, Kings and Kinsmen. Early Mbundu States in Angola (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); John Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Beatrix Heintze, Studien zur Geschichte Angolas im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Ein Lesebuch (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, 1996).

Introduction

13

Ira Berlin’s recent attempt to show that the Creole cultures38 that characterized early slave communities in North America (and that eventually influenced later Afro-Diaspora populations) had deep roots in developments that occurred before enslaved Africans ever set foot in the Americas has certainly advanced the debate. Berlin takes the position that American Creole cultures had their birth in the communities that formed around European forts and settlements in coastal Africa, and that these communities provided the charter generations for African American slave cultures.39 Certainly this development must be considered in any analysis of slave identity and ethnicity in the Americas. The larger issue that still requires attention, however, is the extent to which the African cultural background and the notions of ethnicity and identity informed slave Afro-Diasporic and American culture. The question divides the scholarly community. One group of scholars argues that African societies were so fragmented, and the toll of the slave trade and plantation agriculture so destructive, that they precluded the continuation of African culture in the Americas.40 Opposed to this position is the view that African ethnicity and identity were important and influenced the process of creolization in the Americas.41 In several respects, Central Africa provides an interesting contribution to the debate. In marked contrast to West Africa, where in many regions (Sierra Leone and the Niger Delta region, for example) vastly different languages, ethnic groups, and cultures coexisted even in small areas, Central Africa represented a largely linguistically and culturally homogenous region. Moreover, the continuous presence of a European and Afro-European community in commercial and cultural contact with many of the peoples of the region (for example, the Kingdom of the Kongo) resulted in a mixed cultural heritage that had few parallels in West Africa (Cape Verde provides the exception). Because of the deep Creole roots, the Central African input into Afro-Diasporic traditions may have been less dramatic and visible than the Yoruba and Fon elements, which appeared more African (exotic) to researchers and thus merited more attention. The collection explores the questions of what elements of Central African culture did survive and why, by locating cultural traditions and culture 38 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998). 39 This position departs from the existing analysis of anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, who, in The Birth of African-American Cultures (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), located the development of Creole societies squarely in the plantation societies in the Americas. 40 See for example, Mintz and Price, The Birth of African-American Cultures. 41 For this view see the work of John K. Thornton cited in Footnote 13.

14

Introduction

change in Africa. It reassesses the concept of creolization as it as been applied to the African Diaspora, and it provides exhaustive examples of Central African cultural traditions in the Americas. The book differs from those cited above in that it is the first comprehensive work that examines the cultural and social forces that informed the slave trade from Central Africa, and it explores the extent to which Central African traditions were successful in reproducing and transforming themselves in the Americas. The essays in the collection provide updated accounts of Central Africa during the era of the slave trade, giving insights into how local, regional, and international developments in the region determined and influenced conditions in the Americas. The essays highlight the factors responsible for the export of over four million enslaved Central Africans to the Americas and explicitly demonstrate the prior emergence of West Central African Christian traditions. Moreover, the contribution redefines the question of creolization by emphasizing adaptation and cultural synthesis among certain West Central Africans prior to their departure from Africa and documents the presence of identifiable Central African ethnicities in the Americas. Finally, the book identifies specific cultural traditions that made their way from Central Africa to the Americas, and it explores the concepts of history, memory, and invention in the Atlantic Diaspora. The collection thus provides a forum for an analysis of issues essential to the study of the African Diaspora, advancing models that help to explain how enslaved Central Africans and their descendants succeeded in integrating various elements of Central African culture with those of West Africans and Europeans to form the various dynamic African Diasporic cultures that are characteristic of American societies. STRUCTURE OF THE ESSAYS AND OVERVIEW

The book is divided into four parts. Part One comprises three essays that focus on Central African societies during the era of the slave trade. The aim of these essays is to highlight the questions of ethnicity, cultural traditions, and creolization. Joseph Miller’s essay opens the section, and it looks at “how people living in Central Africa during the era of the slave trade thought about themselves and the many worlds they lived in,” and the patterns of slaving that led to the capture and exports of millions of Central Africans to various regions of the Americas. John K. Thornton provides a tightly presented description of indigenous religious culture in Central Africa, examining the religious history of Central Africa, explaining how the history came

Introduction

15

to be written, showing how these traditions intermingled with Christian beliefs and practices, and identifying those aspects of the religious traditions that were more likely to be reproduced in Diasporic communities in the Americas. Linda Heywood’s essay on creolization in Central Africa rounds off Part One. The essay challenges the idea that creolization was a manifestation of adaptation and cultural synthesis specific to the Americas by detailing similar processes in Central Africa. It provides detailed examples showing that a considerable number of enslaved Central Africans were exposed to this Creole culture prior to their departure to the plantation societies in the Americas. These essays on the Central African background should force scholars working in the Americas to rethink the way they deal with the African background, problematizing the concept of creolization, and reconceptualizing the reasons they have advanced for the differential success of various African cultural traditions in reproducing themselves under the conditions of slavery in the Americas. The pertinent question is that if Central Africans were already bringing Creole cultural traditions with them to the Americas, why is it that scholars do not place as much emphasis on understanding the nature of the interaction between European and African cultural traditions as they do in detailing the success of some African cultural traditions in surviving under the conditions of slavery? These and other issues are the focus of the essays in Part Two of the collection. The essays here cover several geographic areas, have a broad chronological sweep, are rich in historical details, and present original arguments concerning cultural adaptations, identity, and memory. They all detail how Central Africans remembered and drew on their cultural traditions once they were forced to resettle on plantations, in mining regions, ports, and urban centers that the Spanish, French, and English established in the Americas. In the Americas, Central Africans called on the various cultural traditions as they interacted, and in interacting with Africans from West Africa as well as continuing interactions with European cultural traditions, they forged a new sense of community. The first three chapters in Part Two highlight the specific cases of Central Africans in Brazil by exploring the connections between cultural endurance, ethnic identity, and political resistance. The essay by Mary C. Karasch opens the section and uses detailed research to document the demographic strength and economic and social life of Central Africans in Goiás, a remote region of Central Brazil. The author contends that Central Africans and their descendants in Goiás, living in an area hundreds of miles from the

16

Introduction

coast, were able to retain both historical traditions and memory of Central Africa. Elizabeth Kiddy delves further into the idea of memory by problematizing the historical meaning of the term Reis Congos (Kings of Congo), which observers used to identify groups of Afro-Brazilian leaders connected with Brazilian festivals, pagents, and armed rebellions. It examines the different types of references to Congo kings and questions the meanings attached to the various situations in which kings appear. The point that Kiddy raises is the extent to which these references to “Kings of Congo” represent living memories of the historical Kongo kingdom and to what extent should they fall into the conceptual space of what some call “the invention of tradition.” Slenes’s contribution, which rounds out the discussion of Brazil, leaves no doubt about the Central African provenance of the enslaved Africans who participated in “The Great Porpoise-Skull Strike.” Here we see Central African spirituality utilized in a dynamic way to establish a space where Central Africans imposed their own sense of order. The next section, Part Three, documents and analyses the Central African presence in Spanish North America and Haiti. The first essay by Jane Landers is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of the entire Spanish-speaking regions in the Americas, but it does illustrate how Spanish sources and archaeology both document an early and ubiquitous Central African presence in many Spanish Maroon communities. The Central African provenance of some of the leaders of Spanish Maroon communities and their prominent military roles suggest some rethinking of the ethnic complexity of runaway slave settlements. Moreover, the ability of Central Africans, many of whom may well have originated from the Creole communities of Central Africa, to achieve leadership positions in the maroon settlements as well as to gain their freedom and integrate into the free black communities also touch on the dynamic way that ethnicity was played out during the period of enslavement. The three remaining essays in this section assess the impact of Kongo beliefs and rituals on Haitian Vodou. The focus on Haiti is warranted, as Africanists have gone farthest here in documenting and conceptualizing the range of Kongo influences in Haiti. The fact that there exists a well-developed historiography on religion for both Kongo and Angola (see the contribution by Thornton) means that the questions have moved beyond that of documenting to exploring the dynamics of transformation. Wyatt MacGaffey’s essay addresses the issue of transformation by examining and linking the class of loa called simbi in the petro series in Haitian Vodou directly to Kongo. Whereas

Introduction

17

MacGaffey seeks to demonstrate the influence of Kongo traditional culture on Haitian Vodou, Hein Vanhee shows how Kongo popular Christianity that Kongolese leaders brought merged with West African cults in the eighteenth century, and came to influence Vodou during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Terry Rey, on the other hand, connects Kongo and Haiti by linking Kongo Catholicism with Haitian popular Catholicism. Although both Vanhee’s and Rey’s contributions detail the Kongo influence on Haitian popular religions during the formative period (1700s–1860), Vanhee seeks to demonstrate the linkages at the level of structure during the colonial period, whereas Rey is more interested in the actual ramifications of Kongo Christianity on Haitian popular culture during the nineteenth century. In any event, the four essays in this section demonstrate the resilience and pervasiveness of Central African traditions, and the role of prior creolization and Christianization among enslaved Central Africans in the two regions. The last section of the book, Part Four, shifts the focus from religion to the environment, liberated Africans in the postslavery Caribbean, and contemporary performance arts. The three essays in the section cover the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and they suggest the continuing influences of Central Africa in the period since the end of slavery. Ras Michael Brown opens the section with the focus on the United States South. Here, as Slenes does in his essay, Brown turns also to the question of environment and makes a convincing case for Central African continuities and impact on the culture of the Lowcountry by focusing on how enslaved Central Africans in the region interacted with the natural world. The case he makes is particularly strong because of the Central African linguistic retentions in the culture of the region. The similarities of the environment of Central Africa and the Lowcountry also drive home the point. In the second essay, Monica Schuler examines the experiences of the West Central African contingent among the group of 13,000 liberated Africans who were recruited by the British to work in Guyana between 1841 and 1866. Based on both archival and oral sources, the contribution suggests strong parallels between the experience of the African indentured labor and those of slaves. At the same time, the paper, by highlighting the oral narratives of return collected from descendants of the indentured Africans, pinpoints one of the most interesting and least understood elements of Diasporic experiences. Moreover, Schuler’s contribution also confronts the issue of the re-Africanizing of Creole culture by indentured African laborers who were bought to the Caribbean

18

Introduction

after the official end of slavery. The last essay, by T. J. Desch-Obi, takes us on a panoramic tour of the West Central African martial arts tradition of foot fighting and its relationship to the Kongo–Angolan religious rituals. He makes a persuasive case of arguing for the centrality of the Central African connection between the different forms of martial arts found in Brazil, Martinque, and North America. This contribution also reinforces the point made throughout the collection of the countless ways in which Bantu spirtuality and culture have permeated the lives of Afro-Diasporic peoples in the Americas.

PART ONE

Central Africa: Society, Culture, and the Slave Trade

1

Central Africa During the Era of the Slave Trade, c. 1490s–1850s JOSEPH C. MILLER

Understanding the Central Africans who reached the New World as slaves requires consideration of at least four phases in their disrupted lives: (1) how the Bantu-language-speaking people living in Africa south of the Equator thought about themselves and the many local worlds they lived in, from the sixteenth through the midnineteenth centuries, (2) how those captured coped with removal from their home communities, the hardships of being marched into unknown coastlands and eventually loaded onto ships, and the trauma of the oceanic Middle Passage, and (3) how they might have remembered and drawn on these experiences once forcibly resettled in Spanish mainland colonies, in Brazil, in the West Indies, and in North America, depending (4) on what from their former lives in Africa they recognized as relevant to forging new senses of community in the Americas, with others of different backgrounds enslaved alongside them, under specific challenges of surviving that varied enormously throughout the continents and over the centuries. This paper draws on the growing secondary literature on Central Africa during those times to historicize – as far as current knowledge permits – the first two of these abrupt transitions in the lives of the Central Africans enslaved. Historians are now specifying with increasingly useful precision the rapidly changing African contexts of time and place that they experienced during the more than 350 years that elapsed between the first, sixteenth-century shipments of African men and women abroad as slaves and the end of systematic transport of youthful captives after 1860. It treats the people involved – their ages, sexes and genders, and particularly their senses of community – rather than abstracted “cultures” or “cultural elements.” It considers also the human experiences of the inhumane brutality of being seized and driven toward the coast as these, too, evolved through time. 21

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Most Central Africans had thought of themselves primarily in terms of social identities constructed out of family and other local communities.1 For them, the essence of enslavement consisted of being stripped of their primary sense of self, and they accordingly struggled in the New World to restore, or create, a communal sense of identity. The history of Central Africans as members of conscious communities in the New World thus arose out of the arrival of sufficiently large cohorts of people of usefully similar backgrounds, who confronted enslaved others of sufficiently different character at moments when both mobilized as groups by turning to the backgrounds in Africa that they shared. The more general and distinguishing the attitudes and behaviors on which they drew the better; local idiosyncrasies, no matter how important formerly to the individual, counted for little in the social processes, vital to surviving slavery in the Americas, of creating new social identities out of old symbols. To the extent that they identified themselves in opposition to their masters, they did so as slaves, in America; they drew on symbols of African provenance primarily to distinguish themselves from one another. Complex mixtures of cohorts of Africans from many different backgrounds would have intensified the tendencies for all concerned to pour the new wine of life under slavery into the old bottles of their backgrounds in Africa. Local origins, numbers, and timing thus formed the background of Central – and other – Africans in the New World: Enough people of the right sort, at the right moment, and in the right circumstances could make effective use of experiences in their former lives. This paper therefore proceeds from what scholars now know, or surmise, about the demographic patterns of the Atlantic slave trade to identify such viable groupings of Central Africans arriving in the Americas and then returns to Africa to consider, more inferentially, the kinds of distinctions there that they might have recognized and drawn on. It takes account, where possible, of the ongoing creation of new collective identities in Africa that reflected the profound transformations proceeding from the social and personal tensions provoked by contact with the commercial world of the Atlantic, the resulting traumas of slaving, and the radical strategies that the successful adopted to survive. 1 In their communal self-identification, they did not differ from Africans from any other part of the continent; see, inter alia, the personal accounts reproduced in Philip D. Curtin, ed., Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967; reissued Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1997); Jerome Handler, “Life histories of enslaved Africans in Barbados,” Slavery and Abolition, 19:1 (1998): 129–141; Paul E. Lovejoy and Robin Law, eds., The Biography of Muhammad Gardo Baquaqua (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2001). The only known narrative of a Central African is that of “Domingos,” paraphrased and cited in Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 3–4.

1. Central Africa During the Era of the Slave Trade, c. 1490s–1850s

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It leaves to the other contributions to this volume the elucidation of the particular American contexts that provoked resort to specific resources from Central Africa. WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT WHO CAME FROM CENTRAL AFRICA

The aggregative statistics of the Atlantic trade provide the demographic basis for attempting to understand the Central African component of these cultural strategies of Africans enslaved in the Americas, by indicating when and how many people, from what parts of the coast, boarded the ships as slaves and where in the New World the survivors were sold and settled.2 Broadly summarized, the first Central Africans to be captured and sent away in significant numbers came from the area of the lower Zaire River.3 Most of them – some hundreds, in most years – went to the Gold Coast for sale to gold-mining interests in the Akan region, often via the equatorial island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea for provisioning and refreshment; from there, a minority may have joined the flow of captives from Upper Guinea to Lisbon and Seville, and, after 1518, from Iberia a few found themselves sent on across the Atlantic to the Spanish West Indies.4 By the 1520s, the Portuguese and others on the island held enough Central Africans in transit on São Tomé, most from the lower Zaire River basin, along with the survivors of other captives taken there from Benin 2 Now available in the Harvard Database of 27,233 voyages; David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen D. Behrendt, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM Set and Guidebook (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Unfortunately, for present purposes, the database is least complete for the Portuguese (and Brazilian) trade before the late eighteenth century. It is more comprehensive but often imprecise for the French and British trade on the coasts of Central Africa. For a preliminary assessment of these limitations, see my “Slaving from ‘West-Central Africa’ Before 1830 and the Harvard Database – A Cautionary Tale,” unpublished draft paper, Conference on Transatlantic Slaving and the African Diaspora: Using the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute Dataset of Slaving Voyages; Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg VA, 11–13 September 1998. For the present purposes, see Appendix 1 for reproduction of a chart indicating orders of magnitude, as they appeared to me in 1985, and figures for exports, decade by decade, assembled from the available quantitative studies taking account of geographical origins of slaves over time. All of these modify, but do not fundamentally alter, Philip D. Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). I am grateful to Professor David Eltis for reviewing the presentation of these figures and for offering the current unpublished work of his included among them. 3 The comprehensive reconstruction of this trade is Ivana Elbl, “The volume of the early Atlantic slave trade, 1450–1521,” Journal of African History, 38:1 (1997): 31–75. 4 Destinations are specified in terms of the places where Central Africans had to come to terms with enslavement to Europeans or other Africans and do not take account of their further movements, which were not uncommon. In the case of people sent in the early sixteenth century to Portugal, or Seville, for example, most of those who reached the New World did so as European-trained servants, artisans, and other skilled retainers less reliant on their African backgrounds than the people later sent directly to the Americas, who form the primary focus of this volume.

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before that West African state ended sales of slaves to Europeans in 1516, to employ them in cultivating sugar on significant scales; the numbers of those arriving on Portuguese-government-authorized ships seem to have risen to the range of more than a thousand in most years. As sugar prospered on São Tomé in the 1520s and 1530s,5 the Tomista planters supplemented the slaves available from this transit-oriented trade with local slaving ventures of their own. Some of these surely arrived through personal networks reaching deep into the emerging Christian aristocracy in Kongo,6 but others came from the hills above the Kwanza River, where ngola warlords were waxing powerful among the farmers living in that region and selling some of their captives to Tomista traders along the lower Kwanza. Presumably, an increasing proportion of the Central Africans taken to São Tomé came from these regions and from the adjoining southern provinces of Kongo during the 1540s and 1550s.7 They attracted Portuguese government interest in the area during the 1560s, leading to diplomatic contacts with the by-then-dominant ngola a kiluanje kings and to the establishment of a Portuguese military base at Luanda Island (São Paulo d’ Assumpç a˜ o de Luanda) in 1575, just north of the river’s mouth.8 Though no quantitative estimates survive to support inferences that seem obvious from this context, the numbers of “angolas” joining older generations of Benin and Kongo backgrounds on São Tomé surely grew to several thousands in some years. Only a few would have continued on to Portugal, Spain, and the American settlements of both European nations among other Africans from Upper Guinea (see Figure 1.1). During the turbulent 1570s, revolts on São Tomé disrupted the island’s trade and sugar production, and the metropolitan military presence along the lower Kwanza began to divert a growing portion of captives acquired 5 The general English-language history of early São Tomé is Robert Garfield, A History of São Tomé Island 1470–1655: The Key to Guinea (San Francisco: Mellon, 1992). Though, for caution regarding the island’s conventional sixteenth-century history, Jan Vansina, “Quilombos on S. Tomé, or in Search of Original Sources,” History in Africa, 23 (1996): 453–59. 6 John K. Thornton, “Early Kongo-Portuguese Relations, 1483–1975,”History in Africa, 8 (1981): 183– 204. For Kongo, see King Afonso’s famous objection to the growing disruptions of uncontrolled slaving in his domains in the early 1520s; for an accessible reference, John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1500–1680, 2nd ed., expanded (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 109. 7 In 1535, the term for the refugee settlements of slaves who escaped to the rugged wildernesses of the island was mocambo, evidently from Kimbundu; Isabel de Castro Henriques, “Formas de organizaç a˜ o e intervenç a˜ o dos Africanos em S. Tomé nos séculos XV e XVI,” in Actas do II Colóquio Internacional de História de Madeira (Funchal, 1990), p. 811. 8 A recent revisiting of this documentation, though without emphasis on slaving, is Il´ıdio do Amaral, O Reino do Congo, os Mbundu (ou Ambundos), o Reino de Ngola (ou de Angola) e a presença portuguesa, de finais do século XV a meados do século XVI (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigaç a˜ o Cient´ıfica Tropical, 1996).


25

Figure 1.1. The Early Portuguese trade in slaves (1510–1560s).

there after 1580 to Spain’s colonies in America, as the nascent colony became subject to the unified crown of Spain and Portugal (1580–1640). As drought added to the afflictions of the people living in the hills above the Kwanza in the 1580s, the “Angolan wars” spreading from the expansiveness of the ngola a kiluanje and from the growing intrusions of the Portuguese military forces based at Luanda reached profoundly disruptive proportions.9 9 I will not attempt to refer systematically to the literature on events in Angola; a (now-aging) summary of my general approach may be found in “The paradoxes of impoverishment in the Atlantic zone,” in David Birmingham and Phyllis Martin, eds., History of Central Africa (London: Longmans, 1983), Vol. 1, pp. 118–59; John Thornton’s current synthesis is “Angola, 1400–1800,” in Marila dos Santos Lopes, ed., O Império africano (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, forthcoming). (Nova história da expansão portuguesa, Vol. 9, dirs. Joel Serrão and A. H. de Oliveira Marques; and briefly condensed as “Kongo-Angola Region: History,” in John Middleton, ed., Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara

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Merchants based in Portugal, as subjects of the Spanish crown, gained licenses to send them as slaves to the Indies under Spain’s asiento, exploiting the anguish along the Kwanza to buy as many as 10,000 Central Africans each year by the early 1590s.10 Shippers could acquire captured refugees at prices so low that they could afford the high mortality inevitably sustained in the process of working out maritime strategies of carrying such large numbers of people on the lengthy trans-Atlantic course from Central Africa across the perilous equatorial doldrums to the Caribbean ports of Spanish America, Cartagena, and Vera Cruz. These new trans-Atlantic markets extended only secondarily at first to the emerging sugar plantations of the northeastern Brazilian captaincies of Bahia and Pernambuco. The well connected, Lisbon-based agents of the merchants holding Spain’s asiento bought Central Africans in Luanda and sold some of them for silver pesos in the cities of the Spanish Americas and others to the R´ıo de la Plata, en route to the administrative center of Andean silver mining at Lima.11 Other traders, often of Sephardic backgrounds and connected to Netherlands-based financiers behind the take-off of Brazilian sugar, would have inherited the Tomistas’ role as intruders on this government-regulated trade and, from the 1580s through the 1630s, would have sought to open new trading contacts in locations remote from the bureaucratic controls that excluded them at the government’s post at Luanda. The latter seem to have probed the river mouths and bays along the coasts south of the Kwanza and probably added a third source area of Central Africans, making contract there with suppliers who exploited local conflicts among people living below the escarpments that led up to the massive – and populous – highland plateau within the great bends of the Kwanza and Kunene Rivers.12 Fewer than half of the 8,000–10,000 captives sent each [New York: Scribner’s, 1997], Vol. 2, pp. 472–474); also, and importantly, see Beatrix Heintze, Studien zur Geschichte Angolas im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert: ein Lesebuch (Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 1996), which presents the results of numerous studies previously published in German, French, English, and Portuguese. 10 According to the Harvard database, there were 15 successful crossings from Central Africa in the 1590s, 30 in the 1600s, 47 in the 1610s, 27 in the 1620s, 21 in the 1630s, and none in the 1640s; presumably the decline after the early 1600s complements growing (but unrecorded) shipments to Pernambuco and Bahia at that time. 11 I rely on the broad estimates from David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, and David Richardson, “The volume of the transatlantic slave trade: a reassessment with particular reference to the Portuguese contribution,” unpublished paper, Conference on Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil; Emory University, Atlanta, 17–18 April 1998. For a recent survey of the Angolan trade in Portuguese, see João Medina and Isabel Castro Henriques, eds., A rota dos Escravos: Angola e a Rede do Comércio Negreiro (Lisbon: Cegia, and Luanda, Ministério da Cultura [Angola], 1996). 12 Joseph C. Miller, “Angola central e sul por volta de 1840,” Estudos afro-asiáticos (Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, Rio de Janeiro), 32 (1997): 7–54.


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year from all the coasts south of the Zaire River mouth reached northeastern Brazil.13 Reasoning from this political-economic context, one can surmise that the first generation of Central Africans settled in northeastern Brazil came primarily from the coastlands south of the Kwanza, along with fewer people from the Luanda hinterland or the area of the lower Zaire, and would have joined enslaved Amerindians and other captives from West Africa in a laboring population of very diverse backgrounds. Central Africans thus dominated the initial slave populations of the Americas at the beginning of the seventeenth century, with approximately equal numbers in Spanish cities and on sugar plantations in Brazil.14 The Dutch definitively disrupted these early-seventeenth-century flows of Central Africans during the 1640s by adding Luanda and Portugal’s other African ports to earlier seizures of most of northeastern Brazil. This Dutch occupation of Portugal’s slaving nexus in the southern Atlantic coincided with the end of Portuguese merchants’ access to Spanish markets under the union of the two Iberian crowns, the initial extension of sugar production in the Americas into the West Indies, and the entry of the English into systematic slaving along the shores of western Africa.15 Portuguese forces from the unconquered regions around Guanabara Bay in the south of Brazil drove the Dutch out of Luanda in 1648 and stayed on to develop intermittent slaving along Central African coasts south of the Kwanza mouth in the 1660s. They gradually consolidated their early trade in this region at a settlement, called Benguela, on the bay (the Baia das Vacas) previously known by the “cows” they found grazing on its shores. By the 1670s, they were sending raiding parties up onto the populous plateau and had secured government coverage at a military post established well inland at Caconda.16 13 Generally for Bahia (although the distinct structure of slaving in Pernambuco is vastly underrepresented in the literature); Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chs. 2 and 3; the consolidated comments on the slave trade in this fine study are on pp. 339ff., but they do not seem fully consistent: “the numbers [for the Portuguese trade as a whole] between 1580 and 1600 probably exceeded 2,000 a year”, but “[b]y the last decades of the sixteenth century, between 10,000 and 15,000 slaves from Guiné, the Congo, and Angola disembarked annually in Brazil.” 14 And among the very small numbers of Africans reaching the Chesapeake in the same years; John K. Thornton, “The African experience of the ‘20. and odd Negroes’ arriving in Virginia in 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly, 55:3 (1998): 421–434, elaborating on evidence found by Engel Sluiter, “New light on the ‘20 and odd negroes’ arriving in Virginia, August 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly, 54:2 (1997): 396–98. 15 For the early English trade, David Eltis, “The volume and African origins of the British slave trade before 1714,” Cahiers d’études africaines, 35, 2–3 (nos. 138–39) (1995): 617–627; also as “The British transatlantic slave trade before 1714: annual estimates of volume and direction,” in Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), pp. 182–205; and The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas: The English in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 16 Miller, “Angola central e sul por volta de 1840.”

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As planting interests from Pernambuco took the lead in reestablishing the Portuguese commercial presence at Luanda in the 1650s and 1660s,17 the Central Africans from the Kwanza area enslaved between the 1660s and the 1690s thus found themselves in Brazil, mostly in Pernambuco, perhaps secondarily in Bahia.18 Those sent from regions south of the Kwanza included a growing proportion of people from the high plateau, who would have joined older populations of Native Americans among the slaves in southern Brazil, mostly around Guanabara Bay, increasingly known also by the growing settlement on its shore at Rio de Janeiro. A largely distinct flow of Central Africans developed from the bays north of the mouth of the Zaire River, the so-called “Loango coast,” to other parts of the Americas from the 1670s through the eighteenth century. The Dutch, more or less excluded after 1650 from coasts south of the Zaire mouth by Portuguese government surveillance, converted older commodity trades along the equatorial coasts to the north to sources of slaves for the sugar plantations they were then spreading throughout the islands of the Caribbean.19 In the 1670s, English slavers also advanced east and south from their initial slaving stations in Western Africa to the Loango Coast to buy slaves for their own burgeoning sugar colonies in the Caribbean, with secondary extensions of this trade to the Chesapeake tobacco colonies and to the Carolina Lowcountry after 1700 or so. The French followed in the 1720s and 1730s, as the numbers of captives they needed to develop sugar on Saint-Domingue exceeded the capacity of their original trading sites in Senegambia and at Ouidah on the “Slave Coast” of Western Africa (see Figures 1.2 and 1.3). The northern Europeans knew the entire coastline of Central Africa south of Cape Lopez as “Angola,” and they designated slaves they purchased there as “Angolas,” employing the term in a sense entirely different from, and considerably less distinct than, Portuguese and Brazilian uses of it. For the Portuguese, the “Kingdom of Angola” had referred in 17 The arguments and evidence supporting this, and most subsequent, patterns of trade sketched here may be found in Miller, Way of Death, supplemented by arguments developed in “Slaving from ‘West-Central Africa’ before 1830.” 18 In Bahia, planters and merchants began to develop a separate African trade of their own from the fast-growing flow of slaves through Ouidah and other ports along what was becoming the “Slave Coast” of Western Africa, which they knew as “Mina.” This trade falls beyond the limits of a paper on the origins of Western-Central Africans; for the transition to large-scale slaving there, see Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1991), and numerous other works cited there discussing subsequent developments in Dahomey, Oyo, Lagos, and the other African regions involved. 19 Phyllis Martin, The External Trade of the Loango Coast (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), remains the basic monograph on this region. Also the work of Carlos Serrano, e.g., recently “Tráfico e mudanç a do poder tradicional no Reino Ngoyo (Cabinda no século XIX),” Estudos afro-asiáticos (Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, Rio de Janeiro), 32 (1997): 97–108.


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Figure 1.2. The Portuguese Southern Atlantic in the eighteenth century. (Source: Joseph C. Miller, “The Numbers, Origins, and Destinations of Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Angolan Slave Trade,” Social Science History, 13:4 [1989]; p. 83).

the 1570s to the region subject to the ngola a kiluanje, the African ruler along the middle Kwanza; after government officials established their principal slaving port at Luanda in the early seventeenth century, they designated the inland regions subject to their military control as the “reino e conquista d’Angola.” “Angola” thereafter served in Brazil as cognate to “Luanda” in distinguishing slaves embarked through government formalities executed at the designated port of embarkation. However, the “Angolas” reaching the Caribbean and North America aboard the ships of the French, Dutch, and English from 1670s onward had begun their Middle Passages at any of the bays north of the Zaire – Mayumba nearest Cape Lopez, then Loango, Malimbo, Cabinda, and the “Congo” River (as the Zaire was known) mouth itself.20 In the 1770s and 1780s, the French also acquired a small portion of the “Angola” slaves they took to the Antilles from Benguela and the rivers to the south, as far as the Kunene; the English intruded as well on the coastline claimed by the Portuguese, mostly south of Luanda, in the 1760s and 1770s.21 20 Most of the voyages carrying them appear in the Harvard database as originating at “Angola” (1681/2882 voyages to ports other than Brazilian ones, or 58.3%), and the remainder (with the exception of 23, none of them Brazilian, classed under an artificial category of “Congo North” devised for voyages of unknown origins within this general area) under the specific ports listed. 21 For all of these details, see Miller, Way of Death; in addition, Manolo Garcia Florentino, Em Costas ´ Negras: uma História do Tráfico Atlântico de Escravos entre a Africa e o Rio de Janeiro (séculos XVIII e XIX) (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1995).

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(a) Figure 1.3. Eighteenth-century slaving from Central Africa to the North Atlantic: (a) Dutch, (b) French, and (c) English.

Portuguese shipments of Central Africans to Brazil from south of the Zaire continued the patterns of the seventeenth century until abolition of the British trade and the British West Africa Squadron’s intrusion on the slaving of other nations altered these southern Atlantic connections after 1810. The southern Brazilian merchants of the growing city at Rio


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(b) Figure 1.3. (Continued)

de Janeiro multiplied their activity at Benguela many times over in the eighteenth century to supply slaves to the gold and diamond workings of Minas Gerais, developing a considerable fleet that carried people originating from deeper and deeper in the southern highlands of Central Africa. They also replaced Pernambucans as the major buyers in the government’s slaving port at Luanda. Pernambuco obtained its slaves mostly through Bahia,

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(c) Figure 1.3. (Continued)

and secondarily through resources of its own in Upper Guinea, and only in modest numbers from Luanda, amplified for only a brief and unhappy period in the 1760s and 1770s by the Lisbon-based Companhia Geral de Pernambuco e Para´ıba.22 These years of Rio traders’ dominance at Luanda 22 The basic work remains António Carreira, As Companhias Pombalinas de Grão-Pará e Maranhão e Pernambuco e Paraiba, new edition, revised (Lisbon: Presenç a, 1983). Also see José Ribeiro Júnior,


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and Benguela – when they carried as many as 15,000–20,000 capatives to South-Central Brazil in some years – consolidated Central Africans as the dominant groups among the slaves in and around the city of Rio de Janeiro and – along with West Africans sent up the valley of the São Francisco River from Bahia – accounted for significant portions of the slaves assembled on the gold and diamond diggings in Minas Gerais. Fewer reached the Brazilian Northeast, where the tone of life under slavery cohered around the Western African backgrounds of the majority of those enslaved there. To the considerable extent that Rio merchants delivered the increasing numbers of slaves sent to the R´ıo de la Plata during the 1790s, the enslaved populations of the last years of Spanish colonial rule there consisted largely of people from Western Central Africa (see Figure 1.4). Portuguese and Brazilian slavers did not compete with the northern Europeans along the Loango Coast in the eighteenth century, but the dynamic Rio traders took advantage of disruptions in French and British shipping during the European wars in the 1790s, so that they began delivering “Cabindas” to Brazil after 1800 and continued through the 1840s. They also added people from several parts of Mozambique to the African populations there and in the coffee-producing regions then developing in São Paulo and the Para´ıba valley of South-Central Brazil. Fewer Central Africans went to the Brazilian Northeast, except possibly from Cabinda and Malimbo in the 1810s and 1820s, where shippers from Pernambuco and Bahia joined in exploiting the sources abandoned by the Northern Europeans; however, the numerous ships reported as reaching Bahia from those subequatorial ports after 1817, in an era when the British West Africa Squadron was becoming increasingly active against Portuguese and Brazilian slaving north of the equator in Western Africa, may well have been concealing their customary, but illegal, trade at Ouidah and elsewhere on the coasts they knew as “Mina.”23 Colonizaça˜ o e Monopólio no Nordeste Brasileiro: a Companhia Geral de Pernambuco e Para´ıba (São Paulo: Editora HUCITEC, 1976). For the northern captaincies, Manuel Nunes Dias, A Companhia Geral do Grão Pará e Maranhão (São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, 1971). 23 David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), remains the basic starting point for the nineteenth-century trade. The Bahians knew the Western Africans they bought at Ouidah generically as “Minas,” but they included changing proportions of people from many different backgrounds as the raiding and trade routes serving that port expanded inland throughout the turbulent eighteenth century. For the Slave Coast in Western Africa, the classic is Patrick Manning, Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640– 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); a recent work is Sandra Greene, Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996), and “African Ethnicities in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” unpublished paper, Conference on New Perspectives on Slavery and the Slave Trade; Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, 20–21 November 1997.

Figure 1.4. Estimated slave exports from Western Central Africa (by decades ca. 1650–1830). (Source: Miller, “Numbers, Origins,” p. 109).


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As Britain gradually suppressed Atlantic slaving through the 1820s and 1830s, the British commercial interests behind the trade shifted their activities to supporting the Brazilians and Portuguese buying at the ports they had once dominated, prominently including Central African ones north of Luanda, and worked behind the scenes – along with merchants from the United States – in extending these sources through Havana to provide enslaved field laborers to expand production of sugar in Cuba and Puerto Rico.24 A significant – and increasing – portion of the Africans assembled in the Spanish Caribbean from the 1820s through the 1850s thus boarded slaving ships at ports all along the Central African coast from Cape Lopez south to Benguela (Figure 1.5). Slaving to Brazil from Portuguese ports in Africa became illegal after 1830, and so the Rio merchants active in Luanda diverted their continuing human cargoes through less closely observed bays along the coast north of the city, mostly at the mouth of the Mbrije River (Ambriz), and followed the traders serving Cuba up the Zaire to concealed loading sites along the banks of the lower river. By the end of trans-Atlantic slaving in the 1850s, in the Spanish Caribbean, Western Central Africans formed the most recent and very large cohort of immigrants among the plantation workers alongside an urban slave population of much older and more diverse origins. They had decreased to insignificant proportions among the mostly Western African slaves in the Brazilian Northeast and were joining many generations of predecessors in the largest flow of captives of the era in the increasingly complex mixture of the Africans among the slaves in Rio and other cities and on the new coffee estates of South-Central Brazil. From the general patterns of merchants active in central Africa and from the voyages recorded in the Harvard Database, Table 1.1 (page 37) summarizes the shifting concentrations of central Africans in the Americas.25 WHICH CENTRAL AFRICANS REACHED THE ATLANTIC

The distinguishable aspects of the lives of the Central Africans ensnared in slaving on which they might have drawn as they redefined themselves in the New World centered on shared understandings of community – generally in the arenas of human experience characterized as “religious,” 24 For this “illegal” trade, see Roquinaldo Amaral Ferreira, “Dos sertões ao Atlântico: trãfico ilegal de escravos e comércio l´ıcito em Angola, 1830–1860” (Dissertaç a˜ o de Mestrado, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro – Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Sociais, Programa de Pós-Graduaç a˜ o em História Social, n.d. [1996]). 25 The table disregards the wide array of occasional voyages from ports in Central Africa throughout the Americas.

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Figure 1.5. Western Central Africa in the eighteenth century (physical geography and ethnonyms).

the security of family, symbols of power and authority, wariness toward strangers, and particularly the broad linguistic similarities through which people who talked with one another on a day-to-day basis expressed the easy familiarity of spontaneous commonality. Nearly all the Central Africans who ended up as slaves in the Americas came from agricultural backgrounds. Those from the grassy woodlands that


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Table 1.1. Periods, Ports, and Destinations of Slaving from Central Africa

Dates/Periods

1500–1520

Central African Port(s)

Carrier(s)

American Destination(s)

Portuguese

Gold Coast,São Tomé

1521–1575

Zaire mouth (Mpinda/Soyo) Zaire mouth

Portuguese

1576–1640

Kwanza Luanda

Tomistas Portuguese

1641–1648 1650–1700

Luanda Luanda Benguela

Dutch Pernambucans Rio de Janeiro

1670–1780

Loango Coast (“Angola,” Loango) Loango Coast (“Angola,” Cabinda, Loango) “Loango Coast (“Angola,” other ports, esp. Loango)

Dutch

Lisbon, Seville (some forwarded to Spanish American colonies, Brazil) São Tomé Spanish America, Pernambuco, Bahia Pernambuco, Bahia Northeastern Brazil Southern Brazil (small numbers) Suriname

French

Caribbean (Saint Domingue)

English

Caribbean (Jamaica) Also North America

Luanda Luanda

English Portuguese Rio de Janeiro

Benguela

Rio de Janeiro

1755–1765 1811–1830

Luanda Luanda

1831–1850

Benguela Congo/Cabinda Malimbo/Loango Congo/Cabinda

1831–1867

Ambriz Benguela Congo/Cabinda

Portuguese Rio de Janeiro Pernambuco Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro Bahia, Pernambuco Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco, (also Bahia?) Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro U.S./Spanish

Also Spanish mainland colonies Minas Gerais (Rio de Janeiro) Rio de Janeiro (Minas Gerais) (also R´ıo de la Plata) Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro (also R´ıo de la Plata) Brazilian Northeast Southern Brazil Northeastern Brazil Southern Brazil Southern Brazil Northeastern Brazil Southern Brazil Northeastern Brazil

1670–1790

1670–1807

1713–1739 1701–1760 1701–1810

Southern Brazil Southern Brazil Cuba

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comprised most of the region drawn into meeting the voracious Atlantic demand for enslaved Africans cultivated tropical grains – sorghums and millets – with hoes on plots of land that they cleared and planted for only a few years until declining soil fertility forced them to move on to clear and plant elsewhere. For those in the forested regions in the basin of the Zaire River, clearance for cereal agriculture meant dealing with much heavier vegetation, and they added bananas and root crops that thrived in their wet, shaded environs. Everywhere people lived in small to moderate-sized village communities of kin, in-laws, clients, and others of familiar backgrounds. All of these small communities sought to grow by reproducing dependents and by attracting clients, and success meant denser populations that forced further particularization of the unique adaptations to local environments that gave them their senses of who they were. At the same time, growing uniqueness also allowed them to exchange specialized products, and also people trained to produce them, with neighbors who had developed complementing strengths by living in other circumstances. Contacts predicated on complementary differentiation conveyed only a limited sense of commonality. The densest populations, who would become the principal sources of captives for the trade, thrived in the intermixed forest and savanna that ran inland across the continent along the latitude of the mouth of the Zaire River. In the drier grasslands to the south, farmers concentrated around the isolated moist valleys of the major rivers – the Kwango and Kwanza in the West, the floodplain of the upper Zambezi in the Southeast, and the lower Kunene and Kubango in the South – and particularly on the relatively rainy high plateau within the bends of the Kwanza and Kunene rivers. Populations in the forest region generally concentrated along the rivers at lower population densities, except around Malebo Pool, but in closer contact with one another over longer distances, because of the mobility of fisherman who pursued schools of fish up and down the river and because of a thriving commerce in food and artisan specialties that linked villages over hundreds of kilometers of navigable waters. The language communities of the region reflected these broad economic strategies, tailored to the specifics of the environments where farmers collaborated closely in exploiting the wealth of their lands and – particularly – the rivers. The languages of the large “Bantu” family that they spoke derived from their remote descent from farmers who had gradually settled the region many centuries earlier and whose descendants over the half millennium or so before 1500 had attained population densities


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that forced definition of the varied communities who engaged traders from the Atlantic in the slaving era the followed.26 The underlying distinctions among the Africans’ languages, not their broad similarities, provided the starting point for effective collaboration, if not also for group sentiments. These differences were sharper south of the forest, reflecting the tendency of populations farming areas on the southern fringe of the area of continuous habitation – where the rains became less reliable and soils grew more porous toward the Kalahari Desert – to concentrate in widely separated wetter areas of greater agricultural potential.27 In the plantation, mining, and urban environments of New World slavery, their minutely specialized agricultural techniques had less relevance than the languages and the assumptions about human community that they brought with them, and so this chapter identifies the central Africans who reached the Atlantic largely in terms of those. The relationship of their linguistic backgrounds to other bases for collaboration under slavery and to conventional notions of “ethnicity” varied according to circumstances, as the succeeding survey outlines.28 The first cohorts of people sent through São Tomé before the 1520s seem to have been seized in wars mounted by military forces of the Kongo king (mani, or generic master–owner in various linguistic forms throughout the area), aided by Portuguese advisers in consolidating a Christian aristocracy in the highlands south of the river.29 They ranged along the lower reaches of 26 It is relevant, and redundant, to distinguish all Central Africans as Bantu-speakers only in relation to Western African speakers of other “Niger-Congo” languages from the Cross River ports west through the Niger Delta, the Slave Coast, the Gold Coast, and beyond to Upper Guinea and Senegambia. Discussion in this paper proceeds in terms of the much more localized senses of community and identity that the people caught up in slaving would have felt. 27 Joseph C. Miller, “The significance of drought, disease, and famine in the agriculturally marginal zones of West-Central Africa,” Journal of African History, 23:1 (1982): 17–61; also “Worlds Apart: Africans’ encounters and Africa’s encounters with the Atlantic in Angola, before 1800,” in Actas do Seminário “Encontro de povos e culturas em Angola” (Luanda, 1995; Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemoraç o˜ es dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1997), pp. 227–280. 28 It is an entirely different process – left here to other contributions to this volume – to identify specific words, practices, and ideas in American slave cultures as “Kongo” by finding cognate terms and practices in ethnographic descriptions from various parts of the Kikongo-speaking regions of central Africa. Consider the strategies adopted by John Janzen, Lemba, 1650–1930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and in the New World (New York: Garland, 1982); and, less rigorously, the many publications of Robert Farris Thompson, e.g., Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983), or “Kongo influences on African-American artistic culture,” in Joseph E. Holloway, ed., Africanisms in American Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 148–184. One may find careful consideration of the multiple meanings of the term “Kongo” in Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The Bakongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and many preceding essays cited there. 29 The starting point for the backgrounds of central Africans from the Kongo kingdom north is Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Central Africa (Madison:

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the Zaire and toward Malebo Pool where they captured Teke (often called “Anzicos” in the sources), who distinguished themselves as living in the relatively open plateau to the north and on the riverain plains surrounded by the otherwise forested regions of the basin of the Zaire River. A few of the earliest captives may come through purchase from the commercial networks that linked Malebo Pool to communities of traders and fishing people living far up the navigable portions of the middle Zaire, Kwa–Kasai, and Ubangi river systems, deep into the forested regions in the center of the continent. However, the trading chiefs who dominated these villages and transported goods in canoes among the numerous communities living there seem to have responded to the initial stimulus of trade with the Atlantic as the commercial entrepreneurs they were, by supplying forest products and artisanry rather than people.30 Although the people purchased at that initial violent stage in Central African slaving came through the Kongo kingdom and were embarked at a Zaire River port at Mpinda under formal arrangements that the monarchs of Portugal made with the Kongo lord whom they treated as a king, not all of the people captured would have thought of themselves as “Kongo” (or “Congo,” in the orthography of the time). Europeans’ uses of this term, now common throughout the literature, grew from Portuguese references to the title of the political authority in the region with whom they maintained diplomatic relations, a lord who had established a degree of seniority within a network of other regional lords in the area south of the lower Zaire who asserted authority beyond their personal followings, above the level of the village, based on riches they derived from distributing copper, a key form of wealth in the area, from ores in the Mayombe hills north of the lower Zaire. But the dominance of these “mani Kongo” lords at the level of the villages was probably still nominal in 1500 and became significant only as the sixteenth century proceeded, as they – and other rivals – appropriated University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); also “Peoples of the Forest,” in David Birmingham and Phyllis Martin, eds., History of Central Africa (London: Longman, 1983), Vol. 1, pp. 75–100. John Thornton has studied the early Kongo kingdom in detail from the perspective of the monarchy; “The Kingdom of Kongo, ca. 1390–1678: The Development of an African Social Formation,” Cahiers d’études africaines, 22, 3–4 (nos. 87–88) (1982): 325–342. Thornton surveys the region in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World; in Portuguese, see his “Angola, 1400–1800,” in Lopes, ed., O Império africano. Also see Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 30 In doing so, they conformed to the pattern of preferring extracted commodities and artisanal production to plunder wherever in Africa resources and transport facilities permitted profitable exploitation of this strategy; see the insightful comments on Central African valuation of people in Jane Guyer, “Introduction” (to special section on “Wealth in People, Wealth in Things”), Journal of African History, 36:1 (1995): 83–90. I have argued the case in other terms in Way of Death.


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Portuguese Christianity, military support, and commercial contacts to mobilize armies and to consolidate power in a more intrusive sense.31 In succeeding years, the term “Congo” acquired numerous less precise meanings, which changed through time and varied from European nation to European nation. In a narrow political sense, Portuguese and Brazilians used it to refer to populations subject to the authority of later mani Kongo, or to that of changing cohorts of regional chiefs (often claiming titles as “dukes” or “marquises” to engage European officials on the coast on grounds of diplomatic equality) in the highlands south of the lower Zaire who competed for the title, as far east as the valley of the Inkisi River and south to the rugged watershed between the tributaries of the Zaire and the streams flowing south toward the Kwanza. This sense of the ethnonym endures in Angola to the present. Ethnographers in modern times have added a linguistic sense to the term “Kongo,” extending it to people living along the coasts north of the Zaire mouth as far as the lower Ogowe River who speak dialects more or less mutually intelligible with the languages(s) of the Kongo kingdom, often designated collectively as the “Kikongo” language (cluster).32 In the early sixteenth century, most of these northern Kikongo-speakers would have recognized only a limited degree of commonality among themselves. To the degree that they recognized political connections, in the sense of transcending the smaller communities in which most people conducted their daily lives, or economic ones, in the sense that such connections served as distribution networks for scarce and valuable goods, their contacts reinforced, rather than muted, local ties of kinship, affinity, and patronage. Similarly, African notions of politics, much more personal and engaged than modern notions of “states” or “kingdoms” resting on abstracted legal principles, prevailed elsewhere in Central Africa throughout the era of 31 John K. Thornton takes the centralized structure evident in the sixteenth century (or later) as inherited from much earlier times; the extent to which such European political models as a “kingdom” may approximate the strategies of African authorities is increasingly being questioned by research based on local conceptualizations. In general, recent ethnographic description and many of the analytical constructs of ethnographers provide very shaky foundations for attributing experiences and identities to people brought to the Americas as slaves from any part of Africa. Such apparently basic strategies as Central African “matrilinearity,” ethnic identities, eighteenth-century political systems, and much else must be approached as aspects of ongoing historical processes in Africa; for Central Africa, Vansina’s Paths in the Rainforests has most systematically developed this perspective; also see the many works of Wyatt MacGaffey for Kongo. 32 Modern “Kikongo” is, of course, the product of nearly five centuries of intensifying contacts among these people, the development of “trade” versions of the language for commercial purposes, enormous dislocation of populations within the region, the assimilation of majorities of slaves from other linguistic backgrounds, missionary and colonial efforts to reduce the variety of spoken Kikongo to standardized written forms, and literary and political elaborations of these in recent times.

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growing engagement with the Atlantic economy. They meant that victims of the slave trade arrived in the Americas not with visions of stable institutions of “state” in their heads but rather thinking in metaphors of protective powers exercised by strong, personal patrons on behalf of loyal clients through continual ad hoc demonstrations of efficacy, often through metaphorical reliance on ancestors and other spiritual figures. Later, similarly efficacious leaders among the populations enslaved in the Americas might invoke memories of feared or respected patrons in Africa, the mani Kongo or the famed queen Nzinga,33 even claiming them as figurative ancestors, as means of creating entirely new communities among people there, otherwise strangers, seeking means of collaboration within slavery. Political sentiments of this patron–client sort were more flexible and transferable to the New World than would have been more structured concepts of institutionalized states. Central Africans would have discovered new social identities beyond these local, and already multiple, ones along their tortured ways toward the coast. Yoked together in slave coffles with others of unfamiliar linguistic and cultural backgrounds, they must have gained a sense of familiarity with one another and would have created alliances out of it, which the Europeans labeled “Congo.” They would have extended these characteristics as bases for collaboration for sheer survival while being held near the shore, amidst many others, awaiting transfer to the ships.34 Entirely separate European and African inventions, building on different aspects of the same cultural background, thus converged to stimulate “ethnic” communities out of the dehumanizing confrontations of enslavement. The slaves’ further experiences 33 See Joseph C. Miller, “Nzinga of Matamba in a new perspective,” Journal of African History, 16: 2 (1975): 201–216; with discussion continuing. See especially John K. Thornton, “Legitimacy and political power: Queen Njinga, 1624–1663,” Journal of African History, 32:1 (1991): 25–40. For the era see, Adriano Parreira, Economia e sociedade em Angola na e´poca da rainha jinga, século XVII (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1990). Nzinga has attracted the sustained attention of numerous other scholars, including Jean Cuvelier, Koningin Nzinga van Matamba (Bruge, 1957), and Roy Arthur Glasgow, Nzinga (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1982). Her stature in popular history grows apace, both in Angola and throughout the world, where she is the subject of dramatic and other literary treatments. 34 There is no systematic sociology of the slave coffle or the coastal barracoons, although experiences at those stages of the journey certainly framed groupings that the people enslaved brought aboard the ships and carried across the ocean. One may presume countervailing tendencies operative among them, in the extremity of deprivation and desperation of individuals faced constantly with death and cut off from all familiar human contacts: the elemental struggle to survive would have encouraged some to prey without scruple on all around them, others to compete on collaborative bases that tapped whatever linguistic or other commonalities they could sense, and a few to unite against their captors on the broader basis of their shared captivity – always opportunistically, depending on the momentary circumstances in which they found themselves. For an imaginative evocation of these contradictory tendencies and a valid caution against overemphasizing the unity of disoriented, exhausted captives in “resistance,” see Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad”; for some of the discussion stemming from this controversial film, see Steven Mintz et al., “Amistad: controversy about the film and its use,” History Teacher, 31: 3 (1998): 369–402.


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of confinement during the Middle Passage and the specific circumstances they encountered in the Americas created changing incentives for Central Africans to draw on differing aspects of their home backgrounds as they searched for a morally restorative sense of humane community among themselves. The meanings of being “Congo” in the Diaspora changed accordingly – through individuals’ lives, from cohort to cohort among the arrivals, and in the varying circumstances they encountered in the Americas, from the R´ıo de la Plata to the St. Lawrence.35 By the 1520s, when the Portuguese intensified their search for captives to sustain supplies of the Africans on whom São Tomé planters increasingly depended, their early, relatively controlled forays up the Zaire River moved to the exploitation of rivalries among the regional chiefs in areas where the mani Kongo claimed dominion. Although the mani Kongo of the time (Afonso I, r. 1506–c. 1543) protested as early as 1525 against the predations that disturbed the Christian realm he was in the process of consolidating, conflicts within this Kongo political sphere waxed and waned at least through the seventeenth century, with particular destructiveness in the 1560s36 and again throughout the “civil wars” of the midseventeenth century.37 The 35 I am, of course, attempting to challenge scholars to provide historically contextualized interpretations of the creation of African-based identities in the Americas, which take account of both the “creolist” influences emphasized by Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the AfroAmerican Past (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976; republished as The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective [Boston: Beacon Press, 1992]), and the apparent continuities. For recent efforts to emphasize the latter, see Douglas B. Chambers, “ ‘My own nation’: Igbo exiles in the diaspora,” Slavery and Abolition, 18:1 (1997): 72–97; Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), and The African Diaspora in the Americas: Regions, Ethnicities and Cultures (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming). On the other side, see Philip D. Morgan, “The cultural implications of the Atlantic slave trade: African regional origins, American destinations and New World developments,” Slavery and Abolition, 18:1 (1997): 72–98. 36 The conflicts seem to have disrupted the eastern provinces of the kingdom at this time, particularly in the valley of the lower Kwango River, perhaps leading to a collapse of social and political order described, well after the fact, as an invasion by “cannibalistic savages,” allegedly from that region. The significance of these conflicts is by no means clear: for the discussion, see Joseph C. Miller, “Requiem for the ‘Jaga’,” Cahiers d’études africaines, 13, 1 (no. 49) (1973): 121–149; John K. Thornton, “A resurrection for the Jaga,” Cahiers d’études africaines, 18, 1–2 (nos. 69–70) (1979): 223–27, with a reply by Miller, “Thanatopsis,” Ibid., pp. 229–231; and Anne Hilton, “The Jaga reconsidered,” Journal of African History, 22: 2 (1981): 191–202. 37 See John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1983), with the consequences considered at length in The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Also see António Custódio Gonç alves, “Kimpa Vita: simbiose de tradiç a˜ o e de modernidade,” in Encontro de povos e culturas em Angola, pp. 323–38, and review of John K. Thornton in Africana Studia (Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos) (Coimbra), 1 (1999): 269–72. Also see John K. Thornton, “As guerras civ´ıs no Congo e o tráfico de escravos: a história e a demografia de 1718 a 1844 revisitadas,” Estudos Afro-Asiáticos (Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, Rio de Janeiro), 32 (1997): 55–74.

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sixteenth-century victims of this local strife, many of them baptized Christians, would have been taken to São Tomé through the family connections of the feuding Christian aristocrats who captured them in Kongo, and they set the tone of the creole language of the island.38 Others from eastern regions and still others from Mayombe and other areas north of the Zaire would have been less integrated into the European-derived court culture that increasingly defined the Kongo political framework. The farmers in the hills above the Kwanza River – roughly as far north as the ndembu watershed, east to the Kwango valley, and up the slopes leading to the high plateau above its southern banks – like the people from Kikongospeaking areas, shared a broad familiarity with one another’s ways and spoke dialects of a perceptible Kimbundu language cluster, but they also thought of themselves primarily as members of local communities focused around specialized ways of exploiting much more local environmental niches.39 Though these Kimbundu-speakers would have acknowledged little sense of political unity early in the sixteenth century, in the 1520s they came under the influence of the expanding ngola warlords, who had begun by consolidating the defenses of the region against raiding from Kongo. Those enslaved would have shared primarily the experience of capture by the forces of the ngola and aggregation for sale to Tomista traders. In São Tomé, particularly before the 1560s, they would have encountered predecessors of recognizably similar backgrounds delivered through the Kongo channels that had fed captives into slavery there from raids into Kimbundu-speaking40 lands beyond the southern fringes of the Kongo 38 See Vansina, “Quilombos on São Tomé,” p. 457; Gerardo Augusto Lorenzino, “The Angolar Creole Portuguese of São Tomé: Its grammar and sociolinguistic history” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1998); as summarized in Gerardo A. Lorenzino, “Linguistic, historical, and ethnographic evidence on the formation of the Angolares: a maroon-descendant community on São Tomé and Principe (West Africa),” unpublished paper, Conference on The Evolution of the Portuguese Atlantic and the Sea Route to India: Quincentenary Reflections, 1498–1998; College of Charleston, 14–16 May 1998. 39 Joseph C. Miller, Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976– Portuguese translation [Maria da Conceiç a´ o Neto], Poder pol´ıtico e parentesco: os mais antigos estados mbundu em Angola [Luanda: Arquivo Nacional de Angola, 1995]). Also Virg´ılio Coelho, “Em busca de Kábàsà: uma tentativa de explicaç a˜ o da estrutura pol´ıtico-administrativa do ‘Reino de Ndongo’,” in Encontro de povos e culturas em Angola, pp. 443–477 (republished in Estudos afro-asiáticos [Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, Rio de Janeiro], 32 [1997]: 135–162); “Os de dentro, os de fora e os outros: análise sucinta de um modelo estrutural de organizaç a˜ o administrativa e urbana do ‘Reino de Ndòngo’ desde a sua fundaç a˜ o até fins do século XVI” (unpublished paper, Conference on Africa’s Urban Past). 40 The -mbundu designation probably derives from Kongo collective designation of “others” living to the south and was not a significant term for the people living in these regions until it acquired ethnographic currency relatively recently. The modern language of the region – Kimbundu – surely has a history no less complex than that surmised for Kikongo (Footnote 32 above). Portuguese sources usually present the word as “Ambundu” (earlier, “Ambunda”) and apply it only to the


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political system. Many more Kimbundu-speakers came from the São Tomé traders working the lower Kwanza. Although speakers of Kikongo and Kimbundu shared many linguistic and other habits, the extent to which these sixteenth-century conflicts, and then encounters under slavery in São Tomé, sharpened other distinctions between them into contrasting “Kongo” and “Mbundu” communities in slavery abroad is a question that only close historical consideration in each instance can answer. In general, the violence attending slaving in Central Africa forced political consolidation and sharpened identities both at home and in slavery abroad, converting diffuse differentiated complementarities into cogently collective “ethnic” defensiveness, even hostility. When these conflicts attained the scale of massed military confrontations, battlefield captives could produce functional cohorts of men trained to collaborate as warriors, as well as masses of women and children seized from the armies’ baggage trains and from villages caught up in the conflict.41 One must speculate on the degree to which the victors would have sold off the captured warriors, the adult males, and would have kept for their own purposes the women and children seized.42 Although people from these Kimbundu-speaking regions formed an increasing proportion of the Central Africans taken to São Tomé as slaves between 1520 and 1570, they did not replace the language that their Kikongospeaking predecessors, and doubtless also masters, had established. Only a relative few of them reached Spain’s colonies in the Americas through Europe, and the first cohorts of slaves to reach Brazil arrived as minorities among West Africans from Portugal. In such small numbers, as domestic servants isolated in the patriarchal households of their masters, they became practicing Christians, acquired Iberian domestic and artisan skills, and identified with the Europeans they accompanied, if only for lack of Luanda area. English-language ethnographies vary but tend to distinguish the modern Kimbunduspeaking “Mbundu” around the Kwanza from the Umbundu-speaking “Ovimbundu” (sometimes “Ochimbundu” in the singular) of the high plateau to the south by thus appropriating the differing prefixes of the two language groups. Apparently, no such self-referents existed in the seventeenth century. The recency of the term, probably eighteenth century, is suggested by the fact that people from this area were known in São Tomé as “Angolas” as late as the early 1700s; see Vansina, “Quilombos on S. Tomé”. 41 All of John K. Thornton’s correlations of events in Africa with subsequent developments in the New World revolve around this theme; “The African experience of the ‘20.and odd negroes’ arriving in Virginia in 1619,”. “As guerras civ´ıs no Congo e o tráfico de escravos,” and “African dimensions of the Stono rebellion,” American Historical Review, 96:4 (1991): 1101–1113. Also “African soldiers in the Haitian revolution,” Journal of Caribbean History, 25: 1–2 (1991): 58–80, and “‘I am the subject of the King of Congo’: African political ideology and the Haitian revolution,” Journal of World History, 4:2 (1993): 181–214. 42 See the majority of women and children in the only known list of (named) individuals from Central Africa, an account of the captives consigned to the Portuguese government as its royal “fifth” of raids in the late 1730s; Miller, Way of Death, frontispiece.

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contact with other Africans.43 They were assembled in numbers sufficient to discover new bases for collective identities based on their backgrounds in Africa primarily in the sugar plantations, and in refugee communities hidden in the mountains of São Tomé. Their successors, embarked in much larger numbers through Luanda after about 1580, came out of conflicts of an intensity and duration that permanently altered the lives and identities of those caught up in them, captors and captives alike, and they formed the first cohort to reach the New World in numbers sufficient to sustain collective identities separate from their masters.44 The drought in the area that extended into the 1590s converted the calculated conflicts of the 1570s into widespread community breakdown, refugee flight, and uncontrolled banditry and raiding that greatly increased the numbers of Kimbundu-speaking captives who fell into the hands of Portuguese buyers. Brigands known to the Portuguese as “Jagas” (and to themselves as Imbangala)45 systematically exploited both the victims and the Portuguese to facilitate slaving. The chaotic conditions in the central African savannas lasted throughout the decades in which the Portuguese concentrated on delivering slaves to Spain’s New World cities, producing mostly Kimbundu-speakers as captives there.46 By the early seventeenth century, the growing Portuguese military presence at Luanda and the wealth that merchants there anticipated from selling slaves to the Spaniards in the New World stimulated raids that moved the principal conflicts yielding captives to the southern provinces of what by then had acquired overtones of an integrated Kongo political sphere. Some of the populations afflicted by these wars – including, but not restricted to, those from Kikongo-speaking areas – sought refuge in the rugged mountains of the watershed that marked the southern margins of the Kongo 43 Consider the role of the Catholic confraternities, the public institutions in which enslaved Africans in these urban environments of domestic servitude in Portugal, Spain, and the Iberian Americas congregated, as sites of recovering social identities otherwise lost to them. These associations would have provided identities of a very different sort than the spontaneous, domestic life of rural slave communities in plantations and mining camps. 44 Ira Berlin makes effective use of this demographic transition in North America, a century later, in Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998). I have begun to explore this distinction in “Uses of people and ideologies of slavery: personal protection, piety, progeny, and prestige, and proprietary product and profits,” unpublished paper, UNESCO Conference on Les fondements idéologiques et juridiques de l’esclavage et de la traite négrière, Lisbon, 9–10 December 1998. 45 These brigands were famous for the warcamps known as kilombo (quilombo, in Portuguese); Miller, Kings and Kinsmen. 46 For Lima, Jean-Pierre Tardieu, “Los Jesuitas y la ‘lengua de Angola’ en Perú, siglo XVII,” Revista de Indias, 53 (no. 198) (1993): 627–637, and “Origines des esclaves de la région de Lima, au Pérou, aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles,” in La chaˆıne et le lien: une vision de la traite négrière (Actes du Colloque de Ouidah) (Paris: UNESCO, 1998), pp. 81–94.


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political sphere and settled there under military leaders known as ndembu. These communities drew on both Kongo and Mbundu political ideologies to achieve unity among the strangers seeking refuge there and were early examples of new communities of refugees of very mixed origins that developed everywhere as violence spread throughout central Africa in the following centuries.47 Their Imbangala mercenaries settled all around the fringes of this conquista in new communities formed from recruits of similarly diverse origins and became providers of captives. They and other suppliers to the Portuguese tended to keep women as slaves close to home while selling male captives to shippers at Luanda. These women would have had a determining influence on the language and on many of the domestic habits of the children they raised in and around the Portuguese domain, as the formative generation of the people who became “Mbundu” adults, as products of the process of slaving.48 This colonial “Mbundu” community gained coherence in the late seventeenth century as the Portuguese consolidated their control over the core of the region, and it thrived in the two eighteenth-century centers – one in Luanda, the other nearer the heart of the old ngola state in Ambaca49 – that are still evident in the politics of modern Angola. Many of the individuals whose children took on this identity originated in areas far to the east, along with minorities of people from the southern Kikongo-speaking regions and the first representatives from the sparsely settled, sandy plains east of the Kwango and Kwanza, then known collectively and indistinctly as “Ngangela.”50 These were the people who would have provided the first 47 They were thus not unlike the “Maroon” communities that formed in wildernesses near large concentrations of new slaves in most parts of the Americas. The classic, early collection is Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (New York: Anchor Press, 1973 – 2nd ed. with a new afterword [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979] – 3rd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); more recently Richard Price, “Resistance to slavery in the Americas: Maroons and their communities,” Indian Historical Review, 15: 1–2 (1988–89): 71–95, and numerous publications on Guyana and Suriname Maroon communities. 48 Jan Vansina explores other central African implications of the well-known predominance of males in the Atlantic trade in “Histoire du manioc en Afrique centrale avant 1850,”Paideuma, 43 (1997): 255–79. The demographic investigations of sex ratios in the Atlantic trade are too numerous to cite here; the most recent work comes from the Harvard Database, e.g., David Eltis, “Age and sex: the slave trade in comparative perspective,” unpublished paper, Williamsburg Conference on Transatlantic Slaving and the African Diaspora, September 1998. 49 One anticipates Jan Vansina’s “Ambaca society and the slave trade, c. 1740–1840,” unpublished manuscript, 1998; in collaboration with Evá Sebestyén; also Evá Sebestyén and Jan Vansina, “Angola’s eastern hinterland in the 1750s: a text edition and translation of Manoel Correia Leitão’s ‘Voyage’ (1755–1756),” History in Africa, 26 (1999): 299–364. 50 “Ngangela” was also an outsiders’ pejorative designation of “others” as unlike themselves, and thus not reflective of the “others” self-identifications or of characteristics that they would have recognized themselves as sharing. It must also have carried increasing connotations of “enslaveable.” The process of “ethnic” labeling in Africa paralleled the alienating alterity that Europeans attributed to Africans,

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coherent cohort of Africans toiling in the canebrakes of Northeastern Brazil amidst a laboring population of mixed Amerindian and Western African backgrounds, the founding generation of slaves.51 The trading opportunities that Portuguese concentration of their slaving through Luanda left at the mouth of the Zaire and along the coasts to the north first attracted the Dutch to the shores of Central Africa. These old Kongo trading contacts at Mpinda seem to have become sources of forest commodities (principally palm cloths)52 in the 1620s, acquired through the commercial routes leading eastward through the coastal Kongo province of Soyo and the royal capital at São Salvador53 to the Kwango valley and the Kuba area beyond the Kasai.54 Though without initially emphasizing slaves, this trade had the effect of consolidating commercial networks that the Christian Kongo aristocracy later converted to less militaristic strategies of acquiring captives from the far east. Some they kept for their own purposes, and others they sold to Dutch and other northern Europeans. John K. Thornton has emphasized the thoroughness of popular conversion to Christianity in the Kongo kingdom in the sixteenth century, and he and others have extended that premise to assert that many of the people taken as slaves from central Africa55 – and, indeed, from other parts of the continent, at least through the middle of the seventeenth century56 – would have encountered their European enslavers on the basis of substantial familiarity in Africa with the dominant cultural world they were about to enter in the Americas. Whether the Kongo experience with Christianity, arguably

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52 53 54 55 56

and so Africans and Europeans – without having to think about what they were doing – collaborated in creating new collective identities through the wary and initially hostile encounters with strangers that arose from the violent aspects of a trade in slaves. The practical differences between encounters through hostile raiding and through collaborating in routine exchanges account for the range of new identities that people developed to handle the complex stages of the trade in Africa. But see the early, isolated, and relatively assimilated minority in Jamestown; John K. Thornton, “The African experience.” For tidewater Virginia, see Timothy H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), subsequently elaborated by others and integrated in Berlin, Many Thousands Gone. Jan Vansina, “Raffia cloth in West Central Africa 1500–1800,” in Maureen F. Mazzaoui, ed., Textiles: Production, Trade and Demand (Brookfield VT: Ashgate/Variorum, 1998), pp. 263–281. John K. Thornton, “Mbanza Kongo/São Salvador: Kongo’s holy city,” in David Anderson and Richard Rathbone, eds., Africa’s Urban Past (London: James Currey, 2000), pp. 67–84. Jan Vansina, The Children of Woot: Essays in Kuba History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). This includes the areas immediately east of Luanda; see John K. Thornton’s and Linda M. Heywood’s contributions to this volume. This is elaborated most strongly in Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the origins of African-American society in mainland North America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 53:2 (1996): 251–288, and incorporated in Many Thousands Gone. The argument represents a novel extension of the familiar case for continuities of African-American cultures from Africa, to seek African origins for the readiness with which early, very small numbers of people arriving as slaves seem to have taken advantage of access to humble places in most seventeenth-century American colonial societies.


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infused with other beliefs of African origin, would have struck those enslaved as making them participants in the emerging Atlantic world in ways that exceeded appropriation of its material resources for African purposes,57 and what reactions to their simultaneous exclusion from its attractions as slaves such perspectives might have provoked, awaits historical analysis. It is not clear how such early and pervasively Christian “Kongoness” might fit into slaves’ discovery of New World “Congo” identities as a form of “Africanness,” opposed to Euro-American domination through slavery. The discernible origins of the Africans coming from “Kongo” sources through the 1620s and 1630s seem to lie mostly on the less-integrated fringes of the Christian political–cultural sphere, to the east and south, and thus seem at least to qualify the hypothesis of Africa-based pan-Atlantic, Christian commonalities. Termination of the large shipments of slaves to the Spanish colonies in 1640, followed almost immediately by Dutch occupation of Luanda, ended Portuguese military raids and forced levies within the immediate Mbundu region. Local Angolan traders became the principal suppliers to the Pernambuco buyers at Luanda, mostly through Luanda families of Portuguese background who married into the Mbundu local gentry under their military domination and used the cover of appointments as Portuguese royal officials to extort slaves from the local populations placed under their control. They consolidated new contacts in the east through arrangements with the famous Queen Nzinga at Matamba (later “Jinga”) in the broad valley of the middle Kwango River and with Imbangala rulers, at the market known as Cassange in the upper valley to the south. Intermittent government wars against the mani Kongo of the era occasionally added significant cohorts of Kikongo-speakers to the ships leaving Luanda.58 South of the Kwanza, in the 1670s and 1680s, Portuguese raiding parties also began to range over the hills leading up to the central plateau where they captured a few of the quite distinct highland peoples, speakers of languages of the Umbundu cluster,59 who later became known collectively as Ovimbundu. A few others acquired from the southerly coastal plains as far south as Benguela also cleared for the Brazilian captaincies as “Luandas.” The Africans enslaved in northeastern Brazil who escaped to the “maroon” quilombo of Palmares, which preoccupied three generations of Portuguese and Dutch planters in southern Pernambuco (now Alagoas) 57 The extent to which Europeans traded on Africans’ terms, even in the most commercialized coastal environments, is widely acknowledged in the literature; I have argued the case for Central Africa in Way of Death. 58 John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo, and many other smaller studies. 59 See Footnote 39, above.

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from the 1630s into the 1690s, would therefore have included people of such varied backgrounds in Africa and with such remote connections to the Imbangala warcamps (except as victims of the latter-day heirs to the warrior ideology of the early seventeenth century) that characterizations of the Palmares settlement as a recreation of a predecessor African polity by militaristic Angolan “Jaga” must represent Portuguese (and Dutch) fears at least as much they stemmed from deliberated strategies of the fugitives.60 At the same time, it seems plausible that people of such diverse origins, in the besieged circumstances in which the escaped slaves of Palmares lived, would have turned to even a few trained Imbangala warriors among them for effective techniques of integrating young male recruits into disciplined fighting bands capable of defending the settlement.61 The cohorts of slaves from the diverse populations east of the Kwango that Pernambucan buyers took to northeastern Brazil included growing numbers of people falling under the domination of yet another network of bandit-like trading chiefs (commonly known in the literature as “Lunda”), anchored beyond the Kasai River at the compound of Ruund warlords boasting the title of mwaant yaav.62 The early Ruund preyed on the dense 60 Raymond K. Kent’s classic “Palmares: An African state in Brazil,” Journal of African History, 6:2 (1965): 161–175, acknowledges the diversity of origins. Recent archaeological investigation emphasizes the diverse elements, including Amerindian ones, of an apparently American synthesis that drew pragmatically, under enormous pressure, on the entire range of locally available resources: “whatever worked.” See Pedro Paulo Funari, “A arqueologia de Palmares: sua contribuiç a˜ o para o conhecimento da história da cultura Afro-Americana,” in João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes, eds., Liberdade por um fio: História dos Quilombos no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996), pp. 26–51; in English and in detail, Charles E. Orser, Jr., In Search of Zumbi: Preliminary Archaeological Research at the Serra da Barriga, State of Alagoas, Brazil (Normal, IL: Midwestern Archaeological Research Center, Illinois State University, 1992), and In Search of Zumbi, the 1993 Season (Normal, IL: Illinois State University, 1993). 61 Reasoning in this way from the relevant historical contexts, one would also consider the possible presence of southern Kongo with experience in the similarly defensive redoubts led by ndembu chiefs. It seems clear that Portuguese employed “Jaga” in Angola and “quilombo” in Brazil in the seventeenth century generically to characterize African defensive military strategies against the violence of slaving and slavery, whatever the particular cultural idioms on which they drew. On the other hand, people from many backgrounds in central Africa, from the central highlands to the Kwango valley, adapted the very effective techniques of the Imbangala; the queen Nzinga was only the example best known to the Portuguese (and hence to modern historians). These were strategies designed for adaptability to fast-changing, diverse circumstances, and their flexibility accounted for their success in the unsettled circumstances of the time, in America as well as in Africa. The interpretation of Palmares has become politically sensitive in Brazil; for the process and a careful assessment of the diversity of people integrated through the quintessentially integrative institution of the kilombo, see Robert Nelson Anderson, “The Quilombo of Palmares: a new overview of a Maroon state in seventeenthcentury Brazil,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 28:3 (1996): 545–566. For the military history in a tactical sense, John K. Thornton, “The art of war in Angola, 1570–1680,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30:3 (1988): 360–378. 62 The complex background to what became the “Lunda” state in the eighteenth century is explored in Jan Vansina, “It Never Happened: Kinguri’s Exodus and Its Consequences,” History in Africa, 25 (1998): 387–403, and “Government in the Kasai Before the Lunda,” International Journal of African Historical Studies, 31:1 (1998): 1–22.


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populations of the forest fringes immediately north of their military – and increasingly political – camp, and they sent some of the captives they took in these regions to other broker-agents settled in the lower Kwango valley east of Kongo (the best-known were the Yaka) and also down the Kasai toward Malebo Pool. These captives of the Ruund became the slaves who supported the chiefs who converted the Kongo “kingdom” to competing networks of mercantile gentry in the late seventeenth century. The traders at the port at Loango, known as “Vili” or “Mubire,” who converted commerce along the Loango Coast from commodities to slaves at that time herded them on to the coast through a Diaspora of settlements among Kongo and others, thus distinguishing between themselves in “ethnic” idioms that reflected the degree to which each community oriented itself to Atlantic commerce. This fundamental contrast between the older environmentally based communities of farmers and the new commercial identities of traders intensified everywhere in the coastal regions as central Africans reorganized themselves around their growing engagements with Europeans. Military–commercial federations of trading chiefs, obedient in only limited degrees to the military power that senior figures among them achieved by surrounding themselves with retinues of captives built from the same sources as the slaves they sold, thus drove slaving deep into central Africa. These networks – in the eighteenth-century Kongo area, and at Loango, Kasanje, and under the Ruund mwaant yaav – raided a growing diversity of people in the densely inhabited regions of the interior for captives, with those from trans-Kwango and the middle Kasai prominent after the 1670s along the trails reaching the Dutch, English, and French slavers along the Loango coast who exploited sources of the people they called “Angolas.” The first Central Africans taken to Rio de Janeiro in the second half of the seventeenth century came from the populations living on the western slopes of the highlands south of the Kwanza. They would have considered themselves relatively distinct from the Luandas or Angolas – only incipiently Ambundu – headed at that time mostly toward the sugar-producing captaincies of northeastern Brazil. The southern Brazilians, lacking valuable export crops, could not then compete with Pernambuco and Bahia planters’ increasingly commercialized trade through Luanda, which depended less and less on outright raiding and grew more and more through the distribution of trade goods on credit, through caravan-leading agents (the famous pombeiros), into the African trading networks of the interior. Lacking similar mercantile capacity, Rio traders resorted to raiding parties sent out to capture people from their bases at Benguela and Caconda. When discovery of gold and diamonds in the southern Brazilian interior in the

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1690s multiplied the demand for slaves at Rio many times over, interests there competed by extending their violent strategies throughout the Umbundu-speaking areas of the high plateau. The violence deeply divided the people of the highlands into several hostile refugee communities under the protection of warlords, the “Ovimbundu” states of the eighteenth century, Wambu, Mbailundo, Humbe, and others. The captives taken in these conflicts would have produced the first substantial group of Central Africans, or “Benguelas,” reaching Rio de Janeiro. They would have fallen back on their shared linguistic background to create the first coherently ethnic element among the enslaved miner population of Minas Gerais. Umbundu-speaking slaves remained one of three significant components of the enslaved African community there – along with West Africans brought in the early years through Bahia and with increasing proportions of Angola captives acquired at Luanda – throughout the boom period of Brazilian mining, at least through the 1750s.63 Arguably, the diversity of backgrounds of both the Western Africans and the Central Africans brought from Luanda would have given captives arriving from Benguela an advantage in setting the tone of slave culture there out of their shared origins on and around the Central African plateau. However, in Rio de Janeiro the patterns of Iberian slaving favored colonial Mbundu from Luanda as the founding generation of the city’s urban slavery. One would expect the Portuguese merchants behind the city’s rapid growth during the still undocumented64 boom years immediately after 1700, following the established tendency that had prevailed everywhere else in the Americas, to assemble skilled slaves for domestic and municipal services from populations of relatively assimilated backgrounds in Europe, or Africa. As the new commercial interests developing in Rio, closely connected to metropolitan merchants, secured Luanda as the principal source of the African labor on whom they were coming to depend in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, they would have tapped the town’s urban slave population for people of colonial Mbundu backgrounds who also were sufficiently familiar with Portuguese colonial norms to perform their duties with the degree of reliability and security necessary in the open, and often intimate, contexts of household and marketplace. Such Mbundu would have been far too valuable for employment in mines or canebreaks 63 The end of the Minas Gerais gold rush led to decreased imports and to a fusion of the children of the Africans brought there into a creole Afro-Mineiro population that was reproducing itself by the end of the eighteenth century; for references to recent demographic work to this effect, see Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge, 1999). 64 Though one eagerly anticipates the results of the current research of Manolo Garcia Florentino in Rio records for the early eighteenth century.


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and thus would be destined for a limited range of duties in the commercial and urban spheres of Brazil. However, the reservoir of such trained, as well baptized and catechized Christian, Portuguese-speaking slaves in Luanda and in households in the areas of military control in the adjacent interior would have been small relative to the growing numbers of captives moving into the trade from wars and raids in the farther interior. Only to the extent that debt foreclosure, corvéelike forced levies, and judicial processes within the area under Portuguese military domination along and above the Kwanza, as well as sell-offs from the slave population in Luanda, contributed to the human cargoes of the ships leaving Luanda for Brazil, would the Mbundu among them include people familiar, some of them intimately so, with Portuguese colonial culture. Even in Angola, African habits balanced the European aspects of colonial life to degrees that dismayed government officials arriving from Lisbon, including in the streets and households of Luanda itself.65 In the military districts of the interior, where government authority (the capitães mores) was often in the hands of families allied with, and married into, the African trading gentry dominant in the adjoining regions, a colonial Mbundu culture prevailed overwhelmingly.66 The issue of whether their Christianity was “African” or their African background was “Christian” was moot in the abstract and situational in practice. For people of colonial origins in Angola, the issue revolved less around familiarity with European culture than their subjugation to Iberian styles of enslavement.67 The captives leaving Luanda (though much less so Benguela) had thus moved through cultural milieux of Portuguese and African tones varying in subtle degrees that rendered all but meaningless the transition between such modern dichotomous stereotypes as “African” and “European.” Some from the distant East moved quickly through the networks of trails and markets converging on Luanda, and most from Benguela, to arrive in Brazil still in baffled cultural isolation. Others stopped in markets and villages along the way long enough to sense the gradations between their agricultural 65 Recent work on eighteenth-century Luanda includes Selma Pantoja, “Luanda: relaç o˜ es sociais e de ´ ´ gênero,” A dimensão Atlântica da Africa (II Reunião Internacional de História de Africa), pp. 75–81, and “Três leituras e duas cidades: Luanda e Rio de Janeiro nos Setecentos,” in Selma Alves Pantoja and José Flávio Saraiva, eds., Angola e Brasil nas rotas do Atlântico sul (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Bertrand Brasil, 1998), pp. 99–126. 66 Vansina and Sebestyén, “Ambaca Society” and “Angola’s Eastern Hinterland.” 67 Colonial judicial processes, strongly conditioned by local politics, existed that might protect clients of powerful local families from seizure and sale deemed “illegitimate”; see the cases revealed by José Curto, “The story of Nbena, 1817–1820: from unlawful enslavement to freedom in Central Angola,” unpublished paper, Tubman Seminar, York University (Toronto), 2000, and “A Pawn in Danger of Enslavement: José Manuel in Benguela, 1816–1820” (draft paper, July 2000).

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home villages, African military camps filled with European imports adapted to local purposes, market settlements where Africans applied local strategies to affect the material accumulation of Atlantic commercial culture but tolerated traders from the coast only on terms they set, colonial outposts of nominally Christian and Portuguese culture and control integrated into an African environment, and the city of Luanda with its distinguishably European and African parishes. From there, it was a short step to the ambivalent rejection and embrace of isolated elements of African cultures that – in varying degrees – pervaded Portuguese society in Brazil, while despising the efforts of slaves there to construct communities of their own from their backgrounds in Africa. Others would have recognized the philosophical parallels underlying differing metaphors in which Africans, among themselves, and Europeans, in comparably diverging ways, confronted the fundamental dilemmas of the human condition.68 The journey from Africa to America, for some (probably only a minority, in decreasing proportions of the captives sent abroad, even if growing in numbers), was a continuum, not a chasm. Many more slaves from deep in the Central African interior reached Rio during the remainder of the eighteenth century. At Luanda, traders built the commercial networks beyond the government-controlled colony that became the axes along which slaves were driven down to the colonial port until well into the nineteenth century. These reached the growing African merchant centers on all sides: the established eastern markets in the Kwango valley at Matamba and Kasanje to the Ruund commercial and political network beyond the Kwango, and – by the 1760s or so – also the Umbundu-speaking traders on the northern slopes of the highlands south of the Kwanza at Bihe. The commercial wealth of Rio had shifted the tone of slaving through Benguela toward commercial strategies by the 1760s, and the Umbundu-speakers of the central plateau, at new centers at Bihe (Viye) and elsewhere, had used them to develop trading routes extending into the Luvale and Lwena areas to the far southeast, even as far as the Lozi (Luyana) populations on the upper Zambezi floodplain. At the same time, highland traders from Bihe were intruding on the Ruund trading networks east of Kasanje. To the north, slaves continued to arrive from southern Kongo chiefs, and increasingly so as 68 John K. Thornton, in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, “ ‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo’,” and elsewhere has creatively explored African religious and political ideologies in European terms. The parallelism extends to the economic and political processes through which Africa entered the Atlantic economy; see Miller, Way of Death. The literature in many parts of the Americas has stressed the same idea in its religious manifestations.


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European wars disrupted slaving in the lower Zaire and along the coast to the north, starting with the disappearance of the French, who had been dominant at Cabinda, in the 1790s. The slaves sent to Rio through both Benguela and Luanda in the period after the gold boom thus would have included people from many parts of the forest fringes north of the developing Ruund confederation of warrior chiefs, as well as Kikongo-speakers, Ngangela, and growing numbers of ancestors to the trans-Kwango farmers known a century later as Cokwe, all in significant proportions that diluted the early coherent generations of Umbundu-speakers in southern Brazil.69 The increasingly commercial nature of primary slaving within the new communities of eighteenth-century Central Africa preyed on isolated individuals, particularly children, many of them of slave origins themselves; this also lessened the coherence of the groups taken to the Americas. Only in decreasing proportions did captives come from the large pitched battles between coherent, trained military forces that had earlier, if only occasionally, allowed survivors to mobilize these common backgrounds under enslavement in the New World. The recent experiences of their enslavement, the immediacy of slavery in Brazil, and the Afro-Brazilian cultures they found in the streets and on plantations there would have provided more resonant bases for forming communities of their own, amidst nostalgic personal awareness of many different local roots in Africa.70 Increasing characterizations of the slave cultures of southern Brazil as generically “Bantu,” largely in contrast to the Western African tone of those in the Brazilian Northeast, thus reflected the depth to which slaving had penetrated all of Western Central Africa by the late eighteenth century. The indistinct designation of the slaves that the French, English, and Dutch bought as Angolas (or Congos, for the Spaniards)71 along the Loango coast in the eighteenth century also accurately represented the amalgam of local minorities reaching ports there. Many of them came from the area of the kingdom of Kongo, others from the (Kikongo-speaking) Mayombe area 69 For a historicized account of these developments in one area, see Vansina, Jan.“Oral tradition and ethnicity: the case of the Pende” (unpublished paper, 1997), which distinguishes the realignment of local communities around the “Lunda” warchiefs who entered the middle Kasai region early in the eighteenth century and other communities of traders from Angola (Ambaca and Kasanje) about the same time. A number of the eighteenth-century polities in this area, and the modern ethnicities deriving from them, arose out of local defenses against Ruund raiding. 70 Hence the long lists of specific ethnonyms claimed by – or attributed to – individual slaves in the late eighteenth-century records of Rio and other parts of southern Brazil; see e.g., Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 71 The Spaniards must have extended terminology developed to describe the slaves who came from Central Africa on asiento ships early in the seventeenth century to all later arrivals from the area.

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north of the lower Zaire, and – increasingly – some, known as Mundongues, from the area earlier termed “Teke” toward Malebo Pool and the interior basin of the river.72 The French tended to concentrate on people obtained at Cabinda bay, many of them Kikongo-speakers from south of the Zaire, whereas the English and Dutch were more partial to Loango, where forest peoples from modern southern Gabon would have been prominent among the slaves they boarded. British slavers moved strongly to Cabinda after the French were removed from slaving in 1793. The “Vili” networks radiating inland from Loango and the Kongo commercial routes south of the river also tapped the main river above Malebo Pool, the lower Kasai, and trails as far south as those feeding the Yaka and Matamba and other markets along the middle and upper Kwango in touch with the Ruund. They thus carried people of central savanna origins identical to those of others sold to Angolan buyers who shipped to Brazil through Luanda. Lacking countrymen and women of their own to create viable communities out of specific habits that they shared, these people would have adapted to the American slave cultures of greater cultural coherence established years earlier by founding generations. Otherwise, they would have capitalized on their shared experiences along the trails – extending to months of suffering together over the growing distances they had traveled from their homelands in the remote interior – and in the ports where they had begun the Middle Passage. They thus appropriated the Europeans’ generic and geographical designations of them as foundations for the communities they created under slavery. In this parallel, ironic convergence of African experience and European stereotypes, specific African backgrounds meant little to the diverse people boarded all along the coast north of Luanda and from the banks of the lower Zaire (Figure 1.6). Only where local events in Central Africa sent large numbers of them into slavery within short periods of time did coherent groups of African provenance continue to form. The political struggles in the area of the Kongo polity in the late eighteenth century fed such significant numbers of warriors, sufficiently familiar with Christian ideas of kingship, to French slavers at Cabinda, who sold them in Saint-Domingue, that they later integrated Kongo Christian ideology into their interpretation of the French and Haitian revolutions.73 When the English moved into the void along the Loango coast left by the French after 1793, they brought similar surges 72 The modern ethnonym in the area is “Tio”; see Jan Vansina, The Tio Kingdom of the Middle Congo 1880–1892 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 73 John K. Thornton, “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,” and “ ‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo’ ”.


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Figure 1.6. Western Central Africa (geography and schematic slaving networks); Source: Miller, “Numbers, Origins,” p. 80.

of new Central Africans to their West Indian islands in the 1790s through 1807, as well as to Charleston and New Orleans.74 In the nineteenth century, the United States, Portuguese, and Spanish traders serving Cuba after about 1810 tended to concentrate their activity 74 Hence the Angolan presence in the Vesey plot of 1822 in Charleston and the Congos in Lousiana; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, unpublished papers (1999–2000).

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from the mouth of the Zaire River to the north. The intensity of this trade added people from the central and northern equatorial forests to the already vast array of Central Africans herded aboard their ships.75 In Southern Brazil, sugar and coffee estates received new African labor from sources ranging from Malimbo, near the equator, to Benguela, with some tendency to favor the southern parts of the region sending slaves from Ovimbundu sources76 and in the 1820s from Luanda (and later Ambriz). A growing stream of captives arriving from Southeastern Africa, particularly through Rio, increased the variety of the Bantu-speaking majority still further. Extreme heterogeneity in backgrounds thus continued to create a Central African mélange among the people enslaved in Brazil and Cuba throughout the increasingly furtive maritime slaving of the 1840s and 1850s (Figure 1.7). The ages and sexes of proportions of the Central African women and men, children, youths, and adults reaching the Americas were vitally significant in their experiences of enslavement. Such characteristics are barely evident in the historical record, beyond the probable high proportions of adult males that prevailed there, as throughout Atlantic slaving.77 The available evidence in areas of Western Central Africa that profited from brokering the transfer from captives from the far interior toward the coast reveals the corresponding predominance of the women and children kept behind.78 There – beyond the Mbundu of the Portuguese-controlled area, throughout the Kikongospeaking areas from Loango south through the Kongo kingdom, in the Kwango valley, around the compounds of the Ruund settlements to the east, and among the Ovimbundu of the central highlands – a relative few men of local backgrounds would have surrounded themselves with multiple wives and numerous children. The apparent presence of trained warriors 75 Robert W. Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and ivory Trades, 1500–1891 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). ´ 76 For the nineteenth century, see Maria Em´ılia Madeira Santos, Nos caminhos de Africa: serventia e posse (Angola século XIX) (Lisboa: Centro de Estudos de História e Cartografia Antiga, Instituto de Investigaç a˜ o Cient´ıfica Tropical, 1998), and Isabel Castro Henriques, Commerce et changement en Angola: Imbangala et Tschokwe face a` la modernité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995 – translated [Alfredo Margarido] as Percursos do modernidode em Angola: dinâmicas comerciais e transformaço˜es sociais no século XIX [Lisboa: Instituto de Investigaç a˜ o Cient´ıfica Tropical, 1997]). 77 David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, “Fluctuations in sex and age ratios in the transatlantic slave trade, 1664–1864,” Journal of Economic History, 46:2 (1993): 308–323, is the most detailed recent, accessible summary. 78 John K. Thornton, “The slave trade in eighteenth century Angola: effects of demographic structures,” Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne d’études Africaines, 14:3 (1980): 417–427. For the middle of the nineteenth century, one has consistent confirmation of the women accompanying the large trading caravans of the era; also, for successful slavers who must have replicated earlier demographic strategies in the region, Joseph C. Miller, “Cokwe trade and conquest,” in Richard Gray and David Birmingham, eds., Pre-Colonial African Trade (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 175–201.


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Figure 1.7. Nineteenth-century slaving from Central Africa to Brazil and Cuba.

in the pulses of slaves sent from large-scale wars in Africa suggests that outbreaks of violence accented the male majority on the ships that carried them across the Atlantic.79 In the refugee areas and warcamps around the areas of sustained disruption, as in the maroon settlements of the Americas, males clustered for self-defense. 79 And aboard the ships; see forthcoming work on shipboard slave revolts, by David Eltis and others.

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Over time, as a decreasing proportion of the people sold to European slavers arose from such violence, the numbers of young boys among them grew, until the nineteenth-century trade from Central Africa was predominantly a transfer of male adolescents.80 Under slavery in the Americas, adult males would have been inclined to utilize their experience with public institutions in Africa, including but not limited to their military training, whereas the boys brought in the last years of the trade were likely to have reacted as adolescents in the increasingly American-born communities of enslaved adults that they entered. CONCLUSION: AFRICAN AMERICA AND AFRICA

Africans taken to the Americas as slaves lived with a deep personal nostalgia for the lives of their own that they had lost to their enslavement.81 Uprooted from their communities of kin and affines, patrons and clients, friends and family, neighborhoods, and trading partners, they put intense energy into finding places of respect and dignity among the other Africans with whom they were trapped in American slavery.82 The very fervor of their need to regain the elementary sense of humanity derived from social recognition made them cultural pragmatists, eager to draw on whatever resources they found effective in the disorienting circumstances in which they found themselves. The historical contexts that the several waves of Central Africans found upon their arrival in the Americas varied enormously, but the relevance of their specific backgrounds in Africa tended to decrease over the more than 350 years that separated the first Teke men sent through São Tomé to the Gold Coast from the vast array of adolescents funneled to Brazil and Cuba through Benguela, Ambriz, and Cabinda in the 1840s. Over the years, the patterns of slaving that tore them out of Africa and the conditions of slavery they found in the Americas both lent greater relevance to the experience of enslavement itself. In the early sixteenth century, conflicts in the Kikongo-speaking areas south of the lower Zaire had produced captives from recognizably shared linguistic backgrounds, but they entered domestic environments, mostly in urban contexts – particularly in the Spanish colonies in the sixteenth century – where they lived in intimate 80 Generalizations emphasizing the low numbers of “children” aboard Portuguese ships before the nineteenth century appear to confuse the demographic categories reported in other parts of the Atlantic trade with a much more limited taxable status assigned mostly to very small children and infants under the strict government regulation of shipments from Angola and Benguela to Brazil. 81 As literary critics are discovering in the texts written by survivors of the experience. 82 See Stephan Palmié’s recent, very thoughtful introduction to Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995).


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contact with their masters and with predecessors who had arrived in small numbers from backgrounds in slavery in late medieval Iberia. Some of these slaves, particularly those coming through Kongo channels, must have had a useful familiarity with Portuguese Christianity and used it to find places for themselves without relying on the more “African” aspects of their origins. However, the often-violent shift to systematic slaving in Central Africa, on scales sufficient to supply the much larger numbers of people consumed by plantation-scale production of sugar, tended to produce influentially coherent waves of captives, starting with the Angolares sent to São Tomé from the wars of the ngola chiefs in the area around the Kwanza. The chaos east of Luanda multiplied the number of captives taken from a relatively small area between the 1580s and the 1630s and gave a recognizably Angolan character to the slave-importing cities of the time in Spanish America. Nevertheless, to the uncertain extent that the slavers supplying Northeastern Brazil during the take-off into plantation slavery there early in the seventeenth century also took Kimbundu-speaking Africans to Bahia and Pernambuco, they entered a much more complex social environment that included enslaved laborers of Amerindian and Western African backgrounds. The small numbers of people sent from south of the Kwanza to Southern Brazil before the 1690s would have had to adapt to communities of similarly heterogenous backgrounds. The commercialized slaving that reached more, and more distant, parts of Central Africa after about 1670 assembled people of increasing diverse origins at Luanda to board slave ships headed for Pernambuco and other Brazilian captaincies: some of these were from generic Congo backgrounds, others were Angolas in the process of becoming colonial Mbundu, and growing numbers of captives came from many areas east of the Kwango. In the mining camps of Minas Gerais, where many Central Africans ended up in the first half of the eighteenth century, they briefly formed a coherent cohort of Umbundu-speakers, along with others, nearly all males, from all parts of Atlantic Africa, from Upper Guinea to Benguela. The women who would have set the tone of domestic life there would have been Afro-Brazilians; the mixture of people enslaved could hardly have favored coherent influences from any part of the continent. In the city of Rio de Janeiro and on the sugar plantations that Central Africans shipped through Luanda and Benguela built toward the end of the eighteenth century, the vast array of trade routes feeding the two Angolan ports would have favored only generically Bantu sensibilities, expressed in a potpourri of isolated specific practices developed from incidental, local circumstances.

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The African merchant networks converging on the Loango coast supplied similarly generic Angolas to the British, French, and Dutch. Their cargoes included greater proportions of Congo and peoples of the forest and fewer Mbundu from the Portuguese colony and very few Umbunduspeakers, but they hardly differed from the Central Africans in Southern Brazil in the extreme diversity of backgrounds they brought onto the ships. The Angola slaves whom the British took to the Americas – first Barbados, than Jamaica, and next the Carolina Lowcountry – at the end of the seventeenth century thus had relatively few specific commonalities on which they might rely. They cumulatively amounted to only small minorities among much more numerous Western Africans, except in the 1720s among the much smaller slave population of the early rice plantations along the Ashley and Cooper Rivers around Charleston, and in Charleston again at the very end of the trade and again in the Haitian revolution in Saint-Domingue, which followed three decades of intense French trading at Cabinda after 1763. The pervasiveness of slaving in Central Africa may have made it an extreme case of the general tendency to diversify these sources. Even where violent breakdowns of the social order produced significant concentrations of people in specific slaving ports, they joined existing populations of predecessors from other parts of Africa, and as time passed they increasingly entered African-American communities with significant cohorts of youthful, energetic, even trend-setting people born in slavery, in the New World. The relevance of distinguishably specific African experiences thus diminished over time, except as personal biographies, in networks of friendship and mutual aid among newly arrived “countrymen,” and at moments that forced specific groups to band together for self-defense.83 At the same time, generic American labels of “Angola,” “Congo,” and “Bantu” acquired an array of differing meanings specific to the broad composition of the slave populations of each colony, varying according to the circumstances and terminology in use at the formative early moments in their histories, and changing over time as the volume and origins of new slaves shifted with the winds of commerce and European politics and war. In the Caribbean area, Central Africans achieved numbers that could challenge the concentrations of Western Africans only in the French sugar 83 Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, is the most systematic effort to imagine this intergenerational process of relying on, reconstructing, remembering, and then imagining Africa. The biographical aspects of the large “Nigerian Hinterland” project, under the sponsorship of the UNESCO “Slave Route Project” and the Canadian SSHRC and directed by Paul E. Lovejoy, will surely yield further historicized insights along these lines. Also see the extremely careful work of Gwendolyn Hall, now nearing completion (Footnote 35).


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islands – Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe (but not Martinique). At New Orleans, the combination of slaves brought from the French Caribbean and British shipments from Cabinda in the last years of slaving added an influential cohort of Congo to the complex slave populations of nineteenth-century Louisiana. Modern ethnographic descriptions bear only the most problematic similarities to particular practices, beliefs, or aesthetic motifs that the people seized and enslaved in Central Africa might have known at home, if such observed abstractions have any relationship at all to the multiple meanings they had for the individuals and groups who held and practiced them.84 The collective terms in which people identified themselves in Central Africa changed continually – since before the first farmers had abandoned older groups and moved into the region to settle in new communities among the hunters and gatherers they met there. During the era of slaving in Central Africa, their descendants found themselves thrown together in an accelerating sequence of other new collective identities as they struggled to find places for themselves in the scramble to seek advantage, or – for the victims – merely to survive. To understand the stories of these Central Africans in the American Diaspora, one must avoid falling back on assumptions of stable ethnic stereotypes – in the Americas as well as in Africa – to impute connections through assumed continuities and apparent similarities in form.85 Rather, it was the momentary historical circumstances in which people from Central Africa were caught up in slaving, that they encountered along their paths from the interior toward the coast, that they experienced in suffocatingly close contact with strangers in the holds of the ships that carried them to the New World, and that they sought out among countrymen and countrywomen in slavery in the Americas that provide clues about where one might start to search for evidence in Africa that will indicate what about their previous lives motivated action in the Americas, and thus contributed to the histories Central Africans made there under slavery. 84 There are a few rigorously historical ethnographies: see Vansina, The Tio Kingdom of the Middle Congo; Janzen, Lemba; and MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa. Vansina, “Oral tradition and ethnicity,” Paths in the Rainforests, and other recent papers using historical linguistics, the most promising method of moving beyond the limited vision of European sources and the plasticity of oral traditions, are the starting point. 85 I have summarized some of the recent Africanist discussion of ethnicity in “History and Africa/Africa and History,” American Historical Review, 104: 1 (1999): 1–32. Vansina, “Oral tradition and ethnicity” offers an elegant reconstruction of the political dynamics of ethnicity in one small part of Central Africa; parallel studies may be expected to reveal similarly plastic collective identifies everywhere in the area. I have attempted to sketch a regional history in these terms in “Worlds apart: Africans’ encounters and Africa’s encounters with the Atlantic in Angola, before 1800.”

APPENDIX

1

A. Slaves Boarded from Central Africa, by Decades

West Africa Central Africa, Carriers

Decade

Dutch

French

English

Portuguese

1480–1489 1490–1499 1500–1509 1510–1521 1522–1579b 1580–1639

2,064d

0a 0 1,600 15,900 50,000c 60,000e

1640–1649

11,504

0

1650–1659 1658–1674 1675–1689 1690–1699

785 7,337h 11,266 6,682

i

n/a j

8,000 24,000 17,153

(“Mina” Only) Portuguese

50,000g 127,500 105,000 60,000

(2,671 by Dutch from West Africa) 3,000 f (+7566 by Dutch from West Africa) 3,000 10,000 21,000 60,800

70,000l 59,000 73,000 116,000 119,000 131,000 131,000 131,000 154,000 168,000 188,000

86,000 67,000 63,000 49,000 39,000 34,000 36,000 30,000 33,000 53,000 73,000

k

1700–1709 1710–1719 1720–1729 1730–1739 1740–1749 1750–1759 1760–1769 1770–1779 1780–1789 1790–1799 1800–1809

a

9,128 4,447 9,762 1,929 5,990 9,587 19,771 17,306 2,190 2,313 0

2,610 4,550 14,090 22,060 47,970 42,920 74,690 81,980 116,460 34,080 0

33,600 65,730 87,960 89,930 34,240 36,190 45,780 12,230 25,150 128,390 80,320m

From Footnote 3, Table 7, p. 73. For periods lacking direct data, overall totals are estimated. c Guesstimate; cf. Footnote 29, Vansina, p. 201. d Ernst Van den Boogaart and Pieter C. Emmer, “The Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1595–1650,” in Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, eds., The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Academic Press, 1979), pp. 353–375, Table 14.5, p. 369. e Extrapolated from Footnote 11; Eltis et al., Table 5, p. 35. f Patrick Manning, “The Slave Trade in the Bight of Benin 1640–1890,” in Gemery and Hogendorn, eds., Uncommon Market, pp. 107–141, from Appendix 4. g Portuguese estimates 1650–1699 are extrapolated from Footnote 1, Miller, p. 233. For this barely documented period, Footnote 11, Eltis et al., have suggested figures on the order of two thirds of these; I have elaborated reasoning favoring figures of these magnitudes in Footnote 2, “Slaving from ‘West-Central Africa’.” The late seventeenth century shipments from Central Africa of Brazil – mostly Pernambuco – remain one of the least satisfactorily documented periods in the entire Atlantic slave trade. h Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), combining figures from 5.5 (the WIC) and 5.7 (“free traders”), pp. 115, 121, except for 1580–1649. i Extrapolated from Footnote 15, Eltis, Table IV, p. 620, column evidently mislabled “West-Coast Africa.” Figures for the 1660s–1690s are calculated for decades beginning in 1671, 1681, and 1691, and the decadal total for the 1660s is for 1662–1670. j But not significant before 1700. k All eighteenth-century calculations are those of David Richardson, “Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700–1810: New Estimates of Volume and Distribution,” Journal of African History, 30:(1989): 7–22. Columns for French and British are from Tables 5 and 6, pp. 13–14; columns for Portuguese are from Table 4, p. 10 l Richardson rounded to nearest thousands. m 1800–1807 only. b

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Central Africa: Society, Culture, and the Slave Trade B. Slaves Boarded from Central Africa, By Decades (Nineteenth Century)

Central Africa

Decade

1811–1820 1821–1830 1831–1840 1841–1850 1851–1860 1861–1867

Zaire River and North

98,200 85,600 51,300 117,900 95,500 40,600

Ambriz, Luanda, Benguela

Total

164,700 207,200 245,000 192,000 15,300 3,600

262,900 292,800 296,300 309,900 110,800 44,200

Source: All nineteenth-century figures are from David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), Appendix A.9. Details in David Eltis, “Slave Departures from Africa, 1811–1867: An Annual Time Series,”African Economic History, 15 (1986): 143–171, Tables 9 and 10, pp. 168–169.

C. Imports to the Americas, By Decades (Nineteenth Century)

Decade

Brazil, South of Bahiaa

Bahiab

Brazil, North of Bahia

Cuba

French Americas

1811–1820 1821–1830 1831–1840 1841–1850 1851–1860 1861–1867

106,100 233,800 199,500 212,700 3,600 0

70,000 71,600 32,500 66,100 1,900 0

82,600 63,600 41,200 12,600 900 0

168,600 83,100 181,600 50,800 121,000 31,600

18,000 57,900 600 0 12,500 5,900

a

b

Figures from Appendix A.8, reduced by totals from southeastern Africa in Appendix A.9. Details in David Eltis, “The Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade: An Annual Time Series of Imports into the Americas Broken Down by Region,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 67:1 (1987): 109–138. All carriers, with proportions from Central Africa difficult to distinguish but predominant after 1840; Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Appendix A.8.

D. Estimate of Proportion of Slaves from Central Africa Among Those Sent to Northeastern Brazil and the Caribbean, By Decades (Nineteenth Century)

Decade

(1) Est. Central Africa to Bahia and Caribbeana

(2) Est.Total Exports to Bahia and Caribbean

Column (2) less Column (1) as estimate of West Africans

Approx. % of Central Africans Taken to Bahia and Caribbean [Col. (1)/Col. (2)]

1811–1820 1821–1830 1831–1840 1841–1850 1851–1860 1861–1867

147,900 41,100 81,600 80,900 106,900 47,600

367,500 297,300 275,500 139,400 133,300 47,600

219,600 256,200 193,900 58,500 26,400 0

40.2 13.8 29.6 58.0 80.2 100.0

a

Total Central Africa less imports at Rio, from tables above, adjusted for mortality losses of 7.7%, 1801–1820, and 7.1%, 1821–1867; Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman, “Long-Term Trends in African Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Slavery and Abolition, 18:1 (1997): 36–48, Table 2, p. 44 (cf., data computed in another form, Table 1, p. 43).

E. Slaves from Central Africa (Embarked) as Proportion of Total Atlantic Trade, By Quarter Centuries

Years

1519–1600 1601–1650 1651–1675 1676–1700 1701–1725 1726–1750 1751–1775 1776–1800 1801–1825 1826–1850 1851–1867 Total

Central Africa

Total Atlantic

% Central Africa

130,900 564,700 88,400 134,100 256,700 550,400 712,000 813,900 698,300 770,600 155,000

158,300 608,800 223,500 516,300 956,300 1,303,700 1,901,200 1,906,000 1,650,400 1,621,000 180,500

82.7 92.8 39.6 26.0 26.8 42.2 37.4 42.7 41.8 47.5 85.9

4,875,000

11,026,000

44.3

Source: David Eltis, “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment” (Draft paper, August 1999). Thanks to Professor Eltis for permission to reproduce this selection of his preliminary figures from Tables 1 and 2. I have calculated the column of percentages.

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Central Africa: Society, Culture, and the Slave Trade F. Slaves from Central Africa To Selected Caribbean Sugar Islandsa

Island Saint-Domingueb 1701–1725 1726–1750 1751–1775 1776–1800 (Total) Cuba (Total)c Guadeloupe (Total)c Danish Islands (Total)c French/British/Dutch South America (Total)c Barbados (Total)c Jamaicab 1701–1725 1726–1750 1751–1775 1776–1800 1801–1825 (Total) British Leewards (Total)c Windward Islands (Total)c

a

b c

% Central Africa

18.0 31.7 60.2 51.8 (49.5) (30.9) (30.5) (28.6) (27.6) (15.6) 11.1 25.8 9.7 18.7 20.7 (15.1) (15.1) (13.0)

Figures are not comparable throughout the table. Those for Jamaica and Saint-Domingue refer to slaves leaving Africa, include estimates, and cover only the years listed; those for the remaining islands are based only on voyages reporting slaves landed and cover the years 1662–1867. David Eltis, “Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment,” selected figures from Tables 4 and 5. David Eltis, “Gender and Ethnicity in the Slave Trade to the Caribbean” (unpublished paper, Caribbean History Seminar, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, March 1995), Table 4. No doubt, Professor Eltis has since refined these calculations.

1. Central Africa During the Era of the Slave Trade, c. 1490s–1850s G. Percentages of Males and Children from Central Africa

Dates

1663–1700 1701–1809 1810–1867

Males (%)

Children (%)

(N = slaves, males/children)

60.9 68.9 72.1

21.7 28.1 53.0

49,925/47,378 348,055/298,681 101,999/75,471

Source: David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, “Fluctuations in Sex and Age Ratios in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1664–1864,” Economic History Review, 46:2 (1993): 308– 323, Table 1, p. 310. Note that these percentages are based on the small proportion of slaving vessels reporting slaves landed by sex and age – of the order of 5% of the total volume of the trade.

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2

Religious and Ceremonial Life in the Kongo and Mbundu Areas, 1500–1700 JOHN K. THORNTON

Figure 2.1. West Central Africa in the era of the Atlantic slave trade.

71

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In spite of wars and the occasional displacements outlined in Miller’s chapter, the inhabitants of sixteenth and seventeenth century Central Africa had a fairly stable religious and ceremonial system, whose greatest change came not from instability but the introduction of Christianity. Furthermore, Central African contributions to American religious life have been well established. In order to understand the underlying principles and stability of these African systems of religious life, historians must come to grips with the beliefs and dynamics of this religious background. The first task is to identify salient features of West Central African religion in the period of the slave trade, which many of the pioneering scholars did by using the ethnography of modern Central Africa. This chapter breaks with that practice and reconstructs religious ideas primarily from documents written during the period of the slave trade to account more fully for regional variation and change over time. The second task is to recognize that from the eve of Columbus’ voyages, hundreds of thousands of central Africans practiced a local form of Christianity, initially brought to the Kingdom of Kongo by Portuguese missionaries, but eventually forming the core of a dynamic local church. Scholarship that focuses on the Americas has largely ignored this important part of central African life, whereas Africanist scholarship has occasionally misconceived it either as a restricted belief of the upper classes, or, because it incorporated many traditional features, as not genuinely Christian. Scholars who have done the work of recovering the original elements of central African religion have made use of an exceptionally high-quality and insightful modern ethnography. Many pioneers were “self-ethnographers,” Kongo people who began systematically recording information about their religion, history, and culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Often they wrote in Kikongo, and as insiders their texts give us important insights into how Kongo think about religion and culture. From the notebooks produced for the missionary Laman in 1910–16,1 through Bahelele Ndimansa’s classic insider ethnography of the 1950s,2 to Fu-Kiau Bunseki’s philosophical work in 1966,3 and Muanda Nsemi’s organization Bundu dia Kongo,4 a stream of insider cultural description has defined Kongo society and culture. In recent years, many Kongo insiders 1 Wyatt MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 34–41 and passim for an overview of the project and its authors. 2 Bahelele Ndimansa, Lusansu ye fu bia N’kongo tekila mvu 1900 (Kinshasa: Centre Protestant d’Editions et de Diffusion, 1977 [1956]). 3 A. Fu-kiau, Mukongo ye nza yakundilila (Kinshasa: Office National de la Recherche et de Développement, 1966, with a French trans., Le mokongo et le monde que l’entournait). 4 For example, Mayala, Nos. 1 and 2 (Kinshasa: Periodical no publisher listed, 1996).

2. Religious and Ceremonial Life in the Kongo and Mbundu Areas

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such as Simon Bockie, Tulu kia Mpanzu Buakasa, André Mankenda, and Mata Makala ma Mpasi are also academically trained anthropologists.5 The region has also been served by excellent field work of Western anthropologists such as Wyatt MacGaffey,6 John Janzen,7 and Robert Farris Thompson,8 who have provided their own insights into the religion and culture of central Africa. In addition to their own field work, they have read, critiqued, and utilized the self-ethnographic literature. For all the seductive quality of central African ethnography, it describes religion best only for the northern part of the Kikongo-speaking area (there is not a similar tradition for the Kimbundu speakers even further south). This region did not include most of the Kingdom of Kongo, was outside the ancient penetration of Christianity, and only participated fully in the slave trade in the nineteenth century. Ethnography necessarily also focuses on the cultural situation of the twentieth century, which complicates using it for periods centuries earlier. For a historical appreciation, one must turn to the fairly abundant but problematic writing of sixteenth and seventeenth century visitors from Europe, and a few central African texts. Many of the visitors, especially missionaries, were hostile to African religious ideas and practices, which caused them to misrepresent African religion, but these early observers had the tremendous advantage of witnessing the religions at first hand during the period of the slave trade. Contemporary eyewitness testimony, for all its problems, is still the philosopher’s stone of the historians’ craft. Thus, the reconstruction that follows necessarily takes up a process of triangulation in which hostile older materials are constantly reviewed against the insights to be gained by studying modern anthropology. ORIGINAL THEOLOGY IN WEST CENTRAL AFRICA

Central Africans have probably never agreed among themselves as to what their cosmology is in detail, a product of what I have called the process of continuous revelation and precarious priesthood that characterized African 5 Simon Bockie, Death and the Invisible Powers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Tulu kia Mpanzu Buakasa, L’impensé du discours. Kindoki et nkisi en pays kongo du Za¨ıre (Kinshasa and Brussels: Pub., 1973); André Mankenda, “L’initiation au kimpasi et les rites nkita chez les Kongo,” (Licenciate thesis, Université libre de Bruxelles, 1971); Mata Makala ma Mpasi, “L’initiation nkita en société Ntandu,” (Licentiate thesis, Université Nationale du Za¨ıre, 1973). 6 Wyatt MacGaffey, Custom and Government in the Lower Congo (Berkeley: University of California, 1970); Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986); and Kongo Political Culture. 7 John Janzen, The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire (Berkeley: University of California, 1978); Lemba: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and America (New York: Garland, 1982). 8 Robert Farris Thompson and Robert Cornet, Four Moments of the Sun (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1981); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983); among others.

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religions in general. Theology was thus formed by a constant stream of revelations that was not under the control of a priesthood who enforced orthodoxy, but instead was interpreted individually within a community of belief. Priests were those who could demonstrate efficacy in contacting the Other World, a skill that was not conveyed by a hierarchy or seminary.9 This uncertainty is reflected in the older documentary sources as much as in modern times, and it is revealed in so central an issue as the fate of the soul after death. In the 1650s, the Capuchin missionary Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi described a system of transmigration of souls in Mbundu belief,10 as did the Mbundu ruler of Kakulu ka Kahenda when he engaged in a theological debate about the immortality of the soul with the Jesuit Manuel Ribeiro in 1672. In Kakulu ka Kahenda’s vision, souls passed from men to their wives (or the wife they loved best) or failing that to their children upon their death. He also noted that dreaming of the dead guided the living in sacrifice and other acts of worship.11 This may explain why a bit later Ribeiro encountered, at Capelle, people firing muskets at a funeral to prevent the soul of the deceased from entering the body of a relative.12 But not everyone accepted the transmigration theory. Elsewhere, Ribeiro encountered another man who believed that the soul perished along with the body.13 These disagreements were not restricted to the Mbundu area. The Dutch traders of the 1630s and 1640s, who informed the geographer Olfert Dapper, summed up these theological disagreements, clearly widespread in central Africa, for Loango, a Kikongo-speaking state that lay along the coast north of the Congo River. Some people, he was told, believed in reincarnation – the soul of a dead person was reborn in the same family, much as Kakulu ka Kahenda’s ruler believed. However, the same traders knew of other people, who reported that there was no afterlife at all, mirroring similar beliefs of the Mbundu area (a reminder that materialist conceptions are probably as universal, if less frequent, as religious ones).14 9 On this theology, see John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 2nd. ed. expanded (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 235–247. 10 MSS Araldi (Modena), Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, “Missione evangelica al regno de Congo . . .” (1665–68), Vol. A, book 1, pp. 83–84. For modern ideas see the notes of Amandus Johnson, who worked in Mbundu-speaking regions in the 1920s, University of Pennsylvania, University Museum, Amandus Johnson Papers, 3/10. 11 “Carta da Missaõ que fizeraõ, o P. Manoel Ribejro, e o Irmaõ Francisco Correa, mandados pelo P. Antonio de Souza Reitor, que entaõ era, do Colegio de Angola, anno de 1672 para o de 1673,” (15 January 1674) in António Brásio (ed.), Monumenta Missionaria Africana (1st series, 15 vols. Lisbon, 1952–88), hence forward MMA 13: 258. 12 Ribeiro, “Carta,” MMA 13: 264. 13 Manuel Ribeiro, “Carta,”MMA 13: 262 14 Olfert Dapper, Naukeurige Beschrijvinge der Afrika gewesten (Amsterdam: Leers, 1668, 2nd edition, 1686 (2nd pagination), p. 170; see also F. Capelle, “Brève description des lieux principaux situés en Angola . . .,” March 1642, as translated in Louis Jadin, “Rivaltés luso-néerlandaises au Sohio, Congo, 1600–1675,” Bulletin de l’Institute belge de Rome, 37 (1966):232.


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But these disagreements do not hide the fact that there was still a widely held consensus on this matter, which was that the dead went to an afterlife where they might influence the living. Dapper was told it was common in Loango.15 Jesuits working in sixteenth-century Kongo reported the idea in an unusual form: “The greatest dishonor you can make to someone is to say your father died or your mother died; thus the heathens and most rustic say that when they die they rise up and however old they are, it does not appear to them that one dies except in war or that a witch wishes it.”16 Cavazzi heard the idea in the Mbundu areas as well, for example, by reporting a story of a woman who had been sacrificed, but returned from the dead to report that her services in the Other World were not needed.17 Nearly 200 years later, in 1922 Amandus Johnson heard stories, said to have been first told by people who had “risen from the dead,” who described the land of the dead called Kalunga, ruled by Soba Kalunga, where those judged worthy were admitted after their death.18 Accepting that there was probably never a full consensus or religious orthodoxy, we can still see an outline of widely held beliefs. West Central Africans believed in a variety of spiritual beings residing in the Other World. Contemporary documents stress that religious worship involved two types of distinct Otherworldly beings: remote and powerful spirits that we might describe as deities, and the souls of the recently dead ancestors of the living. Some modern authorities relate both categories to the dead, arguing that the deities are simply longer dead ancestors, though this is controversial both among insiders and anthropologists. In addition to these two main spiritual forces, there were two categories of lesser spirits who were detached from individual families or territories, and who either activated charms that any one possessing the charm could use, or were dangerous angry spirits, ghosts whose malice and mischief could be troublesome.19 Some scholars put the cult of these latter spirits into the realm of magic as opposed to religion, to differentiate their theologically less important status. The dieties held universal or more often regional authority. Nzambi Mpungu, the high god and creator of the universe, whose sphere of action was the whole world, might be considered a former ancestor, or the ancestor 15 Dapper, Naukeurige Beschrijvinge, p. 170. 16 Christóvão Ribeiro letter, 1 August 1548, MMA 15: 163. 17 MSS Araldi, Cavazzi, “Missione evangelica,” Vol. A, book 1, p. 70. Cavazzi had her simply survive the sacrifice, but the original probably had more of a miraculous twist. 18 University Museum, Philadelphia, Amandus Johnson Papers, 3/10, unpaginated. 19 Best synthesized in Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society, pp. 19–102. For a strong critique of this position, and a more sharply delineated cosmology in general, see Luc de Heusch, Le roi de Kongo et les Monstres sacrés (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), pp. 222–228.

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of the first human, according to philosophically oriented modern Kongo. Because missionaries to Kongo readily accepted him as the same being as the Christian God, we can thus only assume that they were satisfied that his power and scope resembled that of God as conceived in the early modern West. In Mbundu regions the deities were typically called kilundu20 , although sometimes they were clearly seen as gods (nzambi, sometimes used as a plural, jinzambi ). Cavazzi related two incidents from Ndongo about this in the late 1650s. In one case a woman, when asked about the shrine she maintained, declared, “Father, it is Nzambi, that is, God,” in the other a blacksmith maintained that there were two gods, one in heaven and the other that was him.21 But Nzambi may have shared his power with some more localized deities; modern Kongolese tales sometime attribute this power to beings with other names, like Lusunzi or Funzu, whose territory is more defined.22 Some of Amandus Johnson’s informants in 1922 believed that Soba Kalunga, ruler of the underworld, created the world.23 In the past, as today, Nzambi a Mpungu was not the subject of a specific cult or worship, though His immanence was accepted.24 Worship was directed to territorial deities, if not to Nzambi, often at shrines. In the Kimbundu speaking area, the shrines of territorial deities were called kiteki. These stern deities lived in high places, watercourses, and uncultivated areas and held the well-being of specific areas in their power, though their shrines might be in other locations as well. They were very prominent in villages, or in the mbanza (capital towns) of the rulers. They received a good deal of public attention, and people considered their general (as opposed to their particular) welfare under the protection of these territorial deities. Manuel Ribeiro encountered one such shrine that was given first fruits in exchange for abundant harvests in 1672 at Ndala a Kabasa. When he threatened to burn the kiteke at Kakulu ka Oximi, an old man begged him not to, as the god, he said, had given them good harvests, the hunters success, and the ruler good luck in his wars and alliances.25 The Italian Capuchins knew these deities by name; Serafino da Cortona noted their geographical distribution in 1656, including Ganzambumbo and Naviez, “who are the most esteemed,” regarded as the guardians of Ndongo who had special 20 21 22 23 24 25

MSS Araldi, Cavazzi, “Missione Evangelica,” Vol. A, book 1, p. 90. MSS Araldi, Cavazzi, “Missione Evangelica,” Vol. B, pp. 457–458. De Heusch, Roi de Kongo, pp. 47–50, 58–67, 124–144. University Museum, Philadelphia, Johnson Papers, 3/10. MacGaffey, Religion and Society, pp. 78–82. Ribeiro, “Carta,” MMA 13: 265–268.


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houses dedicated to them.26 Cavazzi included the names of a number of others as well, a list that included 39 “male” and 36 “female” “idols” (the preferred Capuchin term for shrines), typically arranged in family groups of husband and wife.27 Kilundu gave prohibitions, called kixila, for the people to follow, and punished them, often with sickness, if they did not follow them.28 These shrines were often placed in houses or in complexes of buildings. Jesuit priest Pero Tavares described a shrine he discovered at Kaboko in 1632 that included a pyramid with a statue on top, next to a straw cabin decorated with mats in which a number of ingredients were kept, and where the “devil [the kilundu] often speaks.”29 The shrine in Bango a Kitama, described by Carmelite missionaries in 1659, was less spectacular, kept in two large boxes in the house of their priest.30 Shrines to territorial deities were also common in Loango, where they were called nkisi and appear to have varied in their local or regional scope. For the Dutch factor Capelle, who came to Loango in 1637, each area had a particular deity with a regional cult: “In Loango, they venerate Kykocke, in Zary, Bonsy, at Pompo, Kitouba, at Cacongo imbomba, so that each country has its own superstitions.”31 The religious scope of regional shrines is attested by Andrew Battell, who visited the shrine of Maramba around 1610, which he described as being like a beehive in a large house. People kept reliquaries of the deity, who could bring abundant fishing, good health, lucky hunting, and bountiful harvests to much of Mayombe in the northern part of Loango. Young people were initiated into the cult of Maramba and given a taboo when they finished their course. A guardian of public morality, the shrine would kill anyone who lied while embracing it.32 He also described, in similar terms, two other nkisi: Chekoke (Capelle’s Kykocke) in 26 Serafino da Cortona to Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, 14 May 1656, MMA 12: 24–25 (from Cavazzi’s Istorica Descrizione); a slightly different version, dated 2 May, is found in MSS Araldi, Cavazzi, “Missione Evangelica,” Vol. B, pp. 452–453. 27 MSS Araldi, Cavazzi, “Missione Evangelica,” Vol. A, book 1, pp. 91–94 and Vol. B, 454 (mentions 39 male and 36 female “idols”). 28 MSS Araldi, Cavazzi, “Missione Evangelica,” Vol. A, book 1, pp. 94–99. 29 Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesus, Assistencia Lusitania, Vol. 55, fol. 102, Pero Tavares to Jeronimo Vogado, 29 June 1635, published in French trans. with original foliation, Louis Jadin, “Pero Tavares, missionaire jésuite, ses travaux apostoliques au Congo et en Angola, 1629–1635,” Bulletin Institut historique belge de Rome, pp. 328–393. 30 Arquivo dos Padres Carmelitas, Braga, “Chronica de Carmelitas Descalç os,” Vol. 4, book 13, ch. 20, fol. 708. 31 Capelle, “Brève description,” p. 231. 32 “Andrew Battel of Leigh in Angola and Adjoining Regions [ed. Samuel Purchas, 1625] mod. ed., E. G. Ravenstein (London: Hakluyt Society, 1901, reprint, 1964)”, pp. 56–58; also Samuel Brun, Schiffarten (Basel, 1624, mod. ed. L’Honoré Naber, 1913, English trans., with original pagination marked, in Adam Jones, ed. and trans., German Sources for West African History [Wiesbaden: Franz Skiner Verlag, 1985], p. 22).

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the city of Loango, and Gumbiri at Kenga (port of Loango). Dapper’s very detailed account, based on sources of the 1630s and 1640s, gave descriptions of a number of nkisi, some of which, like Tiriko or Kikokoo, were clearly lesser regional shrines with public ceremonies and ministers. Often these shrines were not public and monumental, involving a complex of ingredients, statuary, and pictures, and placed in large pots, sometimes buried in the ground, and frequently kept in small houses in woods, graveyards, or even in the center of towns.33 The “idols” and “houses of idols” mentioned in Kongo reports were probably shrines to territorial deities, called kiteki and served by priests called nganga Kiteke, the analog of the Kimbundu term used by Cavazzi and others.34 In Christian Kongo, however, the merging of the functions of shrines with Christian churches complicated the situation. At any rate, priests called kitomi, mentioned regularly in seventeenth century reports of Kongo, related to territorial deities, called nkita, that were honored in shrines in other places. Nkita were territorial, organized along the local divisions of the country, and responsible for natural events, public morality, and political order.35 The kitomi of Nsevo, in northern Kongo just south of the Congo River, kept two stones, left by the ancients and very sacred, at his public plaza. If the stones were moved, local people told Girolamo da Montesarchio in 1651, the little spring that watered the country would dry up, no doubt because the protective deity would be angry or rendered ineffective.36 In some areas, no officer of state could be installed without the consent of these beings, through the kitomi. Da Montesarchio described the ceremonies required for the installation of the ruler of Kongo’s great eastern province of Nsundi, in which the new governor and the kitomi fought a mock battle, while the governor’s wife and the female companion of the kitomi waged a similar battle.37 At Nsevo, he noted that if the local ruler wanted to visit the kitomi, neither he nor his wife could sit in the presence of the priest, but had to acknowledge the kitomi’s status by sitting on a 33 Dapper, Naukeurige Beschrijvinge, pp. 174–179. 34 da Cortona, “Breve Relatione,” p. 322; Istorica Descrizione de’tre regni Congo, Matamba ed Angola (Bologna, 1687), Vol. 1, no. 170. 35 For fuller documentation and comparisons with the modern situation, where ethnography has usually termed these deities simbi, see John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement 1684–1706 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 12–15. 36 Girolamo da Montesarchio, “Viaggio al Gongho,” fols. 26–26v, in Carlo Piazza, ed., La prefettura apostolica del Congo alla metà del XVII secolo: La relazione inedita di Girolamo da Montesarchio (Milan: Giuffrè, 1976) (original pagination marked). 37 Da Montesarchio, “Viaggio,” fols. 32v–34.


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mat on the ground.38 Kitomi traveled widely, carrying a staff of office, were not allowed to marry, or to die a natural death. The kitomi were frequently subjects of denunciation in seventeenth century sources, as were the kitebela, their feminine counterparts.39 The kitomi was not restricted to Kongo; Serafino da Cortona arrested a “Mani Quitome” near the Bengo in the Kimbundu-speaking region, who was believed to have the rain under his control. He granted permission for the planting and harvesting, along with public ceremonies similar to the kitomi in Kongo.40 The great territorial deities shared religious space with the ancestors, whose sphere of activity was their descendents rather than whole regions and territories. Cavazzi noted that in Mbundu regions, graves, the center of cults dedicated to ancestors, were located far from inhabited areas, and marked by insignia indicating the position the deceased held in life. Wealthy and powerful people often had pyramids built over their graves, with a “window” so that the dead person could see out. In some provinces grave goods were placed within the tomb; in others they were on top of it. Cavazzi noted that on occasion human sacrifices were offered at the funeral. The descendents would then come and make offerings at the birthday of the deceased.41 Seeing after the ancestors was typically family oriented, with descendents forming the group that dedicated themselves to attending the ancestors; in exchange, they received good luck and health, or if they were negligent, sickness and ill luck. Thus, Cavazzi noted that the dead of the Mbundu area might be offended if they were not offered enough, for example, and punish the living by killing children, causing ill luck and the like.42 Andrew Battell, one of the first visitors to write in detail about Loango’s religion, about 1610, noted ceremonies held for the dead, including sacrifices made on the birthday of the deceased.43 Dapper added that the dead were accessible through what he called “house gods” or altars built under the eaves of their homes in the shape of a little house some 8 inches (∼20 centimeters) tall, by which they left food and drink.44 38 39 40 41

Da Montesarchio Viaggio, fol. 26. Cavazzi, Istorica Descrizione, 1, no. 177–180; da Cortona, “Breve Relatione,” pp. 319–320. Serafino da Cortona to Provincial of Tuscany, 12 May 1653, MMA 11: 307–308. MSS Araldi, Cavazzi, “Missione Evangelica,” Vol. A, pp. 130–133. Archaeological research in the Kapanda region has revealed some of these tombs much as described by Cavazzi; Manuel Gutierrez with Frédérique Valentin, Archéologie et Anthropologie, de la nécropole de Kapanda (Angola), (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999). 42 MSS Araldi, Cavazzi, “Missione Evangelica,” A, pp. 83–85, 135. 43 Battell, Strange Adventures, Battell in Purchas, Purchas his pilgrammage X, 1, in Strange Adventures, ed. Ravenstein, p. 78. 44 Dapper, Naukeurige Beschrijvinge, p. 170; Modern ideas: Bockie, Death and the Invisible Powers, pp. 83–133.

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In Kongo, beliefs about ancestors were resistant to Christianity’s own teaching about the resurrection of the dead. According to mid-sixteenthcentury Jesuits, the people constructed a church, called “ambiro” [mbila = grave] “where before they were Christians they buried people with money of their land and trumpets and with other superstitions.”45 Serafino da Cortona, in a mid-seventeenth-century list of unacceptable practices in Christian Kongo, noted that the people “have recourse to the tombs of the dead . . . to demand good luck in war and other events.”46 Cavazzi, his contemporary, added that the dead were carefully buried in cemeteries located in deep woods or away from inhabited areas so that the soul could have “maximum rest,” and would lay quietly in the grave and not bother the living. Before departing to war, Kongo would prostrate themselves at the tombs of their ancestors, “praying for their aid and strength.”47 In addition to the ancestors and territorial deities, there were also a host of lesser supernatural beings. The first of these were those entities that activated charms and gave them force. Charms were commonly called nkisi in Kongo and kiteke in Kimbundu. Kimbundu-speaking informants told Cavazzi that these charms were activated by the spirit of the “person who had discovered the art” and thus might be seen to be working for anyone who possessed the charm.48 Although charms were not theologically very important, they were visible and frequently used. As a result, missionaries, who disapproved of most of them, wrote quite about them and devoted a good deal of their time to collecting and destroying them. In Dapper’s mid-seventeenth-century description of Loango religion, some of the nkisi he describes seem to be more charms than the shrines of regional deities, which were also called nkisi. Dapper’s list included objects such as Asia Botte, which merchants carried with them on long journeys, even though it weighed as much as 12 pounds (∼5.5 kilograms). Still others were placed in pouches that could be worn around the neck.49 Capelle noted that many of these charms were made by priests (duyveljager or “devil chasers”) for clients, and they were often worn on the person, wrapped in skins, or were hung in houses as protection and for luck.50 The last category of Otherwordly beings were the spirits of wicked people, those who had died violent deaths, outcasts, or people who were not buried and formed a category of ghosts and other wicked spirits. Although 45 Letter of Cristóvão Ribeiro, 1 August 1548, MMA 15: 161. 46 Serafino da Cortona, “Breve Relatione de i riti gentilichi e ceremonie diaboliche e superstitioni del Regno di Congo . . .” (1651) in Piazza, Prefettura Apostolica, p. 324. 47 Cavazzi, Istorica Descrizione, 1, nos. 231, 250. 48 MSS Araldi, Cavazzi, “Missione Evangelica,” Vol. A, book 1, pp. 77, 81. 49 Dapper, Naukeurige Beschrijvinge, pp. 175, 179. 50 Capelle, “Brève relation,” p. 231.


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there was not an explicit cult dedicated to them, religious precautions were taken to prevent them from doing harm. Cavazzi speaks of a special “congregation” dedicated to expiation of zizumina, the spirits of those killed in war or eaten by animals and improperly buried. These wicked and bothersome spirits molested the living.51 The inhabitants of the Other World, as envisioned by Central Africans, established a moral and ethical order into which people also fit. Central African theology focused on a struggle between good and evil that created an ethical system. Central African theology did not usually envision evil as the provenance of specific supernatural beings, which were entirely evil, such as Christian theology of the Devil did. Rather, the African concept was more inclined to see the evil in the actions of people with wicked intentions enlisting some of the supernatural world in their projects. The differences between African and European ideas of evil, and the distinction between the Devil as author of all evil, and the use that wicked people make of amoral spiritual forces for evil ends, was also the difference between witchcraft lore in both cultures. Both Africans and Europeans believed that witches existed and did harm through supernatural means, and both traditions also had means of dealing with witches. However, the idea that a person could be a witch by seeking to do good ends through Diabolic intervention, as European theologians argued that their own soothsayers, fortune tellers, or diviners did, was not a part of African ways of conceptualizing evil, which lie in the intentions of the living, not the status of the supernatural.52 As early as 1548, Jesuits noted that Kongolese regarded those killed by witchcraft as having died a special and terrible type of death, a belief that was still current in Cavazzi’s day.53 Finding the cause of death through witchcraft was one of the duties of a diviner, nganga ngombo; in seventeenth-century Kongo, Girolamo da Montesarchio interrupted such an inquest in Nsi Kwilu, in 1651, for example.54 Another priest, the Nganga a Muloko, had the location of witches and their curses (nloko in Kikongo) as a special function.55 Jealousies and related witchcraft might spoil the country (Cavazzi noted that those who felt aggrieved might make curses against a whole family),56 and when Garcia II wrote a decree in favor of the Capuchins, he advised his people not only to abandon the 51 MSS Araldi, Cavazzi, “Missione Evangelica,” Vol. A, book 1, p. 94. 52 For these distinctions, see John K. Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” Journal of African History, 25 (1984). See also Kongolese Saint Anthony, pp. 44–46, 54–58, 70–76. 53 Christóvão Ribeiro letter, 1 August 1548, MMA 15: 163, Cavazzi, Istorica Descrizione, 1, no. 182. 54 Da Montesarchio, “Viaggio,” fol. 26v; also Cavazzi, Istorica Descrizione, 1, no. 181–182. 55 Cavazzi, Istorica Descrizione, 1, no. 186. 56 Cavazzi, Istorica Descrizione, 1, no. 184.

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elements of the traditional religion that missionaries opposed, but also to put aside their “robberies, enchantments, and hatreds.”57 In Kongo, at least, the kimpasi congregation sought to regulate and control problems related to an overabundance of hatred and its cognate witchcraft in a region. The purpose of the congregation, which propitiated the territorial deities, was to create a new generation of people who had been cleansed of this and were now prepared to live better lives.58 The theory of witchcraft also had a political dimension in Central Africa, in that rulers were expected to behave unselfishly and not abuse their power, which was said to resemble witchcraft. For example, the king of Loango, according to Dapper’s mid-seventeenth-century sources, was regarded as nkisi because he had the power to shape people’s lives and cause their deaths should he choose to.59 He also personally administered the poison ordeal to determine cases of witchcraft, and functioned as the highest nganga in the country, according to report of 1624.60 Cavazzi observed that Mbundu rulers were said to control rain (and might be tied up by their subjects to force them to send it), although they actually sought rain at their own ancestors’ tombs, suggesting a complex of ancestors enhancing their power in this and other things.61 Such power could be abused for selfish and evil purposes, and as such would be a political form of witchcraft, or it could be used in the public interest, which might include the suppression of witchcraft. Although most kingdoms and states did not advocate witchcraft and indeed its suppression by a virtuous king was its official ideology, some political leaders did openly embrace evil. This was most pronounced in the case of the Imbangala leaders. The Imbangala openly practiced cannibalism, a trait strongly associated with witches who both symbolically and actually “ate” their victims, either physically or supernaturally by draining them of wealth, luck, or power. Their “kixila laws,” as Cavazzi recorded them in the 1660s, made it clear that Imbangala were expected to engage in cannibalism, and not to reveal any sign of disgust.62 They also lived parasitically, passing through the country and consuming it, by harvesting the crops that others had planted, or by cutting down and draining (instead of tapping) the palm tress, a short-sighted but effective way of exploiting the resource. Imbangala leaders abandoned the cult of the territorial deities 57 58 59 60

Decree of Garcia II, 19 September 1648, MMA 10: 246. John K. Thornton, Kongolese Saint Anthony, pp. 55–58. Dapper, Naukeurige Beschrijvinge, p. 174. Nicholas van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael aller gedenckwaerdiger geschiedenißen die in Europa (Amsterdam, 1624–35), 8th Part, May 1625, fol. 27v (a report of October, 1624). 61 MSS Araldi, Cavazzi, “Missione Evangelica,” Vol. A, pp. 73–74. 62 MSS Araldi, A, book 2, pp. 48–62.


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in favor of a strict propitiation of their own ancestors, who were wicked people like themselves given to cannibalism, human sacrifice, and ruthless killing.63

RELIGIOUS LIFE AND CHRISTIAN FUSION

The deep impact of Christianity in Central Africa is frequently overlooked in studies of central Africans in the Diaspora, which, as Linda M. Heywood shows in this volume, often made them blend in very quickly in America. The Kingdom of Kongo, converted in 1491, was the center of Central African Christianity, and its particular mode of grappling with the junction of its own religious tradition and Christianity formed a pattern that was exported far and wide, even to Portuguese Angola. By the early seventeenth century, and probably even earlier, most of the people in Kongo identified themselves as Christians and were usually accepted as such by visitors. Clergy sometimes disparaged Kongo Christianity because Kongo’s version of the faith contained substantial elements from its original religion, or because Kongo people failed to honor the clergy as they felt was their due. Portuguese settlers often depicted Kongo as less than fully Christian in order to obtain a certification by clergy to make sure their military operations into Kongo met the requirements of a “just war.” The last word might come from Dutch observers, who had no stake in confirming or denying Kongo’s Christian status. Capelle simply said, based on his 5 years of experience, that “the king of Congo and his people are Roman Catholics.” He went on to describe the form that the religion had taken by the 1630s: “All the country is full of wooden crosses which they salute very devoutly and before which they kneel down,” and “every noble in his village” had his own chapel and ensured the rural crosses were maintained. “All have their rosary or chapelet around their neck, which serves some to say their office. Most have it in their hand as if they pray and they do not know how to speak or understand a word of Portuguese.”64 The Kongo mission never had sufficient priests to allow regular services for all. In Central Africa, however, priests were not the primary bringers of Christianity. Their intensive teaching was usually restricted to a relatively 63 See Battell, Strange Adventures, ed. Ravenstein, pp. 84–87, the fundamental original source, also MSS Araldi, “Missione Evangelica,” A, book 1, passim; for this interpretation and fuller argument, see John K. Thornton, “The African Experience of the ‘20 and odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia in 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly, 55 (1998): 426–427; also see Joseph C. Miller, Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 128–175. 64 Capelle, “Brève relation,” p. 224.

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small handful of elite families who sent their children to their schools. But these students, many of whom would eventually become political rulers, would then travel the countryside teaching more intensively in the villages than the priest ever could, and leading the faithful in a few spiritual exercises, usually consisting of a Saturday gathering to say the rosary in Kikongo. To the degree that most Kongolese could say the minimum prayers in Kikongo and answer basic questions about the faith, the lay organization of chapel boys and teachers, not the priests, was responsible. Priests were mainly for performing sacraments, and the Capuchin missionaries, who came to Kongo in fair numbers after 1645, spent most of their time administering them, especially baptism. Many of the Capuchins would baptize tens of thousands of children during their seven-year terms in the country. Many regularly attended Mass when it was being said – often thousands would come to open air chapels or the rural crosses to hear mass or say the Rosary. They baptized their children, took Christian names, wore the cross, and described themselves as Christian. However, they also continued to visit their ancestors’ graves and seek luck, health, and blessing. They respected the territorial deities that they sometimes came to identify also as Christian Saints, but sometimes worshipped separately. They sought out witches to destroy, and resisted attempts of missionaries to describe all these activities as witchcraft. Conversion to Christianity rarely involved any fundamental religious change. From a theological point of view, the initial conversion of Kongo was anchored on a series of corevelations: The miraculous simultaneous appearance of the Virgin Mary to two court officials in dreams, and the discovery of a cross-shaped stone in a stream near Mbanza Kongo. These were followed by King Afonso I’s (1509–1542) famous epiphany of Saint James Major, when the king, badly outnumbered in a battle against his pagan brother for the throne, was saved when a spectral image of mounted warriors frightened his opponents and ensured his victory. The stone was placed as a relic in Kongo’s first church, and elements of Afonso’s epiphany were incorporated into the kingdom’s coat of arms, adopted around 1512 and still in use in the mid-nineteenth century.65 These theological elements were followed up, during the reign of “the Apostle of Kongo,” Afonso I, by the hard intellectual and philosophical work of creating a marriage between Kongo religion and Christianity. This 65 The old coat of arms is found in a seal of a letter of Pedro V written in 1859, now in the British Library, Additional MSS 29960, fol. 22. The arms were subsequently changed. Afonso’s regnal dates have been revised: F. Bontinck, “Ndoadidiki Ne-Kinu a Mubemba, premier e` vequê Kongo,” Revue africaine de Thèologie 3 (1979): 154–56 (1509) and Saccardo, Congo e Angola 1:41 (1542).


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was achieved through careful use of terminology in making translations of key prayers and the catechism. By describing the elements of the Trinity as “three people,” the catechisms integrated Christian ideas with the concept of the dead, whereas its use of the term nkisi to mean “holy” effectively turned churches (nzo a nkisi) into shrines and the Bible (mukanda nkisi) into a charm.66 There were theological gaps, however. The most important one was the gap between the role of recently dead ancestors as active participants in the world of the living, a cornerstone of Kongo theology, and the concept of the permanent removal of the dead to Heaven, Purgatory, or Hell in the Christian one. This was smoothed over by carefully not dwelling too much on these points, and by accepting that certain Christian holidays, especially the feast of All Souls, and All Souls Eve, were both days to commemorate the dead, as it was throughout Christendom, but also days devoted to the ancestors. The key part of the ceremony was the all-night vigil, performed at the graves of the ancestors of particular families, followed in the morning by Mass.67 Cavazzi, writing many years later, noted that in his day the Kongo still followed the older practices with regard to their ancestors, which was impossible to change, and must be tolerated, “it being impossible to reform this corruption, so as not to prejudice the essentials of the Christian religion.” Indeed, he noted that the priests had made attempts to integrate the Kongolese understanding of the ancestors into Christian holidays, like All Souls’ Day, or to the worship of Mary on Saturdays.68 Even so, the festivals themselves had a local twist. The biggest festival of all, for example, was Saint James Day, the 25th of July. Whereas Iberian Christians certainly celebrated this day, as Saint James “Matamoro” was their militant protector, in Kongo Saint James was much more closely identified with Afonso and his miraculous defeat of his brother, so that in reality the day was “Afonso’s Day”. It was celebrated with a spectacular military review and was also the day for collecting royal taxes and tributes. In the end, Christianity, albeit in its syncretic form along Kongo lines, had made deep inroads into all regions, though only in Kongo and areas under Portuguese administration was it a deeply held part of the local identity. Kongo became a center for the spread of Christianity – Afonso requested a Bull of Crusade from Rome in the 1520s, so that his wars of expansion 66 Details on the theology of the conversion are found in John K. Thornton, “Perspectives on African Christianity,” in Vera Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, eds., Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1994), pp. 169–198; and idem “Afro-Christian Syncretism in Central African,” Plantation Societies (forthcoming). 67 Thornton, Kongolese Saint Anthony, pp. 30–31 for these celebrations. 68 Cavazzi, Istorica Descrizione, 1, no. 250.

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were also integrated into the concept of spreading the faith. Afonso’s successor Diogo (1545–61) engaged in considerable missionary work, using the “chapel boys” (often adults) of his churches as missionaries. A retrospective account of Diogo’s missionary work written by Father Sebastião de Souto in about 1561 suggests that evangelization proceeded especially in the south and east, like the Emperor Kongo dia Nlaza, soon to be incorporated into Kongo, and Matamba, whose queen sent her own son as ambassador. By this time Christianity was popular, and a great many rulers sent to ask for missionaries or began the first steps toward conversion, such as the “priest of Quilembo, which is an idol they adore” of Loango, brother of the king, who had burned his idols. The greatest success was perhaps realized in the “Dembos” region, the Kikongo- and Kimbundu-speaking small states that lay in the mountainous region that separated Kongo and Ndongo.69 Mutemo, mentioned among de Souto’s converts in 1561, was a clearly a center of Christian activity in a survey of the church made some 30 years later. It was probably through Kongo that the rulers of Ndongo learned of Christianity. The first mission, 1520–26, failed and the principals were rescued from Ndongo by Afonso himself. The second mission, launched in 1560, was perhaps triggered by the general enthusiasm outlined by Diogo’s efforts, but this mission had also failed by 1564. The third mission, which came with Paulo Dias de Novais’ colonization project in 1575, also effectively failed, when he and his followers were expelled from Ndongo in 1579.70 This history of failure in Ndongo had implications for the spread of Christianity in the region south of Kongo. Although the Dembos region between the two was probably slowly brought into a Christian orbit by the working of missionaries and merchants from both Kongo and Portuguese Angola, most of the regions that had been in Ndongo’s orbit, and Ndongo itself, were integrated through the process of conquest, or at the very least, in the context of armed conflict. The Portuguese insisted, from their first acts of vassalage in the 1580s, that conversion, acceptance of baptism, and permission for missionary activity accompany surrender to Portugal and the payment of tribute.71 Thus the Portuguese main bases in Luanda, along the Bengo and Dande Rivers, and in the inland posts on the Kwanza such as 69 “Apontamentos que fez o Padre Sebastião de Souto . . .” (ca. 1561), MMA 2: 477–481. 70 The general history of these missions is worked out carefully in Saccardo, Congo e Angola, 1. 71 The legal and religious basis for Portuguese conquest and Portugal’s alliance with African powers is outlined in detail in Beatrix Heintze, “Luso-African feudalism in Angola? The vassal treaties of the 16th to the 18th century,” Revista Portuguesa de História, 37 (1980): 111–131.


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Cambambe, Muxima, and Massangano, with their subordinate soba (African rulers) under Portuguese authority were the centers of Christianity. Ndongo’s final acceptance of Christianity also came under strained circumstances. After the Portuguese broke the military stalemate created in the late sixteenth century through the recruitment of Imbangala mercenary soldiers in 1617 and smashed Ndongo, its rulers sued for peace. Ndongo agreed to accept missionaries in 1622, but a few years later, civil war broke out between pro-Portuguese sobas and Njinga, who in turn was forced to accept alliance with the anti-Christian Imbangala, embracing a lifestyle that was regarded as evil, but powerful.72 Although Njinga was believed to have more Christian sympathies than her role as an Imbangala leader suggests,73 it was not until a new stalemate and new peace was arranged in 1655 that missionaries entered Njinga’s large kingdom, and Christianity became a state religion.74 As in Kongo, corevelation was an important element of the theology of conversion, even where military force played a role. Miracles played a role in the conversion of individuals, such as the man who told Cavazzi he became a Christian because he had a dream in which two people, one dressed well and the other poorly, advised him to.75 Rulers were also converted, along with their people, such as the ruler of Quionzo, who related to Pero Tavares in 1632 that a few years earlier a “white man” had erected a cross in his lands, and that it had brought rain to an area that was previously drought stricken.76 Queen Njinga’s decision to return to Christianity in 1655, as well as her subsequent enthusiastic embrace of it, was encouraged by the corevelation of her formerly dead brother through a spirit medium, who was prepared to forego offerings due him as an ancestor in exchange for peace. Antonio Gaeta, Capuchin priest at Njinga’s court, declared the medium’s message to be a miracle.77 Jesuit missionaries developed a theology of conversion for Ndongo, very much like the theology of Kongo, in part because they started their work there with Kongo assistance. Their evangelization was aided by Kimbundu72 These events are outlined in detail in Beatrix Heintze, “Das Ende des Unabhängigen Staates Ndongo (Angola). Neue Chronologie und Reinterpretation (1617–1630),” Paideuma (Frankfurt) 27 (1981): 197–273. 73 Antonio Gaeta da Napoli, La meravigliosa conversione alla Santa Fede di Cristo de Regina Zinga (Naples, 1669), pp. 88–112; for a harsher view, MSS Araldi, Cavazzi, “Missione Evangelica,” A, book 2, passim. 74 John K. Thornton, “Ideology and political power in Central Africa: the Case of Queen Njinga (1624–1663),” Journal of African History, 32 (1991): 25–40. 75 MSS Araldi, Cavazzi, “Missione Evangelica,” Vol. B, p. 482. 76 Pero Tavares to Jeronimo Vogado, 14 October 1631, MMA 8: 67. 77 Gaeta, Maraviglosa Conversione, pp. 103–104.

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speaking converts, such as the priest Dionisio de Faria Bareto, born in Matamba, who probably inspired the catechism of 1642, which reveals the same sort of theological alterations that can be found in Kongo’s Christianity. Although it specifically denounced kiteke (as “idols”), the catechism treated the Trinity as ancestral figures and used the language of the ancestors to describe Christian concepts. They included the concept of precepts given by kilundu, in their translations of the Ten Commandments. As was common in religious conversions elsewhere, the missionaries often tried to replace shrines dedicated to kilundu with crosses.78 Missionaries who traveled and described the life in Mbundu areas give the impression of a reasonably widespread group practicing what they regarded as acceptable Christianity, interspersed with groups of nonbelievers and even anti-Christians. Pero Tavares (1631–1635), Cavazzi (1655– 1665), and Manuel Riberio (1673–1674) all give detailed accounts not only of the non-Christian practices, but even arguments concerning the reality of the religious concepts they were teaching. Although these regular clergy were often relatively demanding in their standards for acceptable Christian practice, they also noted that many Mbundu regarded themselves as Christian when they continued practicing unacceptable elements of their former religion, and in most places at least some Christian concepts were honored. For their part, the Imbangala were more reluctant to accept Christianity or allow missionaries in their states. The leaders of early bands, recruited in 1617 to fight against Ndongo, were baptized,79 but there is little evidence that this was taken seriously by either the Portuguese or the leaders. When the largest Imbangala band, Kasanje, which had conquered a large state for itself along the Kwanza south of Njinga’s kingdom, accepted relations with Portugal in 1639, it accepted the idea of having missionaries. But the mission to Kasanje was notably unsuccessful, despite the serious efforts of Capuchins between 1656 and 1663.80 In large measure, this failure was due to the admittedly evil ideology of the Imbangala, conceived by all as being not just non-Christian but anti-Christian. The Kikongo-speaking regions north of the Congo present a different picture. The rulers of these countries – Loango, Ngoyo, and Kakongo 78 John K. Thornton, “Afro-Christian syncretism.” 79 Fernão de Sousa, “Guerras do Reino de Angola,” ca. 1630, fol. 217 in Beatrix Heintze, ed., Fontes para a história de Angola do Século XVII (2 vols. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985–88). FHA, 1: 212. 80 A good overview is MSS Araldi, Cavazzi, “Missione Evangelica,” Vol. A, book 3, Archivio Provinciale de’ Capuccini, Antonio da Serraveza, “Raguaglio del frutto delle Missioni del Congo.”


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in particular – were anxious to have priests, and they always seemed on the verge of establishing themselves as Christian countries, but never did. Diogo I may have had a mission to Loango in the 1550s, for Sebastião de Souto’s account speaks of a ruler wishing to be baptized and the conversion of a devotee of the “idol” of Quilembo.81 In any case, in 1584, Carmelite missionaries heard that the king of Loango was requesting missionaries to baptize him and his people,82 a call that was repeated in 1603 to Jesuits, with the encouraging addition that the king and his children were learning elements of the faith from a local Portuguese merchant.83 Jesuits were still trying to organize a mission there in the 1620s, where it was felt that Catholic conversion might assist in a policy of preventing Dutch traders from frequenting the coast.84 Although an ecclesiastical note maintains that a successful mission was there in 1628 with the conversion of many people,85 the conversion had no long-range results. In 1663, Bernardo Ungaro, a Hungarian Capuchin, baptized two visiting princes from Loango in Kongo, who, along with a well-respected Portuguese factor, persuaded the king to accept missionaries and baptism. Ungaro traveled to Loango, and he baptized the king and perhaps as many as 12,000 of his subjects before his death in 1664.86 However, the king, named Afonso, was overthrown by a “cousin,” and although a Christian king overthrew him in turn in 1665, visitors in the 1680s found that the country was no longer ruled by Christians, and remnants of the first Christian group, although faithful, were on the defensive and out of power. 87 The basic structure of the original religion remained everywhere, modified by Christian ideas in some areas to be sure, forming a rather uniform

81 “Apontamentos que fez o Padre Sebastiaõ de Souto . . .” n.d., but ascribed by António Brásio to 1561 on internal evidence, published in MMA 2: 478. 82 Letter of Fr. Diogo da Encarnaç aõ, in Belchior de Santa Anna, Crónica dos Carmelitas Descalços Particular do Reyno de Porugal e Provincia de Sam Felippe (Lisboa, 1657) 1: 113–118, MMA 3: 279; “Relatione di q[ue]llo che occorse, et videro nel Regno di Congo tre Religiosi Carmelitani Scalzi mandati a predicare nel 1584, fatta d’un di loro constretto da Precetto impostogli dal Padre General suo.” MMA 4: 401. 83 “Carta Anua da Missão de Angola, 1603,” MMA 5: 82. 84 Fernão de Sousa to his children, events of 1624, FHA, 1: 227, also in MMA 7: 643; a similar result was expected for Cacongo in 1627, Fernão de Sousa to his children, FHA, 1: 278, also in MMA 7: 503. ˇ adový archiv kapuc´ınú, Spisy 2, kart, 1, B 8 ordo, “Collectio S.rum 85 Státn´ı u´ stˇredni arch´ıv (Prague), R´ Missionum Apostolicarum Ordinis Minorum S.ti Francisci Capuchinorum per quator mundi partes stabilitascum” (ca. 1650), Anno 1628, “Loango Regnum.” 86 Cavazzi, Istorica Descrizione, book 5, nos. 53–58; also see Bernardo Ungaro to Guardian of Convent in Brussels, 2 September 1663, MMA 12: 449. 87 Archivio dei Cappuccini de Provincia de Genoa, Cronaca Q, fol. 122v–23, published in Romain Rainero, Il Congo Luca da Caltanisetta, Apendix IV, pp. 458–478.

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pattern in which regional variations were probably as great as those between Christians and non-Christians. Although late seventeenth-century Christians in eastern Kongo scornfully described their Kikongo-speaking but non-Christian neighbors as mbumbas, a derogatory term describing an unsophisticated country bumpkin, they lived very much in the same spiritual world in fact.

3

Portuguese into African: The Eighteenth-Century Central African Background to Atlantic Creole Cultures LINDA M. HEYWOOD

INTRODUCTION

This essay argues that the process of religious interpenetration that John Thornton described in the previous chapter was visible in other aspects of central African culture as well, and that this dynamic continued to characterize Afro-Portuguese relations during the eighteenth century. It contends that by the beginning of the eighteenth century, a Creole culture had emerged in Portuguese Angola and Benguela and was undergoing significant transformation. It also argues that this phenomenon occurred as a result of the Africanization of Portuguese settlers and their culture, thus illustrating that creolization was not a process that only touched African culture and peoples. In Central Africa the Portuguese, a European people with a western culture, encountered no difficulties in adapting to a dominant African cultural environment. The essay also shows how Central Africans were adept at selectively integrating elements of European culture into their own cultural fabric. THE CASE FOR ANGOLAN CREOLE CULTURE

Published works as well as the preceding contribution in this collection provide ample evidence to support the contention that Portuguese culture in Angola and Benguela had been significantly altered before the eighteenth century. What is less known are that the conditions that allowed this development to take place, and what accounted for its spread and continuous evolution far beyond the core coastal regions of Central Africa that the Portuguese inhabited. Studies of Angola that have focused on this issue have highlighted the politico-military dimensions of the Portuguese-African relationship in the pre-nineteenth-century period, and they have applied the term 91

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“Luso-African feudalism” to characterize the vassalage arrangements that sealed the relationship between African rulers and the Portuguese in the region.1 Other studies, among them some by modern writers who were apologists for the brutal Salazar dictatorship that emerged in Portugal in 1926, advanced the concept of “Luso-tropicalism” (especially its post–World War II manifestation) to describe the situation. These studies even went so far as to see in the early Afro-Portuguese relations the roots of “racial democracy” that they argued existed in Angola and Brazil.2 ´ Another group of Portuguese and Angolan writers, among them Oscar Ribas, Mar´ıo António Fernandes de Oliveira, and Il´ıdio do Amaral, sought to explain “Luso-tropicalismo” in Angola more as a manifestation of Portuguese cultural influence.3 De Oliveira, for example, argued that the 1620 festival for the Beatification of the Jesuit Father Francisco Xavier that took place in Luanda was a manifestation of the Portuguese Baroque. He described a public festival that began with “whites led by a Negro dwarf from Dongo meant to represent the father.” The celebration also included personages meant to represent the kings of Angola and Kongo who uttered “heroic verses” in honor of Xavier. The festival also included Creoles from St. Tomé who performed a dance called “danç o Congo.”4 De Oliveira, along with Ribas and do Amaral, whose work detailed the cultural life of pre-nineteenth-century Portuguese Angola, thus went beyond the political apologists and argued for the African influence on Portuguese culture in Angola. They, along with others who saw a Portuguese influence on Africa societies in Angola (see map), laid the foundations for the study of the Creole elements of Angolan culture.5 CREOLIZATION IN THE CORE AREAS: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MANIFESTATIONS

During the eighteenth century, the creolization of the Portuguese and their culture in the Reino de Angola and the Reino de Benguela was evident in 1 See António da Silva Rego, O Ultramar Português no Século XIX (1834–1910) (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1966), p. 248. 2 Gilberto Freyre, Casa Grande e Senzala (Rio de Janeiro: Olympio, 1969 [1933]) 2 vols.; Gilberto Freyre, Sobrados e Mocambos (Rio de Janeiro: Olympio, 1968 [1936]); Charles Ralph Boxer, Portuguese Society in the Tropics: The Municipal Councils of Goa, Macau, Bahia and Luanda, 1500–1810 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1965). 3 Il´ıdio do Amaral, “Luanda em meados do século XIX, revelada num texto de 1848,” Garcia de Orta, Ser. Geografia, Lisboa 9:1–3 (1984); 1–16. 4 “Festijos pela Beatificaç a˜ o do Padre Francisco Xavier em Luanda (1620),” in Mario António ´ F. Oliveira, Reler Africa (Coimbra: University of Coimbra, 1990), pp. 45–67. ´ 5 See for example, Oscar Ribas, Misoso: Literatura Tradicional Angolana, Vol. 1, 1961; Il´ıdio do Amaral, “Luanda em meados do século XIX.”

3. Portuguese into African

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the biological intermixing of European men with African free and slave women and in the growth of an Afro-Lusitanian population. The interpenetration of the two societies was also apparent in the cultural realm. These included religious practices and rituals, the naming customs of major segments of the population, the use of Kimbundu and Umbundu as the lingua francas of the two regions, and the foodways, dance, music, and other cultural practices in the colony. The cultural interpenetration was so pronounced in the eighteenth century that every secular and religious authority who came to the colony from the metropole noted it, some condemning the culture as one of “profound decadence.”6 This assessment rested not only on the fact that the slave trade had come to dominate every aspect of official and unofficial life in the colony, but largely because of what the contemporary observers and later writers believed was the decline of Portuguese metropolitan control over the population and the cultural institutions of the colony.7 To them, Angola and Benguela were not European outposts, although they would not have used the term Creole to describe them. The society metropolitan-born Portuguese officials found in eighteenthcentury Angola and Benguela emerged largely because of the continued demographic superiority of the African population. In 1772, Governor Lencastro recorded the class distinctions among the population in Luanda and other Portuguese settlers living within an area of 12 miles (∼19 kilometers) from the city. He wrote that five classes existed, the first composed of white men, the second of free mulattoes, the third of free Africans, the fourth of mulattoes who were slaves, and the fifth of African slaves.8 A 1776 census of the population in the colony (O Reino de Angola and O Reino de Benguela) gave the demographic breakdown of the population. The census showed a total white population of only 1,700 whites, whereas the free and enslaved Africans numbered 3,874, along with 637 mulattoes. The rest of the population was composed of 435,637 free Africans and 45,510 African slaves.9 Because of demographic superiority of the African population and the tendency of Bantu cultures to change over time by absorbing elements 6 See, for example, Elias Alexandre da Silva, História de Angola, ed. Manuel Múrias, 2 vols. (Lisbon: ´ Editorial Atica, 1937). 7 For the earlier period see, for example, António de Oliveira de Cardonega, História Geral das Guerras Angolanas (1680–1), 3 vols., eds. José Matias Delgado (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1940–42); David Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola: The Mbundu and their Neighbors Under the Influence of their Portuguese, 1483–1790 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966). 8 Carlos Couto, Os Capitães-Mores em Angola no Século XVIII (Luanda: Instituto de Investigaç a˜ o Cientifica de Angola, 1972), p. 110. 9 Couto, Os Capitães-Mores, p. 111.

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from the outside, the culture that emerged in the colony was an AfricanLusitanian one, with the African elements more dominant in many areas. The group that formed the core of this Creole community consisted of some of the long-term metropolitan-born Portuguese residents (naturalizados) and their Angolan-born white and mixed-race children ( filhos da terra). The Afro-Portuguese members of this Creole community grew at a more rapid pace than the European members, largely because of the scarcity of European females, a situation that prevented a self-sustaining white Portuguese population from emerging. Thus, Portuguese and Brazilianborn men took African women as their concubines and wives, and their descendants became a potent force in the cultural life of the colony during the eighteenth century. The conditions that led to the expansion in the size of the Creole population with their mixed culture began from the earliest period of Portuguese settlement, when the monarchy used the colony as a place to exile outcasts and criminals from Portugal, Madeira, and Brazil. During the eighteenth century, the numbers of these forced settlers (degredados) continued to increase, with many coming from Brazil, Portugal’s prosperous slave colony in the Americas.10 These degredados (the majority of whom were men) contributed various elements to the evolving Creole culture. One interesting fact about the population was that many of the settlers were what Portuguese officials referred to as “cristãos novos” (New Christians or Jews who had converted to Christianity), who they accused of being less concerned about spreading “official” Catholicism and Portuguese culture. Indeed, between 1714 and 1751, official census reports described the Europeans who registered in the municipality of Luanda as “exiles, Gypsies, and Jews,”11 who married and had liaisons with African women. One of these men was the merchant João Teixeira de Carvalho, who, after being nominated to the post of schoolmaster of the school in Luanda in 1727, was identified as “a mulatto and of the Hebrew race.” His critics accused him of being a Jew from Benguela who had lived in concubinage there and who had traded with foreigners, and who encouraged slaves there to revolt against their masters.”12 References to the way in which the “Jews” or New Christians in the colony failed to keep the distinctions between 10 Selma Pantoja, “Market traders and smallholders: Women’s business in the food supply in Luanda – 18th to 19th centuries,” Paper presented at the Conference “Bantu into Black: Central Africans in the Atlantic Diaspora,” Howard University, 16–18 September 1999. 11 José Carlos Venâncio, A Economia de Luanda e Hinterland no Secúlu XVIII: Um Estudo de Sociologia Histórica (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1996), p. 48. 12 P. Graziano Saccardo, Congo e Angola: con la Storia dell’antica Missione dei Cappuccini, 3 vols. (Venice: Curia Provinciale Dei Cappuccini, 1982), Vol. 2, pp. 299–300.


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European and African communities continued to appear in the records into the 1740s and beyond. For example, missionaries writing in 1749 complained that the merchants who traveled about the colony were almost all “new Christians . . . [who] outrage their wives, daughters and female slaves . . . discredit baptism and marriage, and introduce circumcision (as a substitute for baptism). . . .”13 Furthermore, an official report of the period noted that most Europeans sent as degredados who lived in Luanda practiced polygamy, having a main wife who they maintained in great pomp and a second and third wife (the last two being slaves – mocambas).14 Although the size of the Portuguese and Brazilian-born population and their Afro-Lusitanian offspring in the Angola and Benguela lagged behind those of Cape Verde and Brazil, the biological and cultural intermixture was significant. This was especially the case in the “reino de Angola,” the city of Luanda and the areas around the military forts of Muxima, Ambaca, Massangano, Cambambe, and Pungo Andongo, and the “reino de Benguela,” the city of Benguela and the area about 12 to 16 miles (∼19–26 kilometers) around the forts of Caconda. The Portuguese and Brazilian-born Angolans (naturalizados) and their white and Afro-Lusitanian offsprings ( filhas da terra) were linked to the larger African population through a series of complex economic, military, political, cultural, and familial ties. For example, in the core regions of the colony – the coastal cities of Luanda and Benguela – and the interior pres´ıdios of Muxima, Massagano, Ambaca, Pungo Andongo, Caconda, and Encoje, the much larger African free and enslaved population lived in the households and in villages that Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese owned and participated in the Creole culture. The thousands of African freemen and slaves who were dragooned by their superiors to work as porters for the army and as merchants also participated in the Afro-Lusitanian culture. For example, many of the slaves (escravos ladinos) had been born in the households of the Portuguese and Afro-Portuguese. These Africans spoke Portuguese, were Christians, and lived and worked in the households and farms alongside their masters and mistresses. Other escravos ladinos were owned by the state or lived on government operated farms, in villages surrounding the pres´ıdios or in mining villages that the state operated. The Catholic Church, which operated several chapels and convents in the colony, also owned a significant number of escravos ladinos who formed part of the Creole population. 13 Saccardo, Congo e Angola, pp. 292–293. 14 Venâncio José Carlos Vernâncio, A Economia de Luanda e Hinterland no Secúlo XVIII: Um Estudo de Sociologia Histórica (Lisbon: Editoral Estampa, 1996), p. 51.

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Another important group comprised Africans agents of the Portuguese, Brazilian, and mixed-race populations engaged in the slave trade and other commercial ventures in the interior. The group included pumbeiros descalçados (barefoot African traders), pretos calçados (African merchants considered white in the interior because of their dress and bearing), and quimbares (free Africans – many former slaves of Portuguese or Afro-Portuguese) who were deeply influenced by Afro-Lusitanian culture, and who spread it through their trade connections in the interior.15 DEVELOPMENTS IN THE CORE: PORTUGUESE AND AFRO-LUSITANIAN SOCIETY

It was the Portuguese and Brazilian settlers and their white and AfroPortuguese children (naturais da terra), the children of free Africans and mulattoes (moles and fuxos), and their slaves who molded the African and European elements of their heritage to form Angola’s Afro-Lusitanian culture. The official roles that this segment of the population played in the colony speak to the growing social and political dominance of the group. For example, between 1762 and 1766, the group always held the three highest positions in the army below the Portuguese-born capitão-mor,16 and all the troops were mulattoes and “fuscas” as well. Several times during the century, officials sent from Portugal attempted to disassociate themselves from this Angolan community – African, AfroLusitanian, and European – and condemned their cultural practices. Indeed, some attempted, though unsuccessfully, to institute a new cultural policy by imposing metropolitan cultural standards on the population to inculcate what they believed were more “civilized” habits among the group. For example, in 1768 the governor, Sousa Coutinho, wrote about bringing more whites into Luanda and Massangano in the hopes that they would cultivate the land and marry among themselves and “perfect the color and better the customs” of the population.17 These attempts, however, ran into the then-fixed creole culture, whose practitioners resisted any official attempt at cultural engineering. Another suggestion of Governor Coutinho in 1769 called on the crown to place all mulatto children of “qualquer cor” (whatever color) without means 15 Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro [IHGB], lata 81, pasta 2, “Varios documentos relativos ao governo do reino de Angola 1677 a 1799,” letter of Sousa Coutinho, 13 September 1769; Vernâncio, A Economia, p. 51. 16 Couto, Os Capitães-Mores, p. 70. 17 Arquivo Nacional Histórico de Angola [ANHA], Officios para Angola, 79-A-7-2, Sousa Coutinho to Anselmo Duartde Figueiro de Ferro, 8 October 1768.


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or parents to take care of them in orphanages until the ages of 14 or 16. The young people would be allowed to leave after they had learnt a skill and were ready to be married.18 Three years later, the governor again returned to the topic of the uncontrollable mulatto population, suggesting this time that the crown free all mulattoes and use them to populate the territory, pointing out that up to that point their actions prejudiced Portuguese prestige.19 Yet the Portuguese could not operate the colony without the Afro-Lusitanians. In 1800, Governor Vasconcelas of Benguela sent a desperate request to the Minister of the Colonies, requesting that the Minister send 80 couples from Rio de Janeiro, specifically “pardos,” (Afro-Brazilians) as colonists. He noted that they would be more adaptable to the climate, would increase the population in a few years, and could also serve as soldiers.20 Official concerns with the demographic health of the colony were directly linked to the plans for cultural reform. The official view was that increased European or Brazilian immigration would lead to the further acculturation not just of the mulattoes, but to the much larger slave and freeborn African population as well. This issue of demography was particularly crucial, given the fact that the slave population in the colony increased throughout the period. Most of these slaves were captives who came into the hands of Portuguese, mixed race, and free Africans as a result of the various small wars that the Portuguese fought against the independent African states which were nominally their vassals.21 A mid-eighteenth-century governor’s report made reference to this demographic trend when he noted the complaints from vassal sobas who were forced to live hidden with their slaves and free people because they feared the tyranny of the merchants whose only ambition was to “carry and sell in Luanda every day infinite numbers of free blacks,” – a situation that led to many litigations.22 Plans to increase the European population were ultimately intended to blunt the cultural impact of the slave population in the colony. These slaves comprised a significant percentage of the population in the core areas. For example, figures for Benguela for 1797 showed that 18 IHGB, lata 81, pasta 2, “Varios documentos relativos ao governo do reino de Angola 1677 a 1799,” letter of Sousa Coutinho, 13 September 1769. 19 “Derrota de Benguela para a sertão,” in Alfredo Albuquerque Felner, Angola: Apontamentos sôbre e Colonizaça˜ o dos Planaltos e Litoral do Sul de Angola, 3 vols. (Lisbon: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1940), Vol. 1, p. 199. 20 Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino [AHU], Caixa [Cx], 95, Angola, Març o 1800, no. 18, letter from Alex José Botelho de Vasconselho to Minister. 21 AHU, Angola, Cx 25 1750–1753, as quoted in Couto, Os Capitães-Mores, p. 158. 22 Couto, Os Capitães-Mores, p. 158. Some of these reports were misleading, however, since officials sometimes exaggerated reports to preface legislation purporting to protect Africans but that were really aimed at shaping commerce so that representatives of the crown could exercise more fiscal control over colony.

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of the more than 9,000 people listed as residing in the pres´ıdio of Caconda, about 2,000 were slaves. Women also made up the single largest category, representing more than 60% of the population.23 Records of the period all make a distinction between those Africans who were “civilizados,” (those who had some exposure to Portuguese culture), and those who were “bárbaros” (those not influenced by Portuguese culture, especially religion).24 One official expressed concern that in order to preserve Portuguese forts in the interior, military positions below the capitão-mor (almost all of which were held by Afro-Lusitanians) should be held by those who were “menos bábaros,” or less primitive.25 In 1768, Sousa Coutinho, in reference to the areas beyond Benguela and Caconda, suggested that Portuguese men living in these areas use religion and commerce to unite the discordant and distant peoples for the benefit of both groups.26 These initiatives, although never fully implemented, led to a level of social intermixing among the different social groups in the vicinity of the pres´ıdios. A report from a capitão-mor at the end of the century noted the difficulty he encountered in delineating the slave population from the “moradores” (civilized population) since “the African moradores, and even the mulattoes (pardos) socialize with their slaves so that they would not escape to the interior.”27 TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE CORE

Religion The biological mixing and the breakdown of some of the social distinctions between Portuguese and Africans were not the only areas where the interpenetration of social groups and ideas took place. In particular, the Catholic heritage of the Portuguese and Brazilian-born colonists and their Afro-Lusitanian descendants underwent a great deal of Africanization during the period. Because of this Africanization, the religious practices and moral standing of the community bore the brunt of the criticism of metropolitanborn Portuguese officials. Most of these officials were scandalized at how Africanized church rituals had become. They were especially alarmed at the sight of Europeans participating in what they described as the non-Christian rites that had come to dominate religious practices in the church. For 23 24 25 26

IHGB, lata 31, pasta 5, “Not´ıcias do Pres´ıdio de Caconda em Benguela,” 1797. IHGB, lata 32, pasta 12, “Not´ıcias do Pais de Quissama.” Couto, Os Capitães-Mores. p. 70. Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa [BNL], FG Cod. 8554, letter of Sousa Coutinho, 23 September 1768, fol. 27–28. 27 IHGB, lata 32, pasta 4, “Not´ıcias do Pres´ıdio de Ambacca do Reino de Angola,” 1797.


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example, writing in 1736, Governor Rodrigues de Meneses informed the crown that because for many years there had been no prelate in the kingdom, “everywhere, not only among the natives of the interior, but even whites use superstitions and diabolic rites.” He also noted that since there was no way of disciplining them, they persisted in continuing the practices.28 Indeed, many of the priests and lay personnel in Angola and Benguela came from the ranks of Afro-Lusitanians and free blacks who, according to the Bishop’s report, were praiseworthy men, one of whom was “good at Latin and Moral theology,” but who he considered “unfit for any ecclesiastical duties.” The moral outrage that recently arrived officials expressed against what they described as the religious and moral failings of the local population stemmed from the fact that the former commonly believed that the population, especially the Africans and Afro-Lusitanians, were raised from infancy “in a licentious life.”29 Between the late 1760s and 1772, Governor Sousa Coutinho made several attempts to correct the situation. He focused his attention on rebuilding churches, constructing new ones, and “ending all the public abuses of Emtambes [elaborate funerals in which African and Catholic rituals coexisted] and other superstitions that the ignorance of the whites allowed to be practiced, burning all public idols and at least making everything appear to be Christian.”30 To encourage the population to practice more Christian burial rites, Coutinho sent directives to the capitães-mores of the pres´ıdios urging them to have cemeteries in their districts, and outlining the procedure for ensuring that Africans traveling far away from the pres´ıdios receive proper burial, and which would also ensure that they “have knowledge of the Holy faith and mysteries for the salvation of their souls.”31 These initiatives, however, seemed to have had little impact on the Europeans and Africans in the colony and the interior. A report from the 1780s noted that the whites in the interior did idolatrous rituals at “houses of uso (puberty rituals), participate in “tambos,” (entâmbes), divining (xinguilamentos), oathmaking, polygamy, infidelity, adoration of idols, and circumcision.”32 Only a few years later when Silva Corrêa visited Angola in the 1790s, he described in detail the overwhelming presence of African practices coexisting in the very heart of church rituals. These 28 29 30 31

As quoted in Couto, Os Capitães-Mores, p. 124. AHU, Angola, Cx. 61, Bishop’s Report, 11 July 1778. Felner, Angola: Apontamentos sôbre e Colonizaça˜ o, 1, Letter of Coutinho, 26 November 1772. AHNA, Oficios para Angola, Sousa Coutinho, “Carta para os capites-mores de todos os Pres´ıdios e distritos de todos os en terros dos negros es das condenaç oes,” 5 November 1768. 32 AHU, Angola, 20 June 1788, Report of Alexandre, Bishop of Malaca.

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Afro-Christian syncretic practices dominated the sacraments (funerals, marriages, and communion). He noted that most of the population believed equally in “Jesus Christ and the Moêne-Bengo or other feiticeiros,” and observed further that whites had fallen victim to human vice and “tolerate the primitive rites.” Indeed, he went so far as to conclude that in Luanda, the religion was a miscellaneous mixture of “Catholicism, Islam,33 and Pagan,” whether in how people made the sign of the cross, “carried a rosary on their shoulders, participated in polygamy, or adored their idols.”34 He was particularly concerned about the extent to which African customs had penetrated the most sacred of Catholic rituals. He wrote that funerals (entâmbes) were celebrated with “abominable superstitions,” noting that in this most sacred Christian act “the feiticeiros join in the most devout and serious rituals of Christianity.” Furthermore, he commented that marriages that took place in the church also had “music that resonated in the hallway,” and “long drums and the batuque (indecent dance that ended in drunkenness)” that were heard in the surrounding area. He further commented that at the wedding celebration, the bride danced and mixed indiscriminately in the festivities of the slaves.35 Corrêa was especially critical of the way Portuguese in Luanda and in the interior avoided their Christian duty by allowing their slaves to take their place in the most sacred Catholic rites, while they themselves succumbed to worldly living. In fact, he wrote that the “canes of penitence” fell only on the African man or woman, who oftentimes tried to avoid having to do this sacrament. Referring to free-spirited (libertine) Portuguese in the interior, he wrote that some of those who moved away were “deeply involved in an abominable living,” and had declared “open war against our Holy Religion” by making “the recruiting of famous African concubines their only concern.” He also added that their slaves also followed their master’s example.36 In 1800, Governor Vasconcelas commented on the religious state of the Benguela region, lamenting the fact that three Lenten seasons had passed without a Vicar to give the Sacraments and that the “naturaes” (Angolan-born residents) were living in a state of apostasy.37 The inability of the Portuguese monarchy to staff the churches in the colony gave little incentive to the Portuguese and their Afro-Lusitanian descendants 33 Many Portuguese believed that some of the descendants of the Islamic and Jewish populations still secretly practiced their beliefs. 34 Elias Alexandre da Silva Corrêa, História de Angola, ed. Dr. Manuel Múrias, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Editoral ´ Atica, 1937), Vol. 1, p. 93. 35 Correa, História, Vol. 1, pp. 87–89. 36 Corrêa, História, Vol. 1, 95. 37 AHU, Angola, Cx. 95, no. 18, Governor Vasconcelho to Minister.


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to follow the teachings of the Portuguese and Brazilian-born priests. Indeed, some of these priests openly engaged in the slave trade and had liaisons with African females, activities that did not give them moral authority over the lay population of white, Afro-Lusitanian, and free African residents. Besides heavily influencing Catholic rituals and the behavior of the white population, the African influence was evident in the very holy objects used in church ritual as well. One illustration of this comes out in the extent to which the church came to rely on local mixed-race and black craftsmen who made the wax used for holy candles and seals. Although they do not seem to have made these fixtures in local styles or to have Africanized the Catholic symbols as the Kongos did, the involvement of these Angolan craftsmen in making the most sacred objects of Catholicism provides yet another illustration of the role of Africans and their descendants in maintaining and re-creating European religious rituals and practices in eighteenth-century Angola.38 The involvement of Africans and their descendants in various activities associated with the Catholic church helped to Africanize the Catholic church in Angola and Benguela. One reason that Catholicism became more Africanized in the colony was perhaps because the nonbaptized Africans (especially slaves and free blacks) made up the largest segment of the population. Correa believed that the ancient law that required slave owners and traders to baptize slaves going over to Brazil, but that made no such requirement for those remaining in the city and presidios, allowed enslaved Africans in the colony to be without the benefit of baptism and training in church doctrine.39 The fact that masters regularly allowed their unconverted slaves to represent them in church celebrations or allowed them to take their place to receive indulgences on Saints’ days also gave an African face to Portuguese Catholicism in Angola.40 Many slaves, however, were baptized, receiving Christian names, and could even expect to be buried in church cemeteries alongside their masters.41 Indeed, Luanda had churches reserved for slaves and some slaves were even members of religious brotherhoods. The existence of these practices, combined with the severe shortage of priests the colony faced, meant that Africans (including slaves) were at more liberty to infuse Catholicism with African ritual practices. Enslaved Africans who reached the Americas brought elements of this central African Catholicism 38 39 40 41

Corrêa, História, Vol. 1, p. 127. Corrêa, História, Vol. 1, p. 93. Correa, Historia, Vol. 1, pp. 91–93. IHGB, lata 32, pasta 2, “Notiç ias de Benguela e seus distritos 1798”; Ibid., lata 31, pasta 9, “Notiç ias de pres´ıdio de Nova Redondo, 1797.”

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with them, where these practices underwent further transformation as they became part of the American Diaspora.42 Catholic missions (the Jesuits, the barefoot Carmelites, the Capuchins, and the Third Order Franciscans), who came to Angola to work among the “heathen,” did most of their work among the thousands of slave laborers who lived with them at the hospices and churches. This group also had an impact on the evolving Creole practices. Indeed, one report noted that since most of the church and hospice slaves spoke Portuguese, it was not difficult to instruct them in the doctrine and practices of the church as church regulations required. The missionaries dealing with these slaves found that they had no need for interpreters, as was the case when they dealt with Africans outside of this creole environment.43 These church and hospice slaves, many of whom had links in the community, and who accompanied the missionaries on their annual tours, did much to spread this mixed Catholicism into the far reaches of the colony. The hundreds of free Africans and Afro-Lusitanians (many of them from leading families) who were catechists in the churches in Luanda and elsewhere in the core areas comprised an important segment of the church hierarchy and were also instrumental in shaping Angolan Catholicism and spreading it beyond the colony. Their religious activities alongside the foreign missionaries, as well as the missionary work they undertook independent of foreign supervision, went a long way to ensure African influences on Angolan Catholicism. Naming, Language, Foodways, Music, and the Like The secular aspects of the culture in the core areas also allowed for the intermingling of African and Portuguese customs, and they provide other examples of the extent to which a Creole culture had emerged in Angola. For example, the naming practices common among some segments of the population in the port cities and pres´ıdios highlight this issue. A late-eighteenthcentury document containing the names of more than 27 white, mixed-race, and African moradores in Benguela illustrates some interesting patterns. The document, recorded in the 1798s, shows that most of the slaves had Christian names. Some of the most popular names were Jacinto, Laurenç o, and Julião for male slaves, while Maria, Rita, Thereza, Luzia, Catarina, and Rosa led the list for female slaves. Slaves who were not baptized, however (the 42 See, for example, Il´ıdio do Amaral, “Descriç a˜ o da Luanda Setecentista, vista através de uma planta do ano de 1755,”Garcia de Orta, 9:3 (1961): 409–420; José de Almeida Santos, “A sociedade luandense em meados de século XIX,” Anais da Academia Portuguesa da História, IIa séria, 31 (1986): 351–375. 43 Saccardo, Congo e Angola, 3: 131.


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majority of the slave population), had more freedom to retain their original names, and they often added a Christian name to their given African names. Male nonbaptized slaves listed had Christian and African names such as António Equimbe, or an African name such as Canjonbo Itanda, while the females all bore African names such as Miganja Ganja, Quiganda, Quiongo Catacoto, and Quifongo. All the mixed-race individuals and baptized free Africans had full-fledged Portuguese names, but they also had African names as well, as did some of the Portuguese and Afro-Lusitanians.44 The adoption of Christian names and other elements of the Catholic religion was not limited to free Africans and slaves in the port cities and pres´ıdios, but was also common among African officials who were part of the guerra preta, and African rulers who became vassals of the Portuguese. Africans incorporated in Angola’s mixed Afro-Catholic culture had names that reflected the interpenetration of Christian and African customs. Thus, for example, it was not unusual for a quimbari in the interior to have a name such as “Manuel Francisco da Costa Canzamba,” a practice that combined a full-fledged Portuguese name with an African surname.45 Titled individuals had names such as Quitendele quiaacababa António João, Quilamba Cangondo Caquiluange Francisco da Costa, or Quilaba Gongue a Camucala António Pedro, which combined African titles and names with full Portuguese names, or which contained two Christian first names (a common practice among African converts); this practice was quite commonplace among African agents of the guerra preta.46 Here again, enslaved Africans carried to the Americas brought these Creole naming patterns with them. Language was also an area that was open to transformation under African agency. In the early years of the century, Kimbundu, the language of the Mbundu (Ambundu in eighteenth-century Portuguese), was the major language spoken by free and enslaved Portuguese, Afro-Portuguese, and Africans in the Reino de Angola. Even before the eighteenth century, the Portuguese recognized the importance of Kimbundu as the lingua franca of the population, and Jesuits had already published a Kimbundu catechism in 1642. The official acceptance of Kimbundu during the course of the eighteenth century allowed for the greater mixing of Kimbundu and Portuguese. The way the process developed is revealing. Although missionaries used Kimbundu when dealing with the African population, 44 IHGB, lata 32, pasta 2, “Noticias de Benguela e seus distritos 1798.” See John Thornton, “Names.” John K. Thornton, “Central African Names and African-American Naming Patterns,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Vol. L, No. 4 (October 1993): 727–742. 45 IHGB, lata 32, pasta 2, “Notic´ıas do Pres´ıdio de Ambaca do Reino de Angola,” fol. 4. 46 IHGB, lata 81, pasta 2, “Varios documentos relativos ao governo do reino de Angola 1677 a 1797,” letter of Sousa Coutinho, 13 September 1769.

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it was its use in legal settings by Portuguese officials that allowed the population to use it as the lingua franca. For example, Governor Rodrigo Cézar de Menezes’s 1737 directive, creating a position of interpreter and judicial enquirer to deal with fines and petitions of liberty on behalf of slaves, stipulated that it be held by a person of high moral character and one who was “knowledgeable in the Ambundu language.” Even the attempt by officials of the crown in 1760 to outlaw preaching in Kimbundu, requiring Portuguese in its place, when they suppressed the Jesuit order (at the time the group owned a total of 1,060 slaves) failed to stop the use of Kimbundu.47 Kimbundu survived, leading metropolitan critics in the colony to complain that “nothing can get done except through depending on an interpreter who is always a “Negro ladino” (Creole African).48 The attempt by Sousa Coutinho beginning in 1765 to suppress Kimbundu, ordering that children should not be raised learning it, and even demanding that it be replaced in the interior (sertões) with Portuguese, had little effect on stemming the tide of Africanization of the Portuguese who lived among the larger number of Kimbundu speakers beyond Luanda.49 A telling commentary of the growing use of Kimbundu among the population in the core region comes from the governor of Benguela in 1800. Lamenting the sorry state of the religious life of naturaes da terra, he observed that most of them had not learned Portuguese, and therefore were unable to participate in the Portuguese-language massess or make confessions to the Portuguese navy chaplains when the vessels visited Benguela.50 The growing use of Kimbundu in the core areas explains why it came to influence the writing of Portuguese, why so many Kimbumdu words were incorporated into Angolan Portuguese, and why many Portuguese loan words filtered into Kimbundu.51 Even more important in this process of Africanization of the Portuguese language were the numbers of Africans who served as scribes to capitães-mores at the pres´ıdios and the African rulers who carried on formal correspondence with officials of the Portuguese crown in both Kimbundu and Portuguese. The role of these Africans in facilitating the written form of this AfroPortuguese language was significant.52 Some locally generated petitions and 47 Sacarrado, Congo e Angola, 2: 315, 321. 48 Couto, Os Capitâes-Mores, p. 164. 49 Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, Fundo Geral, Códice 8554, letter of Sousa Coutinho, 1765, fols. 27–28. 50 AHU, Cx. 95, Angola 1800, no. 18, Governor Vasconcelas to Minister of State. 51 The same process occurred with Umbundu in the Benguela region. 52 AHNA, Governo de Angola, Oficios para Angola, A-17-5, April 1777–December 1779, Carta para Izodore José de Alexandre, Caiptão-mor do pres´ıdio de São José de Engoge de Antonio E. Lencastro, fol. 102.


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testaments of Kimbumdu-speaking litigants written in Portuguese in the 1760s and 1770s and uncovered by Eva Sebastyen in 1988 show evidence of Kimbundu phonology and the incorporation of many Kimbundu words. These are seen in the irregular use of the letters 1, b, and r and the numerous Kimbundu words that appear in the texts.53 The process of creolization that occurred in eighteenth-century Angola was not confined to the social relations, religious rituals, naming practices, and language, but also covered other areas as well. These included public celebrations, medical practices, foodways, music, and dance. For example, in the area of foodways, free Portuguese, African, and Afro-Portuguese as well as slaves remaining in Angola and those slated for export to Brazil shared the same “ground, roasted or cooked corn, cassava roots, ginguba, acola, forest fruits, sugar cane, sardines, and savêlhas” as the white, mixed, and African populations.54 The sardines, as well as the “pungo and savelha,” were the cheapest variety of fish, which, when sun dried and unsalted, were especially in demand among the slaves and Africans in the interior who did not fish in the local rivers.55 The dances and music that observers noted at weddings and other celebrations of Angolan-born Portuguese were all influenced by the dominant African dance and musical patterns.56 Moreover, the masks and other artistic renditions that surfaced during the public festivals in which enslaved and freeborn Africans participated also showed evidence of African influence. Finally, the many medical practitioners (curandeiras) who combined local medical plants and remedies with Catholic rituals to cater to the troubled in Luanda and others in the core areas illustrated other dimensions of the interpenetration of the two cultures.57 MANIFESTATIONS IN THE PERIPHERY

The interpenetration of African and European cultural elements was not limited to the communities in the core areas of cultural interface such as Luanda and Benguela, but was also evident in African regions that were subordinate to the Portuguese, and in some neighboring independent African regions. These included the small states of the “Dembos,” and the kingdoms of the Kongo, Kassanje, Bailundu, Matamba, and Bié. Throughout the century, the pace of this intermixing spread beyond these areas, as was 53 Archives of the Sobada of Caxinga, Municipio de Samba Cajú, Cuanza Norte Province, Angola. See also Thornton, “Central African Names and African-American Naming Patterns”. 54 Correa, História, Vol. 1, p. 117. 55 Correa, História, Vol. 1, p. 134. 56 Correia, História, Vol. 1, pp. 87–88. 57 Luis Mott, “A Calundu Angola de Luzia Pinta 1739,” Revista do Instituto de Artes e Cultura, UFOP, 1, 1994.

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the case when the Portuguese established a pres´ıdio in the north at Encoje, or in areas where Catholic missions established mission stations. By the 1820s, most regions that would eventually be included in present-day Angola had been exposed to the culture emanating from Luanda and Benguela. Missionaries, traders, Portuguese royal officials, and free and enslaved Africans from the core zones all played a part in spreading the Creole culture to the regions beyond Luanda and Benguela. Furthermore, because of cultural, military, and commercial ties that the Portuguese colony had with the larger independent African kingdoms surrounding the colony, these areas were also exposed to the Afro-Lusitanian culture of the colony.58 By the 1700s, the political and military aspects of the relationship between the colony and the surrounding independent African populations had been in existence for almost two centuries, and they shaped the way African and Portuguese culture interacted. The institution, known as the guerra preta (African military units on which the Portuguese relied to maintain strategic points in the interior), offered many opportunities for Africans to influence Portuguese culture. The guerra preta was made up of thousands of foot soldiers (grossos modos), jagas (military mercenary units feared for their reputed practice of cannibalism), empacaçeiros (expert African hunters whose knowledge of local geography made them useful to the Portuguese in their interior wars), musketeers, and quilambas (salaried African captains who assisted the Portuguese in extending their control in the interior, or who carried out civilian duties such as providing postal or security service at the several pres´ıdios). Despite the fact that they served under their African commanders and therefore were not fully integrated into the dominant Afro-Lusitanian culture in the port cities and presidios, the Africans integrated into the guerra preta participated in the creole culture.59 Over the years, Africans from these independent regions developed a series of complex official and unofficial relations with the Portuguesecontrolled core areas. For example, the Dembos region and the kingdoms of Matamba were intimately involved in the Creole culture, whereas Africans living in the Kasanje, Kisama, and the central highlands regions had more formal political arrangements. During the course of the eighteenth century, however, the rulers and peoples in these regions were increasingly influenced by political and cultural developments in the core areas.60 58 Joseph Miller, in Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press), pp. 245–313, has provided a thorough analysis of these social relations. 59 Couto, Os Capitães-Mores, p. 260. 60 On the history of Portuguese administration in 18th century Angola, see Couto, Os Capitães-Mores.


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This situation may explain why African rulers in the regions outside the core became cultural brokers in the spread of Afro-Lusitanian culture. A letter from a Dembos official to the Portuguese Governor Sousa Coutinho in 1767 sheds light on the role of African ruling groups in the spread of Afro-Lusitanian culture. In the letter he reiterated his intention of following the terms of his vassalage by embracing the Catholic religion, overseeing the spread of the Holy faith, continuing to baptize all his people, and destroying the idols and barbarous customs.61 Although the Dembos were never fully accepted as good Catholics, official initiatives of the Portuguese as well as of the rulers helped create an environment favorable to the spread and further Africanization of the Afro-Lusitanian culture. Additionally, African rulers requested priests, as the queens of Matamba did on several occasions in the 1700s.62 The fact that the three missionary orders in the colony – the barefoot Carmelits, the Capuchins, and the Third Order Franciscans – were never able to meet the demand with European-born priests meant that Afro-Lusitanian catechists who were bearers of the mixed culture filled the positions. The Africans among whom they worked adopted elements of the culture from these catechists (as happened in Holo in 1766). Beyond the guerra preta, vassal African rulers, and the larger African populations and communities also helped to Africanize further the AfroLusitanian culture and facilitated its spread to regions outside of the contact area. Special decrees that Portuguese governors passed created the incentives for many freemen in some of the areas outside the core community to separate from the traditional authorities, and put themselves more directly under Portuguese administrative control.63 Indeed, by the second half of the eighteenth century, the thousands of Africans who lived apart from their “sobas, sovetas, quilambas, and quimbares” would have been responsible for the Africanizing of Portuguese culture. Many individuals from the core areas who lived in far-off independent African polities such as Matamba, or around the several mission stations in areas such as Mbwila and Kahenda, often practiced their own Africanized form of Afro-Lusitanian culture. As in the core regions, some aspects of the culture – such as naming practices and religious rituals – reveal more than others evidence of how the Africanization of Portuguese culture was occurring. The naming practices stand out. The historian Corrêa, who wrote his history of 61 ANHA, Oficios para Angola, 79-A-7-2, Corr. do porucador com as autoridades da Colónia 1767– 1768, “Letter of D. Alvaro Filho e 2 Persoa de Dembo Ambuella to Sousa Coutinho,” 28 February 1767. 62 Saccardo, Congo e Angola, pp. 296–97; 357. 63 Couto, Os Capitães-Mores, p. 140.

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Angola on the basis of his experiences in Angola in the last years of the eighteenth century, felt it necessary to alert his readers to the fact that even though the African Matheus Caetano of the Dembos area had a full Portuguese name, he was not a Portuguese. He noted that such names “illustrate [social] distinction . . .” because Africans who had such names “wear trousers and own slaves and thus are honored by being regarded as white.” He added, however, that the difference between such an African and a white would be like that of night and day.64 Moreover, a list of contraband from the Dembos region who Governor Lencastro imprisoned in Luanda in 1774 revealed the extent to which this mixed naming practice had penetrated beyond the core area. The contraband included not only a group of whites with typical Portuguese names, but also a family of pretos with the last name of Cordial de Sá. In addition, the slaves of the Dembos ruler had a variety of African and Portuguese names, among which were Gungo, Ana Sebastião, Sambo, Igrácia Matheus, and Quibocu. The group also included a number of moradores (persons who were recognized as residents in the nearby Portuguese towns or pres´ıdios), all of whom were Africans. The moradores had a variety of Portuguese and AfroPortuguese names, among which were António Solomão, Matheus António, Rodrigo Andre, Belchior Francisco, Lourenco Paula, Ambrósio Mub´ıca, Pedro Musunda, Gracio Muyaya, António Muginga, Sebastião João, and Biondi Camia.65 The names that members of the dominant classes in these states carried also bore evidence of the Africanization of Portuguese names. Thus, for example, most of the rulers in the independent region of the Dembos (which had been exposed to the creole Christian culture through its contacts with the Kingdom of the Kongo), and where the Carmelites had founded missions in 1659 but that the missionaries still considered “heathen” during the nineteenth century, bore honorific Portuguese titles and Christian names alongside their African titles and given names. In his correspondence with the Portuguese governor in Luanda, a Dembos ruler listed his name as Dom André Muginga Bunga Mane Muç osse.66 Indeed, the acts of undamento (the vassalage treaty that African rulers agreed to obey when they became vassals of the crown) not only reveal the naming practices common among these African rulers, but also the extent to which their military and political obligations to the Portuguese exposed them to the linguistic and cultural conventions of the culture in Luanda 64 Correa, História, Vol. 2, p. 197. 65 AHU, “Lista dos Contrabandidos . . . ,” 17 May 1777. 66 BNL, Codex 8742, Coutinho to Rainha de Huando, 28 November 1766.


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and the other Afro-Portuguese settlements. Thus, for instance, most rulers who agreed to vassalage treaties committed themselves and their people to live under the Catholic faith, to hear mass on holy days, and to give safe passage to missionaries, as did the ones that Soba Cacula Cahango Dom António and Soba Ucosso agongo Dom Sebastião Diogo Francisco did in 1770.67 The undamento that soba Dona Anna of the Dembos agreed to in 1770 also required her to make sure that her population received baptism and required that she eradicate “primitive rites” so that the Holy Catholic faith could expand.68 The fact that the Portuguese were not in a politically or culturally dominant position to enforce these requirements on the African rulers and population meant that the latter were free to adopt those elements of Portuguese culture that did not radically alter their own values. Throughout the century, officials condemned the mixed cultural practices that emerged and passed laws aimed at sanitizing them. They leveled their harshest criticisms against the mixed religious practices. For example, in 1768, Sousa Coutinho made light of the news that “negroes of Ingolome made crosses for cemeteries,” believing that none of them understood what they had done since “they are now as they always have been, primitive.” He also contended that none of the sobas married and that they all ignored their religious obligations, and accused the missionaries of not teaching them in the true faith, but baptizing them so that they could collect parish taxes that they received for each baptism.69 As in the areas under official Portuguese control, efforts to eradicate African practices in the neighboring semi-independent regions did nothing to advance the official orthodox version of Christianity or Portuguese culture. Silva Corrêa’s observations reveal how dominant African elements were in the religion. In connection with the collection of the dizimo (the tithe that the law required to be collected from rulers who were baptized), he wrote that its collection had no connection with the Christian piety of the rulers or their populations, since a major part of the people lived under their non-Catholic rulers and followed their ancient (non-Christian) beliefs. He reasoned that because they were vassals of the Portuguese crown and under the command of Portuguese capitães-mores, the latter “give them the honor of including them in the world of Christianity in order to get them accustomed to paying the tax.”70 Although the real aim of the Portuguese 67 68 69 70

AHU, Angola, Cx. 58, letter of Sousa Coutinho, 3 October 1773. AHU, letter of Coutinho, 22 November 1770. AHNA, Officios para Angola, 79-A-7-2, letter of Sousa Coutinho, 22 October 1768. Couto, Os Capitâes-Mores, p. 130.

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in the interior was not to inculcate Catholic habits among the population but to justify the collection of an absurd tax, the incorporation of African communities into the administrative structure resulted in the interpenetration of Portuguese and African religious beliefs and rituals, even though the practitioners may have regarded themselves as Christians. This might explain why, in areas of the interior, numerous secret altars dotted the pathways and hillsides, and why Catholic religious symbols were also often found among the religious relagia in these altars. Indeed, the 1788 report from the Bishop of Angola noted that in the interior of the colony, the Holy objects that fell into African hands were incorporated into local idols, or served to ornament wives or were used as “profane idol for diabolic purposes.”71 The rulers simply followed the same practice with the Christian objects as they did with local religious symbols, turning them into powerful political symbols. Many of these rulers incorporated Catholic religious symbols into their political regalia. This might explain why in 1793 when the Dembos rulers Mbwila and Mbwela were ordered by the capitão-mor of Encoge to answer charges that their people were abusing the Portuguese, although they had not been converted, they proudly displayed an image of the Crucifix made of brass when they met with the official. They understood quite well that the Portuguese believed that the cross was a great and powerful mediator for peace.72 Moreover, when the Portuguese captured and condemned to death Dembo Muene-Zambaxe for having murdered and harassed Portuguese moradores, he requested baptism before his execution so that he could die a Catholic.73 Undoubtedly the condemned believed that the baptism offered safe journey to the other world. Late-eighteenth-century Portuguese roundly condemned the religious mixing, especially the way Africans were using the rituals and religious ornaments for personal advancement. They were especially concerned that communities far in the interior were developing competing centers of mixed culture that reflected much more African agency than Portuguese. Undoubtedly it was for this reason that they often described the people in areas such as the Dembos as “idolatrous Catholics” who adored altars that contained “many massive wooden idols, others with human figures of both sexes . . . and with these gods were many ridiculous fetishes associated with their belief and custom.”74 A Portuguese army that invaded the region of Quingungo in February of 1794 left a vivid picture of this mixing. They described finding an altar located in the tomb of the Dembos of 71 72 73 74

AHU, Angola, Report of the Bishop of Malaca, 20 June 1788. Corrêa, História, Vol. 2, pp. 194–195. Corrêa, História, Vol. 2, p. 197. Corrêa, História, Vol. 2, p. 202.


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the locality that contained not only an image of St. Francis of Assissi, but “an idol of two bodies joined at the back with the figure of a man and a woman.”75 The religious and cultural syncretism was not limited to areas of the traditional vassalage, but was also evident in regions far outside regular missionary activity or political alliances. In 1766, for example, when a Portuguese army invaded Soso country and destroyed the fortified camp, they found among the African religious objects a statue of the image of Nossa Senhora da Conceiç a˜ o (Our Lady of Conception). It is unlikely that this was the only object the people (who had been converted some six decades before but who had not seen a priest since then) would have retained from their earlier exposure to the Catholic religion.76 Even the Kongo region, where the rulers and people were politically independent and had developed their own version of Afro-Lusitanian culture that had sustained itself for more than two centuries, did not escape the approbation of metropolitan political representatives and some missionaries.77 Metropolitan priests visiting the Kongo during the period made light of the creole culture that had emerged there, one going so far as to ridicule the Kongos for their infatuation with “pompous names of infantes, with titles of fidalgos, without knowing how these gradations work and without attempting to imitate civilized nations, and much less make them Christian.78 Although the author may have been merely repeating local Angolan biases against the Kongo (other missionaries were quite impressed with the Kongo Catholicism and culture), another reason for the condemnation might have stemmed from the fact that Kongolese culture and religion were much more African than local and foreign critics cared to accept. CENTRAL AFRICAN CULTURE-BEARERS AND THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

During the eighteenth century, Africans who were part of this evolving Afro-Lusitanian culture and who were sold as slaves brought elements of this culture with them to the plantations, mines, and urban centers of the Americas. The Creole cultures that emerged among slave societies in the 75 Corrêa, História, Vol. 2, p. 210. 76 BNL, Codex 8742, letter of Sousa Coutinho, 31 January 1766. 77 See John K. Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” Journal of African History, 25 (1984): 147–167; John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 78 ANHA, Oficios para Angola 6 January 1787–2 May 1788, letter to Father Jose e Torres from Barrão de Mossamedes, 12 August 1787.

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Americas had deep roots in Central Africa. This Central African input was especially dominant during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, when Central Africans accounted for significant majorities of enslaved Africans who came into the Americas. The country most heavily influenced by this Angolan Creole culture was Brazil, which imported 68% of all its slaves during the eighteenth century from Angola. South Carolina was not far behind with 60% and Central Africans accounted for 51% of the Africanborn population on the eve of the Haiti Revolution.79 In other regions of the Americas, Central Africans accounted for significant minorities among the slave population during the century. Although in the beginning of the century many of the enslaved Africans who were imported into the Americas came from far in the interior of Central Africa and would have had very little exposure to the mixed culture that had emerged in Luanda and the adjoining Portuguese settlements and the independent African kingdoms, increasingly, by the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the situation was changing. As Joseph Miller has so persuasively shown, the dynamics of merchant capitalism had drawn people from the deepest interior of central Africa into the maelstrom of the Atlantic whirlpool.80 Several conditions led to the movement of the Afro-Lusitanian culture from Angola to the Americas. The case of the Brazilian slave woman Luiza Pinto is not atypical. Pinto, a slave of Manuel Lopes de Barros of Luanda, lived during her childhood (up to 13 years) in the Afro-Lusitanian environment of Luanda before being sold to owners in Sabará, Brazil. She brought to Brazil the knowledge she had learnt in Luanda of curing people with a combination of Catholic rituals and an African root mixture. Her repertoire also included divination and contact with the other world. She was arrested by the Inquisition in Brazil in 1739 for witchcraft and underwent a detailed inquest into her activities in 1743 as a curanderia (healer) during the 30 years the she lived in Brazil.81 Other enslaved Africans who brought Angola’s Afro-Lusitanian culture with them did not receive the notoriety of Luiza. Several were captives of war. In some cases, Portuguese capitaes-mores conducted punitive expeditions against vassal rulers who “by their sense of superiority, animosity, and acts of rebelliousness toward us and unrest in their states” challenged Portuguese 79 See Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 207; David Geggus, “Sex Ratio, Age and Ethnicity in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Data from French Shipping and Plantation Records,” in Patrick Manning, ed., Slave Trades, 1500–1800: Globalization of Forced Labour (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1996), pp. 257–278. 80 See his contribution in this collection. See also Miller, Way of Death. 81 Luis Mott, “A Calundu Angola de Luzia Pinta 1739,” Revista do Instituto de Artes e Cultura, UFOP, 1, 1994.


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status. Such wars often led to the capture, secret transfer to Luanda, and exile to Brazil of these African patrons.82 Others may have suffered the fate that befell a group of Africans from the vassal region of the Cuanza, whose captain from the nearby region of Massangano sold them into the Brazilian trade. They may have later encountered their seller in Brazil, for the vassal rulers and people of the Cuanza were so outraged at the incident that they marched to Massangano and condemned the soba to the same fate.83 Still others may have been part of the group to which the 1787 letter from the Governor Barão de Mossamedes to the capitão-mor of Golungu referred. The Governor’s letter noted that he was sending the prisoners soba Carita, his official (macota Cabassa) to Pernambuco on the next ship to leave Luanda.84 Many more would have part of the guerra preta who became captives in wars that the Portuguese lost, and who were sold as slaves by the African conquerors. Still others may have been ladino slaves of the Portuguese and Afro-Lusitanians who were captured by the armies of independent African rulers and sold into slavery. CONCLUSION

Whatever may have been the circumstances of their capture and enslavement, what most of the enslaved Africans who came through the Portuguesecontrolled coastal ports of Luanda and Benguela in the eighteenth century had in common was some exposure to the Afro-Lusitanian culture. This was especially the case with enslaved Africans who went to Brazil, and who the records note, came from “the whole of Angola and its sertões.” Those captives who came from the core areas of the culture brought cultural practices that were more Lusitanian. Opposite to them would have been those similar to the 100 and more subordinates who accompanied Dembo Gombea-Moqueama to Brazil. Imprisoned in 1790 and placed in fetters as punishment for “the insults” against the Portuguese, they were exiled to Pernambuco. They undoubtedly carried with them cultural practices that were more African, but with some Portuguese elements.85 As the Afro-Lusitanian culture moved into the interior of Angola and Benguela through Portuguese, Afro-Lusitanian, and African agents, enslaved Africans coming from far in the interior would bring not only the culture of their respective African ethnic groups, but also various elements of the Afro-Lusitanian culture. 82 Corrêa, História, Vol. 2, p. 62. 83 Ibid, Vol. 2, pp. 69–71. 84 ANHA, A-17-5, Governor Geral Baron de Mossamedes to Capitão-mor do Golungu Felix da Cunha da Almeida, 2 October 1787. 85 Corrêa, História, Vol. 2, p. 173.

PART TWO

Central Africans in Brazil

4

Central Africans in Central Brazil,1780 –1835 MARY C. KARASCH

Figure 4.1. Map of Goiás and Tocantins (courtesy of Companhia das Letras).

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Kalunga is the name of a quilombo (settlement of fugitive slaves) in the state of Goiás. As of 1993, 2,000 to 4,000 blacks lived in 41 communities scattered over 780 square miles (∼2020 square kilometers) in a mountainous region near the city of Cavalcante. Kalunga may be the oldest continuously inhabited quilombo in Brazil. Unlike the famous quilombo of Palmares, it was never destroyed. Fragmentary references in outsider sources suggest that it dates to at least the early nineteenth century. Africans may even have lived there before the Jesuit explusion in 1759, because two Jesuits who worked in the north of Goiás were accused of having relations with quilombolas.1 How or why the quilombolas chose to name a mountain valley and hence their quilombo Kalunga is unknown. What the name Kalunga indicates, however, is that Central Africans inhabited a place as remote as the captaincy of Goiás. How and why they came to live in the savannah lands of the interior of Brazil is part of this essay. The reason was gold. Africans were imported to labor on the gold mines of the captaincy for almost a century. Gold was discovered in the 1720s in the Vermelho River, and soon thereafter the Portuguese founded Vila Boa de Goiás, which they later made capital of the captaincy of Goiás. In order to determine the significance of Central Africans in the interior of Brazil, I am utilizing official Portuguese records from the former captaincy of Goiás of the late colonial and early national periods, 1780–1835. At that time, the Portuguese governors based in Vila Boa ruled a region of about 900,000 square kilometers, including the modern state of Goiás, where Bras´ılia was later constructed, and to its north the state of Tocantins. In addition, parts of Mato Grosso and Minas Gerais once fell under the authority of the governors resident in Vila Boa.2 The core of this vast region that interested the Portuguese were the mining towns, which formed a crescent from Carmo in the north to Vila Boa in the west and Santa Cruz in the south. Other rich towns, such as Natividade, Meia Ponte, Tra´ıras, and Santa Luzia, also yielded large quantities of gold at the height of the mining boom. On the Maranhão River (another name for the upper Tocantins River), 12,000 slaves had once worked on a hugh project to divert the river bed in order to gain access to its alluvial gold. Who these slaves were or where they came 1 Mary C. Karasch, “Os quilombos do ouro na capitania de Goiás,” trans. João José Reis, in Liberdade por um fio: história dos quilombos no Brasil, eds. João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996), p. 258 and note 51, pp. 261–262; and Jesuits: Lisbon, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, maç o 598, Ministerio do Reino, Negocios do Ultramar, Letra B, 1753–1763, letter to the Vigario Geral Pedro Barboza Cannaes from José dos Santos Pereira in São Félix, 5 October 1761. 2 Horieste Gomes and Antônio Teixeira Neto, Geografia Goiás-Tocantins (Goiânia: Editora UFG, 1993), p. 59.

4. Central Africans in Central Brazil, 1780–1835

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from is unknown. What is known, however, is that many died of various fevers. On the Maranhão River and elsewhere, most gold mining was based on simple technologies, that is, the bateia (a wooden bowl for washing gold) and iron tools to dig or shovel dirt in the riverbeds. There were some shaft mines, but most African slaves panned for gold in the rivers and streams of the captaincy.3 The labor force throughout the eighteenth century was composed of enslaved Africans, but in contrast to the hundreds of thousands of slaves who worked on the mines of Minas Gerais or on sugar plantations in the Northeast, the captaincy of Goiás had fewer than 40,000 slaves at the height of documented slavery in 1792 (Table 4.1). During the mining boom from 1735 to 1750, however, the Portuguese had only succeeded in counting 10,000 to approximately 17,000 slaves per year.4 Obviously, most enslaved Africans had escaped the census takers. The Portuguese were too few; the region was too large; and it was too easy to move from place to place and escape payment of the tax on slaves (the capitaça˜ o). In 1779 the Portuguese recorded about 35,000 blacks, most of whom were then enslaved. Most mining towns listed 60–80% of the population as black ( prêto).5 At that time, the mining economy was fully based on black slave labor. Four years later, household lists for 1783 contribute further insights into the numbers of slaves in some of the mining towns and their administrative districts ( julgados) where slavery was most significant and where Central Africans were most likely to reside. In 1783, these julgados were Vila Boa with 4,689 slaves, Tra´ıras with 3,790, Meia Ponte (now Pirenópolis) with 1,682, Pilar with 1,567, and Crixás with 1,207. All others had fewer than 1,000 slaves. Although the census of 1783 is incomplete, it documents that at least 17,713 slaves labored in the captaincy, but this figure is obviously too low (Table 4.1). Although the census of 1783 does not record a total slave population for the captaincy, the household lists are important because they clarify other social and economic realities. They reveal that almost everyone owned slaves. Whites owned the most (more than 50), pardos (mulattoes) a more modest 3 Manuel Aires de Casal, Corografia Bras´ılica (Rio de Janeiro, 1817; reprint ed. Belo Horizonte: Editora Itatiaia, 1976), p. 157; Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege, Pluto brasiliensis, trans. Dom´ıcio de Figueiredo Murta (Berlin 1833; reprint ed. Belo Horizonte: Editora Itatiaia, 1979), 1, pp. 167–195; and illustration in Paulo Bertran, História da Terra e do Homem no Planalto Central (Bras´ılia: Solo, 1994), p. 181. 4 Slaves counted, 1735–1750: Gilka V. F. de Salles, Economia e Escravidão na Capitania de Goiás (Goiânia: CEGRAF/UFG, 1992), p. 276. 5 Census of 1779: “Tabela 1: Populaç a˜ o da Capitania de Goiás em 1779,” in Mary C. Karasch, “os quilombos do ouro,” p. 242.

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Central Africans in Brazil Table 4.1. Slaves in the Captaincy of Goiás, 1783–1832

Location

Comarca do Sul Vila Boaa Meia Ponte Santa Luzia Santa Cruz Pilar Crixás Rio das Velhas Desemboque Carretão Tra´ıras Total Comarca do Norte Vila de São Joãoa Tra´ıras Cavalcante Flores São Félix Arraias Conceiç a˜ o Natividade Porto Real/Imperial Carmo Carolina Duro Total Sum total

a

1783

1789

1792

1804

1825

1832

4,689 1,682 899 723 1,567 1,207 299 — — — 11,066

9,200 4,777 2,960 1,223 1,967 2,444 277 — — — 22,848

8,568 4,855 2,491 1,153 3,839 2,045 2,261 — — — 25,212

4,432 2,282 1,264 997 1,575 634 — 660 — 2,807 14,651

3,274 1,842 741 887 969 699 — — — — 8,412

3,073 1,800 741 1,094 1,033 384 — — 5 — 8,130

— 3,790 923 — 648 363b — 923 — — — — 6,647 17,713

— 6,245 993 — 2,707 1,198 986 2,332 — — — — 14,461 37,309

— 5,328 950 — 2,599 1,198 908 2,338 — — — — 13,321 38,533

— — 1,209 — 641 469 684 1,529 — 844 — — 5,376 20,027

78 1,493 456 478 142 765 271 904 376 — — — 4,963 13,375

228 1,441 474 561 231 792 156 879 325 — 39 5 5,131 13,261

Seat of the Comarca. The manuscript copy of the census of 1783 gives the number as 364 rather than 363. Sources: Gilka V. F. de Salles, Economia e Escravidão na Capitania de Goiás (Goiânia : CEGRAF/UFG, 1992), p. 277; Lisbon, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU), caixa 35, Goiás, 1790–1798, Mappa em que Tristão da Cunha Menezes . . . apresenta ao Real Ministerio . . . até o prezente anno d’ 1789, 19 October 1790; ibid, Mappa em que o Governador, e Capitão General da Capitania de Goyaz Tristão da Cunha Menezes aprezenta ao Real Ministerio . . . , 29 July 1792; AHU, cod. 2109, Reflexoens Economicas sobre as Tabellas Statisticas da Capitania de Goyaz Pertencentes ao anno de 1804 e feitas no de 1806; Rio de Janeiro, Biblioteca Nacional, Manuscript Section, 11,4,2, Estatistica da Provincia de Goyáz remettida a´ Secretaria de Estado dos Negocios do Imperio . . . , 1825; e Rio de Janeiro, Arquivo Nacional, cod. 808, Vol. 1, Goiás, Censo da Populaç a˜ o da Provincia de Goyaz (1832), f. 96. b


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number (10–15), and blacks the fewest (1–3). The racial hierarchies were reflected in slave ownership, and freed blacks, both men and women, were identified as small slaveowners with household dependents (agregados) and obligated persons ( pessoas de obrigaça˜ o). Of the household lists consulted, four African women appear as heads of household; two owned slaves. Of interest given African patterns of pawnship or debt slavery is that free or freed men and women of color tended to control pessoas de obrigaça˜ o rather than slaves. Had they loaned money to other blacks who then exchanged a period of servitude for a loan of gold? Kathleen Higgins and Manuela Carneiro da Cunha have documented the custom of selling oneself into slavery in Sabará (Minas Gerais) and Belém do Pará.6 How obligated persons came under the control of other blacks is still unknown for Goiás. Six years later, the census of 1789 records an increase in the slave population to 37,309. As Table 4.1 clarifies, the julgado of Vila Boa had 9,200 slaves, followed by Tra´ıras at 6,245, and 4,777 in Meia Ponte. All others had fewer than 3,000 slaves. In 1792 yet another census reported 38,533 slaves, the largest number of slaves ever documented for the captaincy of Goiás. This census is particularly valuable because it reveals a shift in population to the new mining boom in Rio das Velhas, which is now in Minas Gerais, and increased mining activity in Pilar. Otherwise the census tracks the beginning of a historic population shift in the captaincy as other mines yielded less and less to the king’s quinto (royal fifth) and the slave population began to die off. In 1792, Vila Boa’s slave population had slipped to 8,568, Tra´ıras also to 5,328, and São Félix to 2,599. A few julgados experienced slight increases, such as Meia Ponte and Natividade. The 1792 census, therefore, points to the future direction of change; the 1804 census confirms the downward trend. By 1804, the Portuguese could find only 20,027 slaves in the captaincy. All julgados had seen the loss of slaves, except for Cavalcante; Desemboque and Carmo were included for the first time in 1804. The next census of 1825, the first after independence, documented still fewer slaves (13,375) with only 13,261 in 1832 (Table 4.1). The 1832 census, however, is unique because it was the first to list slaves as Brazilians or Africans. Thus, Table 4.2 establishes that fewer than 2,000 Africans still labored as slaves in the captaincy, out of a total black slave population of 11,575. In other words, only 16.6% were African by birth. More than four-fifths (83.4%) had been born in Brazil. Another 1,686 pardos were also 6 Kathleen J. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty,” in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1999); and Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, “Sobre a Servidão Voluntária: Outro Discurso: Escravidão e contrato no Brasil colonial,” in Dédalo, 23 (1984): 57 (case of Joanna Baptista, born free, who sold herself into slavery for 80 mil-réis in 1780).

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Central Africans in Brazil Table 4.2. Black Slaves in 1832

Brazilians

Termos

South Goiás Meia Ponte Santa Luzia Santa Cruz Pilar Crixás Carretão Total North Palma Tra´ıras Cavalcante Flores São Félix Arraias Conceiç a˜ o Natividade P. Imperial Carolina Duro Total Sum total Percent

Africans

Male

Female

Total

Male

Female

Total

Sum Total

892 511 250 388 525 139 2 2,707

774 465 241 381 300 170 2 2,333

1,666 976 491 769 825 309 4 5,040

373 214 62 138 125 53 — 965

150 90 44 57 83 22 1 447

523 304 106 195 208 75 1 1,412

2,189 1,280 597 964 1,033 384 5 6,452

100 702 218 329 109 328 90 340 177 14 2 2,409

128 607 200 216 112 353 66 359 148 12 2 2,203

228 1,309 418 545 221 681 156 699 325 26 4 4,612

— 69 36 13 10 100 — 100 — 3 1 332

— 63 20 3 — 11 — 80 — 2 — 179

— 132 56 16 10 111 — 180 — 5 1 511

228 1,441 474 561 231 792 156 879 325 3 5 5,123

5,116

4,536

9,652 83.4

1,297

626

1,923 16.6

11,575a

a

The total slave population was 13,261, including 1,686 pardos (807 males and 879 females). Source: Rio de Janeiro, Arquivo Nacional, cod. 808, Vol. 1, Goiás Censo da Populaç a˜ o de Goyaz (1832); f. 96.

enslaved in 1832. How many Africans continued to live in Goiás is uncertain, however, because many had fled to quilombos or purchased their freedom. In addition to tracking the overall decline of enslaved Afro-Brazilians and the creolization of the slave population, the census takers recorded the shift from a male-dominated slave population with a proportion of three males


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for every female to a more nearly balanced sex ratio by 1832. Unfortunately, the census of 1779 did not distinguish between male and female slaves. A detailed count of both male and female slaves comes from the census of 1789, when the 25,290 male slaves still outnumbered the 12,019 female slaves, who formed only about one-third of the slave population. In other words, there were two males for every female slave, but in 1792 the proportion of 28,428 males to 10,105 females rose to 74% male to 26% female, which suggests a revival of mining activity in that census year.7 In 1804 the general decadence in the economy was also evidenced by an increase in the percentage of females in the slave population, that is, 40%. Finally, the censuses of 1825 and 1832 recorded 45.2% and 45.6% female, indicating the trend of the nineteenth century, when the proportion of slave females steadily rose and eventually surpassed that of male slaves.8 What the censuses reveal, therefore, is that Africans were enslaved in the remote captaincy of Goiás; and that black slaves were a significant percentage of the population between 1779 and 1792. Many of them escaped the slave status by means of manumission, flight to quilombos, or an untimely death, so that by 1832 the number of slaves had declined greatly. Without gold to buy new Africans, slaveowners in Goiás were no longer able to buy as many slaves as in the past. Without slaves to mine gold, the captaincy plummeted into economic decadence in the early nineteenth century – especially in Portuguese discourse.9 However, Central Africans continued to be baptized in Vila Boa well into the 1820s, whereas others were sold throughout the captaincy, which suggests a continued introduction of new Africans to slavery in Goiás. Unfortunately, census figures tell us little about Central Africans or how they came to be in the captaincy of Goiás. We must turn, therefore, to other sources, including baptismal registries, to locate the Africans who lived in Central Brazil in the late colonial period. However, before examining their lives in Goiás, we should explore how they reached the interior of Brazil, which requires a brief survey of the internal trade in slaves between coastal ports and the captaincy of Goiás. 7 Censuses of 1789 and 1792: Lisbon, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (hereafter AHU), Mappa em que Tristão da Cunha Menezes. . . apresenta ao Real Ministerio . . . até o prezente anno d’1789, 19 October 1790; and Ibid, Mappa em que o Governador, e Capitão General da Capitania de Goyaz Tristão da Cunha Menezes aprezenta ao Real Ministerio . . . , 29 July 1792. 8 The 1804–1885 statistics by sex on slaves in Goiás are in my table in “Slave Women on the Brazilian Frontier in the Nineteenth Century,” in More than Chattel, eds. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 81. 9 Decadence: Luiz Palacin; Goiás 1722–1822: Estrutura e Conjuntura numa Capitania de Minas, 2nd. ed. (Goiânia: Oriente, 1976), pp. 171–178.

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Enslaved Africans traveled by means of diverse routes from coastal seaports. The following are the principal ports of origin for the captaincy’s slaves: Belém do Pará at the mouth of the Amazon River, São Luis, Maranhão; Salvador, Bahia; and Rio de Janeiro. Most likely Parna´ıba, Piau´ı, and Recife, Pernambuco also sent Africans to Goiás. Thus, the captaincy’s African population shared ethnic origins reflective of the eighteenth-century slave trade to major Brazilian ports. I also suspect that many Africans spent some time in other captaincies, such as Minas Gerais or Bahia, before their masters took them to the gold mines of Goiás. This pattern is evident in the nineteenth century with the continued introduction of slaves, although not in the same numbers of the eighteenth century. The focus here is on the trade in new Africans or new slaves, as they were identified in colonial records. The first route of entry of Africans into the captaincy of Goiás was from Belém do Pará via the Tocantins River, whose headwaters lie near the site of the future city of Bras´ılia. In fact, the first non-Indians to travel the length of the great river were fugitive blacks in 1723. The route down the Tocantins River was dangerous, however, as a result of frequent Amerindian attacks, but large armed expeditions could effect the passage to the Maranhão River and smaller rivers that gave access to the mining towns.10 The maximum number of newly imported Central Africans who could have traveled from Belém via the Tocantins River is apparent in Table 4.3. Using customhouse records, David Michael Davidson documented the introduction of 24,267 African slaves into the port of Belém do Pará, 1757–1804. Obviously, not all of these Africans were forwarded to the captaincy of Goiás. Some stayed in Pará or were traded west via the Amazon and Madeira Rivers to Vila Bela on the Guaporé River, from which they were distributed to the gold mines of Cuiabá, Mato Grosso. What is of particular interest from Davidson’s table are the ports of origin of the Africans imported into Belém. West African ports were identified as Guinea (the Guinea coast), Bissau, or Cacheu. One ship had apparently stopped in Maranhão on its journey from Bissau to Belém. Thus, 11,693 Africans had been imported into Belém from the Upper Guinea coast (48.2%). In contrast, Central Africans numbered 8,100 (33.4%). Only one ship with 257 slaves had come from Cabinda after stopping in Maranhão. Most Central Africans had originated in Angola (5,457), with almost 2,000 10 Tocantins route: Curt Nimuendajú, The Apinayé, trans. Robert H. Lowie and eds. Robert H. Lowie and John M. Cooper (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), p. 2; and Dal´ısia E. Martins Doles, As Comunicaço˜es Fluviais pelo Tocantins e Araguaia no Século XIX (Goiânia: Editora Oriente, 1973), pp. 17–21, 27–30, 39–44, 47–50.


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Table 4.3. Ports of Origin of African Slaves Imported into Belém do Pará, 1757–1804

Ports

Number

%

West Africa Guinea Bissau Bissau-Maranhão Cacheu Central Africa Cabinda-Maranhão Angola Angola-Benguela Benguela Unknowna Bahia Bahia-Maranhão Maranhão Parna´ıba Parna´ıba-Maranhão Natal-Maranhão Pernambuco Pernambuco-Maranhão Camocimon Blank name Sum total

11,693 1,000 5,814 136 4,743 8,100 257 5,457 399 1,987 3,334 526 1,004 547 19 11 20 159 1,023 25 1,140 24,267

48.2

33.4

13.7

4.7

a

Unknown indicates that the individuals were Africans who were shipped to Belém from Brazilian ports; hence their port of departure from Africa was not included in the customhouse registers. Source: David Michael Davidson, “Number and Origin of African Slaves Imported to Belém do Pará, 1757–1804,” in “Rivers and Empire: The Madeira Route and the Incorporation of the Brazilian Far West, 1737–1808” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1970), pp. 477–484. My totals are based on his year by year ship totals; the total for Cacheu may be six less due to discrepancies noted by Davidson.

from Benguela. An additional ship with 399 had traded in both Angola and Benguela. Thus, Davidson’s data suggest that perhaps 33.4% of the Africans traded from Belém were Central Africans – a percentile that is remarkably close to the 33.3% sold in the north of the captaincy between 1810 and 1824 (see Table 4.8).

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The remainder of the Africans or 3,334 (13.7%) had reached Belém from other northeastern ports: Bahia, Pernambuco, Natal (Rio Grande do Norte), Parna´ıba (Piau´ı), and Maranhão. Presumably, these Africans reflected origins of slaves commonly imported into the Northeast in the eighteenth century, of which Salvador, Bahia’s Africans are best known. Salvador imported its slaves largely from West Africa with smaller percentages from Congo, Angola, and Benguela. Maria Inês Côrtes de Oliveira, in her 1992 dissertation, “Retrouver une identité: Jeux sociaux des Africains de Bahia (vers 1750 vers 1890),” provides similar identities she obtained in wills and inventories from the city of Salvador between 1775 and 1815. In her sample of 881 slaves, she lists 270 “Gentio de la Côte” (People of the [Mina?] Coast) as the largest group (30.7%), but Angola was second in size at 167 (19%), followed by 104 Jeje (11.8%), and 100 Nagô (11.4%). Next were 93 Benguela at 10.6% whereas the 50 Hausa were almost 6%. Only 40 were defined as Mina (4.5%), 15 as Coast of Mina (1.7%), and 12 as Tapa (1.4%). Fewer than 1% were termed Benin, Congo, or São Tomé. A second survey of 3,194 slaves in inventories from 1816–1850 recorded a rise to 1,790 in the proportion of Nagô among the city’s slaves (56%), with decreases in the 277 Jeje to 8.7% and 230 Angola to 7.2%. Other nations that were less than 3% were Mina, Hausa, Cabinda, Congo, Tapa, Calabar, Benin, Benguela, and Mozambique.11 The ethnic and national port samples from the city of Salvador for the late eighteenth century clearly document that Central Africans were imported into Salvador, in particular those identified as Angolans. Benguelas were less numerous, and Cabindas and Congos were still fewer in number. We would expect, therefore, to find similar proportions in the captaincy of Goiás, including a strong bias toward Angola. As the slave trade to Pernambuco also imported Angolans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some Angolans also traveled from Pernambuco across the backlands to Goiás.12 However, Salvador was the most important northeastern port of entry for the captaincy’s slaves in the eighteenth century. Merchants resident in Vila Boa and/or Salvador organized great comboios (trains or convoys) in Salvador to transport dry goods, animals, and new Africans to Vila Boa or Natividade in the north to exchange for gold. The wealthiest merchants in the captaincy of Goiás regularly traded in dry goods 11 Salvador: Maria Inês Côrtes de Oliveira, “Retrouver une identitê: Jeux sociaux des Africains de Bahia (vers 1750 vers 1890)” (Ph.D. l’Université de Paris Sorbonne, 1992), pp. 98, 104. 12 Slave trade to Pernambuco: Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 319 (map) and p. 453; and Marcus J. M. de Carvalho, Liberdade: Rotinas e Rupturas do Escravismo no Recife, 1822–1850 (Recife: Ed. Universitária da UFPE, 1998), pp. 112–113.


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and slaves imported from Salvador. Typical was the case of João Botelho da Cunha, who petitioned to become a Familiar of the Inquisition in 1765. He customarily traveled between Vila Boa and Bahia, and on one occasion he had brought a large convoy of 170 slaves and horses along with dry goods. Other merchants who traded in slaves testified on his behalf.13 Another common pattern was for wealthy men and women resident in Goiás to order a small number of new Africans from the slave market in Salvador. They entrusted a responsible merchant to buy new Africans for them and bring them back to Goiás on his next trip to the port. One example of how slaves were brought from Bahia is documented in a receipt recorded in 1793. Michaela Xavier de Aguirre gave 230 oitavas of gold to Captain Gaspar José Lisboa to go to the City of Bahia to buy three “moleques [young boys] Minas,” paying for each one about 80$000.14 How many slaves traveled on an annual basis from Salvador to Vila Boa is thus far unknown, but the baptismal registries suggest that only a few new slaves were baptized each year. Far better documented is the route followed by Africans from Salvador to Vila Boa, if they were introduced by the wealthy long-distance traders. Presumably, the Africans walked the great distance along this route, as they had done in Africa from interior African markets to coastal ports. The road from the slave market in Salvador ran via the town of Cachoeira across the arid backlands (sertão) of Bahia to cross the São Francisco River, from which the slaves walked on to the town of Barreiras in western Bahia, then to the border of the two captaincies, and to the old Jesuit mission and register of Duro. At this check point, they were counted before being led to the town of São Félix, from which they were then walked to Vila Boa. Others left Duro to walk west and north to the mining town of Natividade, where merchants also dealt in dry goods and slaves. A second route for the Bahian traders and their enslaved Africans was by means of the registers of São Domingos or Lagôa Feia to Meia Ponte and finally Vila Boa.15 These routes were not the only ones Central Africans had to walk to reach Goiás. Two other routes went via the rivers of Maranhão or overland via Maranhão and Piau´ı. Africans were landed at or near São Luis. Those 13 Luiz Mott, “Inquisiç a˜ o em Goiás–Fontes e Pistas,” Revista do Instituto Histórico de Goiás, 13 (1993): 170. 14 Goiás, GO: Biblioteca de Fundaç a˜ o Educacional da Cidade de Goiás (hereafter BFEG), Cartório do Primeiro Oficio, 1792–1799, 22 July 1793, ff. 100–101. 15 Captain João Dias de Aguiar in a pardo regiment described himself as a businessman in dry goods and “comboeiro de escravos.” He also possessed a sugar plantation and 200 slaves, a gold mine, cattle, and a good house in Pilar. He traveled regularly on business between Vila Boa, Salvador, Olinda, and Pernambuco. At the time of his petition he and his socio owed 500 oitavas of gold. Lisbon, AHU, caixa 29, 1790–1794. The Bahian routes are on a 1750 map in Salles, Economia, p. 109.

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that traveled the river routes then went via the Itapicuru River to where it joined the Mearim River, which took them to the far south of Maranhão. From the southern part of that river, they were then walked a short distance to the Tocantins River, on which they continued their journey to Goiás. An alternate route was via the Parna´ıba River that linked up with the overland route in Aldeias Altas, which then went via Piau´ı through the backlands of Piau´ı to the register of Duro. Merchants who transported slaves along this overland route also carried salt, dry goods, and imported European luxury items.16 Apparently, Africans introduced to Goiás by means of the Maranhão–Piau´ı trade routes were of the same ethnic groups and/or ports of origin of those in the Belém trade, as ships often stopped in Maranhão or Parna´ıba before unloading the rest of their Africans in Belém. The size and scope of this trade is unknown because so much of it was unregulated, but many Africans identified as Guiné lived in the mining town of São José de Tocantins.17 The motivation of merchants who engaged in this trade was to trade new Africans, as well as European imports, horses, dried meat and fish, and salt for the gold of Goiás. The third and most significant port of entry for the captaincy’s slaves in the eighteenth century was Rio de Janeiro. As Joseph Miller has already demonstrated for the eighteenth century, the Africans imported into Rio de Janeiro were largely from Luanda, Angola, and Benguela, with additional Africans exported from Loango and Cabinda. Only a minority of slaves were Minas from West Africa.18 Most Africans sent to work in Vila Boa and other mining towns landed at or near the customhouse in the port of Rio de Janeiro. From there those that were sold, probably on consignment to great long-distance merchants resident in Vila Boa, then crossed Guanabara Bay in small boats to Pôrto da Estrêla, where Mineiro traders or mule teams picked them up to enter the well-known route to Minas Gerais. In the nineteenth century, they toted valuable cargoes on their heads, leaving the bulky, less fragile items to the backs of mules. The road they followed went via forested mountain trails to Vila Rica (now Ouro Prêto), capital of the captaincy of Minas Gerais, where merchants undoubtedly sold some slaves before heading out on the road to Paracatú, then across the border of the captaincies to Meia Ponte (now Pirenópolis), and Vila Boa. In the late 16 Rio de Janeiro, Biblioteca Nacional, Manuscript Section, 11,2,4, Roteiro do Maranhão a´ Goyaz pela Capitania do Piauhy, copy, 1800, ff. 7, 12, note 40; and Lisbon, AHU, caixa 11, Manoel Gomez da Costa, Intendent of Gold, São Félix, 15 March 1766. 17 Goiânia, Archive of the Curia, Diocese de Goyaz, Registros, Lanç amento das cargas de todos os papeis da Chancelaria da Prelazia de Goiás, 1805–1808, lista da Companhia de Infantaria do arraial de S. José (Captain Luis Gonç alves dos Santos and his men), 1799. 18 Slave trade to Rio: Miller, Way of Death, pp. 450–459.


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eighteenth century, the armed convoys that escorted the quinto from Vila Boa to Rio de Janeiro could make the journey in 3 months. How long a caravan of trade goods, cargo beasts, and new Africans took is uncertain. How many new Africans traveled that route can be documented for a few years – 1,123 in 1767 and 1,208 between 1791 and 1799.19 The final trade route for a small minority of Africans was the one from São Paulo. Because the Paulistas who went to the mines in the early eighteenth century owned few Africans, not many Africans arrived via the river expeditions that traveled on the Tietê, Paraná, and Parnaíba Rivers. At least one black accompanied Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva on the expedition that discovered gold in Goiás in the 1720s. Thereafter, individual Paulistas introduced a few Africans, who traveled with them to mine gold; but in contrast to the long-distance traders who brought new slaves from Rio or Salvador, the Paulistas did not transport large numbers of new Africans. More often they returned from the mines of Goiás with the gold they needed to buy African slaves in São Paulo.20 Traveling via river or overland routes, new Africans generally reached the captaincy of Goiás from the coastal ports. They were negotiated like any other living being (viveres) and transported in large carvans along with cargo beasts, salt, and other tradegoods. The trips took months, and those that went overland walked as far, if not further, than they had in Africa to reach coastal barracoons. Historians of the slave trade in Africa have documented the extraordinary journeys to the coast many Africans survived, as well as the infamous “middle passage” and sales in Brazilian markets. In the case of the captaincy of Goiás, we must also add to their remarkable journeys at least another 3-month trip to the gold mining towns of the captaincy. Furthermore, after arriving in Vila Boa, some still had to trek west to Cuiabá in Mato Grosso.21

19 Slave trade from Rio: Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 53; and Lisbon, AHU, caixa 21, Mappa das Contagens [dos Escravos], 1767, 24 June 1768. My thanks to Marivone Matos Chaim for this document. See also Gilka Salles, Economia, pp. 162 and note 13, p. 336. One convoy in the 1790s had 353 slaves; others had 113, 116, and 118, who were counted at the register of São João das Três Barras in the far south of the captaincy. 20 São Paulo route: Rio de Janeiro, Instituto Histórico e Geographico Brasileiro, lata 48, doc. 3, “Digressao que fez João Caetano da Silva, natural de Meia Ponte, em 1817, para descobrir com eff.o descobrio, a nova Navegaç a˜ o entre a Capitania de Goiáz, e a de São Paulo . . . ” His attached map shows the traditional trade route. See also Alida C. Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 57–60. 21 Mato Grosso: David Michael Davidson, “Rivers and Empire: the Madeira Route and the Incorporation of the Brazilian Far West, 1737–1808” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1970), map between pp. x–xi, and p. 37.

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Although we can estimate how many slaves lived in the captaincy of Goiás and how they traveled there, we must turn to a variety of sources in the archives in Goiãnia and the city of Goiás to locate the Central Africans in the captaincy and determine their nations and in a few cases, their ethnic origins. Utilized here are baptismal and death registries, tax records (the sizas), the Hutim inventories, manumissions, and lay brotherhoods (irmandades). The first important source for documenting Central African identities in the captaincy is a baptismal registry for slaves for the church of Saint Ann and nearby chapels that records infants and adults who were baptized between 1794 and 1827 in Vila Boa. Obviously, the vast majority of slaves were infants; but adults were also baptized, and Table 4.4 was compiled from the adult baptisms spanning more than 30 years in the registry. As to be expected, most adults who were baptized were Africans. The largest number were identified as Minas (48), followed by Angolans (47), and Congos (19). More specific names linked to Central Africa were Robôllo (Libolo), Banguella, Cabinda, and Munjollo (Tio slaves). Overall, 55.7% of the 131 Africans baptized in Vila Boa were Central Africans. Next in size were the West Africans described as Mina (48), Nagô (Yoruba, 3), and Buç a (2). Even five Africans from Mozambique had traveled all the way to Central Brazil from East Africa (Table 4.5). Table 4.4 of adult baptisms not only registers the existence of Central Africans in Vila Boa, but also indicates shifts in ethnicity over time. Between 1794 and 1806, only two adult Angolans were baptized at Saint Ann’s church, suggesting that other Angolans had already been baptized in Angola, Rio de Janeiro, or Salvador. In contrast, 15 Minas received the sacrament of baptism. Why few Central Africans entered the baptismal registry may also be due to the decline of gold mining in the captaincy. A slow recovery from mining decadence is suggested by the renewed baptisms of Central Africans beginning in 1807. One adult Angolan was baptized in 1807, two in 1809, one in 1811, and two in 1812. Thereafter the numbers picked up, and overall 45 Angolans and 19 Congos received baptism. Apparently, the revival of the slave trade into Rio de Janeiro after the arrival of the Portuguese court in 1808, combined with the appointment of royal bureaucrats and soldiers who traveled to Vila Boa with their slaves, including new Africans, led to the introduction of more Central Africans into the mining town until the early 1820s. In 1821 and 1822, no adult Africans were baptized, suggesting yet another decline in the trade in Central Africans. The situation was so desperate for slaveowners that they petitioned the royal Court in

Table 4.4. Adult Slave Baptisms by Year in Vila Boa de Goiás, 1794–1827

Year

Angola

Congo

Mina

Other

Xa

Total

1794 1795 1796 1797 1798 1799 1800 1801 1802 1803 1804 1805 1806 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812

— — — — 1 1 — — — — — — — 1 — 2 — 1 2

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 6

1 2 1 — 3 — 2 2 — — 1 3 — — 3 1 2 1 2

— 1 2 2 1 — — — — — — — — — — — — 1 2

1 5 4 3 5 2 3 2 — — 2 3 — 2 5 3 2 4 15

1813

4

2

3

3

15

1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 Total:

5 7 1 4 1 2 5 — — 2 1 — 4 3 47

1 2 3 1 2 — 1 — — 1 — — — — 19

1 14 — 5 — — — — — — — — 1 — 48

— 2 crioulo 1 crioulo 1 crioula — 1 Mocambique 1 Moncanbique — — — 1 crioulo — — 1 crioulo 2 Moç ambique — — 1 Nagô 1 Manjolo and 2 Buç a´ 2 Nagô and 1 Moucumba — — 1 Munjollo 1 Robôllo — 1 Cabinda — — — 1 Banguella 1 Mosambique — 1 Cabinda — 23

— 3 — — — 3 — — — 1 — — — 1 20

7 26 5 11 3 6 6 — — 5 2 — 6 4 157

X = Unknown nation or ethnic group. Source: Goiás, Orfenato de São José, Diocese de Goiás, Arquivo Geral, Batizados, Goiás, livro 3, 1794–1834. a

131

132

Central Africans in Brazil Table 4.5. Adult Slave Baptisms by Gender in Vila Boa de Goiás,a 1794–1827

Nations

Male

Female

Total

% Male

West Africa Mina Nagô Buç a´ Central Africa Angola Rebôllo[Libolo] Banguella Cabinda Congo Manjolo, Munjollo Moucumba East Africa: Mozambique Afrcian Total: Crioulos [Creoles] Unknown or illegible Sum total

40 36 3 1 50 29 1 1 2 14 2 1 5 95 4 10 109

13 12 — 1 23 18 — — — 5 — — — 36 2 10 48

53 48 3 2 73 47 1 1 2 19 2 1 5 131 6 20 157

75.5

68.5

72.5 66.7 50.0 69.4

a

And its nearby rural district, some baptisms were performed on nearby plantations. Source: Goiás Orfenato de São Jesé, Diocese de Goiás, Arquivo Geral, Batizados-Goiás, livro 3, 1794–1834.

Rio de Janeiro to authorize the Royal Treasury to buy slaves for them in Africa.22 In contrast, Table 4.4 suggests that the trade in Mina slaves from Salvador to Vila Boa collapsed. Between 1794 and 1813, 27 Minas plus three Nagôs and two Buç as were baptized in Vila Boa. Such numbers suggest that a few new Africans were still being purchased and forwarded to Vila Boa each year. Between 1814 and 1817, another 20 Minas were baptized, including 12 who belonged to one master, who may have purchased them on the coast and transported them in a convoy to Vila Boa.23 After 1817, however, 22 Petition by the inhabitants of Goiás that His Majesty order the purchase of slaves in Africa at the cost of the Royal Fazenda. There is no indication on those documents that the court in Rio responded favorably to their request. Goiânia, Arquivo Histórico de Goiás, caixa 10, Paç o, Thomas Antonio de Villanova Portugal, 24 March 1820. 23 The 12 Minas slaves (10 males, 2 females) were owned by Captain Antonio Navarro de Abreu, Goiás, Orfenato de São José, Diocese de Goiás, Arquivo Geral, Batizados-Goiás, livro 3, 20 September 1815, f. 153.


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not one adult Mina was baptized until a single Mina received baptism in 1826. Apparently, the internal slave trade in Minas had declined between northeastern ports and Vila Boa or Mina slaves no longer converted and accepted baptism. The first hypothesis is more likely because there was also a sharp decline in the numbers of Mina parents of baptized children – only three men and two women were so identified after 1807. In contrast, 11 Mina fathers and two Mina mothers had baptized their children in 1794 and 1795. The drop in the number and percentage of West Africans resident in Vila Boa, renamed the city of Goiás after 1822, is confirmed by the tax records of 1837–1838. Of the 469 slaves who were taxed, only 13 were West Africans; that is, there were eight Minas, one Hausa, and four Caboré (from Buré?) In contrast, there were 36 Central Africans: Congo (4), Angola (30), Banguela (1), and Casange (1). An additional 22 Africans whose identities were unknown or uncertain complete Table 4.6. Thus, by 1837–1838, only 71 Africans or 15% of the total slave population still lived in the city of Goiás (Table 4.6). Table 4.6. African Slaves Taxed in the City of Goiás, 1837–1838

Nation

Males

Females

Total

%

West Africa Mina Usá (Hausa) Caboré Central Africa Congo Angola Banguela Casange Unknown African Maç anbi Total Percent

8 5 1 2 15 3 10 1 1 11 11 — 34 47.9

5 3 — 2 21 1 20 — — 11 9 2 37 52.1

13 8 1 4 36 4 30 1 1 22 20 2 71a

18.3

a

50.7

31.0

The total number of slaves taxed was 469; thus, 15% were African by birth. Source: Goiás, Archive of the Museu das Bandeiras, no. 1012, Fazenda, Impostos, Taxa de (1$000), City of Goiás, 1837–1838.

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In addition to the Africans, the baptismal registries also record a small number of adult crioulos (blacks born in Brazil) who were baptized. Most notably, Joaquina crioula, who was the legitimate daughter of the slaves Manoel Angola and his wife Quiteria crioula, was baptized in 1796. Why would a crioulo be baptized as an adult? Perhaps anticipating another priest asking this question, the priest noted that she had been born in a quilombo, but she was then a slave. Other crioulos born in quilombos, where there had not been a priest to perform baptisms, were also baptized after being captured and returned to slavery, or in the case of these newly baptized quilombolas, enslaved for the first time. What this baptismal registry also establishes is that her parents, an Angolan and his wife, had fled to the quilombo after their Catholic marriage and before their daughter was born. She did not undergo the ritual of baptism until she was an adult in 1796, when she belonged to a different slaveowner than her parents did.24 Finally, a number of individuals were simply listed as adults and slaves without any ethnic indicator, and in such cases they may have been Amerindians, who were being illegally enslaved, especially because the number of females equaled the number of males. Omitting ethnicity for Amerindians was a common practice in colonial São Paulo. It can be documented, however, that the daughters of an Angolan father and Xavante Indian mother, who should have been recorded in the baptismal registry for the free population, were listed on the slave registry, which henceforth would impose a slave identity.25 The next source to document ethnicity is from the mining town of Natividade in the north (Table 4.7). What survives for Natividade are death registers, which identify some slaves by nations; only a few baptismal records have thus far been located, in which the priests noted only one Mina baptism. Unlike the priests in Vila Boa, those in Natividade usually ignored a slave’s nation for baptisms; but the death registers from this northern town suggest the ways in which the north was different from the south, where Vila Boa was located; that is, the vast majority of slaves who died were from West Africa. But here too Angolans lived and worked in the mines. Table 4.7 documents the African identities recovered from the death registers between 1801 and

24 Quilombolas: Ibid., Manoel, ? June 179?, f. 13; and Joaquina, 26 January 1796, f. 22. 25 Maria, legitimate child of João Angola and Eugenia India Chavante, was baptized on 22 February 1818 in Saint Ann’s, Ibid., f. 169v. The parish priests of Santa Anna corrected themselves whenever an individual was recorded as a slave but in fact was not a slave. The reason they were so careful is that in legal cases in which disputes arose over a person’s legal status, the recording of a child as a slave at baptism could determine the person’s future enslavement. Since this child was enrolled in the book of slaves, one assumes she would henceforth be considered a slave.


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Table 4.7. Africans Buried in Natividade, 1801–1827

Nation/Children

Number

%

West Africans Mina Nagô Prêtos da Costa (Blacks of the coast) Childrena Mina mother Granddaughter of Mina Central Africans Angola Children Angolan mother

61 58 1 2

93.9

7 6 1 4 4 4 4

6.2

a

The children were buried; their surviving mothers were identified as Mina or Angola. Source: Goiás, Biblioteca da Fundaç a˜ o Educacional de Goiás, [Book of] Obitos, Natividade e Porto Nacional, 1800–1827.

1827 on 61 Minas and four Angolans. An additional four Angolan mothers buried their children. Near Natividade is the small town of Carmo, once a wealthy mining town, for which there are only a few colonial documents, but they establish that Central Africans also lived there. In 1783, a Maria Benguela with two members of her family (children?) appeared on a household list. In 1807 and 1811, two children of unmarried Angolan mothers were baptized in the town. A third child’s mother was identified in 1809 as Rita da Silva Lundû, which is one of the few references to the Lundu in the captaincy. At least one Angolan man resided in Carmo in 1837; at the age of 50 he married an Indian woman.26 The Central Africans who lived in Carmo and Natividade were probably similar in ethnicity to those imported via Belém, Maranhão, and Salvador. 26 I have gone to both Natividade and Carmo with the anthropologist and ethnohistorian Odair Giraldin. We did not locate parish records for the colonial period on our visits. The ones that have survived were deposited in the city of Goiás, BFEG, with the uncatalogued manuscripts. See [Livro de] o´ bitos, Natividade [e] Porto Nacional, 1800–1859; and Livro do Batismo, Matriz do Carmo, Bispado do Pará, 1802–1877; and Livro. . . dos Casamentos, Freguesia do Monte do Carmo [1836–1837].

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As is obvious from an analysis of these baptismal and death registries, scribes seldom recorded a specific ethnicity. In most cases, only Angola, Mina, Benguela, or Congo were listed. There is, however, one additional source that provides a captaincy-wide portrait of the Africans living there between 1810 and 1824. Tables 4.8–4.10 are based on the nations noted at the time of sale of ladino (acculturated) slaves. At that time in Goiás, slaveowners had to pay a sales tax (siza) when they bought a ladino slave. The scribes recorded the following information for each of the mining towns: the date, the amount of the tax in oitavas of gold or mil-réis, the name of the slave with color or African nation indicated, and the price paid by the new owner. Slaves who bought their freedom also had to pay the tax. Tables 4.8–4.10 are organized by administrative units (the comarcas). In Table 4.8. Percentage of Africans Sold in the Captaincy of Goiás, 1810–1824

Julgados

Central Africans

%

West Africans

%

Total

North São João da Palma Tra´ıras Cavalcante Flores São Félix Arraias Conceiç a˜ o Natividade Porto Real South Vila Boa Meia Ponte Santa Luzia Santa Cruz Bonfim Pilar Crixás Araxá Desemboque Sum total

33 2 9 4 1 — 2 3 5 7 58 — 15 9 1 4 8 9 5 7 91

33.3

66 1 30 3 3 — 2 4 11 12 35 — 6 3 — — 5 20 1 — 101

66.7

99 3 39 7 4 — 4 7 16 19 93 — 21 12 1 4 13 29 6 7 192

Source: Tables 4.9 and 4.10.

62.4

47.4

37.6

52.6


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Table 4.9. West Africans Sold in the Captaincy of Goiás, 1810–1824

Julgados

Minas

Nagô

Guiné

North São João da Palma Tra´ıras

53 1 27

4 — 2

2 — —

Cavalcante Flores São Félix Arraias Conceiç a˜ o Natividade Porto Real

1 2 — 2 3 10 7

1 — — — — — 1

— 1 — — — — 1

South Vila Boa Meia Ponte Santa Luzia Santa Cruz Bonfim Pilar Crixás Araxá Desemboque Sum total

27 — 4 2 — — 5 16 — — 80

7 — 2 1 — — — 4 — — 11

1 — — — — — — — 1 — 3

Other

7 — 1 Mina, Segode to doa 1 Nagano — — — 1 Busa 1 Cobû 1 Sabarû, 1 Tapa, & 1 Ussa — — — — — — — — — — 7

Total

66 1 30 3 3 — 2 4 11 12

35 — 6 3 — — 5 20 1 — 101

a

A Mina who was totally blind. Sources: Goiás Archive of the Museu das Bandeiras, Escravos, Sizas dos Escravos Ladinos, no. 167, Araxá, 1814–1819 and Arraias, 1810–1821; no. 168, Bonfim, 1813–1822 and Cavalcante, 1817– 1822; no. 169, Conceiç a˜ o, 1810–1822 and Crixás, 1810–1821; no. 170, Dezemboque, 1811–1820 and Flores, 1813–1824; no. 171, Meia Ponte, 1810–1822; no. 172, Natividade, 1810–1822 and Pilar, 1810–1822; no. 173, Porto Real, 1813–1822 and Santa Cruz, 1811–1822; no. 174, São Félix, 1810-1818, Santa Luzia, 1810–1822, and São João da Palma, 1815–1816; and no. 175, Tra´ıras, 1810–1822.

the late colonial period, the captaincy of Goiás was roughly divided into the Comarca do Norte (now the state of Tocantins) and the Comarca do Sul (now the state of Goiás). Table 4.8 is of particular interest because it documents different proportions of Central Africans in the south (62.4%) and the north (33.3%). Table 4.8 reveals that the Northern Comarca, which

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Central Africans in Brazil Table 4.10. Central Africans Sold in the Captaincy of Goiás, 1810–1824

Julgados

Angola

Congo

Benguelaa

North São João Tra´ıras Cavalcante Flores São Félix Arraias Conceiç a˜ o Natividade Porto Real

28 2 9 3 1b — 2 3 4 4

— — — — — — — — — —

1 — — — — — — — 1 —

South Vila Boa Meia Ponte Santa Luzia Santa Cruz Bonfim Pilar Crixás Araxá

41 — 12 7 1 4 7 8 —

2 — 1 — — — 1 — —

9 — 1 Bonguela 1 Banguela — — — 1 Banguella 2

2

—

69

2

3 1 Banguela 10

Desemboque Sum total

Other

4 — — 1 Cabunda — — — — — 1 Canjongo & 2 Mutecos 6 — 1 Comunda 1 Banguita — — — — 1 Camundá, 1 Songa, & 1 Cassange 1 Mofumbe 10

Total

33 2 9 4 1 — 2 3 5 7 58 — 15 9 1 4 8 9 5

7 91

a

This column includes similar spellings as indicated below. A freedman. Source: Table 4.9. b

was most closely linked with the trade of Salvador and Belém, had received two thirds of its Africans from West Africa, who were usually identified as Mina, except for a minority of those defined as Nagô (Yoruba) or Guiné. Specific ethnic groups from West Africa also appear in Table 4.9, which further documents the significance of West Africa in the North. The northern comarca also had 28 enslaved Angolans, one Benguela, two Mutecos, one Cabunda, and one Canjongo (Table 4.10). The populations


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of Central Africa were less numerous and less well known to the scribes of the northern comarca. Because coastal ports also imported so many enslaved Africans from what is now the modern country of Angola, or the port of Cabinda, it is hardly surprising to find some more specific names, such as Muteco, that is, the Tio or Teke from north of Stanley Pool in Congo, and Cabunda for the Mbundu, who live in the Luanda area. The tax records reveal, however, that most Africans from Central Africa who lived in the North were identified as Angolans, and they were sold in every julgado, except for São Félix, which was then in economic decadence (Table 4.10). One later tax record of the 1830s listed five Angolans still living in Porto Real (now Porto Nacional) on the Tocantins River.27 Reflecting the southern comarca’s trade with Rio de Janeiro, the south had a smaller percentage of West Africans (37.6%) and a higher percentage of Central Africans (62.4%). As the baptismal registry from Vila Boa also documents, Angolans were far more numerous in the south than in the North; they appear with Benguelas, Cabindas, and Congos in other types of documents to be discussed below. The tax records for the early nineteenth century thus substantiate the patterns of trade between coastal ports and the captaincy of Goiás; that is, the slaves sent through the port of Salvador tended to be West Africans and those shipped through Rio de Janeiro were mainly Central Africans. Thus, Central Africans were more significant in numbers in the southern comarca, whereas West Africans, including those from the Upper Guinea coast, were predominant in the northern comarca. Although masters in the captaincy of Goiás did not import large numbers of Africans, they received an extraordinary variety of African populations from Cape Verde to Mozambique in East Africa. As a result, the slaves of Goiás were extraordinarily diverse in ethnic identities. Furthermore, they often lived with indigenous slaves who had been captured in the frontier wars. A common pattern was for an Angolan man to marry or live with an Amerindian woman, such as João Angola, whose wife was Eugenia Xavante, and Manoel Angola, age 50, who married Luiza Ayres da Silva, an Amerindian of the Krahô nation, age 44, in Carmo in 1837.28 The sizas also document the gender of the Central Africans who were sold in the captaincy between 1810 and 1824 when the slave was identified 27 Porto Real taxes, 1830s: Goiás, AMB, no. 1014, Fazenda, Imposto, Escravos – Taxa de 1$000, Porto Imperial, 1836 a 1842, f. 2. 28 Eugenia Xavante: Footnote 25 above; and Luiza Carão: Goiás, BFEG, Casamentos, Nossa Senhora do Monte do Carmo, 1837.

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Central Africans in Brazil Table 4.11. Central Africans Sold in the Captaincy of Goiás by Gender, 1810–1824

Julgados

North São João Tra´ıras Cavalcante Flores São Félix Arraias Conceiç a˜ o Natividade Porto Real South Vila Boa Meia Ponte Santa Luzia Santa Cruz Bonfim Pilar Crixás Araxá Desemboque Sum total

Males

27 2 9 3 1a — 1 3 3 5 53 — 14 9 — 3 8 8 4 7 80

Females

Total

6 — — 1 — — 1 — 2 2 5 — 1 — 1 1 — 1 1 — 11

33 2 9 4 1 — 2 3 5 7 58 — 15 9 1 4 8 9 5 7b 91

% Male

81.8

91.4

87.9

a

Freedman. Includes Mofumbe or Mafumbe. Source: Table 4.9. b

by name (Table 4.11). As to be expected in an African population in demand for manual labor in mining, more than four-fifths of those sold that can be identified as Central Africans were males (88%). Only 11 Central African females were sold in these tax records – six in the North and five in the South. This small sample suggests that the majority of Central Africans in the captaincy lived in isolation from the women of their own ethnic groups. The solitary Angolan man often appears on lists of slaves on plantation inventories. However, a higher percentage of Central African women lived in towns, such as Vila Boa (Table 4.6).


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Because they outnumbered Central African women, most Central African men lived and worked with Minas, and they supervised an ethnically diverse group of Angolan and Mina slaves with crioulo children. The mix of Angolan and West African slaves is especially evident in the detailed inventory of slaves from the estate of José Francisco Hutim, whose properties in and near Vila Boa were confiscated by the Portuguese because of allegations that he and his slaves were stealing gold from the royal Foundry House, which assayed and registered the king’s fifth of gold in Vila Boa. They must have been quite successful in “acquiring gold” because Hutim owned extensive properties and slaves.29 His house slaves numbered 10: Miguel Mina, age 50; Jozé Soares Angola, age 45; Joaquina parda, age 30; Joaquina crioula, age 40; and six children under age 14, including two mulatinhas. Another group of 28 slaves inventoried included five Angolas, one of whom Miguel Angola was the feitor or overseer; 13 Minas; and 10 crioulos. Eighteen of the slaves were males and 10 were females. The oldest was 80 and the youngest was 8 months. Hutim also had a sugar plantation, where he used 22 slaves (17 males and five females). Caetano Angola was the master sugar technician (assucareiro) on this estate. Two other Angolan men also worked there as well as José Banguella. All the rest were Minas (5), Nagôs (2), and crioulos (10), with one cabra. There were only two children, aged 6 and 5 years. The third property was a small farm, where the 24 slaves raised corn and other foodstuffs. On this estate as well, there was the same mix of Minas (2), Angolas (8), Nagôs (2), and crioulos (8); but additionally one mulatinho, age 12 years; one Cabo Verde woman, and two cabrinha children. Perhaps because the labor was not as intensive as on a sugar plantation or mine, the slaves were older. Of the 13 men, six were age 60 or more. The oldest was 80. There were six women between the ages of 20 and 50 years; and there were five female children. The Hutim sequestration documents are like a snapshot in time. The confiscation was rapid, and we see a group of 84 slaves in their diverse work places in the year of 1805. On at least two of the properties, older Angolan men occupied positions of stature: one as overseer and the other as a skilled sugar maker. Their ages suggest they had been slaves for some time in Brazil 29 Hutim Inventories, Lisbon, AHU, caixa 40, letter from D. João Manoel de Menezes to D. Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho, Vila Boa, 23 August 1800 (accusation against three slaves for theft of gold); and caixa 2, Devassa and attached documents and inventories of the property of Jozé Francisco Hutim, Treasurer of the Royal Foundry House in Vila Boa, 4 April 1805 and 6 April 1805. Actually Hutim may have been jailed and his property sequestered because he would not go along with the corruption at the Foundry House. His three slaves, Sebastião, Thomas, and Jozé, were jailed along with Hutim. The Auto de Sequestro was dated 18 August 1800.

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and possibly had long been resident in the captaincy. Some sense of social hierarchies within the slave workforce is evident, and Angolans may have had some advantage because of seniority. Unfortunately, when we turn to other documentation on slaves in the workplace, we do not have the same detail on who the slaves were who worked at different occupations. We are fortunate to learn how many slaves worked where, from data we have from the 1783 household lists, which listed slaves in domestic service, in mining, on engenhos (sugar plantations), and on roças (small plots of land for foodstuffs); the information is summarized in Table 4.12. Notably, Table 4.12 reveals that by 1783, slaves did more than just mine labor. In some districts, the census takers also recorded the number of slaves engaged in domestic service and agricultural labor. In Santa Luzia, for example, 434 slaves labored on sugar plantations, whereas in São Félix 228 worked on roças, more than the 189 in mining. Of interest is that the Table 4.12. Number of Slave by Occupational Category in 1783

District

Anta Arraias Carmo Cavalcante Chapada Pilar Santa Cruz Santa Luzia São Félix Tra´ıras Vila Boa

a

Mining

841 70 43 550 89 806 287 856 189 1,086 —

House

Engenhosa

Roças b

Xc

Total

— 30 21 373 38 — — 225 233 — —

— — — — — 428 94 434 10 f — —

— 264d 54 — 56 1,528e 305e 38 228 — —

— — 39 — 24 — — — 14 1,064 g —

841 364 157 923 207 2,762 686 1,553 674 2,150 4,689

Sugar plantations or other large estates. Small plots of land used for food production. In Santa Luzia, the 38 slaves listed under roças were engaged in raising corn for farinha de milho (cornmeal). c Unknown occupation. d The 264 slaves in Arraias were used on roças, engenhos, and fazendas de gado. e Includes house slaves. f The 10 slaves in São F´ elix worked on a cattle ranch. g The 1,064 slaves in Tra´ıras worked at occupations other than mining. Sources: Rio de Janeiro, Biblioteca Nacional, Manuscript Section, cod. 16.3.2, Not´ıcia Geral da Capitania de Goiás, 1783; and Not´ıcia Geral da Capitania de Goiás em 1783, Paulo Bertran, ed. (Goiânia: Editora da Universidade Católica de Goiás, 1997), pp. 140, 195–196, and 200. b


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scribes also distinguished between slaves who were more autonomous, for example, those that panned for gold on their own, and those who worked under the direct supervision of their masters or overseers. Descriptions of the actual labor that they did are difficult to locate. It is also uncertain if there were any occupations allocated to specific ethnic groups. Gender was more important in determining types of labor; for example men mined; women worked in the households, sold foods and drinks, and did agricultural labor on the roças.30 We do, however, gain insight into the economic behavior of some Central Africans through an examination of sizas and manumission registers, which recorded the purchases of freedom in Vila Boa in the late colonial period. In the captaincy of Goiás, male slaves obviously had access to gold because they were the ones who mined it. Many owners required them to give them a sum of gold on a weekly basis. Whatever they found above that amount, they could keep for their own use. When the mines were new, it was easy for Africans to pay the jornal; it was more difficult once the alluvial gold gave out. In exchange, however, each man had to buy his own food and drinks (cachaça), paying in gold dust. The gold they mined then passed into the hands of slave women, who sold them food and drinks.31 Thus, even women could accumulate enough gold to buy their freedom, or that of their children. When Africans were identified buying their freedom in the siza records, they were almost all Minas. An exception was Manoel Angola of Flores, who paid only 16$300 for his freedom plus the sales tax of $825.32 One suspects that he was aged and/or infirm because his price was so low. In addition to siza records, there is a small sample of manumissions of Africans from the first cartório of Vila Boa from the 1790s. At that time only four Central Africans can be identified: Maria Banguela and her crioula daughter, Antonio Banguela, João Banguela, and Joanna das Neves de Naç a˜ o Angola. In contrast, 15 Minas and one Nagô were freed upon payment of gold or with a new slave, or they received their freedom with conditions, such as service until death.33 Eugenio, the child of Joaquina Mina, was freed at baptism by his godmother, who paid for his freedom. Possibly, the decline 30 Occupations of slave women: Mary Karasch, “Slave Women on the Brazilian Frontier in the Nineteenth Century,” pp. 85–89. 31 The journal paid weekly: Rio de Janeiro, Instituto Histórico Geographico Brasileiro, archive, lata 356, doc. 15, Que utilidades pode dar a campanha vedada de Pilões, se se facultar anônimo, no place, no date [after 1785 and during the reign of Maria I]. The Intendant of Gold in São Félix reported that the gold brought to the royal Foundry House was from the miners who received it from the jornaes of their slaves. Lisbon, AHU, caixa 11, Manoel Gomez da Costa, São Félix, 15 March 1766. 32 Manoel Angola of Flores: Goiás, AMB, Escravos, Sizas dos Escravos Ladinos, no. 170, Flores, 1813–1824. See Table 4.9 for the sources on the sizas 16$300 is the price in mil-réis. 33 Goiás, BFEG, Cartório do Primeiro Oficio de Goiás, Vila Boa, 1792–1799 [or 1793?], f. 81 (Maria), f. 94 ( Joanna), f. 103 (Antonio), f. 111 ( João), and f. 19 (Eugenio).

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of the number of Minas on the slave baptismal registers after 1805 was due to their success in earning their freedom. However, it is also probable that their numbers before that date merely reflect the higher proportion of Minas in the slave population of the late eighteenth century. After they won their freedom, Central Africans appear on household lists as prêtos forros (freed black men), who were miners, small farmers, artisans, and craftsmen – if male – and as pretas forras, who were single women or widowed heads of households of one to three slaves and agregados (household dependents.) They obviously did not match the wealth in slaves of the great miners, merchants, and landowners of the captaincy because they owned so few slaves; but, nonetheless, they were among the propertied of the captaincy. Scribes also identified those who married and had children on the household lists. Angolan women who were the mothers of pardo children sometimes inherited property in slaves and enter the historical records as widows and heads of households. Isabel Angola, for example, was a widow who lived in Barra near Vila Boa. She owned but one slave and had no children listed.34 African men and women with access to gold also had the ability to support families. If they converted to Christianity, they could marry in the Catholic Church; and the black lay brotherhoods (Irmandades) encouraged their members to marry and form Catholic families. Such families can be traced through the baptismal registries, where the priests of Saint Ann’s church habitually recorded the babies born of legitimate marriages, including those born in a quilombo. On November 2, 1813, for example, Faustina, age 2, and Simião, age 6, were baptized. They were the legitimate children of Antonio Angola and Maria do Carmo, slaves of Pedro Ferreira Alvares.35 Because Simião was not baptized until he was 6 years old and because he was a legitimate child born of parents married in the Catholic Church, his baptismal registry suggests that the family had lived in freedom for a number of years before they were recaptured and returned to slavery. Such children were exceptional, however, as most legitimate slave children were few in number in comparison to the natural children of unmarried mothers. The baptismal registries for legitimate children also record the identity of the fathers as well as the mothers. Table 4.13 records the ethnic identity of the married fathers and mothers who baptized legitimate children in Vila Boa between 1794 and 1827. In the late eighteenth century, 34 Rio de Janeiro, Bilioteca Nacional, Manuscript Section, Cod. 16.3.2, Not´ıcia Geral da Capitania de Goiás, 1783, f. 47 (Izabel). 35 Faustina and Simião: Goiás, Orfenato de São José, Diocese de Goiás, Arquivo Geral, Batizados–Goiás, livro 3, 2 November 1813, f. 139.


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Table 4.13. Parents of Baptized Infants, 1794–1827

Mothers

Fathers

African Angola

Congo Mina and Nagô Brazilian Crioulo Pardo Cabra Unknown Sum total

Angola

Mina

Crioula

20 14

11 1

34 16

— 6

— 10

— 18

8 6 1 1 — 28

1 1 — — 1 13

— — — — — 34

Other

13 2 Xavante, 1 Congo, & 1 Cabra 2 Unknown 2 Cabra 2 Unknown & 3 Cabras — — — — 1 Congo 14

Total

78 37

2 39 9 7 1 1 2 89

Source: Goiás, Orfenato de São José, Diocese de Goiás, Arquivo Geral, Batizados-Goiás, livro 3, 1794–1834.

there were few Angolan mothers who had married in the Church – only two from 1794 to 1799, and they were married to Angolan men. In contrast, unmarried Angolan mothers had 26 children baptized. The other married Angolan women were married to Mina men (4), a crioulo, and a pardo. African men, who were predominantly Minas at that time, tended to marry crioula women rather than African women, apparently because of the small number of enslaved African women then living in Vila Boa. Only five Mina women were married to Mina men (1794–1799), including a Nagô. One Congo woman’s husband was not listed because she was a widow. After 1805, however, the ethnic identity of the married parents of baptized children changed dramatically. Henceforth, the fathers and mothers were almost all Angolans; only six fathers and four mothers were Minas. One child was born to a Mina father and an Angolan mother. Possibly as a result of the overall increase in the numbers of Angolans in the town, Angolan men were more able to marry Angolan women. Ten infants had

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parents who were both Angolans. One child had an Angolan father and a Congo mother. Only two Minas were married to other Minas. If the Angolans did not marry Angolan women, then they married crioula women; and eight children were born of such parents. Finally, two children were fathered by an Angolan man and his Xavante wife. In the early nineteenth century, more Angolan men were able to marry Angolan women and baptize their children at Saint Ann’s. Perhaps the increased number of married Angolans was due to the greater number of Angolan women living in Vila Boa than in the period before 1805. Table 4.5 reveals that 68.5% of adult Central Africans baptized in Vila Boa between 1794 and 1827 were males; thus, 31.5% were females. This was a slightly higher percentage of females than in 1792. Did slaveowners decide to keep more Angolan women in Vila Boa and send the men to the mines and plantations? Or, did more Angolans convert, marry in the Catholic Church, and decide to baptize their children? The latter explanation is possible. However, an analysis of the baptisms of the infants of unmarried African mothers (Table 4.14) reveals that the Angolan mothers had 44 infants baptized between 1794 and 1805 – 20 more than in the later period, 1806–1817. In contrast, Mina women had 31 infants baptized between 1794 and 1805 with a decline to only 13 from 1806 to 1817. Overall, 91 infants of Angolan mothers (64.5%) were baptized versus 50 by Mina mothers (35.5%) for a total of 141 baptized infants of African mothers. In other words, this sample of mothers suggests that almost two-thirds of the African mothers resident in Vila Boa were Angolans in the late colonial period – a higher percentage than for the adults baptized. All these statistics provide only group portraits of Central Africans in the captaincy. An occasional document reveals much more about an individual African, in this case Maria Banguela. In 1793, one of the influential men of the captaincy, Antonio de Melo e Vazconcelos, acted as “fiador do quartamento” for her liberty when she gave him the final half libra of gold for her freedom, which he was to give to her master, José da Sylva Porto. The letter goes on to record that she had “various children” by her husband, all of whom had been baptized as forros (freedpersons) with the fiador’s consent, but they had all died except for one daughter. The fiador freed both mother and daughter because Maria had paid the libra of gold for their liberty.36 Thus, this letter testifies to the amount of gold required to buy their freedom but also to a sole surviving daughter. What is 36 Maria Banguela: Goiás, BFEG, Cartório do Primeiro Oficio, 18 March 1793, f. 81.

Table 4.14. Baptized Infants of Unmarried African Mothers in Vila Boa, 1794–1827

Year

Angola

Mina

Total

1794 1795 1796 1797 1798 1799 1800 1801 1802 1803 1804 1805 1806 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 Total Percent

— 8 6 8 2 2 6 1 4 4 1 2 5 1 3 — 1 1 — 1 2 3a 4 3 3 3 3 3 — — 6 4 — 1 91 64.5

1 3 7 3 3 4 2 2 1 3 2 — — 1 1 1 1 1 — 1 2 1 2 2 — 1 — 2 — — 2 — — 1 50 35.5

1 11 13 11 5 6 8 3 5 7 3 2 5 2 4 1 2 2 — 2 4 4 6 5 3 4 3 5 — — 8 4 — 2 141

a

Includes one Rabello (Libolo) mother. Source: Goiás, Orfenato de São José, Diocese de Goiás, Arquivo Geral, Batizados-Goiás, livro 3, 1794–1834.

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striking in the baptismal registries is that so few baptisms of a second or third child by an African mother were recorded. Thus, Maria Banguela may have been typical of those African women who had only one or two children live to be baptized. She was exceptional, however, in the manner of her manumission. In some parts of Brazil, another method of recovering ethnicity is by means of the Irmandade (Brotherhood) records. In the captaincy of Goiás, however, the few surviving books of the black brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary provide limited information on ethnicity or nations. A review of all the lists of boardmembers of Our Lady of the Rosary for the city of Goiás yields only 12 Africans (9 Angolans, 2 Minas, and 1 Conginho, or little Congo). Most brothers and sisters were listed by surnames; that is, they were free or freed blacks, or slaves. Apparently, African identities were usually ignored because both Minas and Central Africans belonged to the same brotherhood. The only other ethnic distinctions that can be identified in the late eighteenth century come from the brotherhood of Our Lady of Mercies in the mining town of Cocal, where the brothers alternated officerships between Africans and crioulos. Ethnic distinctions, including a reference to two separate languages, Congo and Moç ambique, however, survive in the oral traditions of the blacks who participate in the popular festivities dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary in modern Catalão in the far south of Goiás.37 Because Central Africans worked together with Minas and intermarried, there may not have been the great divisions by ethnicity in Goiás, as was so common on the coast. Contemporary traditions stress cooperation rather than conflict; that is, Congos pleased Our Lady of the Rosary when they danced liked the Mozambiques. Possibly the few numbers of Africans in the captaincy combined with great distance mitigated against ethnic conflicts and led to a greater sharing of cultural traditions. One reality of living on a frontier that may have led them to join together in real life and in ritual was the threat of Amerindian attack. When the Kayapó, Xavante, or Canoeiro struck isolated mines and plantations or ranches, they killed the black slaves as well as the white masters and raided quilombos for captives they could trade to the Portuguese. In order to defend themselves and their communities, Africans served with crioulos in the black regiments, called the Henriques, 37 Irmandades: Rosário: Goiás, BFEG, uncatalogued documents, Livro dos Termos de Meza, Nossa Senhora do Rosário, 1826–1864?; and Mercês: Goiânia, Archive of the Curia, Compromisso da Irmandade de Nossa Senhora das Mercês dos Captivos do Arrayal de São Joaquim do Cocal, 1792; and Carlos Rodrigues Brandão, A Festa do Santo de Preto. (Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE/Instituto Nacional do Folclore; Goiânia: UFGO – Editora, 1985), pp. 109–118.


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that protected their families, slaves, and communities against Amerindian attacks.38 As this paper has demonstrated, Central Africans lived and worked in a remote region of Brazil. Perhaps because they lived so far from the coast, their descendants were more able to preserve aspects of their cultural traditions, which continue to enrich popular culture in the states of Goiás and Tocantins. One example is an oral tradition collected in Catalão in the south of Goiás, where the Congos and Moç ambiques dance in Congadas for Our Lady of the Rosary (Figure 4.2). During the song of the Congos, they address her as “queen of heaven,” “queen of Angola,” and “queen of Congo.”39 According to the black participants, who have a myth about how their festival (festa) for Our Lady originated, she appeared “in the desert, a cave” where the blacks were working. Some informants interviewed by Carlos Rodrigues Brandão said that it was in Africa, in Angola, and one proclaimed that Nossa Senhora do Rosário is African. In the tradition, when Our Lady appeared to the slaves, she smiled at them, which frightened them because they did not expect an image to smile. According to one of Brandão’s informants, she then told them that they ought not to live in that way. If they would put on a festa for her, she would give them liberty. From that time on they were very happy because they believed they were not going to be slaves anymore, and they began to dance for her. The sense is that they danced quickly and enthusiastically with great leaps, but she did not accept their dancing in that manner and asked them to dance more slowly. Those that danced more slowly were the Moç ambiques, and she followed them. When the Congos returned dancing “the Moç ambique” for her, she went and accompanied them, and gave them their liberty. As this tradition also reveals, the blacks of Catalão believe that it was because of Our Lady of the Rosary that Princess Isabel freed the slaves.40 A second congada is performed each Saturday night before Pentecost in the city of Goiás.41 Here the Congos arrive dancing on the side of the 38 Indian attacks on slaves and quilombos: Karasch, “Os quilombos do ouro,” pp. 255–256; and Africans in Henriques: Goiânia, Archive of the Curia, Diocese de Goyaz, Registros, Lanç amento das cargas, lista da Companhia de Infantaria, Captain Luis Gonç alves dos Santos and his men, 1799. This is the only regimental list located thus far that records African identities for both soldiers and their parents. The 1820s regimental lists identify them only as crioulos. 39 “O Canto dos Congos,” Brandão, Festa do Santo, pp. 103–108. One informant did not know where Angola was; Ibid., p. 106. 40 Myth of origin of the festa; Ibid., pp. 115–118. 41 Personal observations and photographs of the Congada, feast of Pentecost, 1987 and 1988. The following summary is from Niomar de Souza Pereira and Mára Públio de Souza Veiga Jardim, Uma Festa Religiosa Brasileira: Festa do Divino em Goiás e Pirenóplis (São Paulo: Governo do Estado de São Paulo, Secretaria da Cultura, 1978), pp. 59–62.

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Figure 4.2. Congada, musicians, and dancers in the city of Goiás (courtesy of Mary C. Karasch).

square before St. Ann’s. The dancing group includes 16 persons, that is, 10 soldiers and an ambassador, the King of Congo, two princes, his sons, and his secretary, who are Christians. Another person strengthens the rhythm by playing a box. The soldiers and the ambassador wear satiny red capes and pants and caps with feathers. Their capes are decorated with sparkling silver


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and gold decorations in the form of moons, stars, and words about Our Lady of the Rosary or the black St. Benedict. The soldiers play instruments – the viola, violão, and caracaxá, which is similar to the reco-reco, which they call the “marimba of war.” They dance, sing, and play the instruments at the same time. The ambassador also carries a sword, which he uses to simulate a fight with the Christian secretary. The Christian King of Congo is dressed in blue and white, and he wears a crown and cape and is accompanied by his two sons, the princes. The secretary also wears blue and white. The Congos are the representatives of an embassy sent by the cousin ( prima) of the king, who lives in a very distant land. At first the Christians think that the strangers who arrive in their kingdom are enemies, and the ambassador and secretary fight each other. Afterward the situation is resolved, and all are friends. According to Niomar de Souza Pereira, the text and music have been orally transmitted, and most of the words are “totally incomprehensible.” As these two congadas reveal, Angola and Congo have not been forgotten by the descendants of the Central Africans of the late colonial period. The kings of Congo still reign over the feast days, and the Congos of Catalão sing of the spirits and saints on the seashore. Even Princess Isabel plays on the seashore late at night at the hour of the cock crowing. And, of course, Kalunga is remembered in the naming of the great quilombo that was never destroyed by the Portuguese, and in the Reserva dos Kalunga, where their descendants now live and contest powerful ranchers for control of their ancestral lands.42 42 “Eu vi a Princesa Isabel/ Brincando na beira do mar/ Já era tarde da noite/ Na hora do galo cantar/ Eu vi a princesa Isabel,/Ai meu Deus,/Brincando na beira do mar,” in Brandão, A Festa do Santo do Preto, p. 104. Reserva dos Kalunga: “Acordo permite demarcaç a˜ o de a´ rea Kalunga,” O Popular (Goiânia), 17 July 1996. As of 1996, at least 100 ranchers have invaded and illegally occupied their lands, which are protected under the Constitution of 1988. Marcos André Torres de Souza recently informed me of the publication by Mari de Nasaré Baiocchi of Kalunga: Povo da terra (Bras´ılia: Ministério da Justiç a, Secretaria dos direitos humanos, 1999).

5

Who Is the King of Congo? A New Look at African and Afro-Brazilian Kings in Brazil ELIZABETH W. KIDDY

INTRODUCTION

Throughout the Americas, Reis Congos, or Kings of Congo, have appeared in religious festivals and ritual dramas. Wherever Africans and their descendants suffered enslavement, the election of kings and queens went with them, and in many cases these elections have continued to the present day. In Brazil, Kings of Congo play an important role in festivals with names as diverse as congados, congadas, congos, cucumbis, maracatus, mozambiques, and quilombos that occur from the North to the South of the country. Early folklorists often called the kings of these festivals “kings of smoke” or “fictive kings” and claimed they had no actual power. Their pervasiveness, however, and local importance belies that assumption. Kings of Congo and the rituals in which they participate continue to work for the populations that they represent. The symbolic work ties an Afro-Brazilian community to their African past. The Kings of Congo symbolically link Afro-Brazilians to African political structures and to their African ancestors and pretos velhos (old black spirits).1 The ties to a remembered past forge a shared identity for community members, defining, deepening, and strengthening their bonds with one another and to their pasts. The link that the Kings of Congo represent, however, is mythic in the sense that Afro-Brazilian communities have created a ritual memory tied to an African past, but one that is distinctly and uniquely Brazilian. The current-day Kings of Congo evolved from a tradition of black kings in Brazil that goes back at least to the seventeenth century, and that can only be understood through the examination of their cultural and historical roots. African and Afro-Brazilian kings appeared in Brazil in many roles. Predecessors to the present-day festive Kings of Congo appear in the 1 Elizabeth W. Kiddy, “The Brotherhoods of the Rosary of the Blacks, Community and Devotion in Minas Gerais, Brazil” (Ph.D. diss., The University of New Mexico, 1998), pp. 395–397.

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documentation as elected leaders in lay religious brotherhoods and as participants of dynastic and other public festivals. In other cases, African and Afro-Brazilian kings appeared as community leaders who oversaw guilds of black craftspeople and different ethnic groups. Black kings also played important roles as leaders of mocambos and quilombos (runaway slave communities) and as leaders of uprisings. In short, Afro-Brazilian kings have served a variety of roles, from leaders of violent revolution to celebratory festival kings.2 The largest problem in discussions of these kings has been the tendency to pinpoint some African “survivals” as being pure or more African than others. This has led many scholars to portray West Africans and their descendants as the true repositories of African culture in Brazil. Sidney Mintz pointed out many years ago “the ‘obviously African’ may eventually turn out to demonstrate less about the retention of tradition than the more modified and less immediately identifiable aspects of culture.”3 John K. Thornton and Linda M. Heywood point out in their essays in this volume that by the seventeenth century the Central African experience already included significant mixing with European culture. When Central Africans arrived in Brazil as slaves, the process of mixing continued. Cultural mixing itself, in the Central African communities of Brazil, points to the retention of tradition, the tradition of adaptation. Slaves and freed blacks in Brazilian society formed political cultures headed by a king and arranged hierarchically around a variety of cultural and religious elements.4 The adaptation did not destroy African culture. On the contrary, adaptation enabled Central African culture to thrive – it indicated a vital, dynamic culture, not the remnants of a rapidly disappearing culture. The history of Afro-Brazilian kings has suffered from a lack of clarity both in regard to the origins of the practice of naming royalty and the context in which the practice occurred. Scholars have conflated Kings of Congo with reis negros, or black kings, a more general term for kings from any number of African “nations” or ethnicities.5 By extension, the literature fails to disentangle black kings of one or another ethnicity, including the Brazilian 2 Silvia Hunold Lara, “Significados Cruzados: As embaixadas de Congos no Brasil Colonial,” paper presented at the XX annual conference of the Latin American Studies Association, April 1997; Marina de Mello e Souza, “Reis negros no Brasil escravista, história, mito e identidade na festa de Coroaç a˜ o de Rei Congo” (Ph.D. diss., Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, RJ, 1999). 3 Sidney W. Mintz, “Africa of Latin America: an unguarded reflection,” in Africa in Latin America, Essays on History, Culture, and Socialization, ed. Manuel Moreno Fraginals, trans. Leonor Blum (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1984), p. 287. 4 See also Linda M. Heywood, “The Angolan–Afro-Brazilian cultural connections,” Slavery and Abolition 20:1 (1999): 20. 5 See Elizabeth W. Kiddy, “Ethnic and racial identity in the Brotherhoods of the Rosary of Minas Gerais, 1700–1830,” The Americas 56:2 (October 1999): 221–252.

5. Who Is the King of Congo?

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ethnic designation of Congo, from kings with the title King of Congo. This lack of specificity has led scholars to call any black king a King of Congo, even applying the term to situations a 100 years prior to its appearance in the documentation.6 The recognition of the differences between kings of various African groups makes possible an inquiry into the connection between the ethnicity Congo with the Kings of Congo, and their possible link to the historic Kingdom of Kongo and its leader, the King of Kongo. One consequence of the conflation of all Brazilian kings of African descent with the King of Congo, especially within the context of the lay religious brotherhoods, was the presumption that the King of Congo was a form of social control imposed from above. This interpretation went hand in hand with the notion that kings had no power – they were fictive kings.7 This argument borrowed the idea that the conversion of the King of Kongo in the fifteenth century symbolized the victory of Christianity over heathenism – the triumph of European values over African. The coronation of Brazilian Kings of Congo, then, reenacted the victory of Christianity and European domination over traditional African values and implied the acquiescence of Africans to their enslavement and acceptance of European culture. The essays in the first part of this volume refute this whiting out of Central African culture. An understanding of the processes of culture change and continuity in Central Africa since the arrival of the Europeans enables historians of Brazil to better understand the dynamic relationship between African and Portuguese culture, and how that relationship manifested on Brazilian soil. Far from symbolizing the triumph of European over African culture, the emergence of Brazilian Kings of Congo symbolizes a process of cultural translation and transformation that represents a continuation of Central African culture among Afro-Brazilians. Black kingship and Kings of Congo in Brazil gradually moved away from distinctions based on ethnic identities to a Central African derived AfroBrazilian identity. The presence of kings and queens helped these Central Africans to reconstruct and recreate an African derived political and religious culture. The slow development from kings with ethnic titles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Kings of Congo in the late eighteenth 6 See, for example, José Ramos Tinhorão, Os negros em Portugal, uma Presença Silenciosa (Lisboa: Ed. Caminho, 1988), pp. 144–146; Patricia A. Mulvey, “The black lay brotherhoods of Colonial Brazil: a history” (Ph.D. diss, The City University of New York, 1976), pp. 87–88; John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 203. 7 See Mário de Andrade, “Danç as Dramáticas do Brasil” in Obras Completas, Vol. 2 (São Paulo: Livraria Martins Editora, 1960), p. 17; and Alceu Maynard Araújo, Folclore Nacional, Vol. 1 (São Paulo: Ediç o˜ es Melhoramentos, 1964), pp. 216–217.

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and nineteenth centuries documents the emergence of an Afro-Brazilian culture, deeply rooted in Central Africa but distinctly Brazilian. ANTECEDENTS

The presence of black kings in almost every Euro-American colony highlights the important role that kingship played in Africans’ understanding of the world. African leaders, whether chiefs of small polities or kings of large states, held important ritual positions that mediated several levels of social, religious, and political relationships. Central African leaders were on the top of a very well understood hierarchy that defined a person’s position in the society of the living and also included an unseen world that extended to the ancestors and/or spirits and to the unborn as well as animals, plants, and inanimate objects. Leaders mediated, by means of ritual action, between society and the natural environment and between the living and the dead.8 African kings united people with each other and linked them with all that existed. Kings connected what Westerners define as the sacred and profane, but what African culture portrays as inseparable elements. Central African kings played important political and economic roles, both within Africa and between Africa and Europeans hungry for African gold, copper, and slaves. In the late fifteenth century in this political capacity the Portuguese first sought to build relations with the King of Kongo. The Portuguese placed representatives and factors in Mbanza Kongo, just as the Kongo royalty sent many noblemen, including a royal factor, to Lisbon. This political and economic exchange was possible because, as John K. Thornton pointed out, “Kongo and Portugal were of the same world.”9 One important aspect of the sameness of the Portuguese and Kongo worlds was the overlapping of the sacred and profane. In the lingering crusade atmosphere of early modern Europe, the ritual, sacred nature of explorations and discoveries played an enormous role in the justification and propulsion of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Portuguese explorations of Africa. The Catholic Church sanctioned the Portuguese explorations, the explorers themselves were deeply religious men, and missionaries arrived very early on in recently opened Central Africa. The Portuguese related to the King of Kongo on this ritual level, winning a great victory for Christianity by 8 See Wyatt MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 216. 9 John K. Thornton, “Early Kongo-Portuguese relations: a new interpretation,” History in Africa, 8 (1981): 188.


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means of his conversion. The King of Kongo became, for the Europeans, the quintessential symbol of African conversion to Christianity. Concurrently, Kings of Kongo understood Christianity as a natural extension of their own ritual power; they used it to consolidate and strengthen their political position in the region. Christianity spread in Kongo from the nobility down to the commoners. By the late sixteenth century, missionaries boasted that there were Christian churches in all the “kingdoms, lordships and provinces” of Kongo.10 But the Kings and the people of Kongo viewed Christianity as but a new means and a new set of symbols to express traditional Central African beliefs. Just as the kings interpreted Christianity as an extension of their traditional ritual and temporal power, the Kongo people often understood Christian rites and Christian talismans as new protections against witchcraft.11 This held true in the Kingdom of Kongo and in the Portuguese-held regions of Luanda and Benguela, and throughout large regions of the Central African hinterland.12 This African Christianity, however, was as much African as Christian. In this manner the relationship between Portugal and Kongo rested on mutual misunderstanding – a “dialogue of the deaf ” grew up between European missionaries and their African flock. African Christianity was just that: a profoundly African interpretation of Christianity.13 Despite this miscommunication, many, and perhaps a majority, of Central Africans became Christians, adopting Christian symbols, rituals, and organizations that included lay religious brotherhoods.14 Lay religious brotherhoods served as burial societies, mutual aid organizations, and centers of devotional life throughout the Iberian world. They are also the most cited locations of African and African-descended kings and queens in the Americas. Lay brotherhoods sponsored many of the festivals that continue today. Brotherhoods in early modern Iberian culture held annual feast day celebrations that were often boisterous and included both drinking and dancing. Sometimes they included the election of a leader with a moniker of royalty. The feast day celebrations of the Divine Holy 10 Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 50–65. See also John K. Thornton’s contribution to this collection. 11 Hilton, The Kingdom, 98. 12 On the interpenetration of European and African cultural elements, see Linda M. Heywood’s contribution in this collection. 13 See Wyatt MacGaffey, “Dialogues of the deaf: Europeans on the Atlantic coast of Africa,” in Implicit Understandings, Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 249–267; and John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans, pp. 237–250; and John K. Thornton’s contribution to this collection. 14 See Heywood, “The Angolan–Afro-Brazilian,” pp. 13–15.

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Spirit, for example, have annually elected an emperor since the thirteenth century.15 When Africans and their descendents chose kings and queens in their brotherhoods in Brazil, Iberian precedents existed that made the practice acceptable to Portuguese authorities who might otherwise have seen them as subversive organizations. The most frequent and the earliest brotherhoods for Portuguese and Brazilian blacks were the brotherhoods of Our Lady of the Rosary. The earliest rosary brotherhood was founded in the Dominican monastery of Lisbon in the late fifteenth century. The incorporating statutes of that organization allowed that “any brother who wishes, by their devotion, to be majordomo, Prince, Kings, Duke, Count, Marquis, Cardinal, or any other dignitaries” could do so.16 After this early record, however, the documents fall silent about any royalty among their leadership until the third decade of the eighteenth century, and there is no documentation of a King of Congo until the mid-nineteenth century.17 The earliest persistent documentation of the coronation of African kings in a Portuguese context, in fact, began to appear in seventeenth century Brazil in runaway slave communities and brotherhoods. Africans also formed religious brotherhoods in São Tomé, the Kingdom of Kongo, and Angola, demonstrating that the impulse for brotherhoods for blacks in Brazil may have also come from enslaved Africans themselves, not merely from religious orders anxious to catechize the slave population.18 The familiarity of Central Africans with Catholic symbols, rituals, and organizations, combined with a belief in the hierarchical ordering of society and the ritual role of kings, made the lay religious brotherhoods an ideal place in which to recreate an African community in Brazil. African kings or chiefs also served as leaders of warrior groups, giving some ritual and political leaders military roles, roles which some Africans in Brazil also assumed.19 Where Africans and their descendents banded together to form communities in lay religious brotherhoods, in runaway slave communities, or when they 15 Mari Lyn Salvador, “Food for the Holy Ghost: ritual exchange in Azorean festivals,” in Time Out of Time, Essays on the Festival, ed. Alessandro Falassi (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), p. 246; and Martha Abreu, O Imperio do Divino, Festas Religiosas e Cultura Popular no Rio de Janeiro, 1830–1900 (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1999), pp. 38–47. 16 “Compromisso of the Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary of Black Men,” Cap´ıtulo 26, published in Mulvey, “Black Lay Brotherhoods,” 262. 17 António Brásio, S. Sp., Os pretos em Portugal (Lisboa: República Portuguesa Ministério das Colónias, 1944), pp. 96–98; Mulvey, “The Black Lay Brotherhoods,” pp. 273–282; Tinhorão, Os negros em Portugal, 144–146, 191–192. 18 See Kiddy, “Brotherhoods of Our Lady,” pp. 75–82; and Heywood, “The Angolan–Afro-Brazilian,” pp. 14–17. 19 Stuart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels, Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 1996), pp. 122–128.


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revolted against the slave system, they named a king to serve in a ritual, political, and military capacity. These kings reaffirmed African, and more specifically Central African, notions of power, identity, and community, in Brazil. BLACK KINGS IN BRAZIL

The first record of a ritual performance in Brazil that included an African king occurred during the visit of the ambassador of the King of Kongo to Dutch Recife in 1642. According to the description written by the Dutch eyewitness, Gaspar Barlaeus, the Kongelese ambassador and his retinue gave a performance that included “original dances, leaps, formidable swordplay, [and] the dazzle of eyes simulating anger against an enemy.”20 In a ritual drama, the Kongolese ambassador represented the King of Kongo and received different embassies from various nations who paid homage to him, “according to the ceremonies used among their nations, in their deportment, courtesies, and reverential behavior.”21 The description of the ritual enacted by the emissaries of the King of Kongo closely resembled the rituals that would later be enacted by the brotherhoods of the rosary. The similarities suggest that the performance of these embassies in the brotherhoods echoed African practices, linking them to similar ritual coronations in European feast day celebrations.22 While Dutch officials entertained the emissary of the King of Kongo in one region of Pernambuco, the famous Quilombo dos Palmares had grown into a kingdom of runaway slaves in the backlands. In Palmares, a king, with the title of Ganga Zumba, ruled over several villages in the interior of what is today the state of Alagoas. After the Portuguese expelled the Dutch in 1654, they attacked the quilombo in futile attempts to overthrow it. In 1678, after an especially brutal attack by the Portuguese, Ganga Zumba went to the new governor of Pernambuco to unsuccessfully sue for peace. Finally, in 1694, the Europeans wiped out Palmares in a 2-year battle with the help of indigenous troops.23 The battles with the Quilombo dos Palmares remained, for centuries, a feared reminder of what slaves could accomplish if they banded together. 20 Gaspar Barlaeus, Historia dos feitos recentements Praticados durante Oito Anos no Brasil, trans. Cláudio Brandão (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério de Educaç a˜ o, 1940), p. 272. All translations from Portuguese to English are mine unless otherwise noted. 21 Ibid. 22 See Salvador, “Food for the Holy,” p. 246. 23 See Robert Edgar Conrad, Children of God’s Fire, A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (University Park, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 369–377; Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, pp. 122–128.

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When Africans named kings in rebellious or tumultuous situations, or in mocambos or quilombos, such action caused great alarm. Even so, in the same decade that Ganga Zumba sued for peace, the first records of the coronations of kings and queens in rosary brotherhoods in Brazil appeared in Recife. From the founding of the rosary brotherhood in 1654 to the middle of the eighteenth century, the brotherhood restricted membership to Angolans and crioulos, or Brazilian-born blacks.24 Each of these groups elected members of their groups to be kings, queens, and male and female judges, and the positions were held by both slaves and free men and women. Every year the brotherhood paid the local vicar to celebrate a mass on the day of the coronations.25 Jesuit André João Antonil, who traveled throughout Brazil in the late seventeenth century, also wrote of how the slaves named their own kings, in this case on a plantation in Bahia. On the afternoon after celebrating the feast days of Our Lady of the Rosary, Saint Benedict, and the patron saint of the plantation chapel, the slaves danced and sang for hours.26 Antonil offers evidence of a rural occurrence of the coronation of kings and queens that may have been present throughout the sugar growing regions. Jesuits had actively helped to create brotherhoods of the rosary for slaves throughout the backlands of Brazil throughout the seventeenth century, many of which probably elected kings and queens. By the eighteenth century the presence of kings as office holders in lay religious brotherhoods and in quilombos had become common place throughout the captaincies of Brazil. In the early eighteenth century, because of the discovery of gold, Minas Gerais joined Bahia and Pernambuco as a major slave-importing captaincy. As Minas Gerais grew in importance, so did Rio de Janeiro, which served as the main port for the importation of slaves for the mines and became capital of the colony in 1763.27 All of these regions became hubs of the slave populations, as well as centers of large numbers free and freed blacks. All of the urban centers of the four captaincies contained lay religious brotherhoods of blacks, especially in their urban centers. As the population of slaves and free blacks grew, government authorities began to feel the threat of possible slave rebellion. These authorities chafed at the apparent independence of blacks in the brotherhoods that elected kings and queens. Fearing that the naming of leaders would lead to rebellions, local 24 Mulvey, “The Black Lay Brotherhoods,” p. 289. 25 “Manuscritos da Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Rosario dos Homens Pretos do Recife,” Arquivos, ed. Diretoria de Documentaç a˜ o e Cultura, Prefeitura Municipal, Recife, no. 1–2 (1945–1951): 53–89. 26 André João Antonil (pseud.), Cultura e opulência do Brasil (São Paulo: Melhoramentos, 1976), p. 92. 27 Before 1763, Salvador, Bahia was the capital of Brazil.


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governments tried to outlaw the crowning of kings and queens. In the capital of Bahia, Salvador, a 1728 proclamation outlawed the coronations of kings and queens during the rosary festivals. The proclamation accused the blacks of “robbing their own altars” to decorate the festival with the usual pomp, and of “violently entering houses of many citizens and taking slaves who were being punished,” supposedly so that the latter could participate in the rosary festival. The proclamation prohibited the brotherhoods of Our Lady of the Rosary from electing kings and queens, but it allowed the selection of male and female judges like the brotherhoods of whites. Finally, it warned that any slave participating in the coronations would be punished – the men by serving 1 year in the galleys and the women with a prison sentence.28 In 1720, the governor of the captiancy of Minas Gerais and São Paulo, the Conde de Assumar, also banned the coronation of black kings and queens. He posted a proclamation condemning the crowning of kings and queens in religious festivals, a problem, he wrote, that had been eliminated in most of Minas Gerais except in the northern district (comarca) Serro do Frio. There, the blacks “at their feast days acclaim and crown black Kings and Queens in a solemn act,” which, to the Count was “a repugnant act considering the humble condition of the slaves, which must be preserved.”29 He threatened to withold the pay of any priest who agreed to crown kings and queens.30 The Conde de Assumar’s reaction could have been prompted by the parallel institution of black rebels choosing royalty to lead uprisings. Assumar had heard rumors of a slave revolt in which the rebels had already “named among themselves King, Prince, and military officials.” Although the Governor thought this rumor was some “ridiculousness” of the blacks, he also had heard a similar warning from a nearby town.31 He suggested that all of the blacks from Mina (a general term for West Africans who had embarked on the Slave Coast) and Angola who called themselves kings be captured and thrown out of town.32 In the same letter he remarked that these rebellious blacks possessed the ability to begin “operations” against the whites “like those of Palmares of Pernambuco.”33 In 1725, the next governor 28 “Copia do Bando que se publicou sobre não haver reynados nas festas do Rozario dos Pretos,” reprinted in Mulvey, “The black lay brotherhoods,” pp. 115–116. 29 Letter from the Conde de Assumar to the King, Dom João V, 20 May 1720. Arquivo Público Mineiro (hereafter APM) SC11, 288v. 30 Ibid. 31 Letter from the Conde de Assumar to the King, Dom João V, 20 April 1719, Revista do Arquivo Público Mineiro (hereafter RAPM) 3 (1898): 263–264. 32 Ibid., 264. 33 Ibid.

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of the captaincy, Dom Lourenç o de Almeida, wrote to the Portuguese King complaining that an uprising had been avoided only because “the blacks from Angola wished that one of their compatriots would be King of all of them, and those from Mina wished the same thing.”34 Despite the fears and preventative measures of successive governors, slaves continued to flee and form quilombos throughout Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century. Almost all of the official documents written between 1730 and 1777 describing the threat of quilombos included a description of kings and/or queens leading the communities.35 In 1738, for example, the governor Gomes Freire de Andrada wrote that he had captured two women from a quilombo, one of which was the queen of the community. The largest quilombo of Minas Gerais, that of Ambrósio, which at its peak had a population of well over 1,000 men, women, and children, also elected a king.36 The documentation on these quilombos remains scarce, but the repeated references to kings and queens leading runaway slave communities throughout much of the eighteenth century demonstrates that the groups elected, or selected in some way, leaders with titles of royalty to lead them. Members of the Mineiran brotherhoods also continued to elect kings and queens to lead their organizations, despite the 1720 prohibition. A proviso written into the compromisso, or incorporating statutes, of the rosary brotherhood in the village of Cachoeira do Campo by the ecclesiastic visitor in 1723 affirmed that the coronations of kings and queens among the black membership had become an integral part of that brotherhood.37 The accounting books form Cachoeira do Campo revealed that the reinado (the crowning of kings and queens) remained important in the feast day celebration at least through the middle of the nineteenth century.38 Even Serro do Frio, where the Conde de Assumar had specifically targeted his ban, ignored the prohibition. The 1728 compromisso of the rosary brotherhood of Vila do Principe (Serro), the capital of the Serro do Frio district, included a king and queen.39 34 Letter from Dom Lourenç o de Almeida to King Dom João V, 18 June 1725, RAPM 30 (1979): 201. 35 Carlos Magno Guimarães, “Mineraç a˜ o, quilombos e Palmares, Minas Gerais no Século XVIII,” in Liberdade por um fio, História dos Quilombos no Brasil, ed. João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996), pp. 147–149. 36 Ibid., p. 148. 37 Compromisso da Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário novamente Erecta na Igreja Matris de Nossa Senhora da Nazareth do lugar da Caxueira no distrito das Minas . . . o anno de 1713, Arquivo Eclesiástico da Arquidiocese de Mariana (hereafter AEAM) AA22, 8. 38 Receita e Despeza da Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário, Cachoeira do Campo, 1783–1840, AEAM AA24. 39 Compromisso da Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rozário na Freguezia da Conceyça˜ o da Villa do Pr´ıncipe do Sêrro do Frio no Anno de 1.728 (Serro, MG: Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário, 1979), p. 1.


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The second half of the eighteenth century brought new restrictions on the naming of kings and queens in brotherhoods – this time coming from the metropolis. The Marquis de Pombal (Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo) attempted to centralize the power of their far-flung empire.40 The Pombaline reforms had their largest impact on the economic structure in Brazil, but Pombal’s zeal to centralize power in Lisbon also affected the relationship between Church and state. Most notably, he removed power from local Church authorities and lay organizations and placed it with the state in Lisbon.41 He ordered that all compromissos (incorporating statutes), which often included the clauses calling for kings and queens, should be sent to Lisbon to be approved by the Mesa de Consciência e Ordens (the branch of government that oversaw Church activities). Among other reforms, his law prohibited the “coronation of kings and queens in the brotherhoods of blacks.42 Coronations of black kings and queens, however, continued in Minas Gerais and elsewhere in Brazil and Portugal. The 1762 compromisso of the brotherhood in the town of São Caetano, after listing the officers, declared that “in order not to break the inveterate custom of this town, and this America, there will be in this Brotherhood also a king and queen.”43 The brotherhood in the village of Santa Rita in the district of Sabará wrote in their 1784 compromisso that brotherhoods of blacks customarily nominated a king and queen to increase the devotion of their members.44 In some places, such as the town of São João del Rei in the southern mining district of Rio das Mortes, the compromisso of the rosary brotherhood did not mention kings and queens. Nevertheless, the accounting books and the election lists from that brotherhood consistently listed a king and queen as having paid their dues.45 These records suggest that the practice of crowning kings and queens had indeed become “inveterate custom” throughout Brazil. Rio de Janeiro, as it grew steadily in importance as a slave port in the eighteenth century, concurrently grew as a center of black religious 40 See Kenneth R. Maxwell, “Pombal and the nationalization of the Luso-Brazilian economy,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 48 (November 1968): 608–631. 41 Thomas C. Bruneau, The Political Transformation of the Brazilian Catholic Church (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 20. 42 Caio César Boschi, Os leigos e o poder: Irmandades leigos e pol´ıtica colonizadora em Minas Gerais (São ´ Paulo: Editora Atica, 1986), pp. 121–122. 43 Livro do Compromisso da Irmandade de Nossa Senhor do Rosário dos pretos da freguesia de São Caetano (Monsenhor Horta), 1762. AEAM Livros das Irmandades 22. 44 Compromisso pelo qual se deve regular a Irmandade de N. Senhora do Rozário dos Pretos erecta no arraial de Santa Rita da Freguezia de Santo Antonio do Rio Assima, 1784, ABGS, Cap´ıtulo 3. 45 Compromisso da Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos, São João del Rei, 1787, Archive of the Museu de Arte Sacra de São João del Rei (hereafter MASSJR) 4.01; Livro de Receitas e Despezas, Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos, São João del Rei, 1803–1825, Arquivo de Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário (hereafter AINSR).

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brotherhoods. The earliest of those brotherhoods, that of Our Lady of the Rosary founded before 1669, did not crown kings and queens until 1759. That year, the compromisso was reformed and the brotherhood officially elected their first king and queen.46 The rosary brotherhood, however, was not the only one to elect kings and queens in Rio de Janeiro. Nineteenth century folklorist Alexandre José de Mello Moraes Filho described a black king and queen in the brotherhood of King Balthasar in the Lampadosa Church. Titling his account “The coronation of a black king in 1748,” Moraes Filho used a petition written in 1748 by the “Emperor, the king and queen and other adepts of the nation of the holy King Balthasar” as the basis of his text. The petition requested that the brotherhood be allowed to collect alms so that on the Day of Kings they would have the funds to crown a king of the Rebolo nation and go out and dance and sing in the streets.47 Africans and their descendents came into the city from plantations to celebrate the occasion with slaves and free blacks living in the city. Moraes Filho described the coronation ceremonies and the ensuing festival, calling them “traditional festivals and genuinely African, celebrated in Rio in the last [18th ] century.”48 During the religious ceremony of the coronation, the chaplain of the brotherhood crowned the new royalty, and then the king and queen made their mark on the official document of their coronation. After the religious ceremony, members sang and danced the batuques (songs and dances) of different African nations. The African instruments announced the “triumphal entrance of the Congos in the profane festivities of the coronation of the black King.”49 Moraes Filho included a description of the 1811 celebration that described the coronation of a king and queen of the Cabundá nation, demonstrating that the nation of the elected royalty changed from year to year.”50 At the end of the eighteenth century, a captain of the royal army, Carlos Julião, painted watercolors of sites in Rio de Janeiro, including the coronation of a black king in Rio de Janeiro on the Day of Kings. The image depicted a similar scene to that which Moraes Filho described in his text, with a king carrying a long staff and being shaded by a large umbrella (Figure 5.1).51 Yet, in the early part of the nineteenth century, travelers to 46 Joaquim José da Costa, Breve noticia da Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosario e S. Benedicto dos Homens Pretos da Cidade do Rio Capital do Imperio do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. Economica de Jacintho J. Fonte, 1863), pp. 75–78. 47 Alexandre José de Mello Moraes Filho, Festas e tradiço˜es populares do Brasil, rev. and ed. Lu´ıs da Câmara Cascudo (Rio de Janeiro: Tecnoprint Gráfica S. A., 1967), p. 396. 48 Ibid., p. 398. 49 Ibid., p. 400. 50 Ibid., p. 399. 51 Carlos Julião, “Coronation of a black king,” Fundaç a˜ o Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Dept. of Iconography.


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Figure 5.1. Detail from a coronation of a black king (courtesy of Fundaç a˜ o Biblioteca Nacional).

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the city already noted the demise of this African celebration. Jean Baptiste Debret, a traveler to Rio de Janeiro in the early nineteenth century, drew a picture of the king and queen of the rosary brotherhood collecting alms for the maintenance of their church. The king and queen, dressed in European finery, were seated against a wall. Musicians played horns off to their left while on the right a small black girl put money on the collection plate, urged on by a group of black women (Figure 5.2).52 Debret commented that the “loud costumed festivals” of the black brotherhoods were no longer allowed in Rio de Janeiro – to see them you had to travel to other parts of Brazil.53 The picture, he added, represented a black brotherhood in the far southern state of Rio Grande do Sul.54 Prior to the second half of the eighteenth century, no document mentioned the election of a discreet and ongoing election of a King of Congo, even though Moraes Filho described a group of dancers called Congos. All of the official documentation stressed the election of black kings and queens, that is, reis negros of one or another ethnicity, even in brotherhoods that divided along ethnic lines. Brotherhoods, however, did not always divide along ethnic lines. Patricia Mulvey found that of 165 compromissos of black brotherhoods throughout Brazil, only nine divided along ethnic lines. The three ethnically divided brotherhoods founded in the seventeenth century were rosary brotherhoods, one in Recife and two in Bahia, and all were for Angolan and crioulo slaves and free blacks. In the eighteenth century, Africans of the Gege nation opened two brotherhoods of Good Jesus (Bom Jesus) in Bahia (one in Salvador and one in Cachoeira). During the same century, Angolans opened another rosary brotherhood, and the “NagoYoruba of the Ketu nation” opened a brotherhood of Our Lady of the Good Death.55 In Rio, too, only some of the brotherhoods divided along ethnic lines. Of 23 black brotherhoods listed by Mary Karasch in her work on slave life in Rio de Janiero in the early nineteenth century, nine included restrictions on membership. Four of the brotherhoods were restricted to pardos (people of mixed African and European descent) and another put limits on pardo control of the ruling board (mesa). Crioulos and pardos together formed another. Only three restricted their membership to particular ethnicities. The “black brotherhood of the apostles St. Philip and St. James,” originally 52 Jean Baptiste Debret, “Collection for the maintenance of the church of the Rosary,” Fundaç a˜ o Biblioteca Nacional, Dept. of Iconography. 53 Jean Baptiste Debret, Viagem Pitoresca e Histórica ao Brasil, Vol. 2, trans. and ed. Sérgio Milliet (São Paulo: Livraria Martins Editora, 1954), p. 225. 54 Ibid. 55 Mulvey, “The black lay brotherhoods,” pp. 289–303.

Figure 5.2. Collection for the maintenance of the Church of the Rosary (courtesy of Fundaç a˜ o Biblioteca Nacional).

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housed in the Lampadosa Church, had been “given” to the Congos. Angolans founded the brotherhood of Our Lady of Belem in 1765, and Mina blacks from West Africa the brotherhood of St. Efigenia and St. Elesbão.56 The records of black kings in some of these brotherhoods show that the most common single ethnically restricted brotherhoods to crown kings and queens were of Angolans. For example, the seventeenth-century record of the rosary brotherhood in Pernambuco, which restricted its membership to blacks from Angola and Brazil, elected two kings, one from each of those groups. In Bahia, Angolans had formed the rosary brotherhood, and it restricted membership to people from that nation. Similarly, in Rio de Janeiro, the brotherhood of St. Balthasar, who himself would come to be called the King of Congo, elected kings and queens from various nations, but the two recorded were from the Rebolo and Cabundá nations, both regions of Central Africa. In Minas Gerais, the black brotherhoods did not divide along ethnic lines. The brotherhoods of the rosary, by far the most ubiquitous of the black brotherhoods, all had heterogeneous populations. In my study of four different brotherhoods, I found over 62 different ethnicities to be participating, both as members and as elected and voluntary officials.57 The general trend in the populations in these brotherhoods shifted over time, like the change in the general slave population, from a large number of West Africans to an overwhelming preponderance of Central Africans by the second half of the eighteenth century. In conjunction with the changing ethnicities, the crioulo population in the brotherhoods steadily increased in the course of the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century. Brotherhood election lists reflected this general trend. Members of various nations became kings and queens, with the majority of identified ethnicities being Central African.58 The sharing of the titles of kings and queens within a heterogeneous Central African community demonstrated the commitment of that population to work together for the community, rather than exposing a population fractured by ethnic rivalries. The frequent passing of the title of king and queen in the brotherhoods has led many scholars to conclude that the role of the kings and queens in the brotherhoods was politically insignificant. In the eighteenth century the black kings of Minas Gerais held enough power to prompt the vicar of a 56 Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 84. 57 Kiddy, “The brotherhoods of the Rosary,” p. 423. 58 Livro de Termos de Meza, Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário, Arraial de Bacalhau, Freguesia de Nossa Senhora da Conceiç a˜ o de Guarapiranga, 1758–1893, AEAM Y12.


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small town near the city of Mariana, Padre Leonardo de Azevedo Castro, to write a petition in 1771 to the governor of Minas Gerais complaining about the abuses of kings in the rosary brotherhoods. Like the Conde de Assumar 50 years earlier, Padre Leonardo complained that the titles of king and queen were “indecent, abominable, and incompatible” with slavery. He attached a series of documents to the complaint that, in his view, proved the bad character of the blacks. In one example, the king went to the jail to order the freedom of some prisoners. When the jailer asked for the order of the judge, the king responded that he did not care what the judge ordered, that he was the king and he who gave the orders. In another, the king and his retinue passed by two shoemakers who did not remove their hats nor stand up when the group passed. In response, the blacks started a brawl that the chief of police had to break up. Clearly, the kings of the brotherhoods had an understanding of their temporal, local power as the leader of the black population. Kings also played a part in the religious and magical complex present in the brotherhoods. Padre Leonardo complained that in his city the blacks knew that the reelected king was their true king because an oracle had foretold it. Members of the brotherhood respected the king as a fortune-teller, and people came from all over seeking his advice.59 The combination of the temporal and ritual power of the kings that Padre Leonardo pointed out in his complaints indicate how the election and leadership of black kings helped to reconstruct an African worldview in the brotherhoods. The black kings enjoyed a political presence at the local level, and an understanding of their own right to receive respect and to wield power within their own communities. The kings also exercised ritual powers that remained obscured in the hidden transcript of the brotherhoods.60 It is likely, despite the absence of documentation, that kings wielded similar power in the quilombos and slave rebel groups. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, black kings came to be called Kings of Congo. The title came to be used in an extraethnic sense for the leader in a community of slaves and freedpeople that combined the political power and ritual skills from their African predecessors. KINGS OF CONGO IN BRAZIL

The earliest mention of Kings of Congo in Brazil, Francisco Calmon’s 1760 account, described the celebration for the marriage of the Princess of Brazil 59 Cited in Gilberto Freyre, Sobrados e mucambos, decadência do patriarcado rural e desenvolvimento do urbano, Vol. 2, 5th ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria José Olympio Editora, 1977), pp. 412–415. 60 See James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

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to her uncle, Dom Pedro, in Santo Amaro, a sugar-growing port in the Bahian recôncavo. The festivities included the “Coronation of the Congos,” which consisted of 80 masked dancers who led the King and Queen of the Congo in a procession through the town.61 The Congos danced on the fourteenth of December along with the ambassador to the King of Congo. On the sixteenth, the Congo dancers appeared again with over 80 masked participants in African costumes adorned with diamonds and gold, leading the richly ornamented King and Queen. Once seated in their velvet-lined chairs, the royalty watched the dances of talheiras and quicumbis, which were accompanied by African instruments.62 On the eighteenth, the groups and the royalty paraded and performed again, and then again on the twentieth, the penultimate day of the festival. Calmon stressed that in each case, even though the ritual remained the same, the general public adored the richly ornamented king and queen and the lively dances and theater in which their “subjects” reveled.63 Africans and their descendents had apparently become an important part of the community to such a degree that they enjoyed a major role in a townwide dynastic festival. According to Calmon, all of the townspeople enjoyed watching the African court, fully accepted their existence, and felt no threat from their participation. Despite the richly descriptive account, however, the event does not specify if the King and Queen of Congo were from the Kingdom of Kongo, nor even if they were part of the secondary ethnicity of Congo. Nevertheless, the names of the dances, as well as the titles of the royalty, indicate cultural elements that clearly point to a Central African community that celebrated its rituals within the European social structure. In Rio de Janeiro, the title King of Congo also came into usage in the late eighteenth century. An account of the celebration held in honor of the birth of the Prince of Beira stated that “all of the pardos in the city made royal court (estado) imitating that of the King of Congo, and it consisted of: a king, a prince, two ambassadors, seven chiefs, nine captains of the guard, three mocambos, one of them naked pretending to be in Africa, armed with a bow 61 Francisco Calmon, Relaça˜ o das Faust´ıssimas Festas, Reproduça˜ o fac-similar da ediça˜ o de 1762 (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. FUNARTE/INF, 1982). 62 The quicumbi that Calmon described became the cucumbi of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, described in detail by Moraes Filho in Festas, pp. 190–198. On the derivation of the word see Karasch, Slave Life, p. 247; Heywood, “The Angolan–Afro-Brazilian,” p. 12. The Talheiras became the Taieira, a dance of the type described by Beatriz Góis Dantas in the terreiro of Nagô in which the mãede-santo takes responsibility to put on this traditional festival on the feast day of Saint Benedict. ´ See Beatriz Góis Dantas, Vovó Nagô e Papai Branco, Usos e abusos da Africa no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Ediç o˜ es Graal, 1988), pp. 220–225. Both of these remain coronation dances today. 63 Calmon, Relaça˜ o, pp. 22–25.


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and arrow.”64 The description of pardos who imitated the King of Congo demonstrates the close association between Africans and their descendents and the coronation of a King of Congo in a festival. When people of mixed descent engaged in the same practice, they were imitating the African ritual practice – and also the practice of Afro-Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro. In the city of Recife, the title King of Congo appeared in a much different setting than those who participated in dynastic festivals. A series of government military commissions (patentes), issued between 1776 and 1802, nominated blacks of different nations to be governors of Africans of those nations, or blacks of different professions to the position of governor of members of that profession. In both cases, the commission papers ordered the King of Congo to recognize and honor the black governors. In 1776, for example, the Governor of Pernambuco recognized Simião da Rocha of the nation Dagome to be the Governor of other Africans of that nation. The commission stated that “Through this I [the governor of Pernambuco] order the respective King of the Congo that by this he will recognize, honor, and esteem him [Simião da Rocha].65 In 1792, another commission named “the black Domingos da Fonseca to the position of Governor of the Black Canoe Drivers in this Town of Recife,” also to be recognized by the King of Congo.66 These government commissions were linked to the social structure within the rosary brotherhood through the position of king of Congo – the same brotherhood that had previously limited the position of King and queen to Angolas and crioulos in their seventeenth century compromisso. The 1782 compromisso, however, called for a King and Queen of Congo to be elected from among the members from the Kingdom of Angola (Reino de Angola). The King of Congo would have the responsibility to “name a Governor of each Nation.”67 This example from late-eighteenth-century Recife demonstrates that the representative of the Central Africans would be the King of Congo, who would rule over the “other,” West African nations. The acceptance of a kind of parallel government depended on the sympathies of the Governor of Pernambuco. In 1815 the Governor, Caetano Pinto de Miranda Montenegro, wrote that he had tried to stop the commissions 64 Quoted in Lara, “Significados cruzados,” p. 10. 65 Simião da Rocha, Governador da naç a˜ o Dagome, 3 February 1776. Arquivo Público do Estado de Pernambuco (hereafter APEPE), Pp 02, folha 114v. 66 O Preto Domingos da Fonseca, Governador dos pretos canoeiros desta vila, 5 December 1792. APEPE, Pp 07, folha 116. 67 Compromisso da Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rozario dos homens pretos erigida nesta Villa de Santo Antonio do Recife, 1782, Cap´ıtulo 28. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Códice 1293, found in the Divisão de Pesquisas do Departamento de História da Universidade Federal de Pernambuco.

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that caused “the insubordination and lack of respect of the blacks of Recife and Olinda.”68 He linked the nature of the government of the blacks to their ethnicity, by pointing out that the blacks of Bahia, because they came from warrior societies, did not have their kings and governors, nor the entire administration that went with them, but that all of this existed in Pernambuco. The different ethnicities to which he referred must have been slaves brought from the war-torn region of West Africa to Bahia. This implied that he understood the Pernambuco slaves to be more predominantly from Central Africa, and that these slaves were known to organize themselves in extended, hierarchical, royal courts.69 Henry Koster’s account from early-nineteenth-century Pernambuco offers a particularly rich descriptive look at the election of a King and Queen of Congo. Koster explained that in May, during the festival of the rosary, the blacks of each district elected a King and a Queen of Congo only if the previous king or queen had died or been dethroned in the previous year.70 He added his own commentary on the presence of Kings of Congos in the feast day celebrations of the blacks at the end of the colonial period: The election of a King of Congo by the individuals who come from that part of Africa, seems indeed as if it would give them a bias towards the customs of their native soil; but the Brazilian Kings of Congo worship Our Lady of the Rosary, and are dressed in the dress of white men; they and their subjects dance, it is true, after the manner of their country; but to these festivals are admitted African negroes of other nations, creole blacks, and mulattos, all of whom dance after the same manner; and these dances are now as much the national dances of Brazil as they are of Africa.71

More than any other account, Koster adds some nuance to the presence of Kings of Congo. The statement that slaves from “that part of Africa” elected the King of Congo demonstrates an awareness of ethnic divisions. When Koster calls the king the Brazilian King of Congo, however, and explains that the groups who participated in the celebration derived from many nations and racial mixtures, he expressed that a shift to an Afro-Brazilian understanding of the King of Congo had been emerging. In other words, the King of Congo became the term of the leader of African descent who represented and received the loyalty of blacks of many nations and people of mixed descent, like the black kings of the brotherhoods of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. The black kings became the Kings of Congo. 68 Caetano Pinto de Miranda Montenegro, 24 December 1815. APEPE, OG 15, folhas 160–161. 69 Ibid. In the frequent slave uprisings in Bahia and the Bahian recôncavo, however, leaders were called “Kings” and “dukes.” See João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil, The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, trans. Arthur Brakel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 45–69. 70 Henry Koster, Travels in Brazil (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), p. 274. 71 Ibid., p. 411.


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In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a German artist, João Maur´ıcio Rugendas, traveled through Brazil as part of a Russian-sponsored expedition to the interior of Brazil. Rugendas drew a scene that he titled “The feast day of Our Lady of the Rosary, patroness of the blacks,” perhaps based on Koster’s description, which Rugendas quoted at great length in his accompanying text (see Figure 5.3).72 Rugendas’ drawing, however, provided visual details to the textual account. The drawing shows a king and queen standing in the midst of a large group of Africans and people of African descent celebrating the coronation. They appear to be leading a procession, because dust and faint figures seem to be descending from the town in the background. The king and queen both use European clothes, except that the king wears a skirt over his pants and a crown encircled with feathers. Musicians in the foreground play a European-style drum and flutes, but one black in the front plays a thumb piano, an instrument of African origin. Two supplicants bow on their knees before the queen, one reaching up with his hands open, asking for something. On the other side of the kings a black raises his hat to the king, while another reaches out his hand as if to touch the king. On the far left, a white man and a white priest, both mounted, look down on the scene below. In his text, Rugendas explains that the crowning of the Kings and Queens of Congo served as proof that the middle passage caused a “real death” that destroyed all of their previous customs, and that they easily became true Christians.73 Rugendas, who had never been to Africa, saw only the European antecedent to the celebration, unaware of the Central African antecedents that had already combined African and European customs. Other early nineteenth century travelers also downplayed the significance of black kings and queens. The German scientist, Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, wrote an account of a dynastic festival, the ascension of D. João VI to the throne (6 February 1818), which he witnessed in Tejuco (present day Diamantina, Minas Gerais). Von Martius wrote that it was the custom throughout Brazil for the blacks to elect every year a king and his court, observing that this king had no power whatsoever, citing the lack of power as the reason why the Portuguese did not oppose the elections. Von Martius described the visit of the newly crowned King of Congo, a freed black shoemaker, to the house of the superintendent of the diamond-mining

72 João Maur´ıcio Rugendas, “Festa de N. Sra do Rosário, Padroe`ıra dos Negros,” Fundaç a˜ o Biblioteca Nacional, Dept. of Iconography. 73 João Maur´ıcio Rugendas, “Festa de N. Sra do Rosário, Padroeira dos Negros,”Viagem Pitoresca através do Brasil, trans. Sérgio Milliet (São Paulo: Livraria Martins Editora, 1954), p. 200.

Figure 5.3. Feast Day of our Lady of the Rosary, patroness of the blacks (courtesy of Fundaç a˜ o Biblioteca Nacional).


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district. The superintendent greeted the black court in his nightgown and cap and invited them into his house. When the superintendent invited the king to sit on the sofa, he was so shocked that he let his scepter fall on the ground. The superintendent picked it up saying, “Your Majesty dropped your scepter!”74 As in the Bahian town of Santo Amaro, the white population played along with the coronations of the blacks, but the appearance of the superintendent in his pajamas, despite his politeness to his visitors, also demonstrates the condescending attitude of the whites toward the ruler of the blacks. Von Martius recorded the election, coronation, and visits not only of a King of Congo, but also of a Queen Xinga – the first such documentary record of a Queen Xinga in Brazil. The famous Queen Njinga ruled the Central African kingdom of Matamba in the mid-seventeenth century.75 She had accepted Christianity and allowed priests to come to her kingdom after consulting three mediums possessed with her ancestors, who urged her that she should. The two priests who witnessed and recorded the event considered it a miracle.76 In the minds of Europeans, Queen Njinga may have served as a mythic heroine – an African Queen who accepted Christianity. Her presence in the festivals of the blacks, especially standing side by side with the King of Congo, to Europeans represented the triumph of Christianity over heathenism. For the Africans and their descendents, Queen Xinga very likely represented the triumph of African traditions in the face of almost overwhelming attempts at European cultural domination, very much what the politically astute Queen Njinga had accomplished during her reign in Matamba. Few accounts of Queen Xinga in the festivals of the rosary mention her again until the twentieth century, when she appeared with the King of Congo in some festivals of congo in northern Brazil and congadas in the southern regions.77 Although Queen Xinga did not appear frequently in Afro-Brazilian festivals, the King of Congo did. Elsewhere in Minas Gerais, especially in the 74 Karl von Martius quoted in Lu´ıs da Câmara Cascudo, Antologia do Folclore Brasileiro (São Paulo: Livraria Martins Editora, 1965), p. 93. 75 Her name is also spelled Zinga, Ginga, and Jinga in the Portuguese, and Njinga or Anna Njinga in African works, and she herself spelled the name “Ginga” in her extant letters. See John K. Thornton, “Legitimacy and political power: Queen Njinga, 1624–1663,” Journal of African History, 32:1 (1991): 25–40. 76 John K.Thornton, Africa and Africans, pp. 258–259. Queen Njinga’s story probably was known by intellectuals in Europe in the eighteenth century through several published seventeenth-century accounts, most notably that of Pe. António Cavazzi de Montecúccolo. 77 Andrade, Danças dramáticas, pp. 40–105; Araújo, Folclore nacional, pp. 263–265, Linda M. Heywood, “The Angolan–Afro-Brazilian,” pp. 20–21.

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colonial period, it is difficult to find references to Kings of Congo, yet occasionally the title King of Congo appears buried in several colonial rosary brotherhood records. The entrance books for São João del Rei identified the slave Brizida as the “Queen of the Congos” in 1773.78 Twenty years later, the same book listed Thereza de Sobral e Souza, a freed black, as the “wife of the King of Congo.”79 The name King of Congo did not appear again in the extant books of the brotherhood. In the brotherhood in the hamlet of Bacalhau in 1830, a list of elected officers identified the slave José Congo as the King of Congo in the same year that they listed a black king and queen who were both crioulos.80 In 1830, the title King of Congo appeared on the list, the last year of the extant list of elections. The records point to a position called the King of Congo in the brotherhoods that may have differed from the position of the black king and queen, who were elected every year. The documentation does not give enough information to draw any firm conclusions, but it does point out that a King of Congo existed slightly beneath the surface of the official documentation of the brotherhoods in Minas Gerais, mostly hidden from the eyes of the authorities. At Brazilian independence in 1822, African kings continued to lead uprisings as well as brotherhoods, and they too began to be called Kings of Congo.81 In 1822 Minas Gerais, for example, Antonio Paulino Limpo de Abreu, a local judge, wrote a letter to the President of the provisional government of the province of Minas Gerias justifying his decisions about a black “who is, or who calls himself, the King of the Congos.”82 Limpo de Abreu explained that the blacks interpreted discussions about liberty in the constitutional congress to signify that on Christmas, or shortly afterward on the Day of Kings, they would receive their letters of freedom. Although Limpo de Abreu concluded that the notice of the uprising was only the whisperings of the wishes of the blacks rather than a plan, he prohibited “all gatherings of blacks, to take away their weapons, and to severely punish those who deserved to be punished.”83 Despite Limpo de Abreu’s fears, gatherings of blacks in Minas Gerais continued to crown their kings and queens and gather together in corporate 78 Entradas dos Irmãos, Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos, São João del Rei 1747–1806, AINSR, 6 January 1773. 79 Entradas dos Irmãos, Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos, São João del Rei 1747–1806, AINSR, 6 January 1793. 80 Livro de Termos de Meza, Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário, Arraial de Bacalhau, Freguesia de Nossa Senhora da Conceiç a˜ o de Guarapiranga, 1758–1893, AEAM Y12. 81 See, for instance, Reis, Slave Rebellion, pp. 44–53. 82 Letter from Antonio Paulino Limpo de Abreu to the President and Deputies of the provisional government, 14 February 1822. APM SP JGP 1/6, Caixa 01, doc. 28. 83 Ibid.


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organizations. The custom had become so much a part of Mineiran society that the Conselho Geral (state assembly) allowed for them in the Postura das Câmaras Municipais da Prov´ıncia de Minas Gerais in 1830. The guidelines for the municipal laws allowed “the quinbites, or reinados, that the slaves are accustomed to have on certain days of the year, as long as they are not held at night.”84 The legal allowance did not show a general laxness in regard to the activities of blacks in Minas Gerais, for the same laws banned the batuque (a dance of African origin that authorities had long considered dangerous) even in private homes during the day or night.85 Count Francis de la Porte de Castelneau attested to the continuation of the coronations when he witnessed the election of the King of Congo in 1843 in Sabará, Minas Gerais. Castelneau focused on the exotic nature of the celebration, describing the King of the Congo and his court sitting on their chairs, with a great umbrella over them “to guarantee the influence of the moon, which was rising.”86 He called the festival an “extravagant carnival” that seemed to be a combination of practices brought from the coast of Africa with Brazilian traditions and religious ceremonies. His account bears repeating at length, for it is one of the most complete that exists for a coronation of a king in mid-nineteenth-century Brazil: A thing worthy of note, the king had a black mask, as if he had a dread that staying in this country would fade his natural color. The court, whose costumes mixed all colors with extravagant decorations, was seated on either side of the king and queen; then came an infinity of other characters, the most considerable of which were without a doubt great captains, famous warriors or ambassadors of distant authorities, all dressed up in the style of the Brazilian Indians, with great headdresses of feathers, cavalry sabers at their sides, and shields on their arms. In this tumult, they mixed national dances, of dialogues between people, between these people and the king, or between the king and the queen, simulated battles and all types of somersaults worthy of very excited monkeys.87

The description offers unusual insights into the festival Castalneau witnessed, presenting many African and many Brazilian elements. The national dances probably referred to dances of the different African nations, one of which was likely Congo. 84 “Postura das Câmaras Municipais da Prov´ıncia de Minas Gerais confirmadas pelo Conselho Geral da mesma Prov´ıncia, 1830,” AEAM – 0158 Dom Frei José da Sant´ıssima Trindade, 1823 02-2-034, Cap´ıtulo 2, Artigo 137. After 1834 the Conselho Geral (literally General Council) came to be called the Assembléia. 85 Ibid. 86 Lu´ıs da Câmara Cascudo, Antologia do Folclore Brasileiro (São Paulo: Livraria Martins Editora, 1956), p. 108. 87 Ibid.

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In Minas Gerais, the elite had come to see the coronations of black kings and queens as harmless pastimes of their slaves and the free blacks of their communities. Nevertheless, each province adopted its own guideline for regulating slave behavior. In other newly formed provinces and towns, the coronation of black kings and queens did not seem so innocuous. In the town of Desterro, Santa Catarina, for instance, the law moved against the coronations: “From this time on assemblies of slaves or freed persons intended to form batuques are forbidden, as well as those which have as their purpose the supposed African royal ceremonis [reinado africanos], which they are accustomed to performing during their ceremonies.”88 Throughout the new empire of Brazil, in fact, except for Minas Gerais, authorities began to show less tolerance for the public coronations and celebrations in the black brotherhoods. Authorities had suppressed the coronations in Rio de Janeiro since the early part of the nineteenth century, as both Debret and Moraes Filho pointed out in their texts. The brotherhood of the rosary had excluded the clause on the position of kings and queens and in fact had not even mentioned a festival in their 1831 compromisso, and the documents of the brotherhood of King Balthasar give no evidence of a king and queen.89 Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century photographer Christiano Jr. ( José Christiano de Freitas Henriques Junior) captured an image of a king and queen during the feast day celebration of the brotherhood of the rosary (Figure 5.4). The photo, taken in Rio de Janeiro sometime between 1864 and 1866, showed a king and queen standing in the middle of a semicircle of other celebrants. The queen was dressed in European clothes; the king, like the Rugendas and the Carlos Julião images, wore a skirt over his pants. Three drummers played African drums and wore festive headdresses with feathers. Although Christiano Jr. did not caption the photo, the image clearly depicts a king and queen of African descent – making it the first photographic image of an Afro-Brazilian king and queen and their retinue.90 In Rio de Janeiro, the title King of Congo had been clearly associated with King Balthasar, the patron saint of the brotherhood housed in the Lampadosa Church that Moraes Filho wrote about. Thomas Ewbank, an American visitor to Rio de Janeiro, made that association clear when he commented 88 City of Desterro, Santa Catarina, Law of May 10, 1845, quoted in Conrad, Children of God’s Fire, p. 260. 89 Compromisso da Irmandade de NSR e São Benedicto dos Homens Pretos Erecta na Sua Mesma Igreja Nesta Corte de Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: A. Guimarães & C., 1883). 90 Paulo Cesar de Azevedo, Mauricio Lissovsky, eds., Escravos Brasileiros do século XIX na fotografia de Christiano Jr. (São Paulo: Ex Libris, 1988), plate 73.


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Figure 5.4. Black kings and queens in Rio de Janeiro.

upon a statue of Saint Balthasar, King of Congo, in the Lampadosa Church.91 King Balthasar had long been considered to be one of the three kings who were present for the nativity of Christ.92 Because of this association, many important events in Brazil’s black brotherhoods of the rosary took place on the Day of Kings, January 6, just as Moraes Filho had noted in his passage about the Kings in the 1748 celebration, and as Carlos Julião had 91 Thomas Ewbank, Life in Brazil; or A Journal of a Visit to the Land of the Cocoa and the Palm (New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1856), p. 398. 92 See the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 9 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967), p. 63.

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captured in his watercolors. This association with King Balthasar clearly was strong in Rio de Janeiro, but evidence of it does not exist elsewhere in Brazil. Although Rio de Janeiro experienced a tightening on the prohibitions on the coronations of kings and queens in the nineteenth century, the King of Congo remained a presence in the capital. Moraes Filho described and transcribed the script of a ritual drama called the cucumbi, which included the presence of a King of Congo. In the opening lines of the drama, the king sang, “I am the King of Congo/I want to play/I just arrived/From Portugal.”93 After this declamation, the drama unfolded in three parts: the arrival of the King along with the dances and call and responses of the different groups, the killing of the queen’s son (Mamêto) by the caboclos,94 and finally the witchdoctor’s ( feiticeiro) success at reviving the son from death with his incantations.95 When the prince revived, the participants sang praises to Saint Benedict and Our Lady, and the witchdoctor destroyed the caboclos with a look (o olhar). Unlike the coronation ceremonies of the brotherhoods, the drama used a script and set choreography, like the religious autos used in the conversion of non-Christians and the folk ritual battles between the Christians and the Moors. The drama, however, remained significantly African. Moraes Filho wrote that the cucumbis had recently reappeared in Rio de Janeiro, because “the direct descendents of the Africans had conserved their inheritance in Brazil.”96 The drama was rich in themes with complex meanings, most notably the struggle between Africans and caboclos (Brazilians) and the death and resurrection of the prince by means of African incantations and charms.97 The language and references of the drama all evoked a Central African past; even the feiticeiro’s reference to Saint Benedict, usually present in the rosary brotherhoods, calls up a Central African connection. The cucumbi, with the important presence of the King of Congo, however, removed from the lay religious brotherhood setting had taken on a profane tone. Moraes Filho even included it in the section of his book on popular festivals. He pointed out that the groups that performed these 93 Moraes Filho, Festas, p. 196. 94 Caboclo was originally a term for Brazilians of mixed Indian descent. The term has come to mean hick or hillbilly. 95 Moraes Filho, Festas, pp. 191–202. 96 Ibid., 194. 97 See Mary C. Karasch, “Central African religious tradition in Rio de Janeiro,” Journal of Latin American Lore 5:2 (1979): 237. See also her excellent description of Moraes Filho’s account in Karasch, Slave Life, pp. 247–249.


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dramas were carnival societies, groups that performed for entertainment. As Mary Karasch points out, however, the drama gave a strong message of the triumph of Central African traditions over those of the caboclos, or Brazilians.98 That the victory included incorporating European elements simply displayed a continuing reaffirmation of Central African traditions. The King of Congo had become the symbolic center of that affirmation, and Moraes Filho’s account the evidence of culmination of a century of a move toward a collective Afro-Brazilian identity. By the middle of the twentieth century, Kings of Congo had become prominent figures in many Brazilian ritual dramas, in coronations that occurred on feast days in Afro-Brazilian black brotherhoods, and during carnival celebrations. In every case, kings from different ethnic groups disappeared, replaced by the King of Congo. These Kings of Congo as leaders in brotherhoods, players in ritual dramas, and as leaders of uprisings, first appeared in the documentary record in the late eighteenth century, replacing black ethnic kings. At first, Kings of Congo may well have been associated with slaves of the Afro-Brazilian ethnicity known as Congo, and with the Kingdom of Kongo. The practice emerged as a natural outgrowth from the black kings of many different nations present in Brazil since the seventeenth century. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Kings of Congo had become the representatives of Central Africans of any number of ethnicities. In the twentieth century, Kings of Congo came to serve still as representatives and leaders of whole communities Afro-Brazilians. Through the positions of King and Queen of Congo, a Central African past is remembered in Afro-Brazilian communities throughout Brazil. Far from being “invented,” however, the tradition of kings and queens in AfroBrazilian represents the continuation of process dating from the earliest days of slavery in Brazil, and even before. The trajectory of the change serves as an example of a move from ethnic understandings of Africans and children of Africans in Brazil to an Afro-Brazilian consciousness. This communal consciousness did not reject African in favor of European traditions, nor did it reject European practices that could be used to serve and maintain the community. Central Africans continued in Brazil a process of culture synthesis that had begun creatively combining cultural elements that worked for them in their new home. They chose transcultural symbols that mediated between their traditional and their new worlds. The kings and queens in the brotherhoods and in other contexts served as mediators. They also served 98 Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life, p. 249.

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as mediators in an African sense, between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The title King of Congo came to be used because of the legendary political and ritual power of the King of Kongo, well known both among Central African slaves and among Europeans. Far from representing the triumph of European religion and customs, the King of Congo represents the triumph of a continuing strategy to preserve a link to Africa.99 AfroBrazilian communities with Kings and Queens of Congo maintain living ties to Africa. The rituals link their ancient homeland to their Brazilian and African ancestors, and to the world of spirits. These links foster unity and African identity that continues to respond and adapt old traditions to new circumstances.100 99 Marina de Mello e Souza comes to a different conclusion in her dissertation. Marina de Mello e Souza, “Reis negros no Brasil escravista, história, mito e identidade na festa de coroaç a˜ o de Rei Congo” (Ph.D. diss., Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, RJ, 1999). 100 I would like to thank J. Lorand Matory, Linda M. Heywood, and William Scott for their invaluable comments and suggestions on this paper. I would also like to thank Linda M. Heywood for organizing the Bantu into Black conference at Howard University, and for the participants’ helpful feedback.

6

The Great Porpoise-Skull Strike: Central African Water Spirits and Slave Identity in Early-Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro ROBERT W. SLENES

In late December 1816, the English merchant and amateur naturalist John Luccock left the city of Rio de Janeiro for a boat “excursion to the upper [part of Guanabara] Bay” (the water on which the city fronted) and to “the rivers falling into it.” After several days of travel on a launch captained by a Portuguese sailor and manned by “four stout negroes,” he put in to a harbor on one of the bay’s many small islands. En route, his interest in geology had made him especially sensitive to the spectacular meeting of mountain and water that characterizes the environs of Rio. His account of the experience abounds in descriptions of tall waterfalls, wide and deep rivers, and extraordinary rock formations, the latter seemingly becoming all the more fantastic as the launch approached the island.1 Once on land in the small harbor, Luccock witnessed – indeed, precipitated – a small insurrection. The boat’s crew suddenly refused to work, for reasons which the merchant-naturalist simply could not comprehend. “Within the pier, about two months before,” he writes, “I had seen a dead porpoise, then in a very offensive state. The skeleton being now dry and clean, I took up the skull and threw it into the boat, intending to examine it at leisure.” Shortly thereafter, when the participants in the excursion were about to reboard the launch, “it appeared that the skull was an object of superstitious dread to our negroes, who thought it a human one, and imagined that it had belonged to a person of their own colour: – the resemblance certainly gave some ground for the suspicion.” Luccock then used his reason with the men, directly or through the captain, but to no avail: It was in vain that the fact was presented to them; they persisted in their entreaties that the bone might be thrown overboard. Instead of complying with their wish, the 1 John Luccock, Notes on Rio de Janeiro and the Southern Parts of Brazil; taken during a Residence of Ten Years in that Country, from 1808 to 1818 (London: Samuel Leigh, 1820), ch. 11.

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Captain tossed it into the lap of one of them, which so alarmed as to disqualify him for his work and so offended the rest as to redouble their unintelligible clamours, which were carried on in their native dialect.

The naturalist and his companions faced a dilemma: We had now only one [sic] alternative, either to compel them to proceed by severity, or to give up the obnoxious skull. The latter was decided on, and the men seemed so gratified by having obtained the rites of sepulture for a brother, that they behaved admirably during the remainder of the day.

His account concluded, Luccock then psychologized to make up for his inability to explain what he had witnessed. “An African born negro,” he asserts, “once roused to obstinacy, may be subdued; but I believe, never was convinced; his opinions and resolutions, particularly those of revenge, are unalterable.”2 The naturalist, perhaps not surprisingly, sought meaning in nature, not culture. Yet it would be unfair to mock him for failing to make sense of this event, for on first appraisal it seems as impenetrable to us today as it did to him. The contemporary historian, however, now has the resources to decifer its meaning. Indeed, when this little rebellion is analyzed in the context of the ethnographic literature on Central Africa, Luccock’s own travel account becomes one of these resources. His comments on the natural world provide a record of what the launch’s crew members also were seeing on their approach to the island, albeit through glasses of a different color. When their perspective on this experience is understood, it becomes apparent why they found Luccock’s reasoning regarding the porpoise skull unconvincing. But why make the effort at understanding? Clearly the event itself is inconsequential. Nonetheless, this “Great Porpoise-Skull Strike” in nineteenth-century Rio, like the “Great Cat Massacre” in eighteenth-century France, recounted by Robert Darnton, exhibits the signs of a significant “episode in cultural history.” Darnton observes that when the historian encounters human actions whose motivations seem totally opaque, he or she actually confronts an opportunity. If one can grasp the symbols and metaphors that underlie seemingly unfathomable behavior, one may gain access to the innermost “reasons” of a particular community or social group. Thus, even banal events, once decoded, can provide keys to understanding questions of broader import.3 2 John Luccock, Notes, p. 336. 3 See the introduction and title essay in Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984). For the subsequent debate, see particularly Harold Mah, “Suppressing the text: the metaphysics of ethnographic history in Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre,” History Workshop, 31 (Spring, 1991): 1–20, and the references therein.

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The case of the porpoise-skull sit-down, I will argue, yields insight into the formation of slave “identity” in Southeastern Brazil: specifically, into the process by which Africans of diverse origins redrew the symbolic boundaries of ethnicity within the slave quarters and discovered a new cultural diacritic to mark themselves as a group separate from others. It also reveals much about the wellsprings of slave Rebellion (with a capital “R”) in that region, during the first half of the nineteenth century, for fragmentary information from 1848 on a foiled plan for a major slave insurrection – to be analyzed in a subsequent article – suggests that the rebels of that later year predicated their unity on the same assumptions motivating the strikers of 1816. One must begin the analysis of the porpoise-skull episode from the few facts that may be deduced or inferred from Luccock’s text. First, his generalizations about “Africans” and his reference to the crew members’ “unintelligle clamours, which were carried on in their native dialect” indicate that these men were not “creoles,” or Brazilian-born blacks. They were able to communicate among themselves in a tongue other than Portuguese or even a Portuguese-based creole, which Luccock – at that time with 8 years of experience in Brazil – would at least have been able to recognize; indeed, the import of Luccock’s comments is that they could speak to each other in an African language. Nonetheless, at least one of them was also able to speak Portuguese or a creolized Portuguese, for there appears to have been no problem of communication between the crew and its Lusitanian captain; that is, one or more were ladinos, Africans with some experience in Brazil. Second, it is virtually certain that the crew members were slaves, as was the great majority of Africans in Rio at that time: Otherwise, presumably, Luccock and his companions would not have considered force as the only alternative for making them resume work, other than giving in to their demands. Third, it is not likely that the crew confused the “porpoise” skull with a human one, despite Luccock’s comments to that effect. The Sotalia brasiliensis, the only species of dolphin (there are no true porpoises) in Guanabara Bay, has a beaklike snout and therefore a typical dolphin’s skull: much more elongated and prognathic than that of a person.4 Finally, it seems clear that the men’s work stoppage was “spontaneous,” not premeditated. To be sure, the evidence to be presented here indicates that they may have had cause for concern as they traveled through the Bay, and it is possible that they 4 Some consider this dolphin a separate species, others a subspecies of Sotalia fluviatilis (the tucuxi). José Truda Palazzo Jr. and Maria do Carmo Both, Guia dos Mam´ıferos Marinhos do Brasil (Porto Alegre: Sagra, 1988), pp. 87–88; Emygdio Leite de Araújo Monteiro Filho, “Comportamento de Caç a e Repertório Sonoro do Golfinho Sotalia Brasiliensis (Cetacea: Delphinidae) na Região de Cananéia, Estado de São Paulo” (Ph. D. diss., Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 1991); The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1994), Vol. 23, p. 432.

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articulated this concern among themselves; furthermore, they must have talked to each other about the skull in the actual heat of events. Nonetheless, their quick, concerted action in the episode suggests that they shared deeply ingrained assumptions that did not need to be debated at length to provide a basis for agreement. One might be tempted to conclude from this that these African slaves shared the same “ethnolinguistic” origin. Indeed, this may have been the case. Nonetheless, it can be argued that a large proportion of slaves in Rio, coming from diverse etholinguistic backgrounds, would have reacted in basically the same way to Luccock’s appropriation of the porpoise skull. Africans in the captaincies or provinces of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais in the first half of the nineteenth century came overwhelmingly from Central Africa.5 Of these, the great majority (in 1816, still pratically the totality) were from Western Central Africa.6 Thus, not only were almost all of them from the Bantu linguistic group, but a substantial percentage spoke languages that were no more distant from each other than members of the romance family of tongues. (See Thornton’s essay, this volume.) With relatively little effort, they could make themselves understood by large numbers of other Bantu-language speakers in Brazil or, conjointly, could easily (and, I suspect, did) elaborate common patois based on one or more of the Bantu languages.7 In addition, and more to the point for this study than these linguistic ties, a large proportion of Western Central Africans shared certain basic assumptions about the world, as outlined in seminal studies by Wyatt MacGaffey and by Willy de Craemer, Jan Vansina, and René Fox. According to MacGaffey, the various ways of reckoning kinship in a large area of the Zaire River basin evolved in recent times (largely as a result of the differential impact of the slave trade) from a descent system that was essentially bilateral.8 Thus, by 5 Over 98% of Africans destined directly for Rio between 1795 and 1852 came from West-Central and East-Central Africa. Population data on the city of Rio in 1832 suggest a somewhat lower percentage; still, no more than 7% of Africans there were West Africans. Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 15. 6 Only after 1811 did slaves from Mozambique constitute a substantial proportion of new arrivals (ca. 20%). Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life, pp. 11–25. 7 Robert W. Slenes, “‘Malungu, Ngoma Vem!’: Africa Encoberta e Descoberta no Brasil,” Revista USP, 12 (1991–92): 48–67 (republished in Cadernos do Museu da Escravatura, 1 [Luanda: Ministério da Cultura, 1995]). Bases for Bantu pidgins could have been provided by the “vehicular” or trade languages derived from Kikongo, Kimbundu, and Umbundu. A vocabulary of Bantu origin was widely used in the Portuguese spoken by slaves in Brazil’s Southeast: see Carlos Vogt and Peter Fry ´ (with the collaboration of Robert W. Slenes), Cafundó: a Africa no Brasil: Linguagem e Sociedade (São Paulo/Campinas: Cia. das Letras/Ed. da UNICAMP, 1996). 8 Wyatt MacGaffey, “Lineage structure, marriage and the family amongst the Central Bantu,” Journal of African History, 24:2 (1983): 173–187.


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implication, slaves of diverse origins exported from Angola, the mouth of the Zaire, and points further North would still have recognized a “grammar” of kinship in common, centered on the concept of “lineage,” despite the fact that their home societies had come to determine the rules of descent more often along matrilineal or patrilineal lines, than bilaterally. In a similar manner, Craemer, Vansina, and Fox have argued that in a vast area of Western Central Africa, culture is “less heterogeneous and less particularistic than is generally supposed.”9 Each people “shares part of its cultural complex, especially the fundamental aspects of its religion, with many others.” The “nucleus” of this common Western Central African culture is a set of assumptions about causation and cosmology: in particular, what Craemer and his associates have called the “fortune-misfortune [value] complex,” that is, the notion that the universe is characterized in its normal state by harmony, well-being, and health and that instability, misfortune, and illness are caused by the malevolent action of spirits or people. Also common to this culture is flexibility in ritual and symbol; Central African religious movements are notable for their ability to create new symbols and reinterpret the meaning of “foreign” objects and rituals in accordance with the precepts of the “fortune-misfortune” value complex. In sum, MacGaffey and Craemer et al. have identified some of the elements of what Sidney Mintz and Richard Price would call a Central African “cultural heritage”: that is, a set of “cognitive orientations,” or “basic assumptions about social relations . . . and about the way the world functions phenomenologically,” that are common to much of that region and that slaves of diverse origins would have brought from it to the New World.10 In Southeastern Brazil, however, the potential for affinities among Africans may have been even greater than these considerations suggest. To be sure, by the nineteenth century the slaving frontier in Central Africa was penetrating ever more deeply into the continent, with the result that the variety of ethnolinguistic groups represented in Brazil was increasing (see Joseph Miller’s essay in this volume).11 On the other hand, however, according to Miller a substantial proportion – perhaps a majority – of Central 9 Willy de Craemer, Jan Vansina, and René Fox, “Religious movements in Central Africa: a theoretical study,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 18:4 (October, 1976): 458–475; passage cited, p. 475. I correct a typographical error in the original; from the context, “homogeneous” should clearly read “heterogeneous.” See also Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: the Bakongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 180–187. 10 Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia: ISHI [Institute for the Study of Human Issues], 1976.) Mintz and Price are concerned with the “cultural heritage” from West Africa. 11 On African “nations” in Rio see Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life, ch. 1

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Africans who were exiled to the Americas between 1780 and 1830 came from societies relatively near the coast, long integrated into the “Atlantic (slaving) system.” Many or most of these people were children of women captured or purchased from other groups, usually on the slaving frontier.12 The implications of Miller’s work, in the context of other recent studies on bondage within Africa, are twofold. First, it appears likely that the proportion of Africans in Southeastern Brazil who had been socialized among the culturally related Bakongo, Mbundu, and Ovimbundu (I use the broader, “modern” ethnic terms here for convenience, although it would be historically more correct to refer to the various subgroups of these peoples – “Basundi”, “Bampangu,” and so on) was considerably larger than has been suspected.13 (For the location of these and other ethnolinguistic groups mentioned in this article, see Figure 6.1.) Second, many of these people probably had the skills to be effective cultural brokers with Central Africans from elsewhere, because they would have tended to be first generation, bicultural or (more exactly) permanently “liminal” members of their “home” societies.14 Elsewhere, I have argued that upon their arrival in the plantation areas of Rio, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais, and their integration into slave communities founded primarily by other Central Africans (see Miller’s essay, this volume), these diverse people would have tended to overcome possible hostilities toward each other and discover a common identity.15 Trapped, 12 Joseph Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730 –1830 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), chs. 4 and 5. Miller suggests “a ratio of two slaves from the Atlantic Zone [a variable region with borders advancing eastward] for every slave coming from the slaving frontier,” although he clearly sees this as an upper limit (Ibid., p. 382). Miller’s contribution to this volume focuses on the moving slaving frontier, not on the societies in the Atlantic Zone that had been structured to produce “dependents” for the trade; thus, it suggests a much greater fragmentation of origins than his book does. 13 Joseph Miller’s model in Way of Death is consistent with Koelle’s data on Central Africans (taken from intercepted slave ships) in Sierra Leone during the 1840s. Among these people there was a strong presence of Kikongo speakers and “Ngola” (Mbundu). Segismund W. Koelle, Polyglotta Africana . . . , critical ed. P. E. H. Hair and D. Dalby (Sierra Leone, 1963; 1st ed. London, 1854), cited in Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), pp. 251– 264, 295–298. 14 “Permanently liminal” is perhaps too strong; however, I wish to indicate my agreement with Joseph Miller regarding the relatively “closed” nature of slavery at this time in those Central-African societies integrated into the Atlantic system, as opposed to Miers and Kopytoff ’s “open,” incorporative model of the institution. Joseph Miller, “Lineages, ideology, and the history of slavery in Western Central Africa,” in: Paul E. Lovejoy, ed., The Ideology of Slavery in Africa (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1981); Miller, Way of Death, Part I; Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), Introduction. 15 See Slenes, “‘Malungu,’” and Robert W. Slenes, Na Senzala, uma Flor: Esperanças e Recordaço˜es na Formaça˜ o da Fam´ılia Escrava – Brasil Sudeste, Século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Nova Fronteira, 1999), chs. 3 and 4. In São Paulo, Rio and the “Mata” (forest) region of Minas Gerais, bordering Rio, the sugar boom after 1789 and the later coffee boom mostly had an impact on sparsely populated areas. Thus, the founding generations of slave communities there were primarily Central African.


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Figure 6.1. West Central Africa: major ethnolinguistic groups and some Bakongo peoples mentioned in text. (Based on the map in David Birmingham and Phyllis M. Martin, eds., History of Central Africa [London: Longman, 1983], Vol. 1, p. 120.)

many of them for a second time, in a shared liminality under slavery; unable to conduct their lives entirely within their former ethnic boundaries, but yet living and working almost wholly with other Central Africans (at least on the plantations, where commonly over 80% of adult slaves had been born abroad); subordinated to people whose culture, although perhaps not entirely unfamiliar (see Heywood and Thornton, this volume), must often have seemed to express an alien identity: their cultural affinities with the

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varied “strangers” who shared their lot would have begun to appear much more important that they had on the home continent.16 Eventually, elaborated and reworked, these affinities would have come to seem larger than their differences.17 The porpoise-skull episode recounted by Luccock provides a prime example of how Basundi, Bampangu, and persons of other origins might discover “Africa” in Brazil and use this discovery as a basis for action. Ethnographic research carried out among the Mbundu and Bakongo peoples in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century furnishes the key to understanding the specific shared assumptions that enabled the crew members on Luccock’s expedition to act “spontaneously” in concert. In turn, historical records from the Kongo at the beginning of the nineteenth century and earlier confirm that the complex of beliefs identified in later ethnographies was well in place at the time of Luccock’s trip. Finally, less detailed materials on other Central African groups indicate that the cognitive paradigms that underlay these assumptions were widespread. I begin with a story, “The Kianda and the Young Woman,” recorded by missionary Héli Chatelain in Luanda and published in his Folk-Tales of Angola in 1894. In the introduction and notes to his book, Chatelain briefly identifies a few of the “spirits” or “demons,” representing “some force of nature,” which the people of Luanda (an Mbundu group) held in high respect. Among these was the “Kituta or Kianda, who rules over the water and is fond of great trees and of hilltops.” More specifically, the Kianda, one of the most popular spirits of Loanda, . . . is the water-genius, and it controls the finny tribe on which the native population of Loanda chiefly depend for their sustenance. Hence its popularity. The water-locked rocks beyond Fort St. Michel, at Loanda, are consecrated to Kianda and serve as altars, on which the natives still deposit offerings of food.

Such offerings were necessary, for the kianda, like the other “demons” Chatelain mentions, “according to his capricious passions, deals with men in a friendly or unfriendly manner”; thus, its “friendship . . . must be secured and maintained.” “Kianda” apparently was not a single entity, but the generic name for a type of local spirit, for “in the Mbaka dialect [of Kimbundu] 16 I do not wish to deny absolutely the possibility of “incorporation” to the new society through manumission or even “occupational mobility” within slavery. These eventualities, however, seem to have been much less open to Africans than to creole slaves; see, for instance, Robert W. Slenes, “The demography and economics of Brazilian slavery: 1850–1888” (Ph.D. diss. Stanford University, 1976), ch. 9, on the question of occupational mobility. 17 Because of the demographic realities just summarized, there is no question that the great majority of slaves in Rio and São Paulo would have had a Central African, not a West African, cultural heritage. Thus, it is not necessary to survey here West African beliefs about water spirits.


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this water-genius is called Kiximbi and bears in every valley the name of the local river.”18 In the story about the kianda, “A woman was with her two children. Then came Skull of the head of a man, who wanted one of her daughters, the younger, for to marry her.”19 The elder daughter thereupon filled the skull’s holes with ashes (perhaps to protect herself from any evil it might wish her) and “threw it into a lagoon,” for “It was no good to marry her younger sister.”20 Nonetheless, “The same [skull] under the water became Kianda” (my italics). In his deliberately stilted translation, designed to convey the flavor of the original Kimbundu, Chatelain continues: In the morning, then, he [the skull/kianda] comes to talk with the mother of that same daughter, saying: “I want thy daughter to marry her.” Her mother then assents. When she finished assenting, Kianda then carried off the woman and went with her under water.

The water spirit dressed his new wife “finely” and, bearing gifts, took her to her mother’s house. The couple set up domestic life together, apparently on land and rather richly; the kianda took his kalubungu, a magic box common in Angolan folktales, and “knocked it on the ground,” whereupon “there came out many slaves, and there came at once houses for the slaves.” The wife then has a child, who dies. The kianda warns her: “Thy mother, let her not come to the funeral.” The mother-in-law, however, not only goes to the funeral, but arrives “as the man . . . [is] dancing,” that is, at the culminating moment of the ceremony, when the kianda is asserting his ties to his offspring. Enraged with his wife, the kianda knocks his kalubungu on the ground and “The houses all then go into” it; “where there was a 18 Héli Chatelain, Folk-Tales of Angola, Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, Vol. I (Boston and New York, 1894) pp. 10–11, 284–285. Folktales collected in Northeastern Brazil bear clear similarities to the story recorded by Chatelain, as Câmara Cascudo and Magalhães have pointed out, despite the water spirit’s change in gender: Lu´ıs da Câmara Cascudo, Contos Tradicionais do Brasil (Belo Horizonte/São Paulo: Itatiaia/EDUSP, 1986), pp. 72–73, and story, pp. 70–72; Câmara Cascudo, Geografia dos Mitos Brasileiros, (Belo Horizonte/São Paulo: Itatiaia/EDUSP, 1983), pp. 132– 133; Bas´ılio de Magalhães, O Folklore no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Quaresma, 1928), pp. 85–87, 244–248 (stories recorded by João da Silva Campos). On kianda post-1950: Ana de Sousa Santos, “Subs´ıdio etnográfico do Povo da Ilha de Luanda,” Estudos Etnográficos I, Memórias e Trabalhos do Instituto de Investigaç a˜ o Cient´ıfica de Angola, N. 2 (Luanda: Instituto de Investigaç a˜ o Cient´ıfica de ´ Angola, 1960), 141; Oscar Ribas, Ilundo ([Luanda]: Museu de Angola, 1958), pp. 40–42; Virg´ılio Coelho, “Imagens, s´ımbolos e representaç o˜ es. ‘Quiandas, Quitutas, Sereias’: Imaginários locais, identidades regionais e alteridades. Reflexões sobre o quotidiano urbano Luandense na publicidade e no Universo do Marketing,” Ngola – Revista de Estudos Sociais, 1:1 (Luanda, 1997): 127–191. 19 Héli Chatelain, Folk-Tales, pp. 115, 117. 20 Héli Chatelain, Folk-Tales, p. 261, indicates that anointing oneself with charcoal was believed to confer protection against an enemy. Would anointing the very enemy with charcoal (and by extension with ashes) also neutralize his or her capacity to cause harm?

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village, then there sprouts the grass.” The kianda flees and his wife follows him, seeking reconciliation; but “the man then finds a place where there is a large rock, that has a door. He enters inside the rock.” The woman thereupon gives up the chase and returns home to her mother. The kianda, then, is a local water spirit. It can be friendly to human beings (the fishermen of Luanda depend on its benevolence and the wife in the folktale is enriched by it), but it must be propitiated through ritual actions and by behavior that follows its rules. It is associated with great stone formations (the “water-locked” rocks near Luanda and the “large rock” into which the kianda enters in Chatelain’s story). Finally, the kianda would seem to be identified in some way with the dead; in the folktale, “skull of the head of a man . . . became Kianda.” Chatelain, to be sure, asserts that “the spirits or shades of mortals are never confounded in the native mind with the genii of nature.” In another of his Mbundu stories, however, a heroic figure (a warrier who has killed an enemy in battle) fights with the lord of the underworld and escapes from death (or the normal consequences of death) by being transformed into a kianda spirit.21 Apparently the souls of some human beings could join the ranks of the “genii of nature.” To the north of the Mbundu, the Bakongo (speakers of Kikongo) also believed in the existence of a water spirit. Among one Bakongo group, the Basundi, located on both banks of the Zaire, this entity had the name of simbi (plural basimbi or bisimbi).22 In a neighboring group, the Bampangu, it was called kisimbi (plural bisimbi), similar to the name given by the Kimbundu speakers of Mbaka to their water genius, kiximbi, which Chatelain identifies with Kianda.23 Among the Mayombe, a Bakongo people north of the Zaire, the spirit’s name was variously simbi or kinda, the latter term recalling kianda.24 Indeed, the attributes of simbi/kisimbi/kinda among all these groups were essentially the same as those Chatelain describes for kiximbi/kianda. For example, according to missionary Karl Laman’s ethnography of the Basundi, based on observations between 1891 and 1919, the basimbi also were local spirits. (To avoid confusion, I henceforth use basimbi as the plural form, following Laman’s preferred usage, except when the 21 Héli Chatelain, Folk-Tales, story no. L. 22 Karl Laman, The Kongo, 4 Vols., Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensia (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1953, 1957, 1962, 1968), Vol. III, ch. 5. Basundi is the plural of Nsundi. ´ 23 J. Van Wing, Etudes Bakongo: Sociologie – Religion et Magie, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Brussels: Desclée de Brouwer, 1959), Vol. 2, p. 293; Bampangu is the plural of Mpangu. ´ 24 Doutreloux, L’Ombre des Fétiches: Société et Culture Yombe (Louvain/Quebec: Editions Nauwelaerts/Les Presses de L’Université Laval, 1967), pp. 215–218; Doutreloux treats kinda and simbi as separate types of spirits, albeit with very similar characteristics; however, he notes that many informants thought these spirits identical (p. 218).


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alternative bisimbi appears in a direct quote.25 ) Normally they were benevolent to the people of their region; however, they could turn against persons who showed disrespect or who did not follow the proper ritual behavior. Like the kianda, they were associated with great rock formations. “Large upright stones and rocks are very often regarded as basimbi. . . .” Although they were also denizens of water, like the kianda they could in addition dwell in “mountains, woods and plains.” Finally, although nature spirits, the basimbi’s relation to the shades of the dead was ambiguous. Whereas some people believed that they were “a special class of beings,” others were of the opinion that they were the spirits of people who had died “in times long past” and who had then “died again” in the underworld, to be transformed into basimbi. Still others regarded them “as identical with the spirits of the dead.”26 Laman adds further details about the basimbi of the Bakongo that, in conjunction with fragmentary information about Mbundu culture, help confirm the essential similarity of the Bakongo water spirits to the kianda. He notes, for instance, that “popular belief in the north [of Kongo] had it that Funza,” the creator and chief of the basimbi, made the mountains “to supply all sorts of stone, which could be crushed and melted to provide copper, lead, and iron, and in addition yield flintstones for guns, round nkumbula stones to be used as chalk, and yellow ochre.”27 One suspects that this belief is the basis for attitudes registered more recently by anthropologist Wyatt MacGaffey: bisimbi are regarded as masters of technology, especially of weaving and metalworking, and are therefore similar to Europeans, although some say that the manufacturing bisimbi are ancestral Congolese experts captured by the Europeans for the sake of their ability and enslaved under the water to produce goods the Europeans would not otherwise have.28

Laman’s observations, together with MacGaffey’s, elucidate an otherwise cryptic statement by Chatelain about the Mbundu water spirits: “when the 25 Karl Laman, Kongo, Vol. 3, p. 33, gives both plural forms, but prefers basimbi. MacGaffey, who used the notebooks of Laman’s native assistants, uses bisimbi. (Wyatt MacGaffey, Art and Healing of the BaKongo Commented by Themselves [Stockholm/Bloomington: Folkens Museum/Indiana University Press, 1991], pp. 57, 60, and Religion, pp. 78–82.) Thornton, Kingdom of Kongo, p. 107, uses isimbi. This variation seems to reflect differences in Bakongo dialects (see Laman, Kongo, Vol. I, p. 1). 26 Karl Laman, Kongo, Vol. III, pp. 33–36. A similar ambiguity existed among the Bampangu where the bankita (the spirits of people, particularly early ancestors, who suffered a violent death) were ´ often confused with the water genii. (Van Wing, Etudes Bakongo, Vol. II, pp. 292–293). MacGaffey (Religion, p. 74) cites one of Laman’s informants, who explicitly linked the souls of those long dead with the basimbi. 27 Karl Laman, Kongo, Vol. IV, p. 32. 28 MacGaffey, Religion, p. 81.

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locomotive began to puff up and down the Loanda railroad, the natives ascribed its origin to Kianda.”29 Another revealing detail provided by Laman is that the Bakongo regarded the basimbi as moral agents who punished wrongdoers: not only people who had insulted them, but also perpetrators of evil actions toward other human beings. Thus, if a thief “crosses a river without confessing his guilt, the basimbi may even capsize his canoe.” The water spirits’ punishment, however, could be meted out through intermediaries; for instance, “if somebody is caught by a crocodile, it is at the behest of the basimbi or he would not have been caught.”30 Laman’s remarks, especially his comment regarding the crocodile, help make sense of two anecdotes about the Mbundu of the Luanda region recounted in 1946 in a rather undistinguished book of “ethnographic” memoirs by the Portuguese administrator, Serra Frazão. In one episode witnessed by this author, an African porter fearlessly entered a crocodileinfested river because “crocodiles never can attack persons who have not committed crimes.” When the man was then killed by one of these reptiles, the other porters explained the fact by using the same point of reference: “he must have been guilty of some crime, without knowing it.” In another episode, attested to by Serra Frazão second hand, some European hunters shot two crocodiles: Wishing to retrieve them from the shallow water where their bodies could be clearly seen . . . the hunters ordered their blacks to go down to the edge of the water and try to put a noose around the animals to pull them out; but the blacks did not show themselves disposed to do it. For it was a great kijila [misfortune, prohibited thing] to kill the alligator [sic: “jacaré”], and it would be an even greater kijila to drag them out of the water to skin them.31

Here we have another “strike,” this time “near the Kwanza river.”32 And once again the European observer is at a loss to explain the deeper meaning of his data. The Mbundu’s “respect for crocodiles,” however, almost certainly reflects the same set of beliefs that Laman describes among the Bakongo. Just as the crocodile could be an intermediary for justice-seeking basimbi spirits, it seems likely that among the Mbundu it was an emissary of rightious kianda/kiximbi. Indeed, another of the tales collected by Chatelain, this time from a native of Mbaka in the hinterland of Luanda, suggests as much. In 29 Héli Chatelain, Folk-Tales, p. 284. 30 Karl Laman, Kongo, Vol. III, p. 34. 31 Serra Frazão, Associaço˜es Secretas Entre os Ind´ıgenas de Angola (Lisbon: Editora Mar´ıtimo-Colonial, 1946), pp. 66, 68, 70. 32 Ibid., p. 66.


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this story, a servant of a woman who is a voracious eater of fish is sent to the Lukala river every day to satisfy his mistress’s huge demand for food. One day, he casts his net but meets resistance when he tries to pull it in. Immediately recognizing the danger that threatens him, he attempts to shift the blame for his actions to his superiors: “thou who holdest the net under the water, whether thou be the river-genius [“kiximbi” in the original Kimbundu] or a crocodile [my italics], let go my net! They sent me; I have not come of myself.” His stratagem works. The net comes free and the “thing” which he finds in it – a being that identifies itself as “the Lord of the Land,” or the Lukala river itself – orders him to summon his mistress and master so that they may give an account of themselves. The crocodile, while not identified here explicity as the emissary of the Lukala kiximbi, is clearly seen as an associate of the water spirit in punishing people who offend the river.33 Serra Frazão’s second anecdote, however, suggests that even a dead crocodile might partake of the sacred: that is, that it was not just an intermediary of the water spirit but its very manifestation. I know of no text that confirms this hypotheses, but the idea can be documented among both the Bakongo and Mbundu with respect to another water animal, the fish.34 Again according to Laman, “the water basimbi are white” (the color of death or of the underworld); furthermore, they “are short of stature . . . and have a fish tail, but a human face.”35 It is not clear from this if the water spirits are “basimbi-fishes” (Laman’s term) in essence, or if this is simply one of their manifestations when they reveal themselves to people. In any case, Laman explicity notes that some fish in stretches of water near cliffs and grottoes may be transformed into simbi-spirits. In such a spot the tolo fish, for example, became very old, big and strong, with a dorsal fin resembling a parrot’s plumes. . . . It was therefore looked upon as sacred . . .

According to Laman, “such a fish may of course not be touched; neither must it be killed or eaten” (my italics).36 Folktales from both the Bakongo and the Mbundu are consistent with these notions: They present fish that, like crocodiles, take retribution against 33 Héli Chatelain, Folk-Tales, pp. 65–81. 34 Coelho (“Imagens,” p. 148), reporting on field work among the Mbundu, indicates that the water genii are thought to be capable of changing themselves “into different fish or snakes or even into crocodiles.” He finds no older account, however, that suggests they presented themselves as halfhuman and half-fish. Such beliefs today, he says, reflect the influence of European mythology about mermaids. 35 Karl Laman, Kongo, Vol. III, p. 33. Coelho, “Imagens,” p. 147, indicates that among the Mbundu today these spirits are held to be “white, extremely white, or cristaline” when they appear to people. 36 Karl Laman, Kongo, Vol. I, p. 115.

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wrongdoers or people who are disrespectful toward the spirits of nature. In a story recorded among the Cabinda, a Bakongo people, by José Martins Vaz, a large talking fish punishes a woman who has unjustly spoken ill of her co-wife to their common husband; clearly, the animal is an emissary or manifestation of a simbi spirit.37 Similarly, a talking fish – a large, lordly creature that is followed out of the water by its smaller brethren – is featured in another of Chatelain’s stories from Luanda. In this tale, which is a variant of the Mbaka story cited above, the animal takes retribution on a woman who eats nothing but fish, that is, who abuses the river’s generosity.38 Here the fish is evidently a manifestation of a kianda if not a water spirit itself, for the Mbaka version explicitly identifies the “thing” in the net as a kiximbi/kianda, intent on punishing a person whose greediness, in its words, will “consume my people.”39 I have established that the Bakongo and Mbundu peoples, who were major suppliers of slaves for Southeastern Brazil, shared a common set of ideas about localized water spirits. Although I have given precedence to detailed ethnographic materials from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or even more recent analyses, historical studies of the Bakongo indicate that the cosmology of these people and the nucleus of their beliefs regarding basimbi spirits are quite old, extending at least back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Furthermore, in both the ethnographic accounts from the twentieth century and in the documentation on that earlier period, it is clear that the cult of the water genii was aimed above all at ensuring or restoring fertility (agricultural and human) as well as individual and community health and well-being.40 Anne Hilton, in particular, has noted the increased importance of the secret kimpasi cults, oriented toward the realm of the water spirits, in the second half of the seventeenth century – a time of recurrent ecological disaster, and particularly of social crisis provoked by the slave trade.41 Hilton and John Thornton have pointed to the ties between the “Antonian” movement in the first decade of the 1700s (an attempt to restore 37 José Martins Vaz, Filosofia Tradicional dos Cabindas, 2 Vols. (Lisbon: Agência-Geral do Ultramar, 1970), Vol. II, pp. 331–333. 38 Héli Chatelain, Folk-Tales, pp. 83–84. 39 Ibid., pp. 65–81. According to anthropologist Carlos Serrano, of the University of São Paulo (oral communication, August 11, 2000), in Cabinda today it is still common to see headmen’s graves adorned by a sculpted fish, usually colored red (the color of transition in Kongo cosmology). The fish represents the ancestors and the lineage of the headman; it also refers to local nature spirits, which embody the most ancient ancestors. 40 With respect to the ethnographic literature, see in particular Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion, ch. 3, esp. pp. 85–88, and Art and Healing, pp. 53–63 (on nkisi Mbenza fertility charms oriented toward the basimbi). 41 Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 192–210.


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social and political harmony, headed by a prophetic leader, Beatriz Kimpa Vita, who presented herself as Saint Anthony reborn) and these kimpasi cults.42 Wyatt MacGaffey has also noted that several details of Kimpa Vita’s story “are familiar from modern ethnography of the simbi cult.”43 Both the historical and the ethnographic literature make it clear that the basimbi are local territorial deities; their peculiar association with water reflects the importance of this element for crop fertility and community well-being, but it does not circumscribe their limits of action (whence their presence also on land). Thornton’s article in this volume further demonstrates the similarity of Mbundu and Bakongo beliefs about territorial genii in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – confirming that the close correspondence between their local “water spirits” in the twentieth century is not of recent origin. Territorial cults (or “earth and fertility cults” in Victor Turner’s phrase) have been common in Central and Southern Africa – indeed, in all of the continent south of the Sahara.44 Thus, it is not surprising that water genii, often with characteristics similar to those of the Mbundu and Bakongo, have been reported in many other Bantu-speaking societies. To be sure, the specific beliefs of other peoples were not identical to those of the Mbundu and Bakongo. Among the riverene groups of the Baloki (Bangala) of the interior of Zaire, for instance, the spirits that inhabited the water seem to have been those of evil people who had been ejected from the underworld; far from being generally benevolent and “moral” nature spirits, they “endeavour[ed] to hinder successful fishing.”45 Likewise, among the Xhosa of South Africa, “rivers are inhabited by demons or malignant spirits.”46 On the other hand, some specific concepts were shared by widely separated groups. For example, the Chagga of East Africa believed that the underworld could be reached through the bottom of pools; people who went there, however, had to refrain from eating any of the spirits’ food if they wished to return.47 The Bakongo knew that they must do the same to escape alive if they were ever 42 John K. Thornton, Kingdom of Kongo, pp. 61, 106–107; The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 56–58, chs. 5–7. 43 Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion, p. 211. More generally, MacGaffey also notes the strong evidence that “the structure of Kongo religion was the same in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as in the twentieth” (Ibid., p. 196). 44 J. Matthew Schoffeleers, River of Blood: The Genesis of a Martyr Cult in Southern Malawi, c. A. D. 1600 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), ch. 1 (Victor Turner cited on p. 10). See also: J. M. Schoffeleers, ed., Guardians of the Land: Essays on Central African Territorial Cults (Gwelo, Zimbabwe: Mambo Press, 1979); R. P. Werbner, ed., Regional Cults (London: Academic Press, 1977). 45 John Weeks, Among Congo Cannibals (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1913), p. 263. 46 W. C. Willoughby, Nature Worship and Taboo (Hartford: The Hartford Seminary Press, 1932), p. 2. 47 Alice Werner, Myths and Legends of the Bantu (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1933), pp. 93–95.

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kidnapped by the basimbi and taken to these beings’ underwater towns.48 Another example of shared concepts involves the Xhosa and the Bakongo. Although their river spirits were very different, both groups believed that under certain circumstances a person who crossed a stream should propitiate them by throwing leaves or grain into the water; and both believed that water spirits sometimes appeared among people in the form of dwarves.49 A third example brings together the Ronga from Mozambique and the Bakongo/Mbundu. Among all three peoples, the water or river spirit was essentially benevolent and commonly assumed the form of a fish.50 More important than shared individual concepts, however, are cognitive paradigms. The widespread belief in the strong association of territorial spirits and water, and the need to propitiate those spirits for community well-being, would have enabled many slaves from varied origins in Central Africa to converse in the same “language,” even if they disagreed initially on items in the “lexicon.”51 Given these circumstances, in a very diverse Bantu slave community, founded mostly by Mbundu, Bakongo, and related groups, and with a nucleus still composed of a large minority of Mbundu and Bakongo, it would not be surprising to find that the cosmological “vocabulary” of these peoples had come to prevail.52 But this is to leap ahead in my story. First, I must return to the great porpoise-skull strike, where the reader has probably arrived before me, anticipating the argument. What initially was opaque now becomes clear in the light of Bakongo and Mbundu cosmology. Luccock’s African sailors knew perfectly well that the skull he had found was that of a fishlike water creature; however, they also believed that it was a manifestation or incarnation 48 Karl Laman, Kongo, Vol. III, p. 34. 49 J. C. Willoughby, Nature Worship, p. 2; Karl Laman, Kongo, Vol. III, pp. 33, 34. 50 Jan Knappert, Bantu Myths and Other Tales (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), Ronga story on pp. 58–63. See also: André Boulanger, Yambe a l’aube des symboles: essai d’anthropologie religieuse zela (Rép. du Zaire), Bandundu, Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo): CEEBA publications, series II, v. 21, 1974, which came to my attention when this book was in press. Among the Zela, who live in Shaba province far in the interior of the continent (at ca. 27–29◦ longitude and 7–8◦ lattitude south: see map, Figure 6.1), territorial genii and individual protective spirits (the latter called ba-bisimba), both associated with water, together combine attributes strikingly similar to those of the simbi/kianda of the coast. This is further evidence of the wide dispersion of the particular complex of beliefs studied in this chapter. 51 J. C. Willoughby, Nature Worship, p. 2, notes that “throughout Bantu Africa, . . . pacificatory [propitiation] ceremonies . . . are connected with rivers, lakes, and the real or fabulous denizens of these waters.” My linguistic metaphor parallels that of Mintz and Price (An Anthropological Approach, p. 5) on the cultural “grammar” that informs West African attitudes and practices regarding twins (seen as desirable or undesirable, but in any case having “supernatural significance”). 52 Belief in territorial genii associated with water also existed in parts of West Africa. (See, for instance, Jean-Marie Gibbal, Genii of the River Niger [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994].) Thus, even many West Africans would also not have found Mbundu and Bakongo notions about such spirits entirely foreign.


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in fish form of a kianda/kiximbi/simbi/kisimbi/kinda spirit. If they did tell Luccock that the skull was that of “a person of their own colour,” the fact would not have been inconsistent with their belief that it was also a tutelary genius of nature; as we have seen, many people among the Bakongo and Mbundu thought that at least some shades of the dead (like “skull of the man” in Chatelain’s tale) could be transformed into water spirits. Their fear of touching the skull or of permanently removing it from its home in the water was predicated on the same logic that led the Mbundu hunting assistants in Serra Frazão’s anecdote to refuse to take the dead crocodiles from the river. In both cases, the removal and disfigurement of the water creature that manifested or was the essence of the “Spirit-Lord of the Land” was sacrilege and, as such, invited divine retribution. As Laman notes, a basimbi-fish “may of course not be touched; neither must it be killed or eaten.” The exception to this stricture only proves the rule; when a basimbi spirit appears to people “in the guise of a stick” or other object, says Laman, “those who are so favoured . . . transport themselves into ectasy before picking up the object, it cannot be done otherwise” (my italics).53 The problem with this explanation, of course, is that it begs the issue. Although it is consistent with the evidence, it does not indicate why the African sailors believed that this particular “fish” skull was an expression of the Other World, and why it had to be a manifestation of a kianda/simbi, not some other spirit. Indirectly, however, Luccock’s descriptions of the natural environment of Guanabara Bay resolve these questions. When examined in the context of the literature on the Mbundu and the Bakongo, his account of the crescendo of nature’s marvels on the trip through the Bay and the approach to the island provides the final proof for my argument. As we have seen, the water spirits of these Central African peoples are associated with large rock formations. According to Laman’s informants, the basimbi are identified particularly with high mountain peaks and with huge stones rising abrubtly from the water. In addition, they “prefer to stay near rapids and in deep ravines or water-filled caves,” although they may also be found in springs and elsewhere. Indeed, they frequent “caves and nooks” under the water and “their houses . . . consist of rock caves.”54 The magical properties of the combination of deep waters, mountains, fantastic rocks, rapids, waterfalls, springs, and caves are particularly evident in Laman’s discussion of several sacred places in Kongo that were known as basimbi haunts. In the middle of one “famous water . . . a heavy rock rises 53 Karl Laman, Kongo, Vol. III, p. 36. 54 Ibid., Vol. III, pp. 33, 34, 35 (passages cited); also 41, 43.

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round and smooth into the air, its top covered with creepers that are the clothes Mpulu Buzi [or Bunzi, among the Southern Bakongo the equivalent of Funza] dressed them [the basimbi] in.” Another magical pool is “surrounded by big rocks.” A third sacred place is defined by “two big rocks rising high into the air”; the basimbi on them inhabit a “vast” cave, which has water streaming “from all cavities.” A fourth home of the water spirits comprises a group of waterfalls, characterized by “twelve mountains and twelve pools,” with water trickling slowly from one pool to the other. At another sacred falls, “the water descends from one pool over flat rocks, so smooth as to permit no ascent, down another rock into a cave, finally rushing into the third pool.” Yet another waterfall “has twenty caves,” with basimbi dwelling in “two very deep pools.”55 Although Laman does not say so explicitly, the sparkle of light reflecting from water and mountain in these places almost certainly was interpreted by the Bakongo as one more manifestation of the basimbi. Recent studies indicate that the Bakongo associate reflective surfaces in general with kalunga, the line that separates the world of the living from that of the dead.56 More to the point, another early-twentieth-century observer of the peoples of the lower Zaire, G. Cyril Claridge, reported that “When the sun shines on distant objects, such as stones in the hillside, opal, glass, flint, quartz, lakes, etc., their reflection is seen a long way off and is thought to be the clothes of the fairies [basimbi] hanging out to dry after washing.”57 Judging from Laman’s observations, these sacred places must have had a formidable appearance. Indeed, their impact on the beholder is described by the missionary (or his informants) with superlatives: they are “terrifying” or “something of a wonder.”58 A visual record of one such simbi haunt more than confirms this impression. In the early nineteenth century, an English explorer in the lower Zaire river, Captain J. K. Tuckey, visited the “Fetish rock,” about 20 miles (∼32 kilometers) downriver from the town of Mboma. He described this stone formation as “a collection of masses of the oldest granite mixed with quartz and mica, running into the river perpendicularly.”59 55 Ibid., Vol. III, pp. 38–43. 56 Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion, p. 146; Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Random House, 1983), pp. 121–125. 57 G. Cyril Claridge, Wild Bush Tribes of Tropical Africa (London: Seeley, Service and Co., Ltd., 1922), p. 276. Claridge (p. 275) indicates explicitly that he is translating “simbi” by “fairies.” Cf. Coelho, “Imagens,” p. 147: among the Mbundu today, it is believed that water spirits exhibit “scintillations of light” and “thousands of luminous points” when they reveal themselves. 58 Karl Laman, Kongo, Vol. III, pp. 40, 41. 59 (Captain) J. K. Tuckey, Narrative of an Expedition to Explore the River Zaire, Usually Called the Congo, in south Africa, in 1816, under the Direction of Captain J. K. Tuckey, R.N., to Which is Added the Journal of Professor Smith; Some General Obervations on the Country and its Inhabitants; and an Appendix. . . . Published by Permission of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty (London: Frank Cass and Co., Ltd, 1967; facsimile of the original ed., London: John Murray, 1818), p. 95.


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From Laman’s and Clairidge’s accounts, one would suspect that this Fetish rock was associated with the water genii, given its physical characteristics, location, and presumably reflective surface (formed partly of “quartz and mica”). True enough, according to the anonymous author who compiled some “general observations” about Tuckey’s expedition, based on the notes and journals of its leading participants, the stone was “considered as the peculiar residence of Seembi, the spirit which presides over the river.”60 The botonist/geologist who accompanied Tuckey’s expedition observed the “conical shape” of the Fetish rock and noted that it was “the terminating point of the high mountainous land which is seen to extend into the interior”; its “towering cliffs . . . the new and varied vegetation on its sides, and the extensive view of the river which it commands presented a magnificent scene.”61 Complementing this verbal description are the sketches of the stone formation and its surroundings made by the expedition’s artist(s). Two engravings made from these drawings are reproduced in Figures 6.2 and 6.3.62 The more elaborate, showing a close-up view of “the Fetish Rock, looking down the river,” west by southwest, from near the Southern Bank (Figure 6.2), is dramatic enough; however, because of the angle from which it is taken, it does not capture the full grandeur of the formation. As the observer moves to the right, far out into the river, and then downstream, the main face of the rock comes into view. The topographical profile made from a distance, looking toward the southeast (Figure 6.3), captures the helter-skelter appearance of the enormous stones that composed this granite mass and permits an appreciation of its full size. Since the breadth of the river, indicated with an “f ” in the topographical profile, is given as “1.5 [statute] miles,” the formation itself appears to be about 1.9 miles (∼3 kilometers) long and to measure almost 3,000 feet (914 meters) at its highest points.63 Wondrous, indeed, was the house of Simbi – not only in Laman’s day, but also at the time of Luccock’s travels in Brazil. Tuckey and his men viewed the Fetish rock on July 25, 1816, which was 5 months before their compatriot departed from Rio to reconnoiter Guanabara Bay. Awesome 60 “General observations . . . collected from the preceding narratives, and from the observations of the Naturalists and Officers employed on the expedition,” In J. K. Tuckey, Narrative, p. 295. 61 “Professor [Chretien] Smith’s journal,” In J. K. Tuckey, Narrative, p. 295. 62 The principal (or only) artists on the expedition seem to have been John Hawkey and Tuckey himself. (See J. K. Tuckey, Narrative, frontispiece map and pp. lvi, 381; I suspect Tuckey was responsible for the topographical sketches and Hawkey for the landscape.) 63 The illustrations are from Ibid.: for Figure 6.2, the landscape facing p. 96; for Figure 6.3, the topographical profile on the frontispiece map and another profile, p. 97, which gives the breadth of the river.) I located the approximate viewpoint for each sketch from the compass directions in its title, together with signs on the map indicating where Tuckey’s ship dropped anchor. Judging from the breadth of the river and the scales of distance on Tuckey’s map, the statute mile is used here.

Figure 6.2. The Fetish Rock, as one looks down the Zaire River (west by southwest) from near the Southern Bank (courtesy of Frank Cass Publishers).


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Figure 6.3. The Fetish Rock as seen from a distance, as one looks toward the Southeast (courtesy of Frank Cass Publishers).

too, was Simbi’s wrath, which in both periods seems to have been expressed in a similar way. In the twentieth century, Claridge noted the belief that cyclones expressed “the united fury of the [basimbi]” against wrongdoers.64 One would expect that wildly gyrating water, the basimbi’s own medium, had the same connotation. Indeed, Laman suggests as much, since among the Southern Bakongo the creator and chief of the Basimbi, Bunzi (or, among other names, Mpulu Bunzi or Mangundazi), “manifests himself in torrents and sudden floods.”65 Tuckey’s account from the early nineteenth century is consistent with this idea. Like Luccock, the explorer of the Zaire confronted a strike of sorts, predicated on reasons that he too probably misunderstood: “some of the natives on board could not be prevailed on to accompany me in the boat [used to approach the Fetish stone], dreading the whirlpools of the rock, as much as the ancients did Charybdis.”66 The comparison with the monster of mythology is perhaps more apt than even Tuckey thought, for the Africans probably feared less the whirlpools themselves (not dangerous at that time of year, as the Captain discovered) than the simbi’s wrath. Or perhaps they were afraid of the very chief of the basimbi. According to Tuckey, the native name for the Fetish Rock was “Taddy d’ya M’wangoo,” or “the Rock of M’wangoo”: conceivably a reference to Mangundazi (Bunzi) himself. 67 Such, then, is the grand environment in which the water spirits dwelt. Yet, it was not only great waters and rocks, marked by treacherous currents and reflected light, that could reveal these spirits’ haunts, but also smaller signs. For instance, according to Laman “some people believe . . . [that] crooked or twisted trees and various objects rising to the surface of the water [are basimbi].”68 In addition, smoke was often interpreted as an indication of the presence of water spirits; “where the smoke is there are the fairies [basimbi],” says one Bakongo proverb registered by Claridge. Fog and morning mist 64 G. Cyril Claridge, Wild Bush Tribes, p. 275. Cf. Coelho, “Imagens,” p. 147: among the Mbundu today, it is believed that water genii are accompanied by “vibrant sounds,” carried by “noisy gusts [ventos] and whirlwinds.” 65 Karl Laman, Kongo, Vol. III, p. 36. 66 J. K. Tuckey, Narrative, p. 96. 67 Ibid., p. 97. 68 Karl Laman, Kongo, Vol. III, p. 36.

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were likened to smoke as signs of the basimbi. According to Claridge, “the fog which sometimes settles over the valleys, especially in the winter, is said to be the smoke from the fires kindled by the fairies to cook their victuals”; likewise, if a person goes outdoors “before cockcrow” and gets ill, “it is because he has unwittingly intruded himself among the fairies . . . [when] they are en fête, which is always . . . in the fine drizzle of the dawn.”69 Finally seashells, especially the spiriform kind, were associated with the spirit world and particularly with the basimbi. According to MacGaffey, to describe the movement of the dead in time as a continuous spiral [with some dead ancestors eventually becoming basimbi] is justified by indigenous usage. One of the expressions for the otherworld [in Kikongo], kutwazingila, is translated by both Laman and Van Wing [another early missionary-ethnographer among the Bakongo] as “where we shall live,” but zinga also carries the sense of “to perdure” and to move in a spiral path.”

“The use of shells in charms is at least partially based on this association,” asserts MacGaffey, “certain shells being both spiriform and enduring objects that were formerly ‘alive.’”70 He then cites a passage from Laman as an example: “Mbamba is a large sea-shell. Finding many of these shells, the people in the old days consecrated them their bisimbi. They hid their souls in the shells . . .” to protect them and ensure their perdurance in the afterlife.71 The point of all this is that Luccock’s description of his excursion through the bay evokes both the grand environment and these small signs of the basimbi. The naturalist, of course, could not have known this; nor did the crew membres read his account. The latter, however, had eyes of their own and most certainly saw what he did. Long before the trip, they would have appreciated the lofty mountains behind the city and the extraordinary rocks (Pão de Açu´ car, the “Sugar Loaf,” among them) rising “round and smooth” out of the bay and crowned with vegetation, much like one of the formations described by Laman. Without the smog that besets Rio today, they would ´ aos) in the have seen the mighty “Organ Pipes” (part of the Serra dos Org˜ distance and even the tall waterfall on the face of the Serra that Luccock himself observed from the city. On the excursion, they would have been impressed, as Luccock was, with the confluence of rivers flowing into the bay, particularly with the largest of them, the Iquapecu, more than 600 yards (∼548 meters) broad at its mouth and continuing “long and deep” for a considerable way upstream.72 69 70 71 72

G. Cyril Claridge, Wild Bush Tribes, pp. 275, 276. Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion, p. 77. Karl Laman, Kongo, Vol. III, p. 37, cited in Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion, p. 77. John Luccock, Notes, pp. 347–48.


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Above all, however, they would have marveled, for reasons of their own, at the rock formations they observed at various points on the trip. In size, unusual shape or position, and placement in or near water, these formations were similar to those described by Laman and registered by the Tuckey expedition. “At the entrance of the Inhomerim [river] . . . lies a pile of broken rocks, which looks as though they [sic] had been tossed from a considerable distance.” Up the Macacu river, “in the first rising ground are many large roundish stones, imbedded in clay, which must have been conveyed to their station by some powerful agent.” Near the mouth of the Guaxendiba river, we . . . noticed the appearance of the rocks lying close to the shore. They consist of large masses of granite, rising abruptly out of the water; some of them in the shape of parallelepipedons, with sides and angles naturally smooth, as if well-wrought with the chisel, but most have a roundish face. . . .

The rock formations became even more extraordinary as the expedition advanced; furthermore, they were now associated with very strong water currents. Upon rounding the northern end of Paquetá island, “a surprising scene bursts at once upon the stranger”: For the space of several square miles immense masses of naked rock, chiefly if not wholly of gneiss, break abruptly through the water, irregular in their shape and position, and rising to a great height. Many of them are perforated horizontally; the largest of these singular holes being about three feet in diameter. . . .73

Luccock does not comment on the way these great stone formations caught the afternoon light; however, since gneiss, like granite, contains quartz and mica, it is easy to imagine some of them flashing brightly for the people in the launch.74 In any case, between these imposing rocks, with their numerous caves, “the channels . . . [were] deep,” but “the current ran so rapidly as to induce us to drop anchor at the island of Bocéjo, and to wait until the force of the wind and tide had abated.”75 The next morning, on the way from Paquetá to the island of Braç o Forte, where Luccock would find the porpoise skull, spectacular rocks were again viewed, “standing high out of the water” and forming “an interesting broken mass; some of them have evidently been split, and the parts of them which heretofore formed one stone now lean [away] from each other.” Braç o Forte itself was “composed of large masses of granite, scattered in a confused manner, partly covered with earth and forest wood.” Luccock noted that 73 Ibid., pp. 341, 349, 362, 363 74 Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 1971), entry for “gneiss.” 75 John Luccock, Notes, p. 363.

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the island had “many natural caverns” and “possesses what is very uncommon among these islands, two or three springs of good water.” This information he apparently obtained second hand. If it came from the captain of the launch, as seems likely, then the African crew may also have been privy to it. In any case, the entrance to the island’s small harbor, following the sequence of fantastic rock formations beginning at Paquetá, would have been enough to alert them that they were arriving at a rather special place. This haven “ought to be approached with caution,” writes Luccock, “for it is surrounded with rocks, among which the current runs violently, and a conical one lies under water, just in front of the harbour’s mouth” (my italics).76 The coincidence is extraordinary: at the culminating moment of their approach to the island, one of the small signs of the basimbi (in Laman’s words, an object “rising up to the surface of the water”) joined the increasingly grand environment of rocks and unpredictable currents that denoted the presence of these spirits. Earlier, however, the Africans would have noted another of these signs and, given the circumstances, may have found it deeply troubling. At the Iriri river (into which, apparently, fell the great waterfall that was visible from Rio) they witnessed shells being gathered to be transformed into lime. Later, when they stopped at Paquetá the day before proceeding to Braç o Forte, they again encountered “the people whom we had seem in the Irir´ı,” who “had conveyed their cargoes of shells, and were employed in completing their conversion into lime” by baking them in open-air “ovens” formed of alternate layers of shells and wood.77 The shells themselves “were chiefly of the spiral kind” (my italics).78 What effect would the destruction of spiral shells, associated with the water spirits, the tutelary “Lords of the Land,” have had on these Africans? The fact itself, of course, would not have been new to them. At the time, virtually all the lime used in Rio was extracted from shells and much or most of it was processed within Guanabara Bay. Because of this, according to ethnographic artist Jean Baptiste Debret, one could see “from a distance the rolls of smoke produced by these manufactories which adorned the small, inhabited islands of the bay.”79 These particular shells, however, were taken from a place that could be construed as a special home of the basimbi, a locale where mountain, waterfall, and bay met as one. Thus, if the sailors saw the practice as a sacrilege, they may have begun their trip into the bay with some uneasiness; 76 Ibid., p. 364. 77 Ibid., pp. 344–345, 364. The process is illustrated and described in Jean Baptiste Debret, Viagem Pitoresca e Histórica ao Brasil, 3 vols. in 2 tomes (São Paulo: Livraria Martins, 1940; 1st ed. France, 1834), Tome I, Vol. II, plate 35 (after p. 212) and p. 230. Debret’s observations were made between 1816 and 1831. 78 John Luccock, Notes, p. 364. 79 Debret, Viagem, p. 230.


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but their trepidation would then have increased when they witnessed close up (and by imputation, perhaps, thereby shared the guilt for) the gathering and burning of the Iriri shells. Given the normal association between smoke and spirits, the “rolls of smoke” rising nearby from objects closely identified with the basimbi may have hovered like dark clouds in their imaginations. In sum, concern about possible retribution by the basimbi may have weighed on their minds and influenced their interpretation of subsequent signs. One such sign possibly appeared the following morning on the trip from Paquetá to Braç o Forte. Almost certainly, the launch left Paquetá at the break of dawn, in accordance with sailing practice, and may have arrived at the entrance to the harbor of the smaller island before the morning mist (frequently present, according to Luccock) had dissipated.80 In the context of the increasingly grand environment that pointed to the presence of water spirits, one wonders if this smokelike “fog” or “early morning drizzle,” following on the (sacrilegious) smoke produced the day before by the burning of the shells, may not have been taken as a sign of ominous portent. These speculations, of course, push us beyond the limits of the evidence. Still, whether or not the Iriri shells, their smoke, and possible morning mists on the approach to Braç o Forte contributed to the spiral of events that led to the porpoise-skull episode, it seems clear that the escalation of nature’s wonders had prepared Luccock’s sailors to expect something highly unusual. If Bakongo/Mbundu cosmology helps to explain their actions after Luccock’s appropriation of the skull, it also leads to an understanding of their state of mind before the event. The analysis undertaken here reveals the importance of examining shared cultural assumptions in order to comprehend behavior. It makes it clear, if anyone was in doubt, that African slaves used their past to make sense of their present and that their cosmology gave them resources to act conjointly and decisively. Finally, it suggests that a common cultural heritage existed for a substantial proportion of Central Africans in Brazil, and raises the possibility that this heritage could be articulated as a basis for unity among people of diverse origins, and thus ultimately as a platform for resistance. It does not prove, however, that this indeed happened. To do that, we must look at a larger episode: Brazil’s “1848 Revolution,” when Central African water spirits threatened to rise up in concert over the combined rivers and mountains of Rio, São Paulo, and Southern Minas Gerais. In a subsequent article, I will attempt to show that the 1848 slave conspiracy, in its organization and rituals, is suggestive of Central African 80 John Luccock, Notes, last paragraph of ch. 11.

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“revitalization” movements of the kimpasi type among the Bakongo, which historically have sought to bring the people into harmony once again with the basimbi, the spirit lords of the land. In particular, in the apparent devotion of its participants to Saint Anthony, the abortive rebellion of 1848 may be reminiscent of the most famous of the early revitalization movements among the Bakongo: that of the “Antonians” of 1704–1706, which took Saint Anthony as its standard, perhaps reinterpreting him as Bunzi/Funza, the father and chief of the basimbi.81, 82 81 On millenarian revitalization movements, see Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements Against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979). On the Antonians, see the studies cited in fns. 41–43 and António Custódio Gonç alves, ´ Le Lignage contre l’état: Dinamique Politique Kongo du XVième au XVIIIième siécle (Evora: Instituto ´ de Investigaç a˜ o Cient´ıfica Tropical, Universidade de Evora, 1985), part III. The suggestion that Saint Anthony was reinterpreted in the Kongo as Bunzi/Funza is made by MacGaffey, Religion, pp. 210–211. 82 The author is Professor of History, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. A preliminary version of this article was presented at the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan (mimeo, working paper 8, January 1995).

PART THREE

Central Africans in Haiti and Spanish America

7

Twins, Simbi Spirits, and Lwas in Kongo and Haiti WYATT MACGAFFEY

After decades of neglect, the Congo-Angolan element in American popular culture is now enthusiastically pursued and discussed. African culture does not open itself easily to understanding. In the search for trans-Atlantic parallels and connections, one cannot simply help oneself to traits as though Central African culture, or any other, were a sort of plumbers’ supply store to which you can go in search of a widget like the one you have at home; enthusiasm may have to wait on patient labors of translation that recognize that each word, idea, or object is embedded in matrices of language, history, and ritual practice. In the work of translation, we must also recognize that the English terms with which we necessarily begin are by no means free of ambiguity and implicit moral valency. The topic of the relation between Kongo beliefs in simbi spirits and the popular religion of Haiti is both rich and difficult. It is well known that the Petro series of Haitian spirits called lwa includes many that are called simbi or by simbi-related names. This paper provides ethnographic details to supplement the meager published documentation of Kongo cults related to simbi spirits and to enrich the study of religious innovation in Haiti and elsewhere in the Americas. It is precisely in the details of Kongo culture, rather than in general conceptions of “African religion,” that specific correspondences are likely to be discovered. In what follows, I rely on the classical sources for Haitian ethnography, fully recognizing that good information about West Central Africa was not available when they were written, and that Haitian religious practice has evolved since then.1

1 My knowledge of Haiti is limited to books; I am grateful to Robert Farris Thompson for comments he made (long ago!) on a draft of this paper. Kongo material in this paper is based on research in Mbanza Manteke, Kasangulu, and Matadi in 1965, 1966, and 1970. Also on texts written in KiKongo by native speakers in about 1915 (MacGaffey, Footnote 18).

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In Kongo, bisimbi (the plural) are spirits of localities, inhabiting rocks, gullies, streams, and pools, who are able to influence the fertility and wellbeing of those who live nearby. “Local spirit” literally translates simbi kya nsi (spirit of a country or territory), but it lacks the sense of the marvelous that is essential to the concept of bisimbi. The Latin genius loci is close, but “genius” has taken on other meanings in English. Because they are believed to dwell in features of the landscape such as pools, waterfalls, and unusual rocks, and because they are associated with the weather, we might call them nature spirits, but that term carries irrelevant connotations of the modern European idea of Nature. Bisimbi are closely associated with, and at times indistinguishable from, both persons born abnomally (called baana ba nlongo, “sacred children,” or “children subject to taboos) and minkisi, which are magical devices or “power objects.” The baana ba nlongo (sing. mwana wa nlongo) are also called both baana ba nkisi, “nkisi children,” and bakisi.2 All these terms are linked. Bisimbi are also very similar to bankita; in some parts of the KiKongo-speaking region people use one term, some the other, and some both, often with local disagreement as to whether there is a difference and if so, what it is (MacGaffey, 1986, pp. 77–78).3 A KiKongo text from 1915, by Kavuna Simon (S. Kavuna, “Northern Kongo ancestor figures,” African Arts 28, 2 (Spring 1995), 48–53), shows how difficult it is to categorize the manifestations of these spirits: What are bisimbi? They have other names, too. Some are called python, lightning, gourd or calabash, mortar or a sort of pot. The explanation of their names is that they are water spirits (nkisi mia mamba). The names of some of these minkisi are: Na Kongo, Ma Nzanza, Nkondi and Londa. They have many appearances of all kinds. Some are seen to be green, or red, black, perhaps in spotted or sparkling colors. The body in which they are appealed to is of three or four kinds: 1) the body of a person 2) of a snake such as a python or viper 3) a calabash or gourd 4) of wood or pottery. Sometimes, a spark of fire.

As one attempts to understand Kongo thinking on these matters, it is often difficult to decide whether, from a European point of view, one is dealing with objects or persons, and with “spirits” or “real people.” In another text Kavuna indicates his own confusion in the matter: 2 In Bantu languages, nouns change their meaning according to the noun class to which they are assigned by the prefix; in KiKongo the prefix ba- (sing. n-) normally identifies persons, whereas mi(sing. n- or mu-) signifies, principally, persons considered as agents; spirits and mysteries connected with them; certain plants; and certain parts of the human body (also see Footnote 23 below). The prefix bi- (ki- in the singular) indicates cultural objects, both “things”and cultural elements such as condition of being, rank (kimfumu, chiefship), customs (bifu), and language (KiKongo, the language of the BaKongo). Bisimbi, territorial spirits, are also, interchangeably, basimbi. 3 W. MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986).

7. Twins, Simbi Spirits, and Lwas in Kongo and Haiti

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Perhaps they originated as people, for some bisimbi are minkisi, others are living persons, and others are the dead who were once people. God knows how to explain this tangle; we ordinary people can’t make much sense of it. W. MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 141.

Throughout West Central Africa, bisimbi (called by other terms in other areas) affect the lives of the living in three modes. They are the tutelary spirits of particular territories, they become incarnate as twins and other special children, and they are the principal animating forces in minkisi. Their role as local spirits was once prominent in the migration myths of chiefdoms and in the installation rituals of chiefs. The greatest of these spirits were associated with the most important political units; for example, the shrines of Bunzi and Lusunzi in Ngoyo on the Atlantic coast. Since the destruction of indigenous polities under colonial rule, the great, named spirits are scarcely remembered. Nowadays, bisimbi are most familiar as anonymous spirits able to cause trouble if they are not treated with respect. When too many accidents occur on a stretch of road, truck drivers may make small offerings to the bisimbi in a nearby watercourse; if a man finds after moving into his new house that all is not well – he has bad dreams, his children fall ill – he may be advised to throw coins to the four corners to placate the bisimbi of the place. SPECIAL CHILDREN

Protestant missionaries adopted nlongo as the equivalent of “sacred” or “holy,” but the translation “sacred children” for baana ba nlongo distorts the meaning. These children have exceptional powers and demands, which require that they be treated in special ways. The most important of them, twins (nsimba, also mapasa) and albinos (ndundu), are considered to “be” bisimbi, and they are the objects of a cult whose servants are the mothers of twins (ngudi za nsimba). Because bisimbi are water spirits, one of the taboos applied to twins is that they be kept away from fire; since malicious bisimbi may invade any child’s brain by way of the fontanelle, many modern mothers keep a match in their infant’s hair to bar the way, just in case. Twins are regarded as an affliction, in two senses; literally, because it is a great burden on their mother to nurse them and try to keep them alive; and mystically, in that twins, as bisimbi, use their power to bewitch each other and other people who incur their displeasure. The principal purpose of the rites of the cult is to keep happy the children themselves and other bisimbi connected with them. A subsidiary purpose is to cure certain diseases that may afflict members of a lineage into which twins have been born and that has thereby

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been revealed as particularly susceptible to simbi influences. Diviners may also refer other clients to the mothers of twins for treatment. The women of a matrilineage in which twins are born are supposed to know which streams or pools are the homes of the particular bisimbi incarnated in their line. They say the twins themselves reveal the information. All twins are said to be jealous of one another, and to quarrel even in the womb, but those born with separate placentae are said to have come from separate waters and to be for that reason even less likely to get on well together (MacGaffey, 1986, p. 86).3 One hears that women may bear twins as a result of contacting bisimbi in streams, and that men may have twin or other unusual children if they pass certain simbi habitats without making an offering, especially at dawn or twilight, when bisimbi are about. Clearly it is not supposed that such contacts substitute for the normal process of impregnation. In Kongo physiology, the mother is thought of as a mere incubator of material (semen, becoming blood) deposited in her by the father. Nevertheless, the simbi connection attaches to the matrilineage, to the female line, as a function of its localization. This belief embodies a folk recognition of the fact that a specialized gene for twinning, which occurs with exceptional frequency among the BaKongo and also among the Yoruba of Nigeria, is inherited by women from their mothers (MacGaffey, 1986, p. 86).3 Besides twins and the children born after them, special children include dwarfs, albinos, and all that are defective or deformed. The missing parts of defectives are considered to have remained in the other world. The deformed are said to resemble twisted roots and trees, which are considered to show the influence of bisimbi such as Funza, a kind of creator deity. Dwarfs are small and disproportionately large-headed, like the bisimbi called Mbwidi-Mbodila, who live at the edge of the universe. All abnormal bodies, especially twins and albinos, should be buried not in the clan cemetery but at a crossroads or in water. Their graves become simbi cult objects equivalent to termite hills and grottoes, the same rituals being performed at all these places to influence both fertility and the weather. Passersby should throw green leaves on their graves lest they suffer curses or the fertility of their lineage be reduced. In some areas, water should be poured into the grave at the burial of an abnormal child lest a drought ensue. Formerly, the birth of twins required that the parents be initiated to the cult of Bunzi (Lumoni), Funza, Lemba, or an equivalent major simbi. These great spirits, said to be the oldest of all, were thought to have introduced minkisi to the visible world. Twisted roots, strange stones, and abnormal births were read as signs of divine creative power. The bisimbi were also


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manifest at the beginning of time in the form of the BaMbaka-mbaka or BaMbwidi-Mbodila, whose name means “I fell down, I rotted”; it is said that their heads were so large that, once down, they could not stand unaided (this idea recurs in Zambia and elsewhere in Central Africa). Twins and the parents of twins were considered to have special powers with respect to minkisi and their constitution [cf. A. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Schocken Books, 1972)]: When one gives birth to twins one becomes associated with all the bakisi, and one cannot fear minkisi. When they call you to go and prepare an nkisi, go, for you have become a companion of the bakisi of the land and those of the water . . . If someone has hung an nkisi on his n’safu tree to keep others from helping themselves to the fruit, or if a palm tree is hung with nkisi, the parent of twins need not fear to help himself (p. 59).4

When a woman gives birth to twins, her own mother and grandmother also become Mothers of Twins, retroactively. These women, and any other women of the lineage, may put single or double marks in white (sometimes blue and white, or yellow and white) on their foreheads and temples with the intention of advertising both forward and to the sides that twins have been born. Similar marks are sometimes worn when a death occurs in a lineage whose women have had twins. In these and other rituals, usage varies considerably. Mothers of twins say that it is the twins themselves who indicate what is to be done, each colony of bisimbi having its own unpredictable views on the matter. The first-born twin is called Nsimba; the second, Nzuzi or Makanzu. Nsimba and nzuzi are two species of wildcat, which twins are forbidden to eat, like various other spotted and striped foods; particolored creatures, like twins, mediate between the visible and invisible worlds. A child born before twins acquires the name Masamba, from samba, to open a way. Those who come after are called Nlandu (landa, to follow), and Lukombo (komba, to sweep up). Other sacred children include Kinene, who has a hare lip; Nzinga, who was born with his cord around his neck (from zinga, to encircle) and is likely to be stupid; Nsunda, who was born feet first; Nsenga, born lying on his back (senguka); Mfulama, born face down ( fulama); and Mbwidi-Mbodila, having an excessively large head (hydrocephaly). All special children are equipped, in lesser degree, with the simbi powers of twins. Some individuals, however, may be called by one of these names simply because it was the name of a grandparent. Kilombo is born with a caul and 4 J. M. Janzen, and W. MacGaffey, An Anthology of Kongo Religion (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1974).

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is said to be a hunter (Troesch, p. 43).5 A child not otherwise abnormal may be revealed as a simbi in his mother’s dreams; such a child is called a kilombo and thought to be a precursor of twins. Triplets are called abidi, literally “abundance,” although abundance is not a strong theme of this cult, as it is among Ndembu in Zambia (Turner, p. 44).6 The third child, in case of triplets, is called Katumwa, “He who is not ordered about.” Twins must be provided with a dish for each one, in which the parents should put small gifts every day, including money “so that the twins will have something to spend if they feel like going to market.” Traditionally this dish would have been a bark box containing white and red clays, kola nuts, a red parrot feather, small iron chains (zimpangu), seashells (for long life), and other things (Troesch, pp. 44–45).5 Twins should be sung to, to keep them happy; if not sufficiently sung to they will leave in a huff, to return whence they came (die). The songs they demand are the special songs of twins, many of which consist simply of the names of sacred children, sung seriatim with a refrain. All are in the old pentatonic scales of indigenous music, uncontaminated by the tub-thumping rhythms and predictable cadences of Protestant hymnbooks, otherwise pervasive in modern Kongo music. In lineages where there are young twins about, these songs, regarded as joyful and partylike, must be sung even at funerals lest the twins misunderstand the significance of the usual dirges, assume that their welcome is worn out, and say to each other, “let’s go back where we came from.” Here are three songs of twins recorded in Matadi in 1970. E, nsimba kayelanga ko, Nsimba dawuna lukaya Inga mono ngyamana yukwa kwame Nsimba dawuna lukaya Mayangi mayangi Nsimba dawina lukaya.

The twin is not ill, The twin tears off a leaf [the disease is ended] Indeed I am accustomed [to being a mother of twins] The twin tears off a leaf Happiness, happiness, The twin tears off a leaf.

Tearing off a leaf is an offering to bisimbi. The second song is a list of some of the twin medicines and their significance. As with the medicines in minkisi, significance is derived from play on words.7 5 J. Troesch, “Le nkutu du comte de Soyo,” Aequatoria 24:2 (1961): 41–49. 6 V. W. Turner, The Ritual Process (London: Routledge, 1969). 7 W. MacGaffey, “Complexity, astonishment and power: the visual vocabulary of Kongo minkisi,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 14 (1988): 188–203.

7. Twins, Simbi Spirits, and Lwas in Kongo and Haiti Nsimba and Makanzu Mono ngyongenene kwame. Mama Nzambi ye Lukombo, mono nkombedele kwame. Mayangi ye mayangi. Mono nayizingina kweno. E malemba-lemba meto, biika twalembama kweto. E luyangu-yangu lweto, biika twayangumuka kweto. E zinsaku-saku zeto, biika twasakumuka kweto. Engwa tata mapasa, biika kalanga mafumba. Engwa mama mapasa, biika kalanga mafumba. Mayangi mayangi Ngudi za nsimba.

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Nsimba and Makanzu, I complained, Mother of Nzambi and Lukombo. I have “swept up,” Happiness, happiness. I said, now come all of you, Leaves of lemba-lemba, Let us be “peaceful.” Flowers of luyangu-yangu Let us “purify” ourselves. Leaves of lusaku-saku, Let us be “blesssed.” Eh, the father of twins, May he cease to grieve! Eh, the mother of twins, May she cease to grieve! Happiness, happiness, Parents of twins.

The third song makes a pun on (ki-)sangwa, a rattle, which is the women’s principal musical instrument, formerly made from a gourd, and sangwa, seed: E sangwa yeto yole nani wena yo vingila? E, e nani wena yo vingila. E, mama mapasa, bika kalanga mafumba. Bu mfwidi kwame, nani wena kumpingila? E na yizi yizi kweno. E mono lumbu mfwidi kwame, nundidila mu sangwa.

Our two rattles (the twins), who will inherit them? Chor. Who will inherit them? Mother of twins, cease your sorrow. When I die, who will take my place? Come all of you. The day I die, mourn me with rattles.

Twins are also supposed to be treated alike, lest they envy and therefore bewitch one another [lokasana; cf. A. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Schocken Books, 1972)]. The obligation to treat twins equally has given rise to a proverb, widespread in Central Africa, in support of fairness: “If you have given birth to twins, sleep on your back.” If one of them dies, the other is given a little wooden figure as a substitute, lest he pine away; the parents may not mourn. Besides bewitching themselves and others, twins can bring unexpected blessings; their father may, for example, find money in the house. They can see other bisimbi in the water and may warn their parents to avoid certain pools. Their special powers (called kindoki, “witchcraft”) also enable

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them to perform spectacular but useless feats like crossing rivers on leaves or the like. In all this they are no different from other spirits or holders of kindoki. Albinos, like twins, are common in Kongo, though I have found no statistics. Albinos retain the light color of the dead, and because their poor daylight vision is believed to be complemented by superior nocturnal vision, they are considered to possess the wisdom of the night (ngangu za mpimpa) as well as ordinary diurnal wisdom. In practice, exceptional intelligence in an albino attracts this explanation, whereas duller wits are simply ignored. Lineages in which albinos occur observe taboos similar to those for twins. Albinos formerly had important ritual roles in the eastern Kongo cults of KiNdembo and KiMpasi, and at the court of Loango, where four of them were trained to be “the king’s witches” (Battel, p. 331).8 Albino hair is still an important magical ingredient, and my daughter’s blond hair was clipped for this purpose at least once. Dwarfs also “are” bisimbi, and those born lacking body attributes are thought to have left them in the other world. AILMENTS, CURES, AND CURSES

Twins or other special children, their parents, and other members of their lineage are considered liable to afflictions sent by the twins themselves or by the bisimbi to which the lineage is related [cf. A. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Schocken Books, 1972)]. Such afflictions are usually treated by mothers of twins, that is, in practice, by recognized experts among them. The reminiscences of a mother of twins in 1970 show how the cult functions in some instances as an oblique aggressive strategy enabling women to force their husbands and fathers to compensate them for neglect:9 Twins can be really bad characters. Take Nsimba’s wife Makanzu, for example. When she was about ten years old she had a quarrel with her stepfather. He himself was Nzinga, and strong enough to put her in a bottle. She let herself out, however, and put him in himself, with the stopper on, just to show him who was master. So he fell seriously ill, with a terrible fever, until his kinsmen brought gifts to the mothers of twins and they held a party with food and drink, dancing and singing, to put Makanzu in a good mood and get her to relent, which eventually she did, after her stepfather begged her pardon. She blessed him, and he recovered. There was another Makanzu in Mbanza Nkazi whose twin died and who used to have fainting fits afterwards, passing out as though she were dead. Her husband 8 A. Battel, “The strange adventures of Andrew Battell,” in J. Pinkerton, ed., Voyages and Travels (17 vols. London, 1808–14) Vol. XVI, pp. 317–336. 9 I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971).


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had to call in the mothers of twins to put the spots on their foreheads and hold a party around her prostrate form, until some three hours later she would come back from the marsh at the foot of the hill where she had gone to have fun with her twin and the bisimbi. Her husband got tired of it after a while and divorced her.

Other treatments seem to use the presence of abnormal children as a conveniently available explanation. In my sample of 86 cases from the books of a healer in Matadi, 10 mentioned afflictions associated with the twin cult. In one of them the client complained of burning sensations and trembling in the legs; she had taken herbal remedies to no avail. A younger sibling had been a mwana wa nkisi, and her elders told her that her own difficulties were due to an open fontanelle, which allowed the light to trouble her brains. Bisimbi themselves are supposed to have cloven heads, and on that basis were traditionally associated with heads of corn. In Haiti, the lwa called Simbi is the patron of maize, also of rain and magicians (Deren, p. 70).10 In another case, a mother asked whether her child was nkisi or not; she had heard that he was, which might explain his ill health. At birth he had seemed deficient and had failed to cry. She had dreamed of crossing water, of gullies [where bisimbi are found], and of washing white clothes which kept disappearing. The prophet divined that the basimbi in the water were holding parties to tempt the child back. He sent the mother to the mothers of twins, after first bathing the child six times in order to close its eyes to the otherwordly invitation. Because it was chiefly the concern of women, took place in domestic contexts, and did not result in public disturbances, as did witchcraft accusations, the twin cult went generally unrecorded by missionary ethnographers. After all, if a group of women should want to sing over a newborn infant in the maternity ward, who is to notice? This social seclusion also meant that the cult is relatively archaic; it is here, and in other activities of women, rather than in the prophetic churches, that one is likely to hear the old Kongo music, and to approach most closely the ancient beliefs. In 1970, I found that few men were interested in the twin cult and its beliefs, and that many female twins had renounced their supposed mystical powers and obligations. This skepticism is not necessarily a recent development, however. It is easy to see during healing consultations that women with certain anxieties are likely to reach out to their culture, so to speak, for tentative solutions that they then offer to the diviner, or to relatives, in the form of dreams they have had, which everyone recognizes as implicit recommendations. The diviner’s endorsement of such a suggestion lends it some authority in the eyes of the woman herself and those close to her. 10 M. Deren, Divine Horsemen (New York: Delta, 1970).

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Men’s anxieties are not the same, and Kongo men are usually inclined to let women deal with their own problems as best they may. THE BAMANDONA

11

Ritual practices vary within and between districts of Central Africa, though they all subscribe to similar general concepts. In Eastern Kongo a cult of the water spirits called bankita (also mpongo) replaces the cult of twins in its most important functions, though bisimbi are also known there. Some say that bisimbi inhabit the water’s edge, but that the bankita, who were never human and have always been stones, live deep in the falls of the Congo; Bamandona, the servants of the bankita, who wish to raise them up must request permission to pass from the bisimbi. When easterners (BaNtandu) move west, as to Matadi, they take their cult with them, making contact with local bankita at convenient pools and waterfalls where westerners would encounter bisimbi. I have not witnessed anything but fragments of the cult. My information comes from a priest of the cult and from her husband, a Manteke man who had often witnessed its séances. The wife, about 20 years old and completely illiterate, with a vital, mercurial temperament, was a remarkable woman. The informant’s mother entered this work after completing a protracted cure for a swollen belly, one of a wide range of diseases in which the Bamandona specialize, which includes fainting, painful or swollen legs, nightmares, and madness. The cure normally consists of seclusion in a ritual enclosure for as long as several months. For women, this may well serve as a much-needed rest; men do not usually take such cures because they have jobs, or else have no money. During seclusion the patient’s body is entirely covered with red camwood powder; if she has to go outside for ritual baths and other purposes she is covered from head to foot in cloths, and the Mandona who precedes her sounds a little double-ended wooden bell (kunda). The red powder rubs off on the cloths, which have to be thrown away and replaced by new ones. After bathing, the patient may not look back at the water; when she crosses any stream on the way she hooks her little finger in that of her guide (nsongi a nzila). The Mandona herself wears red while at work (as a mediator) and white for visits to cemeteries (the land of the dead). The patient’s family must support her during her seclusion. After the cure, she is expected to be initiated as Mandona herself, lest the disease 11

Ndona is from the Portuguese term for “lady.”


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return. The initiation fee, paid in foodstuffs, might easily run in 1970 to the equivalent of $100, but the qualified priest could expect to benefit in due course from fees paid by new initiates. This is the standard form of affliction cults in Central Africa. The patient cannot work alone, so she recruits two relatives, one of them male, to complete the priestly trio. All are known as Mandona. The man is called Ta Mfumu. The healer is Ma Mvumbi (mvumbi, a dead body). The other woman is Ma Ntombo (from tombula, to invoke spirits), whose function is that of seer, notifying the healer of what she has seen in trance and what herbs to use. Ma Ntombo also acts as a general diviner, advising clients about witchcraft. The plants she uses are classified in part according to where they are found: grassland, forest, water, or on the margins between (Janzen, p. 199).12

SONGS OF BAMANDONA

In the first song, twins and other sacred children are explicitly associated with the nkita cult (mpongo is another name for nkita; kanga and kutula are verbs referring, respectively, to cursing and to relieving afflictions). Yandi Mantombo watombula mpongo, yakanga, yakutula. E yaya, baana banlongo, e yay’e Yandi Mantombo yibatuma ku vwela, E mama, e Nsimba ye Nzuzi, ye baana banlongo. E taata ngizidi kwame ku nima mvukulu,

Mantombo, she raised up the spirit; I tied it, I released it. Refr. E yaya, the special children, yay’e. Mantombo. She sent them to the (ritual) enclosure. Nsimba and Nzuzi and the special children, E taata, I have entered the enclosure.

In another song, twins are not mentioned, but the first verse repeats a cliché of twin songs, “look sharp”: Things are happening, Father said, look sharp, Trouble is on the way. This is the time the bankita come, in the dark. This is the time to enter the sanctuary of Mandona. Whoever breaks a prohibition causes his own death. 12 J. M. Janzen,The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

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The founder of each group sets up a shrine in her house, which she is supposed to have obtained from the bankita under the water. The Mandona, intending to constitute a shrine (tombula bankita, bring up the bankita), makes an offering of palmwine, chickens, and kola nuts (as one would to an elder or an ancestor) in the course of a ceremony marked by singing and ecstatic dancing. Suddenly, just before dawn, the Mandona dashes off to the water, leaving behind her on the path a cross marked on the ground to indicate where her companions should await her return. Having perhaps traveled a long distance deep under the water, the Mandona sees a large flat basket with three large round stones in it, a knife (mbeele a lulendo, “sword of power”) and a baton (nkawu, such as prophets also use). This collection is brought back on the head of the candidate, who is allowed three tries; failure to raise the bankita presages a death in the family. The stones are to be arranged in the basket in a convenient corner of the house, with the knife and the baton between two of them. A small dish is added to receive offerings. Rites performed at the shrine give the Bamandona the power that makes their herbal cures and other operations effective. Among other services they may, for example, bar the road to the cemetery by performing a rite at the crossroads that leads to it, so that a man who has decided to sell his child in order to raise capital for some venture will be prevented from carrying it to the other world; such a service would be requested by some sick child’s mother. Buakasa has published accounts13 of the cult as it exists in the Ngungu (Thysville) region, at the western edge of its area of distribution. Here the priests are no longer called Bamandona but simply nganga nkita, or nganga nkisi (“magician,” the ordinary term for an operator of minkisi). Buakasa says that nkita may be identified by a diviner as responsible for the same range of afflictions that, still further west, would be attributed to simbi and treated by the mothers of twins; for example, birth defects, twin births, and difficulties in childbirth (Buakasa, p. 160).13 Twin cults of one sort or another are very widespread in Africa. Among the Tio (north of Brazzaville), whose religion is closely similar to that of the BaKongo in both form and content, it is noteworthy that though abnormal children (nciele) were supposed to influence the fertility of the fields and to be, in their own right, nkira (nkita) spirits, twins were thought to have less power, and less attention was paid to them (Vansina, p. 204).14 The frequency of twin births is an unknown but possibly pertinent factor here. 13 G. Buakasa, “Notes sur le kindoki chez les Kongo,” Cahiers des religions africaines 2:3 (1968): 153–169. 14 J. Vansina, The Tyo Kingdom of the Middle Congo, 1880–1892 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973).


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Among the Kukuya, a western Tio (Teke) group, the comparable domestic cults seem to have been more elaborately developed, in the 1960s, than in Kongo.15 As in Kongo, twins must not be crossed lest they return. They are never mourned; they are believed able to bewitch themselves and to afflict their parents until they reach the age of about 10; and their birth involves considerable expense for ritual entertainment, which must be borne by their father. Like other abnormal children, among whom they are the most important, they are called nkira. The spirit they incarnate is connected, however, with any of the four lineages to which their genealogy links them and not, as in Kongo, with their mother’s lineage only. Kukuya lineages are in fact shallow and impermanent. In Angola, cults of water spirits and twins among the Kimbundu are much like those of the BaKongo. In recent years, the spirits (kyanda, ximbi, kituta) have become prominent features of popular culture.16 HAITI

Kongo religion, including the simbi cult and its offshoot, the cult of twins and abnormal children, is present in the Caribbean to a greater extent than the classical literature recognizes. Lack of information on bisimbi and other features of Kongo culture handicap reports such as that of Herskovits17 and A. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Schocken Books, 1972). In addition, an extensive fusion has taken place in the New World. Haitian spirits called lwa (loa), for example, can be read not only in either European Catholic or in African terms, as Herskovits noted, but also in either Central African (Kongo) or in West African or (Dahomey/Yoruba) terms. The two series of Haitian lwa (“deities”), Rada and Petro, are predominantly Dahomeyan and Kongo in origin, respectively. In the lists of deities given by Herskovits, none of the Rada series is clearly associated with Kongo, linguistically or otherwise. In the Petro series, in contrast, five names out of 60 include the word Congo, and 22 possibly incorporate Bantu words. Of the latter, 15 include the words Kita or Simbi, and there are two references to Lemba, an important nkisi. Some others might or might not be Kongo. The twin cult in Haiti likewise reveals a synthesis within which Kongo features remain recognizable, largely because of original religious continuities between West and Central Africa in the remote past. Herskovits17 says 15 P. Bonnafé, “Un aspect religieux de lidéologie lignagère,” Cahiers des Religions africaines 3 (1969): 209–297. 16 V. Coelho, “Imagens, simbolos e representaç o˜ es ‘Quiandas, Quintas, Sereias’: imaginários locais, identidades regionais e alteridades,” Ngola [Luanda], 1:1 (1997): 127–191. 17 M. J. Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (New York: Knopf, 1937).

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the Dahomeyan toxosu represent the spirits of all malformed and aborted children, the abnormally born guardians of the portals of the dead. The translation of the name, “kings of the water,” recalls the famous Kongo nkisi Ntinu a Maza, “king of the water.” Formerly, said Herskovits’ informants, as did mine in Matadi, abnormal children were returned to the river where they belong (I doubt that this usually happened). They include twins (marassa, cf. Kik. mapasa) and the children born after twins, who are associated with the lineage dead (Herskovits, p. 195).17 Marassa were invoked together with Christ and the dead as guardians of gardens and as forces governing fertility and childbirth (Herskovits, pp. 78, 90).17 Twins do harm if not humored, and they must be given anything they ask for. At their birth, special twin plates are provided to receive offerings. Ambiguous and contradictory statements relating twins to lwa reveal parallels to Kongo thought: twins who have been dead a long time become lwa; the marassa are the mothers of the saints [cf. Kongo, “twins command all bakisi”]; twins are less powerful than lwa and the dead; “marassa et morts font une chapitre pour nous.” To worship twins it is sufficient if a tradition exists that twins were once born to some member of the family (Herskovits, pp. 199–202).17 In ritual, the lwa are unlike bisimbi, though both cause trance states in their adherents, in that possession by lwa imposes, as in Dahomey, a dramatic representation of the deity in question, often associated with a biographical narrative. Kongo simbi possession, on the other hand, is generic and does not identify the particular spirit. In Bahia, Dr. Mikelle Omari-Obayemi tells me, on the basis of her recent research, that it is precisely on this ground that nkisi are distinguished from Yoruba-derived orisha. The personalized character of lwa or orisha is allocated, in Kongo, not to bisimbi but to minkisi. Bisimbi, as local spirits, were normally the concern of a group related to the locality; nkisi objects, in contrast, were specialized to deal with particular afflictions as experienced by individuals. Although the operator (nganga) of any nkisi might become possessed, the particular identity of his spirit was expressed by its form: for example, the kind of wooden figure, the pot or shell in which it was embodied, and the “medicines” contained in it.18 Though there has been intermixture between the West and Central African elements, the striking fact is that in the Haitian context the two have come to be defined in opposition to each other as part of a system of belief and practice that is neither Dahomeyan nor Kongo. In Nigeria, the orishas (“gods”) are divided into those that are generally “hot,” “red,” and male, such as Ogun and Shango, and those that are “cool,” “white,” 18 W. MacGaffey, Art and Healing of the BaKongo Commented by Themselves (Stockholm: Folkens Museum; and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).


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and often female, such as Obatala and Yemoja, famous for her beauty and love affairs. Minkisi in Kongo, animated by bisimbi and other forces from the land of the dead, are similarly divided into those “of the above,” such as Nkondi, which are retributive and masculine, associated with fire, thunderstorms, and birds of prey, and those “of the below,” such as Mbumba Maza, which are associated with feminine concerns, fertility, terrestrial waters, and the color white (MacGaffey and Harris, p. 69).19 Like the lwa, the bisimbi are also divided between those of the water and those of the savanna [A. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Schocken Books, 1972)]. Simpson (p. 39),20 who heard of zanges [angels] of the forest and zanges of the sky would have found the information less confusing if he had known of this classification (MacGaffey and Harris, p. 69).19 In Haiti these functions have been redistributed. The Kongo lwa (Petro) are associated with the left hand, the upward direction, and with fire and violence, as opposed to the Rada group, marked by feminine concerns, the right hand, the downward direction, and water and healing.21 It is quite disconcerting, from a Kongo perspective, to find that the simbi Mbumba Maza is associated with fire, though by its very name it is a water spirit, and that during Petro ceremonies the rattles of the mothers of twins occur together with the explosions of gunpowder that in Kongo would be used to arouse violent Nkondi (De Heusch, 1989, p. 298; MacGaffey, 1991, p. 146).18, 21 De Heusch correctly recognizes that in Haiti as in Kongo the contrast is not a rigid classification (De Heusch, 1989, pp. 297–299).21 Some spirits share features of the opposing series, and some are specifically said to operate in both domains; this second feature is not itself a result of syncretism, since it also characterizes a number of important minkisi. The contrast also does not correspond to “good” versus “evil,” since the spirits own afflictions that they can both impose and remove, and their action is evaluated according to the circumstances and the interests of the parties concerned.22 19 W. MacGaffey and M. D. Harris, Astonishment and Power (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1993). 20 G. E. Simpson, “Belief system of Haitian Vodoun,” American Anthropologist, 47 (1945): 1–42. 21 L. Luc de Heusch, “Kongo in Haiti: a new approach to religious syncretism,” Man, 24 (1989): 290–303. 22 De Heusch’s comparison between Kongo and Haiti is rendered unnecessarily complex by the fact that he makes too much of an alleged contrast between basimbi and bankita, calling the former “kindly water spirits,” whereas the latter are “benevolent ancestors” (Footnote 21, p. 295). In his most recent book. De Heusch (see Footnote 24) gives a more nuanced account, based in part on fieldwork. Kongo opinions concerning the relationship between bankita (which may also be called minkisi and bisimbi are various and sometimes contradictory, indicating no clear contrast between the two (MacGaffey, Footnote 3, pp. 77–78, 81–82). In Kasangulu, bankita are said to live deep in certain stagnant pools and in very large bodies of water such as the Congo River. Bisimbi also live there, but

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The contrast between Kongo and Dahomeyan/Yoruba spirits is more marked in Haiti than in Cuba, where the two series are regarded as belonging to different “denominations,” Palo Monte and Santer´ıa, respectively. Between denominations, parallels are recognized, as also with the saints of Catholicism. It is evident in both Haitian and Cuban religion, however, that much has changed since the 1930s, as increasing immiseration pushes cult practice away from rural toward urban areas, such as Port-au-Prince, Havana, Newark, or Brooklyn, and confronts the practitioners with new problems and new resources.23, 24 at the margins; Bamandona intending to invoke or raise up bankita say they must request permission to pass from the bisimbi. Bisimbi were once human and may reveal themselves in human form; bankita, on the other hand, although they are related to bisimbi (mpangi a bisimbi), have always been stones and were thus never ancestors, although they belong to the great category of the dead. In manuscripts written by Kongo men at the beginning of the century, we find a similar diversity of opinions. 23 K. E. Laman, Grammar of the Kongo Language (New York: The Christian Alliance, 1912). 24 L. Luc de Heusch, Le Roi de Kongo et les Monstres Sacrés (Paris: Gallimard, 2000).

8

The Central African Presence in Spanish Maroon Communities JANE LANDERS

Maroons have long captivated historians and popular audiences alike. Their daring and initiative in the face of terrible oppression and relentless persecution command our interest and sympathy, and yet only a few almost superhuman figures emerge from the historical treatment and the folk legends.1 Most maroons remained anonymous and little specific is known about them – their names, their origins, or ethnicity. What little we can determine about the people who risked their lives for freedom is in great part shaped by which slave system they challenged and which, therefore, recorded their history. Iberian legal, religious, and social traditions recognized the humanity of all slaves, including Africans, and this ethos led bureaucrats and churchmen to create a more complete ethnographic record of the enslaved in Latin America than is found in areas where they were considered chattel. Other scholars in this volume examine the linkages between Africa and Portuguese Brazil, which boasts the most well-known and significant of all maroon quilombos, Palmares. I will, however, contain myself to my own research on maroons living in communities known as palenques, cumbes, or manieles in the Spanish Americas. I draw on the ethnographic data available in a wide variety of Spanish colonial documentary sources and read closely for the material world described in them, as well as in the nascent archaeological record. Guided by the pathbreaking work of some of the fine Africanists represented in this collection, I address possible cultural clues discernible in military–political and socioreligious practices of the maroons to make some preliminary arguments about the ubiquitous presence and the impact of Central Africans among them. 1 For a discussion of some of the most famous maroons such as Cudjoe of Jamaica, Yanga of New Spain, and Ganga-Zumba of Brazil, see Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

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My earlier work focused on slave runaways from Carolina who achieved freedom in Spanish Florida in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, many of whom were Central Africans. As Peter Wood’s classic study of black Carolina showed, the preponderance of slaves arriving in that English colony in the mid-eighteenth century came from Kongo/Angola. By Wood’s count, slavers transported over 8,000 persons from those regions to Sullivan’s Island in just 5 years (1735–1740), and this is a conservative count since the source of some shipments was given simply as Africa.2 More recently John Thornton revisited the Stono slave rebellion that Wood so ably analyzed, and he concluded that despite contemporary accounts that described the uprisen slaves as Angolan, the rebels were more probably from Kongo. He argues that actions which to their pursuers (and chroniclers) seemed nonsensical – such as dancing, music making, and pauses along the road – actually relate to the maroons’ Kongolese military practice. Moreover, if the rebels were from the Kongo, they were potentially Catholic and able to understand Spanish for its similarity to Portuguese.3 In fact, the Stono rebels were headed for Spanish St. Augustine to avail themselves of the well-known religious sanctuary available in that colony – a sanctuary their predecessors had secured in 1693. After that date the Spanish government in Florida freed runaways from the British colonies, granted them homesteads, and permitted them to elect their own political and military leaders in return for their religious conversion, military service, and fidelity. The freed men and women eventually established their own town of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose on the periphery of St. Augustine, and this incorporation generated censuses and religious and military records through which we can know the former maroons.4 Although the leader of the settlement and captain of its militia was a Mandinga, a number of the Carolina refugees at Mose identified themselves as belonging to the Congo nation.5 Pedro Graxales, a Congo/Solongo, served as sergeant of the Mose 2 Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1974). App. C, pp. 334–341. The W. E. B. DuBois Institute Dataset of Slaving Voyages enables scholars to refine earlier estimates. In contrast to Carolina, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall finds that Senegambians formed the largest ethnic group among Louisiana slaves throughout the eighteenth century – a pattern she attributes to timing and slave owner preference. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: the Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), p. 288. 3 John Thornton, “African dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,”American Historical Review, 96 (October 1991): 1101–1113. 4 Jane Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: a free black town in Spanish Colonial Florida,” American Historical Review, 95 (February 1990): 9–30 and Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), ch. 2. 5 I will use the term Kongo to designate the African kingdom and culture but will use Spanish orthography and Congo to designate an individual’s “nation.”

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militia. Graxales was married to a slave woman of the Carabal´ı nation but he chose Congo godparents for his children. Graxales also served as a godfather to other Congos at Mose, such as the former slave Tomás Chrisóstomo. Chrisóstomo married a Congo woman, Ana Mar´ıa Ronquillo, and on her death, married a second, Mar´ıa Francisca Solana, with whom he made his home at Mose.6 Other members of the Mose militia also identified themselves as Congos.7 The freedom of the Mose villagers was based upon their claim to and/or conversion to Catholicism and they were carefully observant, building their own church and sacristy at the site, celebrating religious holidays, and documenting their church (and thereby, community) membership in parish registers. Spanish clerics took seriously the responsibility of introducing the newly introduced Africans to Christianity, and as they baptized, married, and buried Africans in Florida, they recorded their ethnicity in parish registers. A survey of 113 church marriages performed in St. Augustine during the first Spanish period (1565–1763) that involved at least one black partner shows that Congos were the most numerous ethnic group registered, with 48 individuals marrying.8 In their entries, priests noted any references to previous Catholic baptisms their converts had undergone in Africa, and even as the Africans learned Spanish, some of them still prayed and blessed themselves in their native language of Kikongo.9 With regard to baptisms it is impossible to tell if the Congos in Spanish Florida followed namesaking patterns such as those noted by Wyatt McGaffey, since grandfathers’ names were not usually given. They were, however, electing Catholic names for themselves and their children, as Thornton found many did earlier in 6 The Graxales children were slaves like their Carabal´ı mother and lived with her in St. Augustine, where their father visited them freely. How the children identified ethnically is unknown. Marriage of Pedro Graxales and Mar´ıa de la Concepción Hita, January 19, 1744; marriage of Tomás Chrisóstomo and Ana Mar´ıa Ronquillo, February 28, 1745; marriage of Tomás Chrisostomo and Mar´ıa Francisca Solana, December 12, 1760; Black Marriages, Cathedral Parish Records, Diocese of St. Augustine Catholic Center, Jacksonville, FL (hereafter cited as CPR), on microfilm reel 284 C. Baptisms of the Graxales children, Mar´ıa, November 8, 1744; Manuela de los Angeles, January 6, 1747; Ysidora de los Angeles, December 22, 1748; Joseph Ynisario, April 4, 1755; Juana Feliciana, July 13, 1757; Pantaleona, August 1, 1758; and Mar´ıa de los Dolores, August 16, 1761; Black Baptisms, CPR, on microfilm reel 284 F, P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History University of Florida, Gainesville, FL (hereafter cited as PKY). 7 Nicolas Briones and Pedro de Leon were Congos. The author has created a database called Militia, which incorporates available data from civil and religious records for all free black militia men from the first and second Spanish periods in Florida, 1565–1763 and 1784–1821. 8 Figures collected by, and courtesy of, Dr. Kathleen A. Deagan, Florida Museum of Natural History, Gainesville, FL. 9 Baptisms of Miguel, September 29, 1746; Francisco, October 14, 1746; and Miguel Domingo, January 26, 1748; CPR, microfilm reel 284 D, PKY. Although the Spanish records only refer to “their own language,” John Thornton identifies it as Kikongo. Thornton, “African dimensions.”

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Angola, but also as Africans of all ethnicities did upon baptism in Spanish America.10 Even within a carefully practiced Catholicism, however, one might glimpse possible Kongo practice in the material record. Archaeologists, directed by Kathleen Deagan of the Florida Museum of Natural History, excavated segments of various rosaries at the site, but also a hand-crafted St. Christopher’s medal. The shiny, circular pendant might itself be read as a metaphor for the Kongo cosmogram, but its surface imagery carries a fascinating dual allusion. St. Christopher – depicted, staff in hand, carrying Jesus on his shoulders over the water – was certainly an appropriate patron for African (Catholics?) who had crossed the Atlantic against their will and escaped the dangers of swamps and patrollers on their way to Florida from Carolina. The image might also be read, however, as a possible reference to the Konglese expectation that they would someday cross the watery divide separating the living and the dead and be reunited with long-lost African ancestors. Leland Ferguson has studied the Kongo/Lowcountry connection through the archaeological record. Inside broken ceramic bowls deposited in Carolina rivers he has found patterns of designs such as crosses, which he argues are examples of Kongo cosmograms marking the circular pathway of the sun and the boundary between the earthly world of the living from the watery world of the dead. Ferguson cites these symbols as evidence that Congolese slaves maintained religious associations with water in the Lowcountry.11 Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, unknown numbers of Lowcountry and Georgia runaways followed the southern route to freedom, and Spanish government officials, laypersons, and church figures corroborated that many of the incoming maroons were of the Congo “nation.” Spanish authorities often made surnames of the “nation” names and carefully recorded ethnic origins on censuses, notarial records, military rosters, and a wide variety of other documents. Parish registers dating back to the mid-seventeenth century are a rich source of information on ethnicity and record the baptism of numbers of adults declaring themselves to be Congos. Others who stated they had come from Carolina may also have been from Kongo/Angola, and some with no connection to Carolina 10 Although some individuals chose saints names as Thornton found, blacks in Spanish Florida also commonly chose the names of godparents for themselves and their children. John Thornton, “Central African names and African-American naming patterns,”William and Mary Quarterly, 50 (October 1993): 727–742. 11 Leland G. Ferguson, “‘The cross is a magic sign”: marks on eighteenth-century bowls from South Carolina,” in “I, Too, Am America”: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life, ed. Theresa A. Singleton (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), pp. 116–131.


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identified themselves as of the Angola nation.12 Tax records in which owners legitimated prior slave purchases (indultos) provide another rich source of ethnographic information for Florida. Congos were the most numerous single ethnic group listed on the indultos for the years 1752–1762 – 38 of 204 slaves. If other Central African nations such as Manicongo, Soso, and Sozongo are added, Central Africans formed almost one fourth of the total list.13 Scattered references by slave owners about material items they understood to be of cultural importance to their slaves also offer clues about ethnic origins and cultural persistence. The Florida slave trader and planter, Zephaniah Kingsley, noted that when taken onboard a slave ship, the laterto-be famous Gullah Jack carried with him a sack full of “conjuring implements,” which he always kept with him, and a Georgia planter advertised that his runaway slave Juan Spaniard wore “something in a small bag suspended by a string around his neck.” These items may have been Kongo nkisi.14 As archaeologists such as Leland Ferguson have demonstrated, enslaved and escaped Africans spread Kongo traditions southward down the Gullah Coast from South Carolina to Florida.15 Some of these traditions survive to this day in the famous cemetery at Sunsbury, Georgia and in the Bosque Bello cemetery on Amelia Island, Florida where black graves are still decorated with white ceramic chickens and white conch shells – Kongo cultural markers described by Robert Farris Thompson and others.16 Kongo traditions also found their way into interior Florida as Central African slaves escaped bondage and became vassals of the Seminole nation. Some runaways lived in Seminole villages such as Bowlegs Town, but many resided in autonomous black villages such as Pilaklikaha, Payne’s Town, Mulatto Girl’s Town, King Heijah’s Town, Bucker Woman’s Town, Boggy 12 Black Baptisms, CPR, PKY. 13 Book of Indultos, 1752–1762, Cuba 472, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain (hereafter cited as AGI). Others who may have been Central Africans (as spelled in Spanish) include Mumbat (1), Mumbata (1), Mumboma (1), Mungoma (1), Mungundu (1), Musicongo (1), Soso (2), Sozongo (2). 14 Zephaniah Kingsley, A Treatise on the Patriarchal or Cooperative System of Society as It Exists in Some Governments and Colonies in America, and In the United States under the Name of Slavery, with Its Necessity and Advantages (1829; reprint, Freeport, NY: Books for hiliraries press, 1971), pp. 13–14; Charles Harris to Governor Peter Early, November 29, 1813 in “East Florida documents,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, 13 (March 1929): 154–158; Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, pp. 134–137 and Face of the Gods, pp. 56–60, 92–93; Art and Healing of the Bakongo Commented by Themselves: Minkisi from the Laman Collection, Kikongo texts trans. and ed. Wyatt MacGaffey (Stockholm: Folkens Museum, 1991). 15 Ferguson,Uncommon Ground; Theresa A. Singleton, “I, Too Am America”. 16 Landers Black Society, p. 131; Robert Farris Thompson, “Kongo influences on African-American artistic culture,” in Africanisms in American Culture, Joseph E. Holloway, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 148–184.

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Island, and Big Swamp in the Alachua and west central Florida savannahs and along the Suwannee, Apalachicola, and Withlacochee Rivers.17 The Africans of varied ethnolinguistic backgrounds who came to be called Black Seminoles – from cimarrones, the Spanish term for maroons – practiced different settlement and agricultural patterns than their indigenous hosts, to name only a few of the obvious cultural differences. Both Spanish and later American sources, however, indicate that the escaped slaves quickly learned indigenous languages and adopted indigenous dress and well-tested architectural patterns suited to the environment.18 The Florida maroons moved into areas previously not occupied by the Seminoles and soon cultivated sufficient rice, corn, sugar cane, peanuts, Benne seed, and other products. Archaeologist Brent Weisman argues that they were so good at it that their surplus provided the tribute that supported the Seminole shift to a plantation economy in the late eighteenth century.19 Given that most of the Florida maroons were runaways from Carolina, it can be assumed many were from Central Africa; however, even in Spanish documents, ethnicity is much harder to trace beyond urban centers. Only occasional references surface. John Forbes & Company, a British trading firm in Pensacola, submitted a list of escaped slaves to the Spanish engineer charged with retrieving runaways from the so-called Negro Fort at Prospect Bluff on the Apalachicola River, among them Congo Tom, Carlos Congo, and Carlos Mayumba. A fourth African named Macumba was claimed by another owner.20 Many of the Central Africans who lived among the Spaniards in Florida, whether free or enslaved, ultimately migrated to Cuba when political transitions forced Spaniards to evacuate Florida in 1763 and 1821. As 17 Howard F. Klein, Florida Indians II: Provisional Historical Gazeteer with Locational Notes on Florida Colonial Communities (New York: Garland Publishing, 1974). Klein worked from lists created by the Mikasuki chief, Neamathla and by Captain John Bell at an Indian conference convened by Andrew Jackson on September 18, 1821; Landers, Black Society, ch. 10; Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., Africans and Creeks From the Colonial Period to the Civil War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 3–83. 18 William Simmons, Notices of East Florida, facsimile of 1822 edition, ed. George E. Burke (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1978), pp. 32–53. 19 Brent R. Weisman, “The plantation system of the Florida Seminole Indians and black Seminoles during the colonial era,” in Colonial Plantations and Economy of Florida, ed. Jane G. Landers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), pp. 136–149; Report of Horatio S. Dexter, enclosed in Wm. P. Duval to John C. Calhoun, August 26, 1823, in James David Glunt, “Plantation and frontier records of East and Middle Florida, 1789–1868, Vol. I” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1930), pp. 279–298. For the same time period, Gregory Evans Dowd also argues that “among the Cherokees as among the Creeks, African American slaves may have been the most important agents of cultural change. . . .” See Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 159–160. 20 Report of Vicente Sebastián Pintado, December 30, 1814, Santo Domingo, 2589, AGI.


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Lydia Cabrera and Fernando Ortiz have documented, a variety of vibrant African cultures interacted in Cuba. By the time the Florida exiles arrived in Havana, the Royal Congo cabildo or religious lay brotherhood, also known as the Cabildo Rey Mago San Melchor from whom members claimed to be descended, was flourishing and owned several properties on Florida Street. Its members took an active role in Havana’s public rituals, such as Corpus Christi and D´ıa de Reyes, and provided support and association for other Congos.21 Even recently arrived African bozales would have been easily incorporated in a city where kikongo was in common use among blacks.22 They would have recognized the dances such as the tango, the guaguancó, the columbia, and the macuta that the Congolese performed on Sundays and feast days in public squares and the music of Congolese instruments such as the conga, mambisa, and tumba drums, bongós, and claves would have sounded familiar.23 In Cuba, as in other areas of the Spanish world, the Catholic church records are some of the best sources of ethnic identification, and priests in Havana and its suburbs such as Regla and Guanabacoa regularly baptized, married, and buried people from Kongo/Angola.24 Central Africans also elaborated syncretic religions in Cuba such as regla de palo-monte or palo mayombe and zarabanda. Lamentably, many scholars and laypersons still compare those religious systems unfavorably to West African or Yoruba santer´ıa, which more closely resembles Catholicism.25 Even Cuban musuem guides describe Congolese religious assemblages, such as large iron cauldrons called ngangas filled with skulls and legbones, iron objects such as knives, and pieces of wood and feathers as “witchcraft,” and in the popular and 21 Fernando Ortiz, Los cabildos y la fiesta afrocubana del D´ıa de Reyes (Havana, 1992), pp. 7–8, 14, n. 69; Lydia Cabrera identifies Rey Melchor as the oricha Bakuende Bamba de Ngola, patron of the Congos. Lydia Cabrera, Reglas de Congo: Palo Monte Mayombe (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1986), p. 128. 22 Armin Schwegler, “El vocabulario (ritual) bantú de Cuba (Parte I): Acerca de la matriz africana de la “lengua congo” en El monte y vocabulario congo de Lydia Cabrera,” Amer´ıca negra, 15 (1998): 137–185. Linguistic scholars find Bantu words survive in Cuba in association with flora and fauna. See Lydia Gonzáles Huguet and Joan René Baudry, “Voces bantú en el vocabulario ‘palero,’ ” Etnolog´ıa y folklore, 3 (1967): 31–64. 23 Odilio Urfé, “Music and dance in Cuba,” Africa in Latin America (1984): 170–188. 24 For example, on February 22, 1778, the adult slave Ana Josepha Timotea, of the “congo luanga nation,” was baptized in the Santissimo Christo de Potos´ı church, outside Havana. Libro Primero, Bautismos de Indios, Pardos y Morenos, no. 213, Yglesia Auxiliar del Santissimo Christo de Potos´ı, held in the archives of San Miguel del Padon church. 25 Migene González Wippler frequently uses derrogatory terms such as macabre, violent, evil, infernal, and fearful and describes Congolese religious practice as “Black Magic-Brujer´ıa,” in African Magic in Latin America: Santer´ıa (NY: The Julian Press, Inc., 1973), ch. 7. More moderate is the discussion by Eugenio Matibag, Afro-Cuban Religious Experience: Cultural Reflections in Narrative (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), ch. 5.

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critically acclaimed Cuban film, The Last Supper, Congos are portrayed as cannibals.26 The lessons learned in tracking maroons through Spanish Florida documents and archaeology have been valuable guides in my current work on early maroon history in Spanish settlements. The long history of American marronage began in Spain’s first colony of Hispaniola. By 1503 Governor Nicolás de Ovando was already complaining that escaped slaves could not be retrieved and were teaching the Taino Indians “bad customs.” African slave runaways joined in the indigenous wars of resistance begun by Enriquillo in 1519 and then retreated with that cacique to the safety of the Bahoruco mountains in the south. Within 2 years, 1521, Wolof slaves led a revolt on Diego Colón’s sugar plantation. Despite their tenuous control and escalating fears, the planters of Hispaniola demanded more slaves. By the time Archdeacon Alonso de Castro toured the island in 1542, he estimated the black population at 25,000–30,000, the white population at only 1,200, and the maroon population at 2,000–3,000.27 It was a demographic moment in which a maroon victory seemed possible, and a series of great maroon leaders came down from the Bahoruco mountains to wage war against the Spaniards. The most famous included Diego Guzman, Diego Ocampo, Juan Vaquero, and Lemba. These chiefs led maroon bands in attacks on Spanish haciendas and sugar ingenios and generally contained Spaniards to the capital city of Santo Domingo.28 One of the most feared of the maroon leaders of the 1540s was Lemba, whom the Spaniards acknowledged was “extremely able and very knowledgeable in the ways of war.” Lemba’s guerrilla tactics included dispersing his force of approximately 140 warriors into smaller groups that harried the small rural settlements of the central valley. Lemba led many raids himself, and during one attack on the sugar estates of San Juan de la Maguana, he returned to the Bahoruco mountains with a supply of steel and iron and a slave blacksmith.29 Lemba’s selections of booty 26 Visit to the Museo Municipal de Guanabacoa, 1991; Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, La Ultima Cena. It seems possible that this depreciation of Kongo/Angola culture may have had earlier origins and if so, it is possible also that Spaniards in other areas of the Americas may have held the same prejudices toward them. 27 Alonso de Castro to the Council of the Indies, March 26, 1542, cited in José Luis Saez, La Iglesia y el negro esclavo en Santo Domingo: Una historia de tres siglos (Santo Domingo: Patronato de la Ciudad Colonial de Santo Domingo, 1994), pp. 273–274. Many Spaniards had departed the island, seeking quicker fortunes in the fabled mines of New Spain and Peru. 28 The war begun by Enriquillo lasted for 14 years, and after the Taino chief finally negotiated a peace with the Spaniards, the Africans fought on. Carlos Esteban Deive, Los guerrilleros negros: esclavos fugitivos y cimarrones en Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1989), pp. 19–54. 29 Ibid., p. 50. David Birmingham, Central Africa to 1870: Zambezia, Zaire, and the South Atlantic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 65; Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: the BaKongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 88, 94, 112; Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, p. 107.


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are significant on several possible levels. The maroons had a practical need of the metals and the blacksmith in order to manufacture weapons with which to maintain their freedom, but it is also possible that the unnamed blacksmith held symbolic or political importance. Although Lemba’s ethnicity was unspecified in the Spanish documents, his name has various cultural associations in Kongo. Lemba was a Kongo place-name, the name of a mercantile association, a ritual association of fathers and sons, and the name of a healing or fertility cult. If Lemba was indeed of Central African origin, he, and perhaps others in his camp, would have certainly been familiar with stories of the first blacksmith kings of both Ndongo and Kongo – men esteemed for wisdom, generosity, and leadership, among other admirable qualities.30 Although West Africans constituted the majority of the enslaved in the early years of Spanish American slavery, Central Africans were present from at least the 1540s, as Lemba proves, and within several decades Central Africans would assume a larger demographic profile in Hispaniola and other Spanish colonies. The Crowns of Spain and Portugal were joined from 1580 to 1640, and in 1595 Spain granted Portugal the asiento or slave contract to provision the Spanish Americas. At about the same time, Spanish officials in Hispaniola began to complain about maroon activity along the northern coast, where escaped slaves found foreign corsairs and merchants eager to trade for their cattle hides, tobacco, and other products.31 Governor Diego Gómez de Sandoval was determined to eradicate both threats and mounted expeditions against the maroons and their French and English customers on the offshore island of Tortuga. Gómez claimed most of the maroons he tracked along the northern coasts were “dangerous” Angolans, and among the maroons captured in raids on the northern settlements were Luis Angola (who fled slavery with his pregnant Biafara wife), Anton Angola, and Sebastián Angola.32 By the mid-seventeenth century, the French had not only secured their hold on Tortuga, but also on the western half of Hispaniola. French planters established what became a flourishing, if killing, sugar regime in Saint Domingue, and more than half of the slaves sweating in their cane fields were Central Africans. Like their Carolina counterparts, many of those unhappy Central Africans escaped across an international border to get to nearby Spanish territory. Some of the escaping slaves claimed religious sanctuary 30 John Thornton, “African nations in the New World experience,” paper delivered at Vanderbilt University, 1992. 31 The corsairs made the off-shore island of Tortuga a stronghold. Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 97–102. 32 Deive, Los guerrilleros negros, pp. 64–66.

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in Santo Domingo, and in 1679 the Spaniards established them in a satellite town of their own, San Lorenzo de los Negros de Mina. Although parish registers designate most of the residents of San Lorenzo as either Mina, Bran, or Arará, some Congos also lived at San Lorenzo and one, Garc´ıa Congo, served as Sergeant of the town’s militia, along with a captain of the Bran nation and a Mina lieutenant.33 Few escaped slaves actually availed themselves of sanctuary in San Lorenzo – most escaped slaves preferred to become maroons in the remote and inaccessible mountainous hinterlands. After more than a century and a half spent in costly and failed military expeditions against them, Spanish authorities tried a different tactic to settle their maroon “problem.” In 1662 Archbishop Francisco de la Cueva Maldonado was sent to peacefully “reduce” 600 maroon families still living in four separate settlements in the Bahoruco mountains where Lemba had once reigned. Although the Archbishop’s mission failed, he recorded valuable information about the maroon life. The maroons subsisted on agriculture, hunting, and animal husbandry. The women also panned for gold in mountain streams, which the men then exchanged in the capital of Santo Domingo for clothing, aguardiente, and other desired items. The Zape, Biafara, Mandinga, Arará, and Congo nations had all established religious brotherhoods in the capital city by the seventeenth century, and it is possible that the maroons’ surreptitious trading contacts may have been members of their own nation. The Bahoruco maroons may have also been assisted by the villagers of San Lorenzo, for some maroons were occasionally captured there.34 The maroons were trading for iron and steel with which to fabricate arrows points, and short, broad swords, and the Archbishop commented that the men were both good archers and ironsmiths. This suggests some persistence of old-world military and metallurgical skills at least. It is more difficult to determine which, if any, of the complex religious, political, social, and cultural associations with warfare, hunting, and smithing were also maintained despite stress and dislocation.35 Surface collection and shallow excavations at an early-eighteenth-century maroon settlement in eastern Hispaniola, the Maniel José Leta, confirm some of Archbishop Cueva Maldonado’s observations in the Bahoruco mountain settlements. The José Leta site yielded 17 copper bracelets, metal 33 The men all served as witnesses at the marriage of free blacks, Simon and Juana on May 31, 1682, Archivo General de la Arquidiócesis de Santo Domingo, Matrimoniales, 1674–1719. 34 Saez, La iglesia y el negro esclavo, pp. 50–52, 304–310, 327–337. 35 Francisco de la Cueva Maldonado to the king, September 15, 1662, Santo Domingo, 54-1-9, AGI, cited in José Juan Arrom and Manuel A. Garc´ıa Arévalo,Cimarrón (Santo Domingo: Fundación Garc´ıa Arévalo, 1986), pp. 82–84.


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arrowtips, and a variety of iron objects, including tongs and lance points. Iron slag deposits are evidence that the runaway smiths were manufacturing the objects on site. The simple bracelets of coiled metal may have only been body decoration, but perhaps, as in Kongo, they also implied status or leadership functions for those who wore them.36 In nearby caves explorers have also found metal daggers, clay water jugs, and triton shell trumpets, which they identify as the work of African runaways. Most of the shells have the tips cut off and are drilled to enable them to be hung on a cord. While the white shells were probably used to communicate across the mountainous terrain, their association with water and their spiraling form may have also held symbolic value for Kongos among the maroons.37 The Dominican archaeologist Manuel Garc´ıa Arévalo has assembled an important collection of pots made by African runaways and retrieved from water-filled caves near the Santo Domingo airport. That the pots, which were often containers for Kongo minkisi, were so carefully placed in water and hidden from view suggests they were offerings with some symbolic meaning, much like those Leland Ferguson has studied in South Carolina.38 The Kongo presence in these sites is not surprising. More than a century of civil wars in Kongo sent many of the defeated into the holds of slave ships. The W. E. B. Dubois Dataset of Slaving Voyages documents that in the 1780s, French slavers transported more than 116,000 slaves across the Atlantic, most of whom were destined for Saint Domingue. As John Thornton argues, at least some of them may have had military training that they could employ in their subsequent American battles.39 Spanish expeditionaries feared the influx and patrolled the countryside, taking captured slaves into Santo Domingo for interrogation. One group of 13 men questioned in 1770 included six men who identified themselves as Congo, Congo Mondongo, 36 The bracelets found in Hispaniola are almost replicas of the king of Kongo’s bracelets drawn by Olfert Dapper in 1668. Eugenia W. Herbert, Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 131–163, 188, 190. 37 Cimarrón, pp. 48–55. 38 These rather crude hand built and low-fired vessels incorporate indigenous elements such as bats in decorative patterns and are examples of a specific type of pottery designated colonoware; a pottery spatially defined by being found in areas where blacks and Indians coexisted. Scholars are now revisiting collections once identified as purely Indian in search of African production. Interview, Manuel Garc´ıa Arévalo, Santo Domingo, August, 1996; Leland Ferguson, Uncommon Ground, pp. 18–32, 109–116, and “Looking for the ‘Afro’ in Colono-Indian pottery,” in Archaeological Perspectives on Ethnicity in America, ed. Robert L. Schuyler (Farmingdale, NJ: Baywood Publishing Co., 1980), pp. 14–28. Also see Ferguson, “The cross is a magic sign,” in Singleton, “I, Too Am America” and Matthew C. Emerson, “African inspiration in a New World art and artifact: decorated pipes from the chesapeake,” in Ibid., pp. 47–81. 39 David Geggus, “On the eve of the Haitian Revolution: slave runaways in Saint Domingue in the year 1790,” Slavery and Abolition, 6, no. 3 (December 1985): 112–128; John K. Thornton, “African soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,” The Journal of Caribbean History, 25:1&2(1991): 58–80.

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or Mondongo. Bucú, who could not speak either Spanish of French and must have communicated through an African interpreter, was unable to say how long he had been on the run but reported that as soon as he got off the boat he ran for the Spanish side – which seems to suggest that as in the Florida example, captives quickly learned to read the geopolitics of their day. Several other Congo men had already been branded by their French owners and were able to give some information about their Christian names, those of the owners, and the names of the sugar ingenios from which they had escaped. Several reported they had been fugitives for up to 4 years before being captured.40 Although we have seen that Spaniards occasionally captured some slave runaways, they could never totally eliminate maroon settlements. In 1785 the Spanish priest, Luis de Chávez, conducted a visita of Neyba, a maroon settlement composed of 57 households of 133 persons. Residents said the population had once been larger but epidemics of measles and dysentery had killed many of them, including two aged males “who were much venerated.” The surviving Neyba population comprised 43 adult males, 37 adult females (20 of whom had been born of site), and 52 children. Although all ages must have been estimated, some of the oldest residents, whom Chavez guessed to be about 60 years of age, were born at the site, which dates its establishment to the first decades of the eighteenth century.41 The escalating exploitation of African labor on the sugar plantations across the French border is reflected in the population at Neyba. Eleven women and 31 men living at Neyba had once been the slaves of French masters. Some of the refugees bore French names and spoke some French and occasionally, some Spanish. Others, however, still bore African names such as Quamina, Macuba, and Musunga and were probably unacculturated bozales who may have reintroduced African cultural elements to the settlement.42 Many of the general patterns of African slavery and marronage in Hispaniola are mirrored in other Spanish colonies. Patrick Carroll has found that although most of the first slaves imported into New Spain came from West Africa, in the seventeenth century the trade shifted southward to 40 The men who identified as Congo were Bucú, Bautista, Bautista Fransua, and Agustin. Andres called himself Congo Mondongo, and Antonio identified simply as Mondongo. Interrogation by royal notary Francisco Rendon Sarmiento and Don Juan Tomati, July 2, 1770, Santo Domingo, (hereafter cited as SD) 1101, AGI. 41 The number of children indicates that despite having experienced epidemic stress, the population was once again growing. Luis de Chávez y Mendoza, “Lista de los negros que se contienen en el Maniel de Neyba,” April 12, 1785, SD 1102, AGI. 42 Ibid.


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Kongo and then Angola. By the late seventeenth century, Central Africans constituted more than 80% of the slave imports into New Spain.43 Maroon camps sprung up across most of what is today modern Mexico – outside mining towns such as Guanajuato and Zacatecas, agricultural centers such as Oaxaca, and the sugar estates of the Gulf coast where the indomitable Yanga, a Bran reputed to be of royal lineage, established Cofre del Perote. Although Yanga was the recognized leader of the settlement, his war captain was a man of the Angola nation, Francisco de la Matieza. When a major Spanish expedition attacked the settlement in 1609, Francisco commanded the defense that enabled Yanga to lead his people to the safety of a nearby palisaded fort. From that redoubt, the maroons watched the Spaniards torch their homes, but they were far from defeated. Instead they sent the Spaniards insulting letters threatening to make jerked meat out of their hearts. Ridiculing their attackers in a constant barrage of shouted insults, they noisily danced beneath lighted lanterns in a show of unconcern. They also ignored the Spaniards’ white flag and repeated requests for negotiations. After Francisco was killed in battle the maroons went on the run, and finally, when they were near starvation, the aged Yanga delivered his conditions for peace, which the Spaniards accepted.44 The military role of Central Africans in maroon communities can also be discerned in Nueva Granada (modern Colombia). Enriqueta Vila Vilar’s study of Portuguese slaving contracts from 1596 to 1637 shows that Angolans constituted slightly over 46% of the slave imports into Cartagena.45 Although destined for labor in nearby gold mines or haciendas, some Central Africans escaped to the numerous maroon settlements in the rugged interior provinces of Colombia.46 The most famous of them all was San Basilio, founded around 1526 by Domingo Bioho, who, like Yanga, claimed to have been a ruler in Africa. Calling himself King Benkos, Bioho founded an American dynasty that survived even after Cartagena’s governor betrayed their peace treaty and hung Benkos in 1619. San Basilio was not “reduced” into a legitimate and law-abiding town until 1686, by which time it had been in existence for over 60 years and numbered more than 43 Patrick J. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), Table A.3. 44 Relación de la misión a´ que fué enviado el P. Juan Laurencio, acompañando a una escuadra de soldados que sal´ıa a´ la reducción de negros foragiados y salteadores,” in Andés Pérez de Ribas, Coronica y historia religiosa de la Provincia de la Compañia de Jesús de México en Nueva España (2 vols., Mexico: Smprenta del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, 1896), pp. 282–294. 45 Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Hispano-America y el comercio de esclavos: Los Asientos portugueses (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1977), pp. 148–152. 46 Leslie B. Rout, Jr.,The African Experience in Spanish America 1502 to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 109–111.

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3,000 inhabitants, including 600 warriors, ruled by four war captains, each of his own “nation.”47 One Domingo Padilla, also known as Capitan Domingo Angola, was the acknowledged leader of the nearby and contemporary maroon settlement of Matudere. Some Spanish documents described Domingo as a criollo and state that his father, also named Domingo, was born in Angola. Even if Domingo the younger were American-born, it seems he self-identified as an Angolan. Captain Domingo’s aged father, wife, and young sons lived with him at Matudere, and it is possible that like King Benkos, Domingo hoped to establish a dynasty. Although Domingo bore the title of Capitan, his wife Juana called herself Virreina, and it is possible the couple’s sons may have been destined to inherit leadership at the settlement. Matudere’s fighting forces were led by Mina and Arará war captains with a Congo serving as standard bearer. These assignments reflected the relative demographic strength of the nations at Matudere, and this practice may have also operated at San Basilio. When the Spaniards attacked Matudere in 1693, 250 persons were living there, more than 100 of whom were either African-born, or born to African parents. Among the Africans identified by nation were 28 Minas, 19 Ararás, 10 Congos, 9 Luangos, 5 Angolas, 3 Popos, 3 Wolofs, 3 Caraval´ıes, 1 Bran, 1 Goyo, and 1 Biafara.48 The ethnolinguistic diversity evident at Matudere and the Spanish American maroon sites discussed earlier in this paper indicates that maroons managed political and cultural accommodations that enabled them to collaborate and survive for more than three centuries despite determined efforts to eradicate them. As David Birmingham noted, Kwanza valley war camps or kilombos organized themselves “by initiation, and not by birth,” a pattern that strengthened the power of military leaders. By the sixteenth century, according to Birmingham, the infamous Imbangala “lost all their individual ethnic affiliations, and many of their old customs.” As they swept toward the coast, perhaps the Imbangala spread this pattern along with the violence and destruction for which they were more noted.49 Central Africans had already experienced and were able to adopt new cultural affiliations before they reached the Americas. Once there, Central Africans readily adapted certain elements of Spanish political and religious institutions in their re-created communities, as 47 Real Cédula, July 13, 1686, Santa Fe 531, libro 11, folio 217, AGI; Anthony McFarlane, “Cimarrones and Palenques: runaways and resistance in colonial Colombia,” Slavery and Abolition, 6 (1985): 134– 135. 48 Report of Martin de Cevallos, May 29, 1693, Santa Fe 213, AGI. 49 Birmingham,Central Africa, pp. 23–24; Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 142–143.


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Stephan Palmie has persuasively argued happened in Cuba.50 Yet, as this preliminary inquiry into the cultural history of maroons in Spanish American sites also suggests, some Central African cultural and political elements were retained in at least recognizable form despite the incalculable damage wrought by the slave trade and the subsequent cultural mixing. Specific evidence of Central American cultural persistence in the Spanish Americas would include Central African war tactics employed from Carolina to Florida to New Spain to Colombia, the nkisi worn or crafted by Florida runaways and the Kongo grave “charms” found along the Gullah Coast, the survival of Kikongo in Florida and Cuba, the establishment of Kongo religious associations in Hispaniola and Cuba, the material production of Kongo/Angolan maroons such as pottery bearing Kongo cosmograms found in Carolina and in the Dominican Republica, and the iron and copper production on the same island. Much more work remains to be done on the difficult but tantalizing questions of cultural persistence and adaptation in the Americas. Through forums such as the one which produced this collection of essays,51 scholars working on both sides of the Atlantic are now exchanging ideas, comparing findings, learning from one another, and redefining research agendas to focus more attention on Central Africans in the African diaspora. 50 Stephan Palmie, “Ethnogenetic processes and cultural transfer in Afro-American slave populations,” in Slavery in the Americas, ed. Wolfgang Binder (Würzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1993), pp. 337–363. Also see McFarlane, “Cimarrones and Palenques” and Landers, Black Society. 51 I would like to thank Linda Heywood for coordinating the Bantu into Black Conference at Howard University and transforming the papers from that conference into this volume. I would also like to acknowledge the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vanderbilt University Graduate Research Council, and the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States’ Universities for supporting the research for this essay.

9

Central African Popular Christianity and the Making of Haitian Vodou Religion HEIN VANHEE

Quant aux nègres de Congo et d’Angolle, il n’y a qu’à parler aux missionnaires qu’on envoie chez eux pour savoir quelles peines ils ont pour y conserver quelque ombre de la religion chrétienne, car ces nègres font sans scrupule ce que faisaient les Philistins, ils joignent l’Arche avec Dagon et ils conservent en secret toutes les superstitions de leur ancien culte idolâtre avec les cérémonies de la religion chrétienne.1 Jean-Baptiste Labat

Among government documents from the 1760s of the flourishing French colony of Saint-Domingue, we find alarming reports talking about plantation slaves freely “mixing Catholicism with their pagan beliefs.” Moreover, it appears that it was “not uncommon to find them acting as missionaries and priests, issuing a doctrine that was replacing Catholic teachings.” Even the sacraments were said to be abused.2 Such alarming observations had been made earlier by Labat in the beginning of the eighteenth century and are found in most later accounts of slave religion or cultic practices on Saint-Domingue plantations. After the Haitian Revolution, the scanty historical documentation we have, points to a continued process of an appropriation and a reworking of rituals, texts and objects drawn from Roman Catholicism – yet in the relative absence of regular priests and missionaries. Twentieth-century Vodou, as the religion of the black population of Haiti has come to be generally called, exhibits numerous references to Roman Catholicism, which has provoked the most divergent comments in popular media, as well as a whole array of academic studies. 1 Jean-Baptiste Labat, ed. Daniël Radford, Voyages aux Isles de l’Amérique (Antilles), 1693–1705 (Paris: ´ Editions Duchartre, 1979 [1722]), p. 42. 2 Arrêt de Règlement du Conseil du Cap, 18 February 1761; Jean Fouchard, Les marrons de la liberté (Paris: ´ ´ Editions de l’Ecole, 1972), p. 499; George Breathett, “Catholic missionary activity and the Negro slave in Haiti,” Phylon, 23:3 (1962): 282.

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This paper addresses questions about the historical emergence of Vodou as a more or less shared worldview and as a complex of ritual practice among the descendants of a highly heterogeneous population of enslaved Africans brought to Saint-Domingue in the course of the eighteenth century. With a few notable exceptions to which I will return later, most scholarly analyses of Haitian Vodou that have attempted at some historical depth suffer from a number of uncritical assumptions and anachronisms. Among these are a range of misconceptions of what constituted colonial Vaudoux and of the role it might have played in the celebrated Haitian Revolution; some persisting false notions of the general ethnic composition of the eighteenth century Saint-Domingue slave imports; and finally some anachronistic representations of the history and nature of a perceived syncretism of African traditions and Roman Catholicism. Conventional wisdom holds that cultural contributions from ancient Dahomey have been dominant in the shaping of colonial Vodou. This was assumed because one believed that the majority of the slaves brought to SaintDomingue came from the West African Slave Coast and because it appears that half of Vodou’s ritual vocabulary nowadays is rendered in West African languages.3 Suzanne Preston Blier, studying West African Vodun arts, has pointed to the roots of Haitian Vodou in the lower areas of Benin and Togo.4 Robert Farris Thompson, however, has been equally convincing in associating many of the Haitian Vodou arts with Central African traditions, pointing at the continuity of the Kongo nkisi figures, cosmograms, flags, drums, and dances in contemporary Haitian Vodou.5 While much of these art historical analyses based on comparisons of twentieth-century Haitian and African material may be plausible, they do not teach us much about the emergence and nature of Vodou in the eighteenth century. As will be argued, evidently, the roots of Vodou were many. Historians and anthropologists have paid much attention to the role of Vodou, as the religion of the black masses, in the struggle for Haitian independence. For many scholars, Vodou has been of decisive importance in fueling a revolutionary ideology and in creating the unification and organizational tools necessary for the large-scale 3 Melville J. Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (New York: Anchor Books, 1971 [1937]), p. 23; Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen. Voodoo Gods of Haiti (London, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1953), p. 60; Roger Bastide, African Civilisations in the New World (London: C. Hurst, 1971 [1967]), pp. 140–41; Leslie Desmangles, “The Vodun way of death: cultural symbiosis of Roman Catholicism and Vodou in Haiti,” Journal of Religious Thought, 36:1 (1979):8; L. De Heusch, “Kongo in Haiti: a new approach to religious syncretism,” Man, 24:2 (1989):291; Suzanne P. Blier, “West African roots of Vodou,” in Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald Cosentino (Los Angeles: UCLA, 1995), pp. 83–87. 4 Blier, “West African roots,” pp. 83–87. 5 Robert F. Thompson, “From the Isle beneath the sea: Haiti’s Africanizing Vodou art,” in Sacred Arts, pp. 101–119.

9. Central African Popular Christianity

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insurrections of the 1790s.6 The most debated issue regarding Vodou’s history, however, has been the omnipresent inclusion of Catholic rituals, prayers, songs, and images in Vodou ceremonies and shrines. Many students of Vodou have considered this phenomenon as a specifically Haitian product of creolization. Elements that were “borrowed” from Catholicism are seen as constituting only a superficial veil behind which Haitians obstinately continued to practice their true African religions. Consequently, Bastide’s concept of “syncretism in mosaic” is forwarded as the clue to grasp the complexities of such contaminations.7 Or as Desmangles and De Heusch believe, two symbiotic religions have come to coexist without merging.8 In order to criticize some of these views, I will try to define more accurately what constituted Vodou in the second half of the eighteenth century and reflect on the role it may have played in the independence struggles. I will then focus on a major historical contribution made by Central Africans to the emergence of a popular Vodou religion over the past two centuries. I will argue in particular that the inclusion of rites, formulas, ritual roles, imagery, and objects drawn from Roman Catholicism in Vodou makes up the essence of the Central African contribution to the making of Haitian popular culture. Before I start this discussion I may refer to some recent studies of the statistics of the eighteenth-century slave trade to Saint-Domingue, if only to refute the argument of a majority of Dahomeans. Numbers and percentages of enslaved Africans from a specific origin cannot simply be taken as proof of specific roots of cultural phenomena, but they may nevertheless provide some useful background information. From a few thousands at the start of the eighteenth century, Saint-Domingue’s slave population grew exponentially up to half a million at the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution. Gabriel Debien has generally evaluated the mortality rates of newly purchased African slaves during the first 3 to 8 years of their induction at 50%.9 The continuous growth of the plantation economy and these high mortality rates thus maintained the need for a high influx of new labor force. As a result, two thirds of the slaves working on Saint-Domingue in 6 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins. Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1963 [2nd ed.]), p. 18; Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from below (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990), p. 58; Terry Rey, “Classes of Mary in the Haitian religious field: a theoretical analysis of the effects of socio-economic class on the perception and uses of a religious symbol” (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1996), pp. 278, 295. 7 Roger Bastide, African Civilizations in the New World (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 155. 8 Leslie Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 8–9; De Heusch, “Kongo in Haiti,” pp. 291–292. 9 Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves aux Antilles françaises (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles) (Fort-de-France: Société d’histoire de la Martinique, 1974), pp. 83–84.

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the 1780s had been born, raised, and educated in Africa.10 Recent analyses of shipping records and colonial estate inventories have revealed more details on the ethnic composition of the eighteenth-century slave imports. Joseph Miller’s contribution to this volume indicates that by the mid-eighteenth century, French shippers increasingly bought slaves north of the Congo river in the ports of Malembo and Cabinda in order to supply the growing SaintDomingue market. David Geggus’ analysis of estate inventories has shown that indeed these Central Africans most often made up the largest groups on the Saint-Domingue plantations in the 1770s and 1780s. If we look at the North Province, we see that Central Africans made up 64% of the total number of slaves working on coffee and indigo estates, and 44% of the sugar plantation workers. This corresponds to 17% of Slave Coast Africans on the coffee and indigo plantations, and 30% growing sugar. In the West and South Provinces the differences were smaller, but apparently nowhere did the numbers of Dahomeans or Aradas exceed those of Central Africans.11 As the beginning of the Haitian Revolution marked the end of the slave trade to Saint-Domingue, the ethnic composition of the population at that time may be expected to have some impact on the rest of Haiti’s cultural history. ` DRE VAUDOUX AND DOM PE The first mention of the term “Vaudoux” is found in a compilation composed by the Creole lawyer Moreau de Saint-Méry.12 Writing about the great passion slaves had for certain dances, he mentioned Vaudoux as a dance that was already known for a long time, especially in the West province. More than just a dance, however, Vaudoux was said to be one of those institutions largely consisting of “superstitions and bizarre practices.” Moreau de Saint-Méry identified Vaudoux with Africans denoted in eighteenth-century 10 Sidney Mintz and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The social history of Haitian Vodou,” in Sacred Arts, p. 135. 11 David Geggus, “Slave society in the sugar plantation zones of Saint-Domingue and the revolution of 1791,” paper presented at the Association of Caribbean Historians Conference, April 1997; and “Sugar and coffee cultivation in Saint-Domingue and the shaping of the slave labor force,” in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, eds. Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1993). 12 Médéric Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et Historique de la partie française de I’isle Saint-Domingue (Paris: Société de l’histoire des colonies franç aises, 1958 [1797]), p. 64. Although published in 1797, Moreau de Saint-Méry noted that his descriptions largely date from the 1780s. This leads David Geggus to suggest that perhaps the author received much of his detailed descriptions second-hand; David Geggus, “Haitian Voodoo in the eighteenth century: language, culture and resistance,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas, 28 (1991): 23. Since not explicitly indicated in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s book, this is hard to verify.


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terminology as Aradas, who were said to be “the real devotees” who “stuck to the principles and rules.” In their language, the term Vaudoux meant “an almighty and supernatural being,” represented by a snake kept in a box. Moreau de Saint-Méry listed the kind of favors the high Vaudoux spirit was solicited for. Most of the attendants desired the power to gain some control over the will of their masters; some asked for money, others for the recovery of a sick relative, and still others for the love of the man or woman they fancied. The Vaudoux ceremony was led by a “king” and a “queen” who were the principal mediators to reveal during a possession trance the answers of the high spirit. After these revelations, the Vaudoux dance started and several devotees might still get possessed by the spirit.13 Moreau de Saint-Méry’s account has been taken up by most historians in support of the thesis that Vodou’s origins are to be found primarily in the West African Kingdom of Allada. This is, however, less clear from a report written by Etienne Descourtilz, who, shortly after Moreau de SaintMéry, attempted at describing all African “nations” of slaves as he could distinguish them. Writing about the Mozambiques, he elaborated on the sect of their Vaudoux or “convulsionnaires.” In his descriptions, the ceremony of the Vaudoux Mozambiques appears as a nocturnal gathering during which some of the attendants, while dancing, entered into a possession trance, and as such as quite similar to the meetings Moreau de Saint-Méry witnessed and associated with Aradas. Descourtilz’ comments on the Aradas or the Dahomets lack any reference to Vaudoux, a king or queen, or snakes.14 Eager to find out more about “superstitious sects,” Descourtilz attended another Vaudoux ceremony that took place on his own habitation. This ceremony was led by “an almighty priest” called Dompète, who was believed to have the capacity to discover anything with his eyes regardless of what he could actually see or not. According to one of his informants, “the uncertain” were punished with poison, which was frequently used by Dompète.15 The figure of Dompète was mentioned too by Moreau de Saint-Méry. In 1768, a new dance analogous to Vaudoux was introduced by a slave of Petit Goave in the South. This dance, called Dom Pèdre, was much more violent than Vaudoux, and observers had seen that the dancers mixed gunpowder in the tafia they used to drink while dancing. After a number of devotees succumbed to this most violent and exhausting possession trance, the Dom 13 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, pp. 63–68. 14 “Essai sur les mœurs et les coutumes des habitants de Guinée a` Saint-Domingue,” MS copy of notes by Michel Etienne Descourtilz; Archives Générales de la Congrégation du Saint-Esprit, ChevillyLarue, fol. 224, B, II, 8. 15 Michel Etienne Descourtilz, Voyage d’un Naturaliste en Ha¨ıti, 1799–1803 (Paris: Plon, 1935 [1809]), p. 116.

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Pèdre cult was prohibited by government authorities – without much effect, however, as Moreau de Saint-Méry commented.16 Another account related how in December 1781 the inhabitants of the Barradaires region of Nippes were searching for a maroon known as Sim “called Dompète,” who was believed to be poisoning the area around Nippes.17 By 1814, the “Petro cult” was identified by Drouin de Bercy as “the most dangerous of all black societies.” Its members were said to be “thieves, liars and hypocrites,” and they offered “evil advice that destroys livestock and poultry.”18 What do these separate and incomplete accounts tell us about Vodou in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue? Firstly, it appears that in late eighteenth-century accounts the term “Vaudoux” has to be interpreted as a generic designation for various possession cults organized by Africans on the colonial estates. This was literally stated by one of Descourtilz’ informants, who noted that the Vaudoux were “of different nations.” Rather than pointing at exclusive origins, the accounts of Moreau de Saint-Méry, Descourtilz, and others make it clear that Vodou in the eighteenth century – if we can use the term at all – merely consisted of an amalgam of different “national” cults. These cults no doubt will have occasionally converged around common beliefs and practices, but these processes remained largely invisible for contemporary observers. We may nevertheless catch a glimpse of this creolizing process by looking at the lyrics of the African song that Moreau de Saint-Méry added to his description of the Arada Vaudoux ceremony. The missionary and Kongo historian Jean Cuvelier was the first to point out that this song was apparently sung in the Kikongo language.19 The same song was noted by a French priest complaining about an “Amazon band” led by Princess Amesythe, one of his exstudents who had been initiated into the sect of Vaudoux. To his great dismay, his renegade students were heard at night on the outskirts of Cap-Franç ois dancing and singing this Kikongo

16 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, p. 69. 17 John D. Garrigus, “A struggle for respect: the free coloreds of pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, 1760–69 (Haiti)” (Ph.D. diss., John Hopkins University, 1988). 18 M. Drouin de Bercy, De Saint-Domingue, de ses guerres, de ses révolutions, de ses ressources, et des moyens a` prendre pour y rétablir la paix et l’industrie (Paris: Hocquet, 1814), quoted in Garrigus, “A struggle for respect.” 19 The song goes: Eh! Eh! Bomba, hen! hen!/Canga bafio té/Canga moune dé lé/Canga do ki la/Canga li; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, p. 67. Interpretation of this song depends on an accurate translation of the Kikongo verb kanga, literally “to bind,” but in a ritual context with the connotation of magically warding off evil. Jean Cuvelier translated: Oh! Mbumba snake/Stop the blacks/Stop the white man/Stop the ndoki [witch]/Stop them; Jean Cuvelier, L’ancien royaume du Congo (Brugge: Desclée De Brouwer, 1946), p. 290. More reflections on the meaning of kanga are found in John Thornton, “‘I am the subject of the King of Kongo’: African political ideology and the Haitian revolution,” Journal of World History, 4:2 (1993): 210–213.


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song.20 Another similar song was included in Drouin de Bercy’s account of 1814.21 Fanciful translations have often turned this song into a revolutionary creed. David Geggus has argued, however, that these Kikongo Vaudoux songs are best understood as invocations of Mbumba, a Kongo deity, who is solicited to destroy all witches (bandoki), whether they dwell among the black or among the white population.22 In early twentieth-century Kongo, Mbumba was both a generic term for a charm or nkisi 23 and the name of a specific nkisi associated with spiritual contests and warfare.24 The apparent cases of a merging of rituals, images, and songs of various origins will not have been exceptional. The social reality of ethnic pluralism on Saint-Domingue plantations and the inclusive character of African religions facilitated reciprocal borrowings and the accumulation of various rituals and concepts in the organization of cults. While other terms have been in use in the eighteenth century to designate possession cults organized by Africans – such as Calenda,25 Chica,26 Wangua,27 and so on – it appears that Vaudoux and Petro became dominant designations for the possession cults of the African plantation workers, the former being derived from West African religious vocabulary, the latter most probably from Kongo, where people commonly took catholic names, preceded by the honorific Dom or Dona.28 In the first place, Vaudoux and Petro cults addressed the everyday needs of an oppressed people trying to gain some control over their social and natural environment. Their social environment was characterized by a complex set of relationships with white masters, overseers, commandeurs d’atelier, freed blacks, runaway slaves, Creoles, and African-born coresidents of a shared or different ethnic or linguistic background. Local cults provided the means to deal with everyday 20 Jean-Marie Jan, Les congrégations religieuses a` Saint-Domingue, 1681–1793 (Port-au-Prince: 1951), quoted in Rey, Classes of Mary, 277–278. 21 Drouin de Bercy’s song goes: A ia bombaia bombé/Lamma samana quana/E van vanta vana docki; Drouin de Bercy, De Saint-Domingue; translated by Geggus as: Oh! honored Mbumba, oh Mbumba!/Seize, carry off, take by force/Yes! kill, crush that witch!; Geggus, “Haitian Voodoo in the eighteenth century,” p. 26. 22 Geggus, “Haitian Voodoo in the eighteenth century,” pp. 30–31. 23 Minkisi collected in Mayombe often have the word mbumba in their proper name: Mbumba Mbingu, Mbumba Malele, Mbumba Makonda, etc. On multiple meanings of mbumba, see Wyatt MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis: The Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 243, note 5. 24 See 1888 report on the coastal ‘Moussorongos’; African Archives, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brussels, fol. 1370; also Lt. Gilmont, “La végétation au Mayombe,” Précis Historiques, 4 (1895):134. 25 Labat, “Voyages,” p. 51. 26 Moreau de Saint-Méry, “Description,” p. 64. 27 Descourtilz, MS “Essai sur les mœurs.” 28 See, for example, Willy Bal, “Prénoms portugais en Kikongo,” Revue Internationale d’Onomastique, 14:3 (1962):219–222.

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problems and conflicts. They provided technologies for divination and healing, for reconciliation or revenge, for good luck, and for protection against the terror of the overseers and against all sorts of bad spirits wandering about. Misfortunes were typically experienced as the result of witchcraft, and social conflicts were mostly expressed in the idiom of witchcraft suspicions and accusations. Ritual experts used their divinatory skills to detect these witches and provided the means to combat and neutralize their evil influences. It is essentially in these everyday social and therapeutic contexts that manifestations of Vaudoux and Petro have to be understood. P O I S O N E RS A N D I N S U RG E N T S

Colonial Vodou has often been credited, both by contemporary observers and by modern historians, with a strong potential for liberative inspiration and unification, even with a revolutionary antiwhite ideology. An interesting case in this respect is the history of Franç ois Makandal, who provoked a widespread fear of poisoning among the white and Creole population of Saint-Domingue in the 1750s. Makandal was an African-born runaway slave who built up a following on northern plantations by distributing powerful packets and “poisons.” Before he was burnt at the stake in 1758, he was thought to be the head of an extensive conspiracy aimed at killing all the whites. As pointed out by Pluchon, however, it appears that in the end relatively few Europeans were poisoned.29 If the fear for a planned extermination of the whites was essentially without basis, the poisonings, however, did occur with a surprising frequency among the slave population throughout the eighteenth century. An anonymous report from 1763 stated that since 50 years already this evil was ravaging the colony. A plantation owner wrote in 1746 that in 8 years time, of the total number of 150 slaves he had lost, more than hundred had been poisoned. Another report by Nicolas Le Jeune from 1788 spoke of 400 slaves his father had lost in 25 years, and 77 of his own that had been poisoned in 2 years only.30 Makandal, however, was clearly more than a criminal poisoner. A contemporary observer noted that he had revelations and could foretell the future. He had managed to persuade his followers that he was sent by God and that he was immortal.31 There is some evidence to suggest that Makandal was a Kongolese ritual specialist, 29 Pierre Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers, et empoisonneurs: de Saint-Domingue a` Haiti (Paris: Karthala, 1987), pp. 208–223. 30 Documents from Archives du Ministère des Colonies (France), quoted in Pierre De Vaissière, SaintDomingue: la société et la vie créoles sous l’ancien régime, 1629–1789 (Paris: Perrin, 1909), pp. 186, 238. 31 De Vaissière, Saint-Domingue, pp. 236–237.


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composing and selling nkisi charms in the Kongolese tradition. His name may be a corruption of Makenda, being a title for the chief ’s executioner in early twentieth-century Mayombe,32 or of makanda, meaning a medicinal plant.33 Also the names of his two accomplices, Mayombe and Teyselo, suggest Central African origins.34 Makandal was no doubt mostly consulted for such everyday problems as sickness, theft, misfortune, maltreatment, and, perhaps most importantly, for protection against the vices of evil witches. One important clue to understand the activities of Makandal and the makendals35 who came after him may be the fact that probably Makandal administered a kind of poison ordeal to detect witches. Poison ordeals were widely in use at least all over Central Africa and were called nkasa, or brulungo, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts.36 Ritual experts on Saint-Domingue no doubt used similar witch-detecting ordeals. This seems indicated by Descourtilz’ informant, who noted that in the cult led by Dompète, “les incertains” were punished with poison.37 Rather than the uncertain or the unbelievers as Descourtilz translated, his informant may well have meant those who were suspected of witchcraft activities. Somebody accused of witchcraft would be socially pressed to take in a poisonous potion prepared by the priest. If he or she vomited and survived the test, then this would be taken as proof of his or her innocence. If the accused fell sick and died, then this meant that indeed he or she had been a witch.38 Importantly, poison ordeals were believed to work in a merely spiritual rather than pharmacological way. Often the poison did not have to be swallowed by the victim in order to do its job. As a contemporary observer 32 MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture, p. 139. Another title for the executioner in Mayombe was Mak’aka; Bittremieux, Mayombsch Idioticon (Gent: Erasmus, 1922), p. 348. 33 Leo Bittremieux, Mayombsch Idioticon, p. 350. 34 Teyselo may be a distortion of the Portuguese name Terceiro; David P. Geggus, “Marronage, voodoo and the Saint-Domingue slave revolt of 1791,” Proceedings of the Fifteenth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society, ed. P. Boucher (Lanham, New York, London: The University Press of America, 1992), pp. 28–29. Mayumba is the name of one of the eighteenth-century trading ports on the Atlantic coast north of the Congo estuary; Mayombe is the name of the forested hinterland of these ports. 35 “Makandal” became in the eighteenth-century accounts a generic term for African priests or “sorcerers.” Writing about Africans coming from the kingdom of Urba, Descourtilz noted that “Le roi d’Urba entretient a` sa cour une réunion de magiciens qu’on appelle assez généralement en Guinée, Makendals,” and commenting on a band of Congo insurgents, he wrote that “lls avoient pour chef un mulâtre makendal”; Descourtilz, MS “Essai sur les mœurs.” 36 In Kongo for example, the Italian missionary Raimundo Da Dicomano noted that fetishism was nothing else than the administration of poison by a sorcerer; Louis Jadin, ed., “Relation sur le Royaume du Congo du P. Raimundo da Dicomano, missionnaire de 1791 a` 1795,” Bulletin de I’Académie Royale des Sciences Coloniales III, fasc. 2 (Bruxelles, 1957), p. 320. 37 Descourtilz, Voyage d’un naturaliste en Ha¨ıti, p. 116. 38 On poison ordeals in Kongo: Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The Bakongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 166.

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noted, hiding certain plants or arranging them in a particular way close to the door or bed of a victim would be sufficient to cause poisoning.39 In present-day Haiti, sorcerers strew their poisonous powders particularly on crossroads in order to hit a passing victim.40 Another similar cult of makendals flourished in the 1770s on the northern parish of Marmelade, where a number of coffee plantations had just been established, working mainly with Congo slaves.41 The names of the leaders of the nocturnal meetings were recorded as Jerôme, nicknamed Poteau, Télémaque Canga, and Nègre Jean. Together with other participants they were brought to trial at Cap Franç ois. According to their testimonies, the ceremonies were called “mayombe” or “bila” and involved the composition and distribution of charms that appear as quite similar to the ones composed by Makandal in the 1750s. According to Bittremieux’ dictionary, bila in Kikongo means “cause, reason”; hence, tesisa bibila, “to assess the reasons” [of an illness, misfortune].42 Bila seems to have denoted a ceremony involving divinatory rituals to discover the causes of illnesses, thefts, or other misfortunes, in the Central African Kongo tradition. One of the testimonies revealed that the Marmelade ceremonies too involved the administration of a kind of poison ordeal, and another witness mentioned an ordeal involving fire. In addition, Jerôme sold his clients maman-bila, small chalky stones, contained in a bag called fonda [(di)funda],43 red and black seeds that he called poto, and above all, sticks called mayombo. The sticks had a cavity filled with white powder and pepper and were supposed to render warriors invulnerable in fighting. If further garnished with nails, they were sold for very high sums.44 The use of chalk, pepper, gunpowder, nails, sticks, and various herbs and seeds situates the Marmelade cult in line with the one presided by Makandal in the 1750s and Dom Pedro in the 1760s. Sim or Dompète, the Nippes poisoner of the 1780s mentioned earlier, was caught by a free mulatto who left a detailed description of the contents of the bag Dompète was carrying with him. It appears that these included several packets made of red, white, or blue cloth, all firmly tied with a few feathers sticking out, besides pieces of wood, white wax, glass, and the 39 De Vaissière, Saint-Domingue, p. 242. 40 Information from C. Nzungu, Kinshasa, July 1998. 41 Gabriel Debien, “Assemblées nocturnes d’esclaves a` Saint-Domingue, 1786,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 279 (1972):275. 42 Bittremieux, Mayombsch Idioticon, p. 56. 43 (di)funda, pl. (ma-), a packet made from leaves; Bittremieux, Mayombsch Idioticon, p. 108. 44 Debien, “Assemblées nocturnes,” pp. 276–277; based on the notes of Gressier de la Jaloussière, dated 26 May 1786.


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like. Sim’s nickname “Dompète” and the sort of charms he carried with him – called paquets kongo in contemporary Haitian Vodou45 – may identify him, like Makandal and others, as a Kongolese. The tradition of poison ordeals introduced in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue may be largely Kongo import. The possibility of a connection between poison and witchdetecting ordeals has been largely overlooked by historians, and particularly by those who have considered the poisonings as an act of resistance against colonial oppression. The fact that large numbers of slaves were killed by poison reflects the extreme hardships and the terror on the colonial estates, which was tragically perceived as resulting from the uncontrolled evil worked by too many witches. Carefully kept ignorant about the fundamentals of the Saint-Domingue colonial hegemonic order, most plantation slaves could only react to it in terms of their immediate social environment and with familiar tools to act on it. Vodou’s potential for fueling an antiwhite revolutionary ideology has been particularly overrated with respect to the first insurrections of August 1791 that marked the beginning of the Haitian Revolution. The Vodou ceremony at Bois Ca¨ıman, during which a black pig, “encircled by fetishes,” was sacrificed,46 has been recalled by many scholars to argue for Vodou’s decisive role in the outbreak of the Revolution. David Geggus has pointed out, however, that much of the story of Bois Ca¨ıman that developed in the nineteenth century is merely legendary. What we know about the Bois Ca¨ıman ceremony is that it was held 7 days after a general plan for the rebellion had been drawn up during an elite meeting on the estate of Lenormand de Mézy. At Bois Ca¨ıman this decision to launch a rebellion was communicated to the mass of field slaves. A black pig was sacrificed and the attendants eagerly took its hairs as protective amulets. The rest of the story has been added later.47 In spite of prevailing interpretations of Bois Ca¨ıman as one of the most important moments in Haitian religious history,48 the importance of this Vodou ceremony in the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution was minimal. The widespread conspiracy was already established by the time the ceremony was held, and only a small minority of the slaves who took up arms in 1791 participated. Presumably a lot more of these Vodou ceremonies were held that were left undocumented. They merely served to 45 See, for example, Robert F. Thompson, “From the isle beneath the sea,” pp. 91–119. 46 Antoine Dalmas, Histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue (Paris: Mame frères, 1814), Vol. 1, pp. 117–118. 47 David P. Geggus, “The Bois Ca¨ıman ceremony,” Journal of Caribbean History, 25:1–2 (1991): 41–57. 48 Rey, Classes of Mary, p. 78.

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provide the insurgents with protective amulets, just as they had done in prerevolutionary times. Descourtilz mentioned a rebel band of Congos who wore small packets that contained heads of toads and snakes and also other amulets tied to their arms and legs.49 Where rebel leaders appeared to be Vodou priests, their ritual services aimed at making their warriors invulnerable to the bullets of the colonists. This applies to a number of leaders of minor bands in the 1790s, operating largely independent from the great armies of, for example, Biassou and Toussaint Louverture.

CONGOS AND THE NKANGI KIDITU

Eighteenth-century Vodou thus consisted of an amalgam of “national” cults that tried to answer everyday problems such as sickness, theft, or adultery, as well as the pressing constraints of Dominguois colonialism, albeit in terms of how they could relate to it. Although a long process of merging or creolization of various African traditions has characterized Vodou’s development since the end of the eighteenth century, contemporary Vodou still remains highly heterogeneous in cosmology and ritual practice. Central African cultural origins have already been suggested for a number of cultic practices and concepts as described in the eighteenth-century documentary record. Admittedly, in the light of the ethnic composition of the eighteenth-century slave population, these findings should not surprise us too much, and ultimately, the exercise of looking for specific ethnic origins of different aspects of Vodou can be done with respect to any African people having been involved in the Atlantic slave trade. What has been generally overlooked, however, is how a profound syncretism between elements drawn from Roman Catholicism and African traditions developed largely in the absence of any meaningful missionary activity in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Saint-Domingue/Haiti.50 In order to challenge some well-established views that this syncretism was merely a later Creole development,51 I will examine some of the historical documentation for eighteenth-century Central Africa, to see what can be said about the religious background of the majority of Africans brought to Saint-Domingue. 49 Descourtilz, MS “Essai sur les mœurs.” 50 A few notable exceptions are by David Geggus, “Haitian Voodoo,” pp. 21–22; John K. Thornton, “The roots of Voodoo. African religion and Haitian society in pre-revolutionary Saint Domingue,” Anthropologie et Sociétés, 22:1 (1998): 85–103. 51 See Michel S. Laguerre, Voodoo and Politics in Haiti (London: Macmillan Press, 1989); Desmangles, Faces of the Gods, pp. 8–9; De Heusch, “Kongo in Haiti,” pp. 291–292.


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By the end of the eighteenth century, Portuguese and Italian missionaries had been active in Kongo for almost three centuries.52 A point of major significance in the light of this study is to see how they came to rely on a great number of native assistants in their propagation of the faith. The functions of interpreter, catechist, and churchwarden or “maestro da igreja” had been institutionalized and linked with political office in the towns already before the first Capuchins arrived in Kongo in 1645. At the end of the seventeenth century, a certain hierarchy of these roles was established, in that noblemen made a career through subsequent promotions from interpreter to catechist up to maestro da igreja.53 In the countryside, these lay assistants traveled to the remote villages that were never visited by a missionary, where they mobilized and prepared the people to receive baptism.54 Eighteenth-century reports reveal that missionaries continued to rely heavily upon these native assistants. If originally these assistants had been selected by the missionaries who made specific demands upon the candidates, in the eighteenth century most of them were initiated by chiefs and noblemen on behalf of local interest groups. From the writings of Rosario dal Parco (1760), we may infer that these native lay assistants must have been quite numerous. He noted that the total number of the Kongo king’s princes and vassals reached 6,000 and that almost all of them kept several maestri.55 Of the ritual services offered by missionaries, the sacrament of baptism was the most desired. People would often undertake a journey of several days in order to reach a missionary and mission reports mentioned extremely high numbers of baptisms administered. One of the champions was Cherubino da Savona, who reported in 1775 that he had baptized more than 700,000 children and adults over a period of 14 years.56 Similarly high numbers were achieved by the Franciscan 52 Among the best modern studies of the subsequent Roman Catholic missions to the Kongo kingdom are John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition 1641–1718 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Ibid., “The development of an African catholic church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” Journal of African History, 25:2 (1984): 147–167; and other articles; see also Richard Gray, “Como vero prencipe Catolico: the Capuchins and the rulers of Soyo in the late seventeenth century,”Africa, 53:3 (1983): 39–54. 53 Jean Cuvelier, Relations sur le Congo du Père Laurent de Lucques, 1700–1717 (Bruxelles: Institut royal colonial belge, 1953), pp. 87–92. 54 Thornton, “Development of an African catholic church,” p. 165. 55 Louis Jadin, ed., “Informations sur le royaume du Congo et d’Angola du P. Rosario dal Parco, préfet des Capucins en Angola et Congo,” Bulletin de i’institut historique belge de Rome, 35 (Bruxelles 1963): 371. 56 Louis Jadin, ed., “Bref aperç u du Royaume du Congo et de ses missions, par le P. Cherubino da Savona, missionnaire apostolique capucin au Congo, 1775,” Bulletin de I’institut Historique belge de Rome, 35 (1963): 389. The Capuchin Cherubino da Savona served in Kongo from 1760 till 1774, where most of the time he was the only missionary traveling around. Back in Italy in 1775, he wrote a detailed report on the mission of Kongo.

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Rafael Castello da Vide, who noted 380,000 baptisms in seven and half years,57 and by Raimundo da Dicomano, who baptized 25,000 children during his 3-year stay at the capital city of São Salvador.58 To these we may add the efforts made by French missionaries in the years 1766–1776 in the kingdoms of Loango and Kakongo north of the Congo river. In 1774 they met in Kakongo a community of Kongo “Catholics” who had migrated from Soyo, Kongo’s most powerful province. In the absence of missionaries they had maintained the Catholic cult and were most enthusiastic when the French missionaries visited them. Father Descourvières was urged to come back soon so they could confess and attend church services.59 Bakongo generally took less interest in the other sacraments. Noblemen would occasionally attend church services and sometimes people confessed to an interpreter who translated for the priest. Da Dicomano noted that when he finally granted absolution, those present rejoiced and clapped in their hands, and the one who confessed would be carried around on their shoulders.60 Missionaries made common use of visual material to illustrate the content of their religious instruction. Castello da Vide reported that, after he had baptized a number of people in 1780 in the town of Ibaide, he showed them a beautiful representation of the Divine Mother. He also instructed them about Saint Francis and Saint Anthony and noted that afterward all listeners showed “profound Christian feelings,” though at the same time “they continued to practice their superstitions.” On the feast of the Assumption of Mary, a statue of the Virgin was carried about in a joyful procession.61 Since the early years of missionary activity in Kongo, numerous Catholic cult objects had been imported and distributed in the country to substitute for the indigenous charms or minkisi. This tradition clearly went on in the eighteenth century. Most villages had a large wooden cross erected in the middle of the village square, and crosses, crucifixes, and religious medals 57 Marcellino Da Civezza, ed., “Congo,” in Storia Universale delle Missione Franciscane, Vol. VII, Part IV Roma: Tipografia Tiberina, 1894), pp. 313–402; this is a translation of the original Portuguese MS Viagem do Congo do Missionario Fr. Raphael de Castello de Vide, hoje Bispo de San Thomé (1788). The Franciscan Rafael Castello da Vide arrived in Kongo in 1779. In 1788 he went back to Portugal and wrote a detailed account on his travels and experiences in Kongo. 58 Jadin, ed., “Relation [ . . . ] P. Raimundo da Dicomano,” p. 316. Da Dicomano assisted at the coronation ceremony of King Henrique in 1794. After he returned, he compiled his memoirs in 1798 in a manuscript. 59 Jean-Joseph Descourvières described this Catholic settlement in a letter to his colleague Pierre Belgarde and his account was used in L. B. Proyart, Histoire de Loango, Kakongo, et autres Royaumes d’Afrique (Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers Ltd., 1968 [1776]). A compilation of other documents relating to the French mission has been edited by Jean Cuvelier, Documents sur une mission française au Kakongo 1766–1776, avec introduction et annotations (Bruxelles: Institut royal colonial belge, 1953). 60 Jadin, ed., “Relation [ . . . ] Raimundo da Dicomano,” p. 321. 61 Da Civezza, ed., “Congo,” pp. 321, 376.


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had become part of the chiefly insignia.62 Native artisans had copied the imported crosses and saint images and developed their own style. The best known examples of eighteenth-century Kongo Catholic art are the crucifixes with strongly Africanized features. They were called “nkangi kiditu,” which may be translated as “Savior Christ,” though the saving may have had more to do with dispelling witches than with Christian theology.63 Other sacra were crosses mounted on a steel-tipped shaft, called Santus, and small figurines representing the Virgin and Saint Anthony, called Nsundi Malau and Toni Malau. These objects were believed to provide protection if brought in contact with the body and served as individual talismans presumably used for hunting.64 In addition to familiarity with Catholic symbolism and iconography, eighteenth-century sources testify to the general knowledge of a considerable repertoire of Catholic prayers and songs, either in Kikongo or in Latin. Almost everywhere he came, Castello da Vide was greeted by people singing “l’Avemmaria” in Kikongo. During the feast of the Assumption of Mary, the people sung the rosary and the “Salve Regina” in their own language. From the report of Castello da Vide, it appears that the people knew Latin songs as well. At the end of the ceremony the litanies “Tota Pulchra” and “Stella caeli exterpavit” were sung – the latter “to keep the Plague away, which often causes disasters here.”65 In São Salvador, da Dicomano sung with his people the litanies of the Holy Virgin.66 The French missionaries in Kakongo noted that the people freely joined them in reciting the “Ora pro nobis” and the “Te Deum.” Descourvières reported that it was their custom to assemble on Sundays and “sing the hymns and canticles in honor of the Christian God,” this notably in total absence of European missionaries.67 Judging from these various eighteenth-century accounts, it may be clear that inhabitants of the Kongo kingdom and even quite some Bakongo living 62 Mentioned, for example, by Cherubino da Savona in Kongo: Jadin, ed., “Bref aperç u [ . . . ] Cherubino da Savona,” pp. 380–381; and by Descourvières in Kakongo: Proyart, Histoire de Loango, pp. 327, 330, 343. 63 Nkangi, from kanga, “to bind, to tie”; Bittremieux, Mayombsch Idioticon, p. 193. In ritual context, the verb kanga describes the witch’s action, imagined as a use of cords, chains, stoppered bottles, and the like, by which the soul of the victim is imprisoned; MacGaffey, Religion and Society, p. 162. The Nkangi Kiditu was sometimes bound with a cord that encircled the body of Christ from head to foot. Kiditu is most probably a corruption of Kristu, Christ, but may well have resonated also with another significant Kikongo term. An interesting collection of Kongo crucifixes is discussed in ´ Robert Wannyn, L’Art Ancien du Métal au Bas-Congo (Champles: Editions du Vieux Planquesaule, 1961). 64 Wannyn, L’Art Ancien du Métal, pp. 42–43. (Ma)Lau was known in nineteenth-century Lower Congo as a nkisi for hunting; A. Tembo, “Bakisi ba Mayombe,” MS, 1912–1913, Central Archives C.I.C.M., Rome, fol. Z.III.d.5.19, no. 32, 176. 65 Da Civezza, ed., “Congo,” pp. 331, 375. 66 Jadin, ed., “Informations [ . . . ] Raimundo da Dicomano,” p. 325. 67 Proyart, Histoire de Loango, pp. 317, 340–342.

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north of the Congo river were well familiar with Catholic ritual, imagery, prayers, and songs. The Catholic cult was organized largely by themselves, and being Catholic or not was no longer an issue in the second half of the eighteenth century. As virtually all Kongo were baptized Catholics, the question would have no impact on enslavement, and thus thousands of African Catholics would reach Saint-Domingue in the eighteenth century. CHURCHWARDENS AND BUSH PRIESTS

Several eighteenth-century observers in Saint-Domingue noted a similar familiarity with elements drawn from Roman Catholicism among Africans who had just arrived in the French colony. Jean-Baptiste Labat was the first to note in the 1720s that slaves from Congo were familiar with Catholic religion, though they continued to indulge in superstitious practices.68 Government documents of the 1760s reported that certain groups of slaves used to gather in the church day and night and install among them sacristans and catechists who traveled from one estate to another to preach the Gospel. Some were acting as missionaries and “abusing” the sacraments.69 Others insisted on burying their dead inside the parish church, as reported from the southern town of Aquin. Moreau de Saint-Méry equally associated this sort of “abuses” with Congo slaves, whose religion he characterized as a “monstrous assemblage” of Catholicism and paganism.70 These passing comments invite us to look back at a number of notorious characters we have discussed earlier and identified as Central Africans. Makandal and his accomplices were interrogated by a number of magistrates at Cap Franç ois, presided by the judge Jacques Courtin. After the execution, Courtin compiled his memoirs in a sort of vademecum of “fetishism” to be consulted by other magistrates, part of which has been edited by Pierre Pluchon.71 The first obvious thing to infer from Courtin’s descriptions is the apparent incorporation of Catholic elements in the Vodou ceremonies of the makendals. The necessary ingredients for the charms they composed included grave earth, preferably from graves of baptized children, nails, and herbs, bound together and enveloped in a piece of cloth, roots of the fig and the banana tree, and holy water, holy wax, holy bread, and holy incense. All these items were firmly bound together in a larger piece of cloth to form a bundle, which was then once again soaked in holy water. The action of enveloping and tying everything together [kanga] with cloth and cords was 68 69 70 71

Labat, Voyages, p. 42. Fouchard, Les marrons, p. 499. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, pp. 53, 1237. Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers, et empoisonneurs, pp. 208–219.


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thought to be crucial to the effectiveness of the charm.72 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall has pointed out that the Courtin documents relate that Makandal also pronounced the word “Alla” during the composition of his charms.73 The question whether this should be interpreted as an invocation of the Muslim Allah is tempting. As I pointed out earlier, Central African attitudes toward religion generally allowed the inclusion or “testing” of new technologies, concepts, and ideas. Documents concerning the Marmelade cult of Jerôme Poteau in the 1770s equally testify to the manipulation of elements drawn from Roman Catholicism in cults organized by Congos. A detailed description of one of the ceremonies reveals that the officiants had to kneel in front of an altar with two candlesticks on it, and Jerôme carried in his bag, among other sacra, a crucifix.74 We may recall the lament of a French priest at Cap Franç ois in the 1790s about one of his renegade students who came renown as Princess Amesythe after she was initiated in a Vaudoux cult. He noted that the piety of Amesythe and her following, however, seemed not at all diminished. The sectarians were permitted the adoration of God, devotions to Mary, and the wearing of scapulars.75 One more interesting case is the rebel leader Romaine Rivière, who called himself “Romaine-la-Prophétesse.” In the summer of 1791, he had organized in armed rebellion a considerable number of slaves and established a military camp in the mountains near Léogane in the South. He had set up quarters in an abandoned church and claimed to be in direct communication with the Virgin Mary. He was said to preach mass for his soldiers, who were guaranteed certain victory over their enemies, from whose bullets they would be protected.76 Romaine’s band was but one of many minor bands of largely African born insurgents that Toussaint Louverture and the other major leaders of the Revolution tried to control with great difficulty.77 Among similarly styled rebel commanders we know by name were Sainte Jésus Maman Boudier, Sainte Cathérine, Saint ´ Jean Père l’Eternit´ e, Petit Noël Prieur, and others.78 Their fancy nicknames with references to Catholic saints may well suggest that they were 72 Ibidem, pp. 209–211. 73 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: The Louisiana State University Press, 1992), pp. 164–165. The author takes for granted that Makandal invoked the Muslim Allah, which is possible but far from proven. 74 Debien, “Assemblées nocturnes,” pp. 279–280. 75 Jan, Les congrégations religieuses, p. 225, quoted in Rey, Classes of Mary, 278. 76 James Barskett, Histoire politique et statistique de I’lle d’Hayti, Saint-Domingue (Paris: Brière, 1826), p. 220; Fick, The Making of Haiti, p. 128. 77 Gérard Barthélémy, “Le rôle des Bossales dans I’émergence d’une culture de marronnage en Ha¨ıti,” Cahiers d’études africaines, 148: xxxvii-4 (1997): 846–848. 78 Madiou [1847], quoted in Barthélémy, “Le rôle des Bossales,” p. 848; Geggus, “Haitian Voodoo,” p. 47.

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of Kongo origin. Moreover, the uncontrolled bands operating from camps in the mountains were generally called Congos in late eighteenth-century colonial discourse.79 It may be clear from these different accounts that in the eighteenth century, Central Africans on Saint-Domingue freely drew on Catholic ritual and imagery they were already familiar with, in organizing local cults on the colonial estates. As we have seen that in Kongo numerous churchwardens, catechists, and interpreters were operating largely independent from Catholic missionaries, it should not surprise us to find out that in Saint-Domingue ritual experts such as Makandal, Jerôme, Romaine and no doubt many more were continuing Kongo-style adaptations of Catholic liturgy. Attributing these phenomena merely to the influence of Catholic missionaries working on Haiti would be too simplistic. The only substantial missionary activity in the history of colonial Saint-Domingue had been deployed by the Jesuits in the first decades of the eighteenth century.80 By the middle of the eighteenth century, the exponential growth of the slave imports and the opposition by white colonists made any meaningful religious instruction of the newly arrived Africans virtually impossible.81 Where European missionaries did have some influence, they relied heavily on catechists and interpreters chosen among those African slaves who had a better knowledge of Christianity, just as they had done in Africa.82 With the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, many French priests fled the colony while others were killed or ended up as the cherished spiritual protectors of rebel bands.83 The first leaders of the independent Haiti were reluctant to formally recognize the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. While Toussaint Louverture may have been sympathetic to the Catholic Church, Dessalines rejected the authority of Rome, made himself head of the Haitian church, and freely appointed priests all over the place. One of these, called père Félix, was reported to disregard church services, and merely concentrate on baptisms, marriages, and burials.84 In the absence of formal ecclesiastic authority a number of Catholic priests, among whom were several 79 80 81 82

Thornton, “I am the subject,” p. 43. George Breathett, “The Jesuits in colonial Haiti,” Historian, February (1961): 159–163. De Vaissière, Saint-Domingue, pp. 209–214; Breathett, “Catholic missionary activity,” pp. 284–285. Labat, for example, noted that “On destine ordinairement quelqu’un qui est bien instruit pour faire la doctrine en particulier aux nègres nouveaux [ . . . ]”; Labat, Voyages, II, p. 47. On the role and impact of African catechists, see John Thornton, “On the trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas,” Americas, 44:3 (1988): 268–275. 83 Barskett, Histoire politique, pp. 213, 221. 84 “Notes de Monsieur Pierre André sur Ha¨ıti, 1791–1843,” MS, ca. 1843, Archives de I’Archévêché de Port-au-Prince; from 1924 copy in Archives Générales de la Congrégation du Saint-Esprit, Chevilly-Larue, fol. 224, B, II.


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Corsicans, came to Haiti to make a quick fortune, which they sent to Europe for investment.85 After an unsuccessful attempt in the 1840s, Spiritan missionaries reestablished the Roman Catholic Church after a new Concordat was signed between Rome and the Haitian government in 1860. The nineteenth-century documentation for Haiti unambiguously testifies to the abundance of references to Catholicism in the local cults of rural Haitians. Evidently, the process of creolization and merging of different ethnic traditions continued. As a majority of Haitians had Kongo roots, elements drawn from Roman Catholicism, which Congos had brought with them as an integral part of their religious background, were incorporated in the Vaudoux and Petro cults. The English visitor John Candler noted in 1842 that generally births were well registered, as every infant was brought to a priest to be baptized. In the absence of a priest in the town of Gona¨ıves, men and women continued to frequent the parish church, to cross themselves with holy water, and to say their prayers.86 In a remote spot in the country, which was seldom visited by the parish priest, he discovered a household altar dedicated to the Virgin, with a crucifix and a few pages from a Catholic missal arranged in a certain prescribed way.87 What is interesting in the Spiritan accounts of the 1860s is their apparent difficulty in distinguishing the properly ordained priests from the mere “adventurers” governing the country parishes. Lots of Haitians seem to have been involved in some way in the organization of the Catholic cult, which essentially was led by the churchwarden. The sacristans, choristers, cross bearers, and the Spiritan missionaries all had to obey the churchwarden.88 In the 1840s, Madiou noted a sort of antagonism between two “sects”: the guyons or loup-garous, who were savages and cannibals, and the “saints,” who were said to be regular adepts of Vaudoux albeit in Roman Catholic style. The cult of the saints was led by a certain frère Joseph, who made frequent use of candles. He organized novenas and said mass, and he asked lots of money for his services.89 In 1840 the fees a priest could ask for baptisms, burials, and the like were regulated by law in an attempt to control the business of churches. Candler noted that not all services provided by church assistants were recognized, like the baptisms of houses, boats, and door posts, which all generated substantial revenues. One portion of the fees was given to the churchwarden and to the council of 85 86 87 88

John Candler, Brief Notices of Haiti (London: Th. Ward and Co., 1842), pp. 98–99. Ibid., pp. 23, 58. Ibid., pp. 150. “Notes sur le père Pascal, 1860–1865,” s.n., ca. 1865, Archives Générales de la Congrégation du Saint-Esprit, Chevilly-Larue, fol. 221, B, II. 89 “Soulouque,” s.n., ca. 1850, Archives Générales de la Congrégation du Saint-Esprit, Chevilly-Larue, fol. 812, A, I, 4.

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notable men, where this corporation existed. The remainder was bestowed on the rectors, vicars, choristers, cross bearers, and other officers.90 Before the Concordat of 1860, the Catholic cult in Haiti was led by a hierarchy of roles that had been established without much interference from regular Roman Catholic priests. As such, the Catholic cult was integrated in a pluralism of heterogeneous cults that were controlled by local rural elites. From what we know about the religious background of those Haitians with Kongo roots, it may be clear that the way in which elements drawn from Catholicism were integrated in nineteenth-century Vodou cults was essentially a continuation of eighteenth-century Kongo religion. Twentieth-century accounts continue to reveal this specific Kongolese contribution to the historical emergence of Haitian Vodou. In his classic study of religion in the Mirebalais valley in the 1930s, Herskovits described the role of the bush priest or prêt savanne. In contemporary Haiti, the prêt savanne seeks benediction from God or Bondyè at the start of Vodou ceremonies. During initiation or “baptismal” rites, he recites Catholic prayers and chants the canticles of the church, either in Creole or in a fractured Latin, and he sprinkles the person or the object being baptized with holy water. At funerals, it is the prêt savanne who leads the cortège first to the church and then to the cemetery where Catholic prayers are said. On the Saturday night following the day of the funeral, he is usually invited to the home of the deceased to officiate at a novena, after which he collects his fee.91 Students of Vodou have often considered the role of the prêt savanne as a nineteenth-century Creole invention, as a sort of compromise to cope with Catholic pressures and to conceal forbidden Vodou practice.92 Clearly they have failed to see how a set of lay Catholic roles was imported from Central Africa in the eighteenth century and in the absence of a formal church organization incorporated in a complex of ritual practices that we now denote as Vodou. Another detailed account of contemporary Vodou by a native Haitian priest describes, besides the role of the père savanne, still another function known as the “chapitreur.” His main instruments are a book and a needle, and he is consulted for divination and healing. The client pricks a page after which the corresponding chapter is read. The chapitreur is able to discover the causes of an illness or misfortune, for which he proposes an 90 Candler, Brief Notices, pp. 96–99. 91 Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley, pp. 140–168; Leslie Gérard Desmangles, “Baptismal rites: religious symbiosis of Vodun and Catholicism in Haiti,” in Liturgy and Cultural Religious Traditions, eds. Herman Schmidt and David Power (New York: Seabury Press, 1977), pp. 56–57; Ibid., “The Vodoun way of death,” pp. 16–17. 92 Laguerre, Voodoo and Politics, p. 30, Desmangles, “Baptismal rites,” p. 54. Both situate the origins of the prêt savanne in the beginning of the nineteenth century.


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adequate remedy; a pilgrimage to Saint-Jacques or Sainte-Anne, for example, in certain prescribed clothes. Often a misfortune is caused by “maladie Bon Dieu,” which should be treated through a religious marriage or communion. Interestingly, the author adds that 95% of the children who attend catechism are thus sent by the chapitreur.93 By then they are already well familiar with a good deal of Catholic imagery and ritual, to which references abound in the household altars and Vodou services. CONCLUSIONS

The performances of twentieth-century prêt savannes and chapitreurs, nineteenth-century marguillers or churchwardens, and presumably a fair number of the despised makendals of the eighteenth-century appear as consistent with a logic that has its historical roots in eighteenth-century Central Africa, where numerous lay priests controlled a variety of “Catholic” syncretic cults. According to this logic, empowered images, objects, prayers, and songs drawn from Roman Catholicism have been manipulated in the context of possession cults organized along African lines. These Vodou cults have addressed and continue to address the everyday problems and concerns of an oppressed people of farmers and workers. Integrated in Haitian Vodou, the Kongolese Catholic cults remained under the control of Haitian rural elites, notably those who invested in the production of sacred objects and the investiture of ritual roles. In reviewing the history of Haitian Vodou, one may be warned against the kind of ethnocentric and anachronistic biases as made visible and criticized in recent studies of modern colonialism. In popular media as well as in academic studies, the Haitian Revolution has been celebrated over and over again as the first successful revolution of an oppressed people fighting for its freedom. But how are we to understand that this revolution did not come half a century earlier? When reading the eighteenth-century testimonies to the hard labor regimes and the kind of tortures and cruelties inflicted on those who dared to break the rules, this is an obvious question. Many slaves regularly carried arms, and often habitations with 200 or 300 slaves had but one white overseer.94 It appears that for a surprisingly long time, French colonists managed to impose a hegemonic order of activities and lived meanings and values that was not fundamentally contested. Only slowly expression was given to hitherto voiceless experience of contradictions that 93 “De la superstition,” R. P. Truffley, ca. 1940, Archives Générales de la Congrégation du Saint-Esprit, Chevilly-Larue, fol. 812, A, I. 94 See documents quoted in De Vaissière, Saint-Domingue, pp. 180–196, 230–235.

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could no longer remain concealed by the colonial hegemony. In time, these utterings accumulated mainly among the slave elites to fuel an empowering revolutionary ideology that prepared the Haitian Revolution. The outcome of this revolution, however, has made it difficult to accurately assess prerevolutionary phenomena, inclined as we typically are, to attribute coherence and order, totality, and teleology to society, culture, and history.95 This particularly applies to the history of Haitian Vodou, which has been credited too often with an inherent revolutionary ideology. This applies equally to the inclusion of Catholic elements in Vodou, which has been interpreted as a superficial submission to white Catholic pressures, as no more than a veil behind which Haitians obstinately continued to practice African religions. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, a majority of the rural inhabitants of Saint-Domingue/Haiti never received religious instruction by European missionaries or priests. Yet they knew Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Saint James, and Saint Francis, whom they had brought from Africa, and with whom their ritual experts had tried to maintain a good relationship.96 95 Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution. Volume One: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), Introduction. 96 Research in preparation of this essay was partly done during my MA at the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich. I wish to thank Cesare Poppi, Wyatt MacGaffey, David Geggus, and John Thornton for their useful comments on earlier drafts.

10

Kongolese Catholic Influences on Haitian Popular Catholicism A Sociohistorical Exploration TERRY REY

OVERVIEW

The two predominant forces in Haitian religious culture are Vodou and popular Catholicism, which from many angles appear somewhat indistinguishable, interpermeating one another in their liturgy, ritual, mysticism, and the like. Alfred Métraux argues that this interpermeation is largely explained by a “veritable seizure of Catholicism by Voodoo”1 that took place during the period between independence in 1804 and the signing of a concordat with Rome in 1860. The concordat ended a 56-year virtual absence of the formal Church from Haiti and brought Vatican-sanctioned Catholic priests to the new republic for the first time. Vodou’s absorption of things Catholic during this period so impressed Métraux that he deemed it more remarkable than even the general retention of African customs in Haitian religious culture, which themselves have long been the leading preoccupation of scholars of Vodou. Yet, what explains this absorption? For Métraux, it was the “magicoreligious motives” of slaves and maroons (both Creole and Bosal) in SaintDomingue and, later, newly free Haitians, fully half of whom were Africanborn. In other words, free and enslaved dominguois and Haitians esteemed Catholicism as spiritually effective and thus adopted it “greedily” to satisfy their religious needs, many of which had been engendered in Africa, still others by the brutalities of New World plantation society. Missing from Métraux’s account, however, is consideration of the significant fact that the Kongo kingdom, from which derived more than half of the slave imports to the colony during the 30 years prior to the Haitian Revolution,2 had itself 1 Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Schocken Books, 1972 [1959]), p. 331. 2 John K. Thornton, “ ‘I am the subject of the King of Congo’: African political ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History, 4:2 (1993): 184.

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been Catholic for over a quarter millenium before tens of thousands of its subjects arrived in chains to the shores of Hispaniola. Since most subsequent research shares this oversight, a compelling question thus looms large in the attempt to understand sociohistorically religion in Saint-Domingue and Haiti: What were/are the influences of Kongolese Catholicism on the genesis and development of Haitian popular Catholicism? Kongolese Catholicism surely served as inspiration for the popular seizure of Catholicism in SaintDomingue/Haiti that so intrigued Métraux, an assertion that is even more plausible in light of the fact that the conversion to Catholicism by the baKongo during the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries hinged upon Kongolese will and not European domination.3 In effect, Kongolese religious worldview and interests were thoroughly conditioned by Catholicism for several generations prior to the arrival of enslaved baKongo in Saint-Domingue. The Catholicism of the baKongo in their new and oppressive world therefore must have been an important mechanism in their acculturation. This is especially true because dominguois Catholic ritual and practice were far more familiar to them than most of the other African religious traditions they encountered in the colony. A comparison of select elements of Catholicism in the Kongo and in Saint-Domingue/Haiti during the period from 1500 to 1900 will be undertaken in this paper toward answering this provocative yet curiously largely overlooked question, advancing in particular four theses4 : (1) The politicoreligious ideology behind the Haitian Revolution drew from various sources, including Kongolese Catholic prophetic tradition, as reflected in the revolutionary-period prophetic leadership of Macaya and Romainela-Prophétesse; (2) the unsurpassed popularity of the cults of the Virgin Mary and Saint James the Greater in dominguois/Haitian popular religion may be understood in significant part as a transatlantic extension of the preeminence of these cults in the Kongo; (3) one cannot soundly understand the crucial developmental period of Haitian religious history from 1804 to 3 As Thornton observes, “since Kongo converted to Christianity of its own free will, the shape and structure of the Church and its doctrines were determined as much by Kongo as by Europeans.” See “The development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of the Kongo, 1491–1750,” Journal of African History, 25 (1984): 147–167, 148. 4 Another plausible thesis, one concerning Vodou more so than Catholicism in Haiti, is advanced in Hein Vanhee’s essay in this volume. Vanhee argues that the prèt savann in Haitian Vodou, a ritual specialists charged with leading the community in reciting Catholic prayers and administering Catholic sacraments, is not a nineteenth-century Creole creation but rather an adaptation of some of the central lay leadership roles in Catholicism in the Kongo, such as that of the catechist. Vanhee’s wellresearched and valuable essay differs from my own in its focus on Vodou and emphasis on the colonial period, whereas mine explores Kongolese Catholic influences on Haitian popular Catholicism and devotes more attention to Haiti than Saint-Domingue.

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1860 without careful consideration of the powerful appeal of Catholicism to the baKongo prior to their enslavement in Saint-Domingue; and (4) the use of ropes in Kongolese religious culture, which itself was amplified in symbolic and actual power with the emergence of Catholicism in the Kongo, may very well be the source of the pervasive use of ropes in Haitian religious culture. As the Kongolese influences on Vodou have been carefully considered in the research of Jean Price-Mars and later scholars, commentary on them in this study will be limited, with emphasis placed instead on the contributions of Kongolese Catholicism to dominguois/Haitian popular Catholicism. With the exception of a 1938 article by Price-Mars, concentrated scholarly explorations of Kongolese influences on Haitian religion appear in print only beginning in the 1980s,5 as earlier scholars such as Métraux and Melville Herskovits viewed Central African (or Bantu) influence “as having adapted to, or subordinated itself within, the West-African system of ritual symbols and deities,” which are commonly viewed as dominant.6 Moreover, in their quest to uncover traditional Kongolese “survivals” in Haitian Vodou, a task at which they have succeeded admirably, Haitianists have focused entirely on features of traditional Kongolese religion and ignored the possibility of Kongolese Catholic “survivals.”7 In doing so, they unwittingly deCatholicize seventeenth and eighteenth century Kongolese religious culture in the New World, overlooking the impact of African agency in the creation of Haitian Catholic culture. This is curious, for if Kongolese religious culture could have such an enduring influence on Haitian Vodou, then there is clearly sound reason to believe that it has had such influence on Haitian Catholicism as well – and not just by means of Vodou-Catholic syncretism but also by means of Kongolese Catholic-dominguois/Haitian Catholic continuity. 5 See Jean Price-Mars, “Lemba-Pétro: un culte secret, son histoire, sa localisation géographique, son symbolisme,”Revue de la Societé d’Histoire et de Géographie d’Ha¨ıti, 9:28 (1938): 12–31 (Portau-Prince); Robert Farris Thompson and Joseph Cornet, The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in two worlds (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 1981); John Janzen, Lemba; 1650– 1930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the New World (New York: Garland, 1982); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983); Luc de Heusch, “Kongo in Haiti: a new approach to religious syncretism,” Man ( Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute), 24 ( June 1989): 290–303; Lilas Desquiron, Les Racines du Vaudou (Port-au-Prince: Deschamps 1990); John K. Thornton, “On the trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas,” Americas, 44 (1988): 261–278; and “ ‘I am the subject of the King of Congo’ ”; Elizabeth McAlister, “A Sorcerer’s bottle: the visual art of magic in Haiti,” in Donald J. Consentino, ed., Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (Los Angeles: University of California 1995), pp. 304–321; and Terry Rey, “The Virgin Mary and revolution in Saint-Domingue: the charisma of Romaine-la-Prophétesse,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 11:3 (1998): 341–369. 6 Janzen, Lemba, p. 274. 7 Thornton’s “On the Trail of Voodoo” is an important exception here.

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How might this consistency in scholarly oversight be understood? One possible answer lies in the questionable prevailing academic portrayal of Haitian culture and especially Haitian religion as being dichotomous in structure, with Vodou and Catholicism being somehow essentially oppositional. Beginning with Price-Mars, many scholars have dismissed the Catholic features in Haitian Vodou as little more than residue from the Catholic masks that were placed over African rites during the slave era, a strategy employed by slaves to ensure the survival of African traditions in a world that formally prohibited them.8 Such historically uncritical claims contribute to the dichotomous assumptions that, as Drexel Woodson argues, “haunt Haitian studies:”9 Searching for a singularly authentic and effective beginning for Haitian culture among its multiple origins, scientific and political appropriation have privileged “certain” beginnings by placing them in the forefront of accounts, while leaving “puzzling” beginnings to take the hindmost. Such appropriation is conducive to surrealistic science and politics. Surrealism haunts assumptions about the characteristics of European or African cultures at the “moment of contact” and propositions about the “fate” of those original cultural characteristics as Haitian culture developed.10

Proponents of such positions, perpetrators of surrealistic appropriations, are misguided in overemphasizing a Vodou/Christianity dichotomy in Haitian religion, asserting, in effect, that: “Just as Catholicism was the religious beginning that should take the hindmost, Gallo-Latin mentality should yield to African mentality as the beginning of culture.”11 In reviewing Patrick Bellegarde-Smith’s Haiti: The Breached Citadel, Woodson takes issue with the author’s construction of such an “idealized Haiti” that: is indubitably non-Western despite counter evidence. Christianity [for BellegardeSmith] . . . offers Haitians nothing save self-alienation and exploitation. “Vodun” 8 See Jean Price-Mars, “Le sentiment et le phénomène religiuex chez les negres de Saint-Domingue,” ´ in Jean Price-Mars, Une etape de l’Evolution Ha¨ıtienne (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie La Presse, 1929 [1925]), pp. 115–152. 9 Drexel G. Woodson, Review of Haiti: The Breached Citadel, by Patrick Bellegarde-Smith. New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 67, 1, 1993, pp. 156–160, 157. 10 Drexel G. Woodson, “Which beginning should be hindmost?: surrealism in appropriations of facts About Haitian ‘contact culture,’” unpublished manuscript, 1994, p. 2. Cited with author’s permission. Thornton reflects Woodson’s criticism of this shortcoming in Africana studies: “Dona Beatriz’ movement, with its possessed Christian saint and Christian ideology, often seems too embarrassingly bizarre or too atypical of African culture to appeal to American conceptions. Although most Americans are comfortable with the idea of Muslim Africans in the slave trade period, they seem much less comfortable with Christian Africans. A literate elite, dressing partially in European clothes, bearing Portuguese names, and professing Catholicism seems somehow out of place in the popular image of precolonial Africa.” See John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–2. 11 Ibid., 71.


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stands alone, he reports . . . as Haiti’s authentic national religion. Haitian Protestantism and Catholicism are nullities, even though those world religions have formed two sides of a religious triangle of forces, alternatively “engaged” and “disengaged” politically for at lest 170 years and peasants now routinely use Kretyen [Christian] to mean “person” or “human.”12

In an otherwise excellent essay exploring Kongolese influences on the use of wanga (charms)13 in contemporary Haitian Vodou, Elizabeth McAlister makes essentially the same questionable move as Bellegarde-Smith in arguing that “Jesus is problematic for the Vodouist: The heavy catholicizing of the French and, later, the Haitian elite, makes him the god of the dominant classes.”14 Here again the influence of African Catholicism in Haitian religion is ignored. Catholicism in Saint-Domingue and Haiti has never been a Eurocentric monolith planted firmly through any kind of “heavy catholicizing.” Evidently, it remains difficult for some scholars to accept the notion, which historical record in fact strongly supports, that Africans and diasporan Africans might have taken genuine interest in Christianity. In reality, this god manifest in Jesus, far from being widely perceived among the subjugated as merely “the god of the dominant classes,” had long been embraced by the baKongo (however syncretized with Nzambe Mpungu) prior to their arrival in Saint-Domingue. To be sure, Kongolese Catholicism has been so “puzzling” to scholars as to have been made entirely hindmost. Countering this tendency, the present essay places Kongolese Catholicism at the forefront of inquiry into Haitian beginnings. CATHOLIC SYMBOLISM AND KONGOLESE IDEOLOGY IN THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION, 1791 – 1804

The success of the Haitian independence struggle depended on a wider variety of forces for its success than is commonly acknowledged, some of them religious.15 Kongolese military experience, ideology, and prophetic 12 Woodson, Review of Bellegarde-Smith, p. 159. 13 Métraux defines wanga as “The magic weapon par excellence . . . any object or combination of objects which has received, as a result of magic procedure, a property that is harmful to one or more people,” Voodoo in Haiti, p. 285. From my discussions with Haitians, it seems that the term has also taken on a generalized, more abstract connotation, meaning something like what anthropology calls “sorcery.” 14 McAlister, “A sorcerer’s bottle,” p. 316. 15 For discussions of the role of Vodou in the Haitian Revolution, see Henock Trouillot, Introduction a` une Histoire du Vaudou (Port-au-Prince: Fardin, 1983); Odette Mennesson-Rigaud, “Le rôle du vaudou dans l’indépendance d’Ha¨ıti,” Présence Africaine, 17/18 (1958): 43–67; and Michel Laguerre, Voodoo and Politics in Haiti (New York: St. Martins, 1981). Following Price-Mars, these scholars argue that Vodou was crucial to the Revolution’s success. Price-Mars’s claim that “1804 est issu du voudoun,” is not, however, universally accepted. See, for example, Micial Nérestant, Religions et Politique en Haiti (Paris: KARTHALA, 1994), pp. 27–35.

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tradition, as John Thornton demonstrates,16 should be counted among these forces, and therfore so too should Kongolese Catholicism, which by 1791 was integral to each of these three “other” factors. To illustrate, we may briefly compare the religiopolitical prophecy of Macaya and Romaine-laProphétesse, who were each religiously inspired leaders of important maroon insurgencies in the early stages of the Haitian Revolution. Macaya’s ideology and Romaine’s Mariology were more characteristically Kongolese than Creole, and each featured Christian symbolism in ways that echo Kongolese prophetic tradition. Thornton has demonstrated how Macaya, being “probably himself from Kongo, and his band . . . composed entirely or largely of Kongolese,” freely manipulated Christian symbolism in a way characteristic of Kongolese religious leaders and essential to a religioideological system that was as much African Catholic as traditional African.17 Romaine likewise led a band of rebel slaves that was inspired by an ideology characterized by licentious contortion of Catholic symbolism and myth. I have argued elsewhere that, like Macaya, Romaine-la-Prophétesse may well have been Kongolese, or at least that Kongolese religious thought had a demonstrable influence on his leadership.18 The self-proclaimed godson of the Virgin Mary was reported to have said Mass before an inverted cross with a saber in his hand, receiving the Virgin’s messages in writing from inside his occupied church’s tabernacle. Also like Macaya, and like the Kongolese prophetess Beatrice Kimpa Vita19 on the other side of the Atlantic earlier that century, Romaine delivered a message laced with royalist overtones that resonated with seventeenth and eighteenth century Kongolese political ideology, claiming that he was to become the king of the entire island. No less obsessed with royalism, Macaya once declared, “I am the subject of three kings: of the King of the Congo, master of all the blacks; of the King of France, who represents my father; of the King of Spain who represents my mother. These three Kings are the descendants of those who, led by a star, came to adore God made Man.”20 We may compare Macaya’s declaration with Romaine’s syncretic theology on two counts: (1) an emphasis on kingship, which in each case is adjusted and represented in assimilated form 16 Thornton, “ ‘I Am the Subject of the King of the Kongo;’ ” and “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of Caribbean History, 25 (1991): 58–80. 17 Thornton, “ ‘I Am the Subject of the King of Kongo,’ ” pp. 203–204. 18 See Rey, “The Virgin Mary and Revolution in Saint-Domingue.” 19 For excellent insight into the prophecy of Beatrice and the Antonian movement that she led, see Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony. 20 Franç ois-Joseph-Pamphile de Lacroix, Mémoires pour Servir a` l’Histoire de la Révolution de SaintDomingue, 2 vols. (Paris, 1819) 1:25, citation of original correspondence, as quoted in Thornton, “ ‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo,’ ” p. 181.


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with Catholic symbolism and myth; and (2) both Macaya and Romaine claimed to be related to key holy figures in the sanctification of Christ’s birth: respectively, the Magi (Macaya’s master, mother, and father) and the Virgin Mary (Romaine’s godmother). Thornton explains that such appropriation of Christian symbolism and myth had become traditional among Kongo religious leaders by the time of the Haitian Revolution: Thus Macaya’s elaborate description of the three kings he served as the descendants of the Magi was not as farfetched as it might first appear. Kongolese ideologues had reworked Christian concepts in a similar way for many years. For example, in the early eighteenth century, D. Beatrice Kimpa Vita (c. 1684–1706) had led a movement to end the civil wars and restore the kingdom by claiming that she was permanently possessed by Saint Anthony.21

There are other interesting parallels between the messages and symbolism of Romaine and Beatrice Kimpa Vita that further support the notion that Kongolese Catholic beliefs contributed to revolutionary ideology and its popular reception during the Haitian Revolution. Beatrice and Romaine were both “permanently possessed” by Catholic saints. Like Beatrice, Romaine claimed the powers of direct mediumship with the spirit world, and each made “sacrilegious” use of the Christianity’s master symbol: Romaine inverted the cross behind the altar in his church, while Beatrice burned hers. The religious self-identification of each Romaine-laProphétesse and the Antonian sect’s spiritual leader, moreover, transcended gender, as Beatrice was the incarnation of a male Catholic saint, while Romaine chose to call himself a prophetess ( prophétesse) rather than a prophet (prophète). Perhaps most important to the considerable political impact that each made, both Romaine and Beatrice aimed to bring about the restoration of some kind of kingdom, and evidently considered themselves, as the godson or incarnation of Catholic saints, catalysts in its realization. These illustrations corroborate Thornton’s claim that such Kongolese religiopolitical ideology “did not vanish when those unfortunate soldiers who served in the [Kongo] civil wars were captured and transported to SaintDomingue . . . [but] . . . combined with other ideas to constitute an ideological undercurrent of the revolution.”22 And just as such ideologies were rich in – and perhaps even legitimized in the eyes of their audiences by – Catholic symbolism and myth in Kongo, so too were they in Saint-Domingue, as the cases of Macaya and Romaine demonstrate. In other words, in the leadership, prophecy, and movements of Macaya and Romaine-la-Prophétesse, 21 Ibid., p. 189. 22 Ibid., pp. 198–199.

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there is evidence of Kongolese Catholicism’s central place in the “ideological undercurrent of the revolution.” RESTORING AFRICAN AGENCY TO CATHOLIC CULT FORMATION IN SAINT-DOMINGUE/HAITI

Catholicism in the Kongo featured pronounced devotion to Saint James the Greater and the Virgin Mary. It is no coincidence that these cults would immediately become and have remained the most important saint cults in Haitian Catholicism, and that the cults’ strongholds in the colonial era – which remains for the cult of St. James the case today – were in the north (Cap-Franç ais/Cap-Ha¨ıtien; La-Plaine-du-Nord), the region of the highest concentration of Kongolese in the colony. The early strength of these cults in New Spain has not escaped scholarly consideration. Notes Jacques Lafaye in his classic Quetzacóatl and Guadalupe: The development of the Marian cult in the Americas appears to have several causes. Doubtless the first historical reason is the widespread cult of Mary among the leaders of the conquering expeditions, who came from Estremadura or other Iberian provinces. . . . The first Catholic images given . . . were St. James, who appeared to them as a formidable god of war and of thunder, and the Virgin Mary, whose appearance, by contrast, must have consoled the vanquished. This introduction of the Marian cult into the Indies was soon reinforced by the arrival of the first missionaries, especially the Franciscan religious, who were especially devoted to the Virgin.23

These are doubtless key reasons for the spread of these two cults, however, Lafaye’s analysis overlooks cause that is at least equally important, thereby denying the influence of African agency in the development of New World Catholic cults. The most important cults in Kongolese Catholicism were those of the Virgin Mary, in various iconic forms, and Saint James the Greater. Certainly Kongolese slaves (as well as and independent of Spanish missionaries) brought these cults with them to Saint-Domingue from Africa and were thus largely responsible for their early prevalence in the colony. During a sixteenth century battle in which his forces were about to be overwhelmed by a numerically superior enemy, the Kongolese King Afonso I (ruled 1509–1543) cried out “Santiago!,” invoking Saint James the Greater, who duly appeared in the sky beneath a brilliant white cross accompanied by armored horsemen, holy mercenaries who led Afonso’s troops to a stunning 23 Jacques Lafaye, Quetzacóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531–1813 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 226.


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and total victory. In consequence, “Saint James’ Day . . . became Kongo’s national holiday,” and an important Kongolese pilgrimage tradition was thus inspired: Men came armed with ‘sword, scimitar, bows, spears, knobby clubs, battle axes.’ . . . Guns were often overloaded and constantly being discharged, so that the air was filled with their rattle, while billowing clouds of smoke covered the great public plaza. Some people came attired in animal skins, wearing special caps decorated with lion’s teeth, or with bird feathers in their hair. Others were painted various colors, in order to seem more terrible. . . . A dozen women dressed in spotless white linen, faces proud and solemn, took up places on the sides of the mass, breaking through the cloud of gunsmoke that was set up by musketeers from among the soldiers.24

In Haiti, Saint James has been extensively assimilated with Ogun, the originally West African spirit of iron and warfare and one of the most important African deities throughout the Americas.25 This assimilation is, no doubt, a major reason for the enormous popularity of pilgrimage to La-Plaine-du-Nord for the feast of Saint James, one of Haiti’s most remarkable public religious events, an affair every bit as carnivalesque as its Kongo counterpart and parent: Pilgrims arrive at Plaine-du-Nord wearing blue suits and red scarves, or the multistriped rad penitans [penitential garments]. . . . All have come with the usual devout intentions: to fulfill vows, to seek healings, to have a good time. Pregnant women and tubercular children line up before zinc basins for a bath and a blessing from itinerant herbalists. An ecstatic woman, declaiming in a deep male voice, rides a pony bull. Set like an altar with a red ribbon around his neck, and burning candles fixed to his horns, the bull becomes a limbering sacrifice for Ogou [Ogun]. After the muddy tauricide, eager pilgrims line up to be anointed by his blood.26

It is difficult to say when the association of Ogun with Saint James became a dominant characteristic of this particular saint cult in Haiti. It is plausible, in any event, that imported Kongolese devotion to this saint was a major factor in the cult’s development, and that the saint’s defining association with warfare was never solely dependent upon assimilation with Ogun, since Saint James had been from the time of his introduction in Kongo the de facto patron saint of battle. 24 Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony, pp. 34–35. 25 See Sandra T. Barnes, ed., Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989). 26 Donald J. Cosentino, “It’s All for You, Sen Jak!” in Cosentino, The Sacred Arts, pp. 243–265, 244. Rad penitans are strips of colored cloth sewn together and worn by Haitian pilgrims, with colors chosen to represent the Vodou spirit associated with the saint for whose feast day their wearers are making pilgrimage. Certain vows of penitential abstinence must be respected while dressed in rad penitans.

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As for the popularity of the cult of the Virgin Mary, a remarkable scene from eighteenth century Kongo is described for us by Father Giacinto da Bologna, an Italian Capuchin who served in the Kongo from 1741 to 1747. Giacinto explains how devotion to the Virgin was “a most pious custom among the Kongolese,” who called her “Mamanzambi” (Mother of God). Every Saturday offerings would be left before the church for Mamanzambi. In remote places where there was no church, the faithful would simply erect a cross and place their offerings there, and many practiced the custom of presenting the first fruits of their harvest to the Virgin. On one occasion, the Italian friar traveled to a rural chapel in Sonho that housed a statue of Our Lady of Pinda. Since the altar was termite infested and on the verge of collapse, the priest decided to take it along with the statue to his mission station for restoration, announcing to the faithful that he intended later to “return the image processionally to its chapel”: Upon this announcement, the population of Sonho was abuzz with excitement, and by their own initiative, they cut a new road through the forest, ample and large, even destroying their farmland in the process in order that the road be straight and practical; I have never witnessed such an expression of solidarity as that exhibited by these people in preparation for the procession. . . . [On the day of the procession] most brought offerings in abundance: vegetables, manioc, millet, tobacco, fruits and eggs, despite it being a time of famine. Meanwhile, as I arrived in procession at the chapel, I stopped in admiration upon seeing the extraordinary alms offered to Our Lady. What’s more? If these poor people showed such generosity in their offerings, it was neither less liberal nor prompt than how they would be recompensed. In effect, the procession was also made to implore the rain, and the Lord God delivered it to them in abundance, which brought an abrupt and total end to the famine that had already killed many.27

This account features several elements that remain important in popular Haitian Marian devotion today: mass procession, offerings to the Virgin, and beseeching the Virgin to bring rain. More than this, precisely these elements were essential to one of the most important religious events in Haitian history, “the miracle of 1882,” which would ultimately result in the declaration of Our Lady of Perpetual Help as the nation’s patron saint. Urban Haiti was devastated by a small pox epidemic from December 1881 to March 1882. At its height “the scourge” was claiming scores of victims daily, and special hospices and graveyards were created hastily by religious orders to respond to an epidemic that was so sweeping that most simply died 27 R. P. Hyacinthe, La Pratique missionaire des PP. Capuchins italiens dans les royaume de Congo, Angola, et contrées adjacentes, 1747, pp. 142–143.


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and were buried at home. By March 1882, when the pandemic’s spread was halted by what many Haitians would attribute to the Virgin Mary’s miraculous intervention, at least 100,000 people had died. Fervently believing penitence and prayer to be the keys to combating the scourge, “(t)he pious faithful constantly demanded new public prayers to end the epidemic” and on January 16, a mass procession was organized.28 Still the epidemic ravaged unabated. Then, Monsignor Jean-Marie Guilloux, archbishop of Port-au-Prince and a towering figure in Haitian church history, acted upon some kind of inspiration to introduce to Haiti a new Marian icon, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, in a sort of last-ditch attempt to compel the Virgin to heal the plagued nation. On Saturday, February 5, 1882, the faithful were summoned to the church of St. Franç ois in the capital’s Bel-Air quarter. “All Port-au-Prince still healthy transported itself in groups and in prayers to the hill.” They came “like the archbishop . . . reciting the rosary,”29 many accompanying a large group of clergy in a penitential procession from the cathedral to take part in the elaborate ceremonies. The archbishop preached on the necessity of resorting to God in times of public calamity, told the story of the miraculous image of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and blessed the icon, which was then brought to the top of the church steps and used to trace the sign of the cross over the capital. A national novena ensued, halfway through which a heavy rainfall brought to an end the unusually long drought that had exacerbated the epidemic. The 2-day downpour, which “came to wash and purify Port-au-Prince, was judged an indispensable condition for the disappearance of the scourge. From that moment on, there was not a single new case of small pox.”30 The operative formulas of Bel-Air and Sonho are essentially the same: Drought breeds death; procession for and prayer to the Virgin Mary bring the rain that heals and restores life. Granted, the events in Port-au-Prince just described transpired nearly a century after the last slave ships reached the shores of Hispaniola, and one can expect African influences in the Americas to fade over time, so my comparison might appear on first glance stretched. My response to any such objection is simply that insofar as it is tenable to explore the African traits of Vodou across Haitian history, so too is it tenable to seek the Kongolese 28 Adolphe Cabon, Notes sur l’Histoire Religieuse d’Ha¨ıti de la Révolution au Concordat, 1789–1860 (Port-au-Prince: Petit Séminaire Collège St. Martial, 1933), p. 432. 29 Ibid., p. 433. 30 Jean-Marie Jan, Collecta pour l’Histoire du Diocèse du Cap-Ha¨ıtien, Tome 3 (Port-au-Prince: Deschamps, 1958), p. 123.

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Catholic traits of popular Haitian Catholicism.31 The comparison between Kongolese and Haitian saint cults that is here being made is, admittedly, novel; hopefully it is also suggestive of places to look for evidence of this neglected source of Haitian religious culture. One place to look is in the trees. Thornton explains that following her execution in 1706, some followers of Saint Anthony (Beatrice) believed “that she had been seen in the treetops. . . .”32 Three of the most noteworthy Marian apparitions in Haitian history (the false apparition of Bosquette at Croix-des-Bouquets in 1812, the 1849 apparition to Emperor Soulouque’s wife on the Champs-de-Mars, and that at Saut-d’Eau of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, also in 1849) also occurred in treetops.33 And, for one more suggestion where to look in comparing Kongolese and Haitian Marianism, one might liken with some profit the proclivity of Kongolese power suitors to employ the Virgin to legitimize their political ambitions and attainments with illustrious cases of the same phenomenon in Haitian history. For example, Pedro Kibenga, a pretender king of Kongo in the early eighteenth century, placed the Virgin’s icon above a host of pretentious royalist clutter in his throne room,34 which sets himself up rather colorfully for comparison with General Raoul Cédras, putchist leader of Haiti’s brutal 1991–1994 junta, who would address the masses of Port-au-Prince from atop a balcony draped with an oversized icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help – and this gesture from a Protestant! It is thus likely that the developments of the cults of the Virgin Mary and of Saint James the Greater in Saint-Domingue and Haiti depended in significant part on the extension and continuation of these devotions by tens of thousands of Catholics who were born and socialized in the Kongo. In the examples of the Kongolese feast of Saint James and the Sonho procession for Mary, it may be asked, do we not uncover the deepest roots of the vibrant pilgrimage traditions of Haitian popular Catholicism, the most important of which, incidentally, are on several feast days of the Virgin Mary (especially Mount Carmel, Assumption, Perpetual Help, and Immaculate Conception) and that of Saint James the Greater? 31 See Footnote 56. 32 Thornton,The Kongolese Saint Anthony, p. 188. 33 For discussions of these apparitions see Terry Rey, Our Lady of Class Struggle: The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Haiti (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1999), ch. 5. Trees are of religious significance in both Kongolese and Haitian religious cultures, which surely enhanced the power of the apparitions in question. See Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 127–131; and Laënnec Hurbon, Dieu dans le Vodou Ha¨ıtien (Port-au-Prince: Deschamps, 1987), ch. 6. 34 Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony, p. 187.


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KONGOLESE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF POPULAR HAITIAN CATHOLICISM DURING THE GREAT SCHISM:

1804

– 1860

More generally, the development of Catholicism in any form during the 56-year period (1804–1860) when the Vatican refused to send priests to the new republic should also be understood in light of the presence of Kongolese Catholicism in Haiti. There is some agreement among scholars that the crystallization of Haitian Vodou occurred roughly between 1760 and 1860. More than half of this period witnessed a virtual absence of “official” Catholicism in Haiti. It strikes Métraux as remarkable both that Vodou crystallized as an identifiable religion during this period and that it emerged more Catholic than it was during the colonial era. Hence, he finds the phenomenon of African survivals in Haitian Vodou to be exceeded in noteworthiness by the fact that Haitians with no formal Catholic religious instruction, under no formal Catholic leadership of any consequence, took it upon themselves to continue saying and attending Mass and performing other Catholic rituals, which they also incorporated into the Vodouisant religious system. Consequently, they saw Catholic religious capital as effective; hence “the rapid intermingling of so many Catholic elements that were “greedily” adopted” by the popular masses. Métraux refers to “this veritable seizure of Catholicism by Vodou”35 as “the root”36 of le mélange. The intercession of the Virgin Mary is one form of Catholic religious capital that was of strong interest to the baKongo, and this would have a profound impact on the development of Haitian popular Catholicism during the schism with Rome. The most renown Marian apparitions all took place in the first half of the nineteenth century, when also was established Haiti’s leading pilgrimage tradition, that to Saut-d’Eau for the Feast Day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, originating in the 1840s. Furthermore, there is convincing evidence that Marian pilgrimage grew in popularity among the Haitian laity even earlier in the century, such that large numbers of Haitians were making the trek to Higuey on the Spanish side of the island for the feast day of Our Lady of Altagracia, patron saint of the Dominican Republic.37 In light of the lack of any substantial Catholic priesthood to promote such a tradition, it is reasonable to argue that early eighteenth century Haitian 35 Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, p. 331. I am aware that my argument, if indeed sound, would render Métraux’s language incorrect; rather than being a “seizure,” the adoption of things Catholic in Saint-Domingue among many slaves was rather a “recovery.” 36 Ibid., p. 35. 37 Adolphe Cabon, Notes sur l’Histoire Religieuse, p. 406.

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pilgrimage was in significant part a transatlantic recreation or extension of Kongolese pilgrimage customs. Insight into the state of Catholicism in Haiti from 1804–1860 is found in the correspondence of some of the few bonafide Catholic priests in the young republic. Father Tisserand, Vatican envoy to Haiti during the 1840s, described in a report to the Vatican that fewer than 50 priests, only 12 of whom by his estimation were “good,” then served nationwide. Most of them never wore habits and were so infamous for their immoral behavior and taste for drink that a government decree implored any clergy attending Emperor Faustin Soulouque’s coronation not to get drunk!38 Another priest’s letter reflects the wild interest in things Catholic that gripped Haitians in spite of this skeletal and dubious priesthood, and it also demonstrates an interesting concern among the people with the quality of Catholic priests: The people did not have any confidence in clergy, generally speaking. I had, with my chaplain, Mr. Byrne, and a Corsican priest, to hear each morning and each evening for four weeks three hours a day, confessions of twenty to seventy year old adults. I administered confirmation to seven hundred and fifty men, women and children of all colors from all parts of the country. Five hundred received the Eucharist and I have the firm conviction that if I’d had with me ten more priests in whom they could have confidence for confession, I would have had five to six thousand persons for confirmation and communion rites. I had to turn away hundreds for lack of time.39

An application of two key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practise is useful toward understanding this remarkable popularity of Catholicism in early Haiti: (1) religious habitus – the “matrix of perception,” which is shaped by education and developmental life experience, through which any individual’s religious experiences are filtered and assessed; and (2) religious capital – the products of any religious institution or movement that are “marketed” to the “consumer,” such as sacraments, ritual paraphernalia, and formally recognized church membership.40 The African or African-based religious habitus of most Haitians during Vodou’s formative period, even those several generations removed from Africa, predisposed the formulators of Vodou to assess certain foreign forms of religious capital, both European 38 Cited in Anne Greene, The Catholic Church in Haiti: Political and Social Change (Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1993), p. 89. The high figures noted in this letter of Haitians seeking the sacraments impress in much the way that similar estimates from the Kongo do. See Vanhee’s essay, this volume. 39 Citation of original correspondence of Bishop Clancy, in Cabon, Notes sur l’histoire religieuse, p. 277, as cited in Greene, p. 189. 40 Pierre Bourdieu, “Genèse et structure du champs religieux,” Revue française de sociologie, 12:3 (1971): 294–334.


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and newly discovered African forms, out of their original contexts, as worthy of pursuit and “consumption.” Thus, from 1804 to 1860, in the absence of orthodoxy’s religious specialists (who normally would otherwise have carried out a vigorous campaign to monopolize and control the administration of religious capital, especially “the goods of salvation,” or sacraments), the African and Creole religious consumers in Saint-Domingue were free to adopt, translate, and administer Catholic symbols and rituals to suit their own religious needs and interests. As Father Lecum, one of the half dozen or so Catholic priests remaining in Haiti in 1804, observed, “in most parishes, Negroes took pieces of holy ornaments and sacred vessels, and though they don’t know how to read, they administered all the sacraments and even celebrated Masses.”41 I am asserting here that “this veritable seizure of Catholicism by Vodou,” and the religious interests and needs of all of the different African ethnic groups that produced it, is explicable by reference to an interest in alien forms of religious capital that is characteristic of a definitively African religious habitus. This assumption is supported by the fact that similar phenomena of Africans exhibiting genuine and sustained interest in Catholicism occurred in precolonial Africa, where early Catholic missionaries also complained of the “theft” of holy water and other orthodox sacred objects. For example, following the abandonment of the first Portuguese mission to the Kongo, explains Wyatt MacGaffey, a second wave of Capuchin missionaries sent by Rome in the late seventeenth century “were hailed as banganga za n’kisi (magicians) of Nzambi Mpungu (God).” A ritual sack hung around the neck of the traditional Kongo king contained, among other charms, “a bull from pope Urban VIII authorizing the [his] coronation.” In yet another example, “the [Kongolese] governing class made use of the missionaries at times to keep the population in subjection by threats of mystical penalties,”42 a tactic that would have been neither effective nor concocted were it not for the popular estimation of Catholic religious capital among the seventeenth century Kongolese. This population, as noted earlier, comprised the majority of slave imports to Saint-Domingue in the decades prior to the Haitian Revolution. Given this essay’s objectives, an important question to be considered is, What was the nature of the specifically Kongolese religious habitus of this era?43 Research on traditional Kongolese influences in Haitian Vodou gives 41 Cited without reference in Michel Laguerre, “The place of Voodoo in the social structure of Haiti,” Caribbean Quarterly, 19:3 (1973): 36–50, 45. 42 Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, pp. 203–204. 43 MacGaffey’s Religion and Society in Central Africa and Simon Bockie’s Death and the Invisible Powers: The World of Kongo Belief (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), along with the essays by Thornton, MacGaffey, and Vanhee in this volume, are important texts for exploring this question.

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good indication that this habitus was characterized by an interest in local spirits, kingship, charms, ancestors, and a deep concern with sorcery; and yet this is an incomplete portrait. The Kongolese religious habitus had been conditioned by Catholicism for several generations by the time it entered the dominguois religious field. As the habitus functions as a leading determinant of the individual’s consumption of religious capital, the longstanding Kongolese Catholic devotion thrived in Haiti, and was perhaps at least as responsible for the impressive popularity of Catholic sacraments, symbolism, and ritual in the first half of the nineteenth century as was a more generalized African interest in the putative magical potency of Catholic ritual paraphernalia. For these reasons – and because colonial Catholic missions were by most accounts such a failure that they could not possibly have inspired Catholicism’s widespread and enduring popularity in the first half of the nineteenth century – we may conclude that the formation of Haitian popular Catholicism during this critical period was to a great extent influenced by Kongolese Catholicism, of which it should be considered to be something of a recreative extension. F R O M KANGA T O MARE : B I N D I N G P O W E R A N D D I S T A N T S H O R E S

One of the most striking features of Haiti’s thriving pilgrimage traditions is the practice of pilgrims’ wearing colorful ropes around the waist or head while traveling to and entering sacred space. Rope vendors can be found at most Haitian pilgrimage sites, though this is primarily a Marian practice and is especially popular during pilgrimage for the feast day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. After several dozen interviews with Haitian pilgrims in the mid-1990s as to the significance of this practice, I reviewed my field notes in frustration to find little more than a collection of declarations to the effect that the ropes are worn “in order to look beautiful for the Virgin.” But this tradition clearly has much deeper meaning and, as Haitians who wear them believe, power than a mere adornment would. In 1998, one young rope vendor offered an intriguing explanation of the significance of his merchandise: The ropes protect you on your journey, but they do more than this. Pilgrimage gives you power and health. When you travel for Mary, she comes to meet you at the crossroads and fills your soul. The ropes prepare you, and make it possible for you to truly hug her and keep her power inside of you.44 44 Anonymous, Bel-Air, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 27 June 1998.


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On the grounds of this testimony we may venture that the power of tying (Haitian Creole: mare) in Haitian religious culture is consistent with, and perhaps derives from, the Kongolese tradition of kanga (to tie). The use of ropes and the act of binding are pervasive in Kongolese traditional religion. In Kongo, indigenous medicines and charms (min’kisi) may take the form of any “container, including leather bags, snail shells, and, in recent years, glass jars, bottles, and plastic sachets,” as well as statues and wooden images.45 Many are packets (also common in Haitian Vodou; e.g., pakèt kongo) and are believed to contain “medicines (bilongo) and a soul (mooyo), combined to give it life and power.”46 In this respect, it is the binding that makes such an empowering combination possible and ensures that such powers are concentrated and harnessed so as not to become renegade and thereby dangerous. Initiation into the Kongolese kimpasi society, or cult of affliction, also used ropes, in this case to bind the initiand: Initiates were . . . chosen from among the community, often young people just entering adolescence. . . . They came to the gate of the enclosure, and were then tied up with a thin string by the nganga [priest] and the nganga’s assistants. As the bonds were tied on and redoubled over the initiate’s bodies, they gradually lost consciousness, and eventually fell into a deep trance – a catatonic state that people believed was death. Now apparently dead, the initiates were carried into the enclosure for initiation.47

As is common in initiation rites in many cultures, symbolic death is the necessary sacrifice that initiands must make in order to be reborn as empowered, or, to use Maurice Bloch’s imaginative term, to be transformed from “prey into hunter.”48 In the kimpasi initiation ceremony, in essence it is the rope and the act of binding that effects the ritual’s empowering transformation of prey into hunter, or of a normal person into a healer. At the end of this process the initiates are “given a beaded belt to wear around either their wrist or their waist.”49 Women coming to Beatrice Kimpa Vita for healing from infertility practiced a custom of tying threads or thin ropes around her “hands and feet as a sign of their faith.” Thornton astutely notes that above and beyond the meaning in European Catholic traditions of tying gifts to saints, in Kongolese religious culture the binding was of richer symbolic register: 45 46 47 48

MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, p. 139. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, p. 117. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony, p. 57. Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter : The Politics of Religious Experience (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 49 Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony, p. 57.

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But as in the case of so many European Christian customs, the Kongolese found other meanings in it. In Kongo it was also common practice in those days to wear chains or ropes on ones hands and feet on feast days and other special occasions. According to their interpretation, these cords that bound them made them slaves of the Madonna. It is also common today to tie or bind nkisi, as a way of ensuring that the power is held in, and thus the binding of Dona Beatrice had a second significance.50

Like Kongolese pilgrims before them, Haitian pilgrims, as already mentioned, commonly wear ropes around the waist or head during feast days. Moreover, during my field research on the cult of the Virgin in Haiti, one of the most common metaphors employed by poor Haitians to describe their relationship to the Virgin Mary was that of being her servant (Haitian Creole: domestik), much as the baKongo would bind themselves with ropes in order to become her “slave.”51 It is evident that the idiom of tying and the belief in the empowering capacity of ropes was expanded with the Catholicization of Kongo religion. Kongolese crucifixes, for instance, were often bound with ropes.52 The motivation behind this practice may have been to enhance Christ’s saving graces, since the kiKongo word used for the Christian concept of salvation is “kanga,” which, as noted, is also the verb “to tie.” This naunced use of the term created an association of powerful religious concepts that was not lost on the baKongo on either side of the Atlantic: 50 Ibid., p. 133. 51 Rey, Our Lady of Class Struggle, ch. 6. 52 Such bound Christs were called nkangi kiditu in the Kongo. See Vanhee, present volume. An interesting parallel from Haiti in the 1930s, in which a spirit is tied, is described by Jean Price-Mars. During a ceremony of the secret “Lemba-Pétro” cult, Price-Mars observed two thick branches bound together with ropes with three crucifixes, which were then buried. This ritual was accompanied by the following song: Assuré! Assuré! N’ap’assuré point là! Hi! Hi! Nou pralé maré Loa Petro Jean Pétro! Chainne qui chainne Li cassé li Qui dirait corde! Hi! Hi! N’ap maré n’ap maré Loa Pétro Hi! Hi! (“Assuredly, assuredly; We ensure that this charm, is sure; Hee! Hee!; We are going to tie the Petwo spirit; Hee! Hee!; Jan Petwo! Chain that chains, He will break [even] that; Who would [bother] to speak of rope; Hee! Hee!; We are tying, we are tying the Petwo spirit, Hee! Hee!”). Price-Mars, “Lemba-Pétro,” pp. 24–25. I gratefully acknowledge the expert assistance of Jean-Robert Cadely and Drexel Woodson in making this translation.


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Playing on the verb kanga, which also means to bind or tie up, had been characteristic of the Antonian movement, and the untranslated word for salvation in the Salve Regina had inspired the first lines of the Salve Antonia [Antonian version of the Slave Regina]. Later, too, revolutionary Haitians from Kongo would play on the same verb in their famous chant, “Kanga bafiote, Kanga mundele, Kanga ndoki la, Kanga li” (meaning “Tie up [or free or save] the black men, tie up/free/save the white man, tie up/free/save the witch, tie them up”).53

As we have seen, the baKongo viewed European Catholic missionaries as banganga, or priest/healers, and even as returned ancestors; they were, after all, white, which was the color of the ancestors, and they had journeyed across waters like those separating the worlds of the living and the dead in Kongolese cosmology. We may speculate, moreover, that the ropes worn around the Catholic priests’ waists also lent to exaggerated popular beliefs in their powers and, in turn, expanded Kongolese belief in the overall power of ropes and the act of binding. The practice of the late seventeenth century Queen Ana would lend credence to this speculation: “She was a striking figure, who often wore the habit of a Capuchin monk in a show of piety – in fact she had received special dispensation from the order permitting her to do his.”54 Enough has been said to illustrate both the place of ropes and the power of binding in Kongo religion, and how by the time of these traditions’ arrival in the New World, they were as essential to Kongolese Catholicism as to Kongolese traditional religion. In an earlier study I explored the significance of ropes in Haitian pilgrimage, I failed to make the connection to Kongo religion: When the pilgrims leave the church and make the tiresome trek to the mystical waterfalls, they bring the ropes along and tie them around trees at the base of the falls. The ropes are the mark of the pilgrim in Haiti, worn not just at Sautd’Eau but everywhere that pilgrims venture (though most popularly, it seems, on Mount Carmel’s feast day). They are left behind at the falls as a mark of having been there, shed as a symbol of having been purified or of having reestablished harmony with the spirits. An intriguing question (one to which I have found no satisfactory answer) is: Why are the ropes left on tress by the falls rather than on pews in the Ville-de-Bonheur church? I suspect that underlying this choice is some arcane reason rooted in Vodouisant belief and ritual.55

While Vodouisant belief and ritual does feature the use of ropes, some of which is clearly rooted in traditional Kongo religion, the taproot of this practice in Haitian pilgrimage, I would now venture, is popular Kongolese Catholic ritual. 53 Thornton,The Kongolese Saint Anthony, p. 213. 54 Ibid., p. 25. 55 Rey, Our Lady of Class Struggle, p. 161.

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The idiom of tying has been intensified, for obvious reasons, in Haitian culture by the legacy-of slavery. Furthermore, it has extended into realms of Haitian culture that might seem distant from ritual initiation, pilgrimage, or the preparation of charms, as McAlister’s insightful discussion of Kongolese nkisi in Haitian Vodou would suggest: To identify linguistic and symbolic elements in Afro-Haitian religion that derive from Kongo cultures is not to suggest that Kongo languages and religious systems are flourishing in Haiti, centuries after the slave trade. It is to point out that these cultural elements, which have since been creolized and refigured, have an identifiable historical source. Knowing this may lead us to suggestions about meanings, logics and aesthetic principles fueling subsequent cultural expressions.56

In light of such considerations, not only do I now have a better idea why the pilgrims’ ropes are left tied around trees at Saut-d’Eau (trees being to Haitian Vodouisants, much like Beatrice to Antonians, a container of a spirit or saint and thus an object to be bound), and what the rope vendor meant by ropes “keep[ing] the power of Mary inside of you,” but also of why my maid in Port-au-Prince would tie a long kerchief around her waist when too tired to work, a practice that also is common when Haitians mourn. A Haitian folk song reflects this belief in the empowerment that mare brings: “Mare ren ou sere, gason pa kanpe” ([addressed to women] “tie your kidneys [midsection] tightly, [and] men will not stand”). As with many Haitian folk expressions, the double (or triple) entendre of this line is impressive, and yet the essential meaning, which is reflective of how kanga is manifest in Haiti as mare, is that tying brings enormous power through concentrating it and containing it within a vessel, in this case the female body. The revolutionary power of the call for binding the oppressors in the cry “kanga mundele” in 1791, itself overtly political yet inherently loaded with powerful religious meaning, has experienced something of a rebirth in contemporary Haitian class struggle. The reigning carnival song of 1997, the Vodou-rock fusion group Koudjay’s “Gran Manje” (“Big Eater”), called for the binding of the gran manje – a reference to anyone whose self-indulgence impedes underclass liberation – with impassioned chants of “mare yo! ” (“tie them up!”). Doubtless, corrupt politicians and exploitative elite families took little comfort at the sight of thousands of underclass revelers dancing in the streets with ropes; even those unequipped would trace their arms through the air in an unmistakable tying gesture. One can only wonder what King Pedro Kibenga and General Raoul Cédras would have thought! 56 McAlister, “A sorcerer’s bottle,” p. 308.


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CONCLUSION

Much historical and ethnographic research is needed to explore critically the question of the influence of Kongolese Catholic ritual, belief, and symbolism on the development of Haitian popular Catholicism. Noting that research on religion in Haiti thus far has largely ignored this influence, this essay suggests ways that this shortcoming in Africana studies can be corrected. The comparisons made here between Kongolese and Haitian popular Catholicism are suggestive of a transatlantic Kongo Catholic continuity that demands much greater consideration by scholars of Haitian religion. Four strands of continuity have been traced in this essay: (1) the manipulation of Catholic symbols in the religious-based ideology that fueled the Haitian Revolution; (2) devotion to Saint James the Greater and the Virgin Mary, the most important cults in both Kongo and Haitian Catholicism; (3) positive Kongolese estimation of Catholic ritual and practice as essential to the impressive popular interest in Catholicism in Haiti during the period of “Great Schism”; and (4) the pervasive use and Catholic amplification of ropes in both Kongo and Haitian religious culture. In a word, just as traditional Kongolese religion has been demonstrated to be a root source of Haitian Vodou, so should we expect Kongolese popular Catholicism to be a foundational contributor to Haitian popular Catholicism, both representing ties that bind.

PART FOUR

Central Africans in North America and the Caribbean

11

“Walk in the Feenda” West-Central Africans and the Forest in the South Carolina–Georgia Lowcountry RAS MICHAEL BROWN

Figure 11.1. The South Carolina – Georgia Lowcountry.

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“I am an old man now, but I have a longing to walk in the feenda. I want to see it one more time. I have a wife and children here, but when I think of my tribe and my friends and my daddy and my mammy and the great feenda, a feeling rises up in my throat and my eyes well up with tears.”1 Long after arriving in nineteenth-century South Carolina, Gullah Joe pined not only for the comfort and familiarity of his African family and people, but also for the land of his birth. He yearned particularly for the “feenda” (KiKongo – finda, mfinda,) the forest, where he likely spent much of his youth in Africa collecting plants, trapping small animals, practicing the hunt, and otherwise learning to become a Kongo man.2 Gullah Joe also may have experienced or at least heard stories of the forest as a place where the powers of the Other World reigned through the doings of various spirits and ancestors. Indeed, the forest was a fundamental part of the West-Central African landscape in which the material realm of flora, fauna, earth, and water existed inseparably with the invisible domain of spiritual beings and their powers. Much activity and thought in West-Central Africa focused on human interaction with the natural world, especially the forest and its living and otherworldly inhabitants. As such, Gullah Joe’s pained remembrance evoked far more than a distant, vague recollection of Africa. In the same way that his emotional ties to kin and companions remained strong over time and distance, Gullah Joe’s lasting connection to the great forest revealed the centrality of this place to his identity as a man from West-Central Africa. Enslaved Africans and their descendants on the coastal plain of South Carolina and Georgia (the “Lowcountry”) also knew the forest as an integral part of their daily lives. During the days of slavery the wooded wilderness of the Lowcountry became a kind of African domain distinct from plantation society and inhabited largely by enslaved hunters, woodsmen, herders, guides, travelers, and maroons. In addition to the activities of work and survival, enslaved people on and off the plantations recognized the forested wilderness of the Lowcountry as a shelter for ethereal entities and a supplier of the powerful substances and objects critical to health and prosperity known almost exclusively to enslaved people. In the broadest sense, then, enslaved Africans and their Lowcountry-born heirs lived with the forest in ways defined and shaped by ideas and practices current throughout West 1 Edward C. L. Adams, Tales of the Congaree, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), p. 278. 2 “Feenda” is the spelling used by Adams in Tales of the Congaree to represent the KiKongo word “mfinda,” which means “forest.” J. Van Wing and C. Penders, Le Plus Ancien Dictionnaire Bantu (Louvain: Kuyl-Otto, 1928), p. 190; and K. E. Laman, Dictionnaire Kikongo-Français (Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1964 [1936]), p. 552.

11. “Walk in the Feenda”

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and Central Africa. The establishment and elaboration of this orientation toward the Lowcountry’s natural environment, however, was not the product of some idealized, general African background. A close examination of the evidence shows instead that this perception derived fundamentally from the unique influence of West-Central African concepts and activities associated with the finda. Given that the relationship between people and the natural world was so important, it seems than an understanding of this relationship renders a foundation necessary for interpreting the connections between diverse aspects of culture typically delineated in scholarship as the separate topics of religion, politics, medicine, and so on. While some scholars have acknowledged the interplay of people and the natural world in the cultures of early African/African-American societies in North America, this area of inquiry remains largely neglected.3 Our understanding of early African America, especially the African basis for later African America cultures, has thus suffered. Putting the relationship between people and the natural world at the center of analysis allows us to imagine the cultures of early African America in ways that incorporate the concerns and values that enslaved Africans and their American descendants held most dear. This essay attempts to take such an approach and explores the place of West-Central Africans in the cultural history of the Lowcountry’s enslaved community and their impact on African-Lowcountry conceptions of the natural world, particularly the forest. THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT AND CULTURE

People of African descent in the Lowcountry, like their kin throughout Africa, have long held powerful ideas about the intimate and fundamental connection between people and the natural world. An inescapable dependence on nature’s produce and a constant vulnerability to the wrath of natural disasters conditioned individual and collective behaviors in innumerable ways. The natural environment, however, did not simply predetermine the fate of societies. People developed various strategies to extract the resources that nature yielded reluctantly. With ingenuity and effort people felled tress, moved earth, excavated minerals, and otherwise reformed their surroundings for their benefit. The fortunes of the African, European, and 3 Some important first steps include Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Mart A. Stewart, ”What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680– 1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); and Robert Farris Thompson, “Bighearted power: Kongo presence in the landscape and art of black America,” in Grey Gundaker, ed., Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 38–64.

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American states corresponded with the ability of these groups to command potent combinations of both people and resources. Little of the daily struggle to survive and prosper eluded the eternal interplay between human and natural forces.4 To a certain extent the natural environments of West-Central Africa and the Lowcountry have provided enclaves within which communities developed distinct customs and group identities. The environmental diversity of West-Central Africa compelled early Bantu-speaking settlers to adjust older, shared traditions to different surroundings. From the fringes of equatorial rainforests in the north, through the vast belt of savannas and woodlands covering much of the region, to the southern dry sands bordering on the Namib and Kalahari deserts, separate yet related cultures evolved in various regions of West-Central Africa.5 At the same time, however, vast trade networks within the Nzadi basin and across the savannas allowed people, ideas, and things to circulate throughout West-Central Africa.6 The processes of trade and interaction accelerated with the expansion of Atlantic commerce into the region.7 Thus, while some communities may have been less integrated than others into webs of communication, many more maintained at least minimal contact and exchange with their neighbors both near and far and participated in the wider West-Central African and Atlantic worlds. The natural environment of the South Carolina–Georgia Lowcountry also provided a distinct setting that helped define the dynamics of cultural development within African and African-descended communities. An extensive network of streams and rivers dissected the seaboard and made overland travel difficult, but it in no way isolated Lowcountry communities. If anything, reliance on water transport united the entire seaboard into a single, cohesive realm. During the days of slavery when the work of enslaved people on expansive rice, indigo, and sea-island cotton plantations made rich 4 The dynamics of this association have received attention from scholars under the rubric of “landscape” studies. For reviews of approaches to landscape over time, see Ute Luig and Achim von Oppen, “Landscape in Africa: process and vision,” Paideuma 43 (1997): 7–45; and Stewart, “What Nature Suffers,” pp. 5–12. 5 For the ancient traditions of Bantu-speaking peoples in the equatorial rainforests, see Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). For the Bantu-speaking peoples in Eastern Africa and related peoples on the savannas south of the rainforests, see Christopher Ehret, An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), esp. pp. 43–46. 6 Robert W. Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trades, 1500–1891 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); and Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 7 Ibid.


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men of slaveholders, all aspects of life on the coast centered around waterways that ran to the sea and linked every manor to the busy Atlantic ports of Charleston and Savannah. No plantation could afford to be isolated since access to markets was of the utmost economic importance. Further, by the end of the colonial period, one of the best systems of roads in North America connected settlements throughout the Lowcountry. Enslaved people took advantage of these aquatic and terrestrial concourses to move about South Carolina and Georgia with surprising facility to visit relatives and friends and attend gatherings, often beyond the purview of white authorities. Enslaved people also traversed dense woods between the water and roads with such confidence that they often served as guides for less capable travelers.8 In short, the Lowcountry of the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth centuries teemed with activity and grew rapidly within the larger Atlantic world. Isolation, often credited with preserving the African heritage of coastal cultures, played no part in the cultural history of the early Lowcountry. Rather, the role of the natural world in the development of Lowcountry culture came through its place as the ultimate (but not only) source of the limitations and opportunities in the material and intellectual pursuits of its inhabitants. Once we have dispensed with notions of the natural world either as a mere backdrop for human endeavors or at the other extreme as an essentially deterministic force, we begin to appreciate the perpetual interaction between people and their natural surroundings as a dynamic process central to cultural development. The perceptions of the natural world that Africans brought with them across the Atlantic comprised the primary influence on AfricanLowcountry ideas and activities regarding the landscape. The vast majority of Africans carried to the Lowcountry came from cultures that valued the land as an essential link between the living and the Creator, ancestors, and nature spirits. Whether Bambara, Mende, Akan, Igbo, or Kongo, African captives interacted with the natural world in accord with a rich body of beliefs and observances that ensured health, prosperity, and continued contact with the invisible powers.9 Captive Africans did not simply blend these 8 On the human geography of the Lowcountry, see Linda F. Stine, Martha Zierden, Lesley M. Drucker, and Christopher Judge, eds., Carolina’s Historical Landscapes: Archaeological Perspectives (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), esp. the first five chapters. On the activities of enslaved people, see Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Norton, 1974); and Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 9 Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 49, 94, 112–113, 128-129; John Illife, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 85-88; and John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophies, 2nd ed. (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990), pp. 50–57, 76–80.

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traditions indiscriminately into a novel worldview that was only generally African. Instead, the carriers of each tradition made specific contributions to the development of a composite institution – the African-Lowcountry cultural tradition. Interpretation of linguistic evidence, particularly words and meanings of African origin, renders important insights into the evolution of this tradition. While historians have tended to dismiss or ignore African words in Lowcountry speech as useless, random, and isolated “survivals,” a closer consideration of the semantic connections between these terms and the cultural work they likely performed demands that we recognize their importance to any interpretation of African-Lowcountry culture. This acknowledgement takes on added significance when we recall that in many African cultures the act of speaking words generates power. Thus, within the culturally volatile context of American slavery, retention of African words and their meanings by Lowcountry-born people represented much more than simple vocabulary choices. Maintenance of an African lexicon demonstrates that African forebears (who retained and used their mother tongues) in the Lowcountry communicated to their progeny the creative power of certain words.10 The children of Africans in turn impressed the same lessons upon succeeding generations. The importance of African lexical retentions is further highlighted by the coexistence of African words with English terms that carried the same literal meanings. Gullah Joe, who had a firm grasp of English vocabulary, certainly knew the word “forest,” yet he choose to speak of the “feenda.” Why? Only finda could express the full breadth of meaning that Gullah Joe wished to convey. That fact that “feenda” appeared in twentieth-century folklore untranslated by the narrator further demonstrates the continued resonance of the word in Lowcountry speech. In these ways, language provided more than a functional tool for basic communication. Instead, it served as an expression of group identity, a link across generations, and a instrument to access meanings and powers that had only African names.11 The linguistic evidence that informs this study comes from several sources, most recorded in the early twentieth century.12 This body of words and 10 See David Lee Schoenbrun’s conception of creative power in A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998). 11 This position derives in large part from the Gomez’s analysis of the politics of language in Exchanging, pp. 170–173. 12 The most expansive source is Lorenzo Dow Turner’s, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), pp. 190–204. See also Winfred K. Vass, The Bantu Speaking Heritage of the United States (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, UCLA, 1976), pp. 105–122, reproduced in Joseph E. Holloway and Vass, The African Heritage of American English (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 93–106.


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meanings likely represents the distilled remnants of a larger corpus known and used throughout the Lowcountry in earlier times. The documented Lowcountry African lexicon reflects the importance of Africans in naming the natural environment. No less than 87 words identified plants and animals, almost half of which originated in West-Central African languages, usually KiKongo. In addition to flora and fauna, Africans named the larger landscape. The terms they used, finda (forest), dimba (valley, field), and kalunga (sea), came exclusively from Bantu languages. The relationship between the landscape and flora/fauna terminologies suggests that West-Central African captives provided the primary material for comprehending and interacting with the natural environment, while they and other Africans filled in the original Bantu template with words for the creatures and vegetation they encountered. This language evidence points to a direct and powerful connection between West-Central African conceptions of the natural world and African-Lowcountry perceptions derived from them. It also supplies a solid framework around which demographic evidence concerning the importation of Africans and the chronology of settlement in the Lowcountry as well as evidence from folklore and plantation archaeology coalesces to reveal the principle role West-Central Africans played in shaping various aspects of African-Lowcountry culture. CROSSING KALUNGA AND THE EXPANSION OF SLAVERY IN THE LOWCOUNTRY

For more than 200 years, West-Central Africans lived and died in the Lowcountry. From the first captives landed in the late seventeenth century to the aged survivors of the illegal trade in the nineteenth century, West-Central Africans figured prominently within the region’s African and Lowcountryborn communities. This section presents a brief review of the trade from West-Central Africa to the Lowcountry and the place of West-Central Africans among all the captive Africans taken to the Lowcountry. Further, I will consider the position of West-Central Africans within the evolving African-Lowcountry society that reveals their presence in numbers as well as their influence on the cultural milieu. West-Central Africans caught in the westward flow of captives from the interior to the coast entered at numerous points in a vast intersecting complex of commercial networks.13 Three systems defined broadly the 13 Phyllis Martin, External Trade of the Loango Coast, 1576–1870: The Effects of Changing Commercial Relations on the Vili Kingdom of Loango (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); and Joseph C. Miller, “The numbers, origins, and destinations of slaves in the eighteenth-century Angolan slave trade,” in Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on the Economies, Societies, and Peoples of Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992).

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Central Africans in North America and the Caribbean Table 11.1. African Captives Imported into the Lowcountry, 1710–1808

Region

1710–1744

1749–1776

1783–1808

1710–1808

% of Total

11,093 11,093 —

10,922 10,683 239

21,789 21,316 473

43,804 43,092 712

26.57 26.14 0.43

Upper Guinea Senegambia Sierra Leone Windward Coast

2,818 2,818 — —

36,563 18,311 9,733 8,519

14,787 4,269 8,008 2,510

54,168 25,398 17,741 11,029

32.86 15.41 10.76 6.69

Lower Guinea Gold Coast Bight of Benin Bight of Biafra Africa (unspecified)

2,552 438 — 2,114 13,638

15,981 7,963 1,857 6,161 6,977

12,307 9,164 652 2,491 15,437

30,840 17,565 2,509 10,766 36,052

18.70 10.65 1.52 6.53 21.87

Total

30,101

70,433

64,320

164,864

100.00

Central Africa West-Central Africa Southeast Africa

Source: David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

directions that captives followed to the ports of the Loango Coast, Luanda, and Benguela. Almost all West-Central Africans taken to the Lowcountry began their crossing of the Atlantic at terminals of the northern network, which included the ports of Loango, Malembo, Cabinda, and lower Nzadi trading centers such as Mboma. The rivers that drained into the Atlantic between the Nzadi and the Dande, such as the Mbrije, Loje, and Bengo, also hosted exchanges between European and African merchants.14 The era of importation of Africans to the Lowcountry can be divided into three periods that correspond with significant phases of African-Lowcountry cultural history (see Table 11.1). The Early Period (c.1710–1744) extended from the founding generations of the Carolina colony through the establishment of large-scale plantation agriculture. These formative decades witnessed the growth of the enslaved population, which consisted largely of Africans but included an increasingly large Lowcountry-born contingent as well, and the emergence of African-Lowcountry culture. By the end of this period, enslaved people inhabited almost all of the Carolina portion of the 14 Miller, Way of Death, pp. 207–244. See also Miller’s essay in this volume.


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Lowcountry. The Lowcountry expanded its territory during the Middle Period (1749–1776) as plantation slavery reached the rivers of the upstart Georgia colony south of the Savannah River. The much heavier importation of Africans during this time contributed not only to the people of the Georgia Lowcountry, but also to the continued growth of the Carolina Lowcountry and the recently settled interior. The Final Period (1783–1808) corresponded with the retooling of plantation slavery following the tribulations and destruction of the War for American Independence, the extension of settlement to the sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia, and the explosive expansion of slavery in the southeastern interior. Deeper analysis of the contexts for and consequences of these periods of importation takes up the remainder of this section. Slavery in the Lowcountry began with the initial settlement of the Carolina colony in 1670, albeit on a limited scale. The founding European settlers typically brought enslaved people in small family groups from West Indian and North American colonies. These early captives, however, formed only a small part of the black population that developed by the beginning of the eighteenth century into the majority faction of early Carolina. The increase of captives needed to effect this transformation came as AngloCarolinian settlers began to exploit their commercial ties to the Caribbean to procure greater numbers of laborers. Through these connections they acquired Africans transshipped through Barbados and Jamaica.15 The first West-Central Africans probably arrived in the Lowcountry during this time in the late 1600s. Carolina merchants started to import Africans directly in the early eighteenth century, but only in small numbers. The presence of West-Central Africans among these new captives may be seen an Anglican missionary’s comment in 1710 that “I have in this parish a few Negroe Slaves . . . born and baptised among the Portuguese.” Almost certainly these people came from the region once governed by the kingdom of Kongo, where Portuguese missionaries and traders lived since the beginning of the sixteenth century.16 By the end of the eighteenth century’s second decade, the vast majority of enslaved newcomers came straight from African ports. Further, the patterns of English trade in African suggest that a sizeable 15 Wood, Black Majority, pp. 20–24, 43–47; Russell R. Menard, “Slave demography in the Lowcountry, 1670–1740: from frontier society to plantation regime,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 96,4 (1995): 284; “Report of the Governor and council, 1708,” in H. Roy Merrens, ed., The Colonial South Carolina Scene: Contemporary Views, 1697–1774 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977), p. 33. 16 Frank J. Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956) p. 69 and John K. Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” American Historical Review, 96:4 (1991): 1101–1113.

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portion of Africans taken to the Lowcountry came from West-Central Africa.17 Africans comprised no less than an estimated 50% of the overall enslaved population from 1700 to 1720.18 Thus, while some scholars have portrayed the enslaved population of the Lowcountry as an assimilated, Atlantic, or West Indian creole set,19 the fact remains that the vast majority of bondpeople came from Africa or were no more than one generation removed from the continent. As such, the early Carolina plantation society built near Charleston along the Cooper, Ashley, and Stono Rivers evolved as the hearth of a solidly African-based people and culture. At the same time that importation of enslaved Africans surged in the 1710s as a result of profitable commerce in forest products (such as deerskins, timber, pitch, and tar), planters increased production of rice, ushering in an era of plantation agriculture that endured until the abolition of slavery in the mid-nineteenth century. The size of plantation populations increased accordingly. Whereas late seventeenth century estates rarely had more than 10 enslaved residents, over half of all bondpeople occupied plantations with 20 or more fellow captives. The largest of these plantations, such as those of Walter Izard and John Williams in St. George’s parish, contained more than 90 enslaved inhabitants.20 The expansion of slavery in the Lowcountry continued as rice cultivation reached peak levels during the 1730s with the settlement of new lands. Expansion north and south of Charleston accompanied a large influx of enslaved Africans. By the end of the decade, planters along the rivers that fed Winyah Bay near Georgetown commanded plantations with hundreds of cleared acres, several buildings, and full complements of skilled and field laborers.21 Established planters from lands upriver from Charleston extended their operations to the southern reaches of the province as well. Through the 1730s and 1740s, plantations along the Combahee, Pocotaglio, and 17 Daniel C. Littlefield, “The slave trade to Colonial South Carolina: a profile,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 91 (1990): 71–72; Converse D. Clowse, Measuring Charleston’s Overseas Commerce, 1717– 1767: Statistics from the Port’s Naval Lists (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981), p. 31. On the English trade from Africa, see David Richardson, “Slave exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700–1810: new estimates of volume and distribution,” Journal of African History, 30 (1989): 1–22. 18 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, p. 61. 19 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 17–28, 64–76; and Edward A. Pearson, “‘A countryside full of flames’: a reconsideration of the Stono Rebellion and slave rebelliousness in the early eighteenthcentury South Carolina Lowcountry,” Slavery and Abolition, 17:2 (August 1996): 30–31. 20 Menard, “Slave demography,” pp. 285–286; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, pp. 39–40; the 1726 census of St. George’s parish appears in Frank J. Klingberg, An Appraisal of the Negro in Colonial South Carolina (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1941), pp. 58–60. 21 George C. Rogers, Jr., The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), pp. 16–29.


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Table 11.2. African Captives Imported into the Lowcountry, 1730–1744

Region

Captives

% of Total

11,093 11,093 —

49.72 49.72 —

Upper Guinea Senegambia Sierra Leone Windward Coast

1,871 1,871 — —

8.39 8.39 — —

Lower Guinea Gold Coast Bight of Benin

2,296 277 —

10.28 1.24 —

Bight of Biafra

2,019

9.04

Central Africa West-Central Africa Southeast Africa

Africa (unspecified) Total

7,053

31.61

22,313

100.00

Source: David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Coosawhatchie rivers became home to communities of enslaved people that consisted mostly of recently imported Africans in addition to some bondpeople who had relocated from older plantations.22 The enslaved population of the whole region increased to such a degree that one European observer stated in 1737, “Carolina looks more like a negro country than like a country settled by white people.”23 The creation of the Lowcountry’s black majority followed the trend of importing increasing numbers of African that began in the early 1700s. Although figures detailing the volume and regional origins of African captives are incomplete for the opening quarter of the eighteenth century, records from the 1730s and early 1740s provide greater detail. West-Central Africans comprised the largest regional cohort, with almost half of all captives imported having originated among Bantu-speaking peoples (see Table 11.2). 22 Lawrence S. Rowland, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers, The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina: Volume 1, 1514–1861 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 111–116. 23 R. W. Kelsey, “Swiss settlers in South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 23 (1922): 90.

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Given the tendencies of the English trade at the time, some of the captives whose African origins were not recorded may have come from West-Central Africa as well. In any case, West-Central Africans dominated numerically among newcomers and pioneered the settlement of lands to the north and south of the plantation center. The prevalence of West-Central Africans can also be seen in a planter’s admonition regarding an “Angola” named “Clawss” that “as there is abundance of Negroes in this Province of that Nation, he may chance be harboured among some of them.”24 The significance of the connection between West-Central Africa and the Lowcountry is further highlighted by the fact that English slaving vessels delivered more West-Central Africans to the Lowcountry than to any other American destination, including Jamaica and Barbados, during the second quarter of the eighteenth century.25 The importance of West-Central Africans in the Lowcountry extends far beyond their numbers alone. West-Central Africans, along with smaller groups of captives taken from Senegambia and the Bight of Biafra, built and worked the many rice plantations that set levels of production unsurpassed until the mid-1760s.26 This means that almost a full generation before the celebrated connection between the Lowcountry and Africa’s “Rice Coast” (particularly Sierra Leone) was formed, the foundations for Carolina’s preeminence in rice cultivation and for African-Lowcountry culture had already been laid in large part through the unparalleled efforts of West-Central Africans. West-Central Africans not only constructed the plantation complex; they also sowed the seeds for the uninterrupted growth of the African-descended population. Following the Stono Rebellion and the outbreak of King George’s War, both in 1739, South Carolina’s African trade foundered under the weight of prohibitive duties on importation of enslaved people and decreased trade generally.27 People from West-Central Africa thus constituted the last large influx of Africans for another decade. This brief respite coincided with the stabilization of self-reproducing communities by the end of the 1740s.28 Taken together, these conditions reveal 24 South Carolina Gazette, 6 August 1737. 25 David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 26 For figures of rice production, see Rogers, History of Georgetown County, p. 29. 27 James Glen, “A description of South Carolina,” in Milling, ed., Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951), p. 45. See also, Richardson, “British slave trade,” p. 131; and Stuart O. Stumpf, “Implications of King George’s war for the Charleston mercantile community,”South Carolina Historical Magazine, 77 (1976): 161–188. 28 Glen, “Description,” p. 45. For analyses of demography of the enslaved population throughout the eighteenth century, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, pp. 79–95; Peter Wood, “‘More like a negro country’: demographic patterns in colonial South Carolina, 1700–1749,” in Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, eds., Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); and Menard, “Slave Demography,” pp. 291–302.


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that West-Central Africans were the fathers and mothers of a burgeoning Lowcountry-born society. An enslaved woman renamed Angola Ame represented a generation of African mothers who launched this expansion. Carried from West-Central Africa to Comingtee Plantation in 1726 as a girl, Angola Ame grew up to have seven children between 1743 and 1753 with her husband Windsor, a man of unknown origin, although he could have been from West-Central Africa as well. Their four daughters, Easter, Dye, Subrina, and Cleopatra, gave birth to 31 children from the late 1760s through the early 1790s. Over the course of a half-century, West-Central African women, like Angola Ame, begat one generation and helped raise another with such success that the proportion of the Lowcountry-born among the enslaved population grew from 34% in 1740 to 77% in 1790.29 West-Central African men made their contribution to Lowcountry-born generations as well. Many fathered children with women from West-Central Africa, other parts of Africa, and the Lowcountry. Advertisements for fugitives document these relationships. A West-Central African man named Jack ran with his wife Auba and their two children, 9-year-old Sancho and an unnamed infant, from an Ogeechee Neck (Georgia) plantation in 1771. In 1781, Andrew and his “Callabar” wife Affey left their South Carolina plantation carrying their 1-year-old baby. That same year Hercules and his Creole wife Betty took their 5-year-old child Winter with them as they fled a coastal Georgia Plantation.30 Even if all West-Central African men could not perpetuate their biological line, especially during earlier times when men far outnumbered women,31 they certainly acted as role models and elders within enslaved communities. Comingtee Plantation’s inhabitants in the late 1770s included three West-Central African men, all 55 years of age and the oldest male residents. They most likely had particular influence over younger Africans imported during the 1750s and 1760s and, of course, over both groups’ Lowcountry-born children and grandchildren.32 Indeed, respect for male elders has long been a part of African-Lowcountry culture. During the days of slavery and after emancipation, elder men occupied a particular place of authority as mediators of community order and as voices of the past. In the first instance they arbitrated the internal adjudication of 29 Population figures from Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, p. 61. 30 Royal Georgia Gazette, 11 October 1781; South Carolina Gazette (SCG), 21 March 1771; and Royal Georgia Gazette, 4 January 1781. 31 For sex ratios, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, pp. 82–83. 32 Cheryll Ann Cody provides a detailed analysis of the enslaved population at Comingtee in “Slave demography and family formation: a community study of the Ball family plantations, 1720–1896” (Ph.D. diss. University of Minnesota, 1982). See also Cheryll Ann Cody, “There was no ‘Absolom’ on the Ball plantations: slave-naming practices in the South Carolina Low Country, 1720–1865,” American Historical Review, 92:3 (1987): 573–575.

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ordeals and disputes.33 As keepers of traditional lore they enlightened younger audiences with stories of Africa and educated succeeding generations in the skills and observances of pursuits such as hunting.34 A glimpse of the importance of West-Central African men in this regard may be gleaned in the retention of the Bantu word tata in Lowcountry speech. Indeed, tata was the only African term for “father” maintained throughout the Lowcountry into the twentieth century.35 A consideration of the place of African men seems especially important as about two thirds of African captives carried to the Lowcountry were male. The proportion of males in ships from West-Central Africa mirrored the pattern for the Atlantic trade as a whole.36 The preponderance of males among African arrivals recommends that scholars pay close attention to gendered aspects of African cultures and the probability that African men imbued Diaspora cultures with these norms.37 Indeed, the analysis of African-Lowcountry perceptions of the forest demonstrates as much in the next section. Clearly, West-Central Africans represented a “founder generation” on Lowcountry plantations during the Early Period of importation. Although Carolina had been occupied for some time before the arrival of the first great wave of West-Central Africans landed on the shores of the Lowcountry, West-Central Africans nevertheless led the way in settling new areas and establishing communities of enslaved people during a period when the Lowcountry experienced profound changes on all levels. Their place in the structure of early plantation society also put West-Central Africans in positions of limited authority, such as drivers and other ranks reserved for “seasoned” bondpeople. By the time that importation of Africans resumed with unprecedented fervor in the 1750s, West-Central Africans and their progeny had already shaped plantation life in fundamental ways.38 33 Margaret Washington Creel, “A Peculiar People’: Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988); and Douglas B. Chambers, Eboe, Kongo, Mandingo: African Ethnic Groups and the Development of Regional Slave Societies in Mainland North America, 1700–1820 (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, forthcoming). 34 Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, pp. 19, 167–186, 201; Ravenel, “Recollections,” Yale Review, XXV (1935–36) 750; and A.M.H. Christensen, Afro-American Folk Lore: Told Round the Cabin Fires on the Sea Islands of South Carolina (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969 [1892], pp. 4–5. 35 Turner, Africanisms, p. 202. 36 Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. See also David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, “Fluctuations in sex and age ratios in the transatlantic slave trade, 1664–1864,” Journal of Economic History, 46:2 (1993): 308–323. 37 Edward Pearson has done so in his interpretation of the Stono Rebellion as a reaction against the division of labor in plantation slavery that required men to do the “women’s work” of agriculture. See Pearson, “A Countryside Full of Flames,” pp. 22–50. 38 For the role of Africans in enculturating American-born bondpeople, see Gomez, Exchanging, pp. 186–199.


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The Middle Period of the African trade to the Lowcountry differed markedly from the previous period. Lowcountry merchants not only imported greater numbers of people, but also began to express preferences for enslaved Africans from particular regions other than West-Central Africa. Importation trends reflected the sentiments of Charleston factor John Guerard that he “wod chose all Men of Gambia or Windward Coast, in failure of wch Angolas.” Another prominent merchant, Henry Laurens, opined “Gold Coast or Gambias are best, next To Them The Windward Coast are prefer’d to Angolas.”39 The apparent disfavor that Lowcountry merchants had for West-Central Africans emanated from their participation in the Stono Rebellion and the perception that they were smaller than Africans from other regions.40 Importation figures for the middle period seem to follow these opinions. West-Central Africans comprised just over 15% of all Africans landed in the Lowcountry from identified regions of Africa (see Table 11.1). Closer scrutiny of the record reveals a different story. The precipitous drop in the number of West-Central Africans imported in the 1740s and 1750s had less to do with the Stono Rebellion than with international affairs such as the start of King George’s War and a period of relative peace in West-Central Africa that lasted until 1760s.41 Further, the 1740s marked the beginning of a significant lull in European trading activity on the WestCentral African coast.42 As such, the perceptions and preferences of Carolina planters affected the much larger realm of Atlantic commerce far less than some scholars have supposed. While the wishes of rice growers and sellers certainly encouraged the importation of as many people from Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast as possible, Lowcountry planters eagerly bought captives from all regions to satisfy their desire for African bodies. Further, the gross figures for the period do not reveal that the most intense period of importation from Upper Guinea regions occurred during the last 2 years of heavy trading (1773–1774) before the start of the War 39 John Guerard to William Jolliff, 1 June 1752, Guerard Letterbook, South Carolina Historical Society; and Henry Laurens to Smith and Clifton, 17 July 1755, in Philip M. Hamer, George C. Rogers, Jr., and Peggy J. Wehage, eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), Vol. 2, p. 295. 40 Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rogue: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), pp. 8–11, 25; and Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, pp. 66–68. On West-Central Africans in the Stono Rebellion, see Thornton, “African dimensions of the Stono rebellion,” pp. 1101–1113. 41 The peace in Kongo (and its end in the 1760s) is inferred from John K. Thornton’s Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800 (London: University College London, 1999), p. 103. 42 David Richardson, “The British slave trade to Colonial South Carolina,” Slavery and Abolition, 12: 3 (December 1991): pp. 131, 137; and “Slave Exports,” p. 17.

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for American Independence. Up to that point (1710–1772), the overall numbers for importation show that West-Central Africans constituted over 24% of African arrivals, while people carried from Senegambia and the Bight of Biafra comprised over 19% and 9%, respectively. These proportions matched the relative order established in the Early Period. Only the furious traffic before the close of trade in the mid-1770s upset this order, although the trend toward more importation from Upper Guinea had begun in the 1750s. Overall, the fact remains that West-Central Africans continued to figure prominently among imported people through all the fluctuations of the African trade. These numbers take on added significance when one considers that the second major expansion of plantation agriculture occurred during the 1750s and 1760s as planters established new operations along the Savannah, Ogeechee, and Altamaha rivers. The rapid growth of slavery in Georgia derived much of its vigor to the diversion of recently imported Africans from South Carolina to the Georgia coast.43 Once again, West-Central Africans formed a large portion of the enslaved pioneers on the frontiers of the growing Lowcountry plantation complex, although very few were imported directly into Savannah.44 The Final Period of importation resembled the early period as WestCentral Africans constituted over a third of the captives taken to the Lowcountry (see Table 11.1). While many of these Africans labored on plantations in the developing short-staple cotton belt in the interior, quite a few also populated the booming long-staple cotton plantations on the islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Certain areas experienced rapid increases. For example, the enslaved population of St. Helena parish in South Carolina nearly doubled between 1800 and 1810.45 Other areas where planters experimented with sea-island cotton, such as the Georgia islands of Sapelo and St. Simon’s, became the sites for new, large plantations built in the last several years of the eighteenth century.46 Although the importation of Africans ended officially on the first day of 1808, the illegal traffic continued 43 Rowland et al., Beaufort, pp. 178–181. 44 Darold D. Wax, “‘New negroes are always in demand’: the slave trade in eighteenth-century Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, 68:2 (1984): 193–220. 45 Philip D. Morgan, “Black society in the Lowcountry 1760–1810,” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of American Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), pp. 83–141; and Rowland et al., Beaufort, pp. 347–350. 46 Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730– 1815 (Chapel Hill: Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1993); and William S. McFeely, Sapelo’s People: A Long Walk into Freedom (New York: Norton, 1994), pp. 32–58.


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until the middle of the nineteenth century and brought additional WestCentral Africans to the Lowcountry.47 Throughout the duration of the trade in enslaved Africans, people from West-Central Africa arrived in such large numbers that they formed one of the largest African communities in the Lowcountry. They lived in every district of the region since the first captive Africans landed in Charleston. They also represented the last victims of the Atlantic trade.48 From the first to last, West-Central Africans and their descendents inhabited the Lowcountry and made it their own land. PEOPLE AND THE FOREST IN WEST-CENTRAL AFRICA AND THE LOWCOUNTRY

Generations of captive Africans cascaded upon the shores of the Lowcountry. Each wave brought a small parcel of the tens of thousands of people that ultimately crossed the sea. Those not broken by the forces of the Atlantic emerged from the festering holds of floating tombs and saw around them only a strange land. But every African beheld this new world with African eyes. With these eyes the founders envisioned and eventually witnessed the renewal of descent in a place not known to their ancestors. The sons and daughters of Africa endured much simply to survive. The trials of captivity, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and the encompassing violence of chattel bondage assaulted enslaved people in the Lowcountry for nearly two centuries. The toll was high as slavery beat mightily against the bodies and spirits of its victims. Many succumbed, unable to repel the continuous barrage, weary of the struggle, or hopeful that the end of this corporeal existence would lead to peace in another realm. Many more, however, labored not only to persevere, but also to make a clearing in the American wilderness for the dead, the living, and those not yet born. They never forgot their ancestors or whence they came. Though separated by space and time, they remembered familiar things and imagined responses to novel circumstances, all with African eyes. The processes of remembering and revitalizing their connections with the life- and death-giving powers of the invisible realm required that captive Africans find their bearing within their new surroundings. This difficult 47 Charles J. Montgomery, “Survivors from the cargo of the negro slave yacht Wanderer,” American Anthropologist, 10:4 (October 1908): 611–623. 48 Daniel C. Littlefield, “‘Abundance of negroes of that nation’: the significance of African ethnicity in Colonial South Carolina,” in David R. Chesnutt and Clyde N. Wilson, eds., The Meaning of South Carolina History: Essays in Honor of George C. Rogers, Jr. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 19–38.

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task entailed the endeavor to ensure material subsistence and the quest to maintain sources of spiritual sustenance. These efforts initiated by the WestCentral African founders during the early plantation phase of the Lowcountry’s development required that African captives engage the forest both physically and intellectually. The ideas and observance that informed West-Central African perceptions of the natural world were both ancient and widespread in Central Africa.49 In a general sense, West-Central Africans mentally divided the physical world into two domains, consisting of the cultivated, built sphere made by people and the wilderness where mighty forces and untamable creatures reigned. They also recognized a complementary relationship between these two realms. Just as they needed deforested areas and constructed sites for fields, towns, and markets, West-Central Africans relied on wild territories as sources for raw materials and preserves for game. This awareness extended from a larger understanding of the universe within which everything had an inverted and inseparable counterpart. As such, death complemented life, night complemented day, killing complemented fertility, and so on.50 The relationship between men and women followed this design in many ways as well. The work of women usually remained within the safe confines of the cultivated realm. Indeed, planting and foraging by women provided the largest portion of food produced in West-Central African communities.51 The paths to the manhood, however, led into the wilderness, especially the forest, where the risky pursuits of trade, war, and hunting brought honor and wealth. Filled with menacing beasts such as elephants, buffalo, big cats, and snakes, the forest was perceived by West-Central Africans as a place for men.52 In addition to being a productive place, the forest was a sacred space that abounded with invisible forces and represented a transitory realm in contact 49 Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 50 Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 43–51. 51 John K. Thornton, The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 28–37; and Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 5–6. 52 Wyatt MacGaffey, ed. and trans., Art and Healing of the Bakongo Commented by Themselves: Minkisi from the Laman Collection (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 98. See also René Devisch’s treatment of gendered space in Weaving the Threads of Life: The Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical Healing Cult Among the Yaka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 54–60. On the animals of West-Central Africa, see Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, Descriça˜ o Histórico doe três Reinos Congo Matamba e Angola, 2 Vols., Graziano Maria da Legguzzano, ed. and trans. (Lisbon: Junta de Investigaç o˜ es do Ultramar, 1965), bk. 1, pp. 59–69; and Antonio Brasio, ed., “Histor´ıa do Reino do Congo,” Studia, 27–28, (1969): 444–450.


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with the Other World. Power emanated from ancestors in the land of the dead and from territorial spirits (simbi, nkitas, or kilundus) that inhabited natural landmarks and remarkably shaped things found in the wilderness. Living people called the land in which the ancestors abided ku mfinda and ku bonde (both meaning “in the forest”). This seemed befitting since the living typically interred the bodies of the dead in the forests, often at locations where villages existed long before.53 The other ethereal denizens of the forest, territorial nature spirits, preferred to occupy bodies of water, trees, and rocks. People usually associated territorial nature spirits with beneficent forces behind growth and prosperity. Diverse thoughts about the origins and characteristics of simbis existed, but the central idea remained that they symbolized the permanence and the potency of nature. Connections made by West-Central Africans of ancestors with nature spirits suggests that territorial deities represented elders of the Other World as they were once ancestors who entered the land of the dead so long ago that they eventually lost ties to specific lineages to become guardians of all in particular areas. The significance of the linking of ancestors and nature spirits extended to the relationship between the living and the land they inhabited. Through the construction of tombs, the proper decoration of graves, and timely offerings to the deceased, living descendents not only retained contact with the dead but also reaffirmed their own ties to the land. Graves provided focal points for the collective energies of descendents, who hoped to receive blessings in return for the attention, and landmarks of identity in that a person’s country was where his ancestors were buried. As the Kongo proverb intones, “Where your ancestors do not live, you cannot build your house.”54 Nature spirits served similar functions. Their presence allowed those who lacked ties with named ancestors or who may have come to a region as strangers to still have access to agents of otherworldly powers and to feel attached to the land where they lived. West-Central Africans also regarded mountains and forests as sacred places, and established shrines to honor the forces of nature embodied in these features of the landscape.55 Further, people attempted to experience the invisible powers of the wilderness 53 MacGaffey, Religion, pp. 55–56; and Cavazzi, Descriça˜ o, p. 1:124. 54 Quoted in Georges Balandier, Daily Life in the Kingdom of Kongo: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century, trans. Helen Weaver (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968), p. 253. 55 Laman, The Kongo (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1962), pp. 42, 195, 203; and Elizabeth Colson, “Places of power and shrines of the land,” Paideuma, 43 (1997): 48–53. On Kongo simbis, see Thornton’s and MacGaffey’s esssays in this volume; Thornton,The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 12, 26, 57, 117; and Wyatt MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

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by locating meeting places for initiation societies in remote locales, often in the forest.56 In addition to its reputation as an abode for spirits, forests took on significance in people’s minds for other reasons. Wooded areas provided WestCentral Africans with the organic materials for herbal healing and the creation of charms, two areas very much connected. Further, at many times in the history of the region, people retreated to forests as a defense against persecution. Nfinda Kongo and Nfinda Ngula served as havens or protective barriers for political factions during periods of civil struggle. Wars and raids for captives drove many West-Central Africans to abandon the fertile river valleys for the security of thick woods as well.57 In all these ways the material and metaphysical qualities of wooded areas led people to associate forests with strength and power. Another important link between this world and the Other World came through hunting. West-Central African men often went into the forest to hunt. Hunting offered men the opportunity to gain prestige and respect for their own benefit as well as to acquire meat and other valued animal products for their communities. West-Central Africans celebrated the exploits of great hunters and honored them in death with impressive grave adornments and lamentations: “Who will now give us meat? We have had a mouth for meat, now we have already got a mouth for stewed leaves.”58 Additionally, a tradition holds that Kongo began as a hunting land. When the hunter Mukongo came upon a beautiful place while tracking a wounded animal, he decided to give up the chase and settled his family on the site that became Mbanza Kongo, the capital of the kingdom of Kongo.59 Initiation into the men’s realm of hunting not only served to train rising generations for a necessary vocation, but also to become a part of a larger value system and tradition. In their early years boys assisted their mothers and sisters in the women’s work of raising crops, collecting edible plants, and tending small domesticated animals. They also got their first taste of catching wild animals by helping dig up burrowed rats in the charred savannas after the grasses had been burned in preparation for the next planting season. As they grew older, West-Central African boys began their education in the ways 56 “Bref apercu du Royaume du Congo . . .,” fol. 43, in Louis Jadin, “Aperç u de la situation du Congo et rite d’élection des rois en 1775, d’après le P. Cherubino da Savona, missionaire au Congo de 1759 a´ 1774,” Bulletin, Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 35 (1963): 343–419; and Cavazzi, Descriça˜ o, p. 1:198. 57 Thornton, Kongo, pp. 6–7; and Miller, Way of Death, pp. 37–39. 58 Laman, The Kongo, 90 (quote); and Joseph C. Miller, Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 52. 59 Simon Bockie, Death and the Invisible Powers: The World of Kongo Belief (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 2–3.


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of men under the tutelage of their fathers. They learned to clear land from forests or scrub, climb and tap palm trees for their wine, and build houses. Boys also became acquainted with the rudiments of hunting as they accompanied the men on regular hunts and undertook shorter expeditions with their age-mates.60 Young males gained added experience through hunting associations in which master hunters took on the roles of fathers as well as tutors to novice members.61 Bows and arrows and slingshots operated as introductory weapons augmented later with traps, snares, spears, nets, and pits.62 As European guns became more accessible, they too entered into the hunter’s array of implements, although the quality and quantity of firearms may not have significantly impacted the methods of hunters in areas beyond the Loango Coast and Kongo until the nineteenth century.63 The first prey for apprentice hunters included rodents and birds caught with traps and snares. The basic principles behind the use of these devices originated with the distant ancestors of West-Central Africans.64 Over time hunters developed various designs and determined which baits worked with particular animals. An early-nineteenth-century observer described a snare made to catch beach birds as “an elastic twig with a bit of line and noose, which catches the bird’s neck.”65 Pits served to capture larger game such as buffalos and elephants. Dug along paths cleared and frequented by these big animals, hunters sometimes installed wood spikes in the floor of the pit and camouflaged the hole with vegetation and dirt. Likewise, people made smaller pits, some equipped with snares, near roads to catch wild pigs.66 As much as the West-Central African hunter depended on these devices and tactics, he also relied on his dogs. One of the few animals domesticated by the early Bantu ancestors, dogs outfitted with bells tracked the scents of quarry, flushed prey from hiding places, and detained or killed wounded animals. They also led hunters to large game with their bells and barking. Accounts from the twentieth century show that West-Central Africans ´ 60 Joseph van Wing, Etudes Bakongo: Sociologie – Religion et Magie, 2nd ed. (Brussels: Desclée de Brouwer, 1959), p. 228; Laman, Kongo, p. 97; Laman, The Kongo p. 19. 61 Miller, Kings and Kinsmen, pp. 51–53; and Jan Vansina, “Government in Kasai before the Lunda,” International Journal of African Historical Studies, 31:1 (1998): 11–12. 62 Vansina, Paths, pp. 90–93, 287–288. 63 Laman, Kongo, pp. 92, 100–102; and J. K. Tuckey, Narrative of an Expedition to Explore the River Zaire (London: Frank Cass, 1967 [1818]., pp. 122, 155. Miller, Way of Death, pp. 86–94; Thornton, Warfare, pp. 107–109. 64 Vansina, Paths, pp. 90, 287. 65 Tuckey, Narrative, p. 157. 66 Cavazzi, Descriça˜ o, Vol. 1, p. 59–60; and Laman, Kongo, pp. 97–98.

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valued their canine companions greatly. They buried especially valued hunting dogs in cloth wrappings and adorned their graves with the bells they wore in the hunt.67 A good hunt required the approval of ancestors and other guardians of the forest. The results of the hunt revealed the quality of relations between the hunters, his people, and the spiritual forces. Hunters who returned home empty handed represented proof that someone in the community had clearly faltered in some obligation toward their divine benefactors. Situations of this kind called for ritual redress.68 Faced with these challenges, hunters carried empowered objects to invite success and safety. These charms consisted of complex combinations of plant and animal components contained in sacks, gourds, and horns.69 The desired charms often corresponded to the target of the hunt. Thus, many who pursued elephants kept bones of these animals in their homes and wore elephant tail hairs in pouches around their necks for protection and strength.70 The proper creation of charms depended on the knowledge and skill of a religious expert to assemble the suitable ingredients, speak the appropriate words of invocation, and follow along with the hunter the correct behavioral and dietary prohibitions.71 Practitioners such as the nganga-ngudi-a-nambua and mpombolo also earned renown for their ability to enchant animals and draw them to hunters for the kill.72 The approbation of ancestors and territorial spirits as well as the assistance of sanctified objects and ritual experts bolstered the individual skills of hunters in their pursuit of game and glory. Hunters needed all the help they could get as they ventured beyond the normal human realm of the cultivated world and entered into the wilderness. Unfortunately, many West-Central African hunters possessed no defenses against another force from beyond the land of the living as they became prey themselves, caught in the snares of the Atlantic trade and carried away from the mfinda to distant, unknown lands. Many of these captives survived to set foot upon the shores of Lowcountry. An oral tradition from coastal Georgia holds that the earliest African arrivals surveyed the alien land of their enslavement and knelt in supplication. They memorialized their distress and resolution in a song that intoned 67 Laman, Kongo, pp. 88–90. For the antiquity of domesticated dogs, see Vansina, Paths, pp. 92, 290. 68 Vansina, Paths, p. 91; Miller, Kings, p. 51. 69 Vansina, Paths, pp. 96, 298; and Marie-Claude Dupré, “Le système des forces Nkisi chez les Kongo d’après le troisième volume de K. Laman,” Africa, 35:1 (1975): 22–23. Kongo minkisi are described and analyzed in MacGaffey, Art and Healing. 70 Lorenza da Lucca Relations sur le Congo de Père Laurent de Lucques (1700–1717), trans. and ed. J. Cuvelier, (Brussels: Institut Royal Colonial Belge, 1953), pp. 128–29, 244. 71 Vansina, Paths, pp. 96, 298. Laman, Konga. 72 Cavazzi, Descriça˜ o, p. 1:100.


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“kneebone [pray] in the wilderness, kneebone in the valley.”73 A strange wilderness surrounded enslaved Africans on all sides, although a few features of the Lowcountry may have seemed vaguely familiar to the newcomers. The palmetto, a diminutive relative of the grand and productive palms of Africa, may have evoked some sense of familiarity. Extensive grasslands between wetlands and forests possibly roused images of home in the minds of some Africans. Even some animals resembled those of the African plains and forests. Alligators patrolled Lowcountry waters like their crocodile cousins in Africa’s rivers, and similar kinds of birds filled the trees. Nevertheless, exotic flora and fauna dominated the Lowcountry. Spanish moss draped southern magnolias and evergreen live oaks, giving wooded areas a gloomy, ethereal cast. Bald cypress trees, their roots displayed like knobby “knees,” appeared as though they squatted in the black water of swamps. Vast stands of loblolly pine, another species foreign to Africans, stretched across the extent of the seaboard’s interior. No elephants trampled the grasses of Carolina’s savannas or pounded paths through Lowcountry forests. For the first time in their lives, Africans encountered the black bear, the raccoon, and the opossum.74 Africans most certainly felt the full impact of having crossed kalunga and come out in another world. As in West-Central Africa, the lives of captives in the Lowcountry revolved around the complementary properties of both the cultivated domain and the wilderness. Of course, bondpeople spent most of their time laboring in plantation fields. They also maintained their own provisional gardens and kept small animals near their dwellings on plantation grounds. Enslaved people made the plantations and to a degree laid claim to them. As one Lowcountry resident born in the mid-nineteenth century recalled proudly, “All them rice field been nothing but swamp. Slavery people cut canal and dig ditch and cut down the wood. . . . All been clear up for plant rice by slavery people.”75 Still, plantations represented the world of slavery with its work regimes and discipline as defined by the master class. The wilderness, however, existed outside of plantation society in both literal and metaphorical senses. The contrast between the two worlds led one observer to remark 73 The narrator of this tradition states that the song is “the oldest slave song that ever was sung by black people when they first come over from Africa over here.” Lawrence McKiver, quoted in Art Rosembaum, Shout Because You’re Free: The African-American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), p. 18. 74 Mason Crum, Gullah: Negro Life in the Carolina Sea Islands (Durham: Duke University Press, 1940), pp. 8–10, 13–14; H. K. Airy Shaw, “The vegetation of Angola,” Journal of Ecology, 35 (1947): 23–48; Laman, Kongo, pp. 4–5; and Silver, New Face, pp. 14–19, 24–31. 75 George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), Vol. 3, pt. 3, p. 91. See also Joyce E. Chaplin, “Tidal rice cultivation and the problem of slavery in South Carolina and Georgia, 1760–1815,”William and Mary Quarterly, 49:1 (1992): 57.

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that the “whole face of the countryside is covered with woods, except the plantations, which are like islands in a sea of forest.”76 For European settlers, the wilderness represented a threat to their ambition toward dominating the Lowcountry.77 For enslaved people, the sea of wilderness beyond the banks of the plantation represented a realm in which they could assert their autonomy and initiative.78 Runaways often took to the woods, sometimes as individuals and occasionally as maroon bands striving toward unfettered and independent lives.79 As a sacred space the forest also provided the privacy and proper surroundings for important gatherings. Gullah Jack, a Central African nganga who conspired with Denmark Vesey to lead an uprising in 1822, held meetings and conducted rituals on a farm isolated in the woods outside of Charleston.80 Other ritual activities took place beyond the cultivated realm. Young people who sought admission into the adult religious community had to endure a period of solitary “seeking” in the wilderness until they experienced signs that confirmed their acceptance as candidates.81 Further, not only did the living bury the dead in the woods, but the spirits of the deceased continued to inhabit these areas. Other beings, such as the malevolent Plat-Eye, wandered the swamps and forests.82 Simbi spirits occupied water springs throughout the inland portions of the Lowcountry. These springs formed where subterranean streams pushed through depressions in the land. Often surrounded by trees and located near thick swamp forests, these springs with their bubbling discharges inspired awe. Simbi spirits guarded the natural fountains and harassed unaccompanied women who attempted to draw water from the springs. Enslaved people described the spirits as vaguely human in form, and each possessed unique characteristics and names such as The Evil, One-Eye, and The Great Desire of the Unrotting Waters. Occasionally, the springs disappeared, which 76 Philip J. Staudenraus, ed., “Letters from South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, 58 (1957): 210. 77 “Governor James Glen’s valuation, 1751,” in Merrens, pp. 178–179; and Silver, New Face, p. 138. 78 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, pp. 522–530; and Stewart, Nature Suffers, pp. 134–136. 79 SCG, 9 February 1734; South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, (SCGCJ), 14 October 1766; Ibid., 25 February 1772; Charleston Morning Post, and Daily Advertiser, 26 October 1786; Georgia State Gazette or Independent Register, 28 October 1786; and Ibid., 19 May 1787. 80 Edward A. Pearson, Designs against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 113–114. Also see the letter by “Stranger,” SCG, 17 September 1772. 81 Creel, “Peculiar People,” p. 288. 82 Rawick, American Slave, Vol. 2, pt. 2, pp. 15–16; Georgia Writers’ Project, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986 [1940]); South Carolina Writers’ Program, South Carolina Folk Tales: Stories of Animals and Supernatural Beings (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1941), pp. 50–51, 86–89; and Creel, Peculiar People, pp. 314–320.


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enslaved people interpreted as a sign that the resident simbi had “died” or departed because of some human offense. Although these water spirits elicited fear, enslaved people sought to maintain their presence at these important sites. When one planter attempted to build a small wall around a spring to make it more accessible, he was confronted by an elderly enslaved man who argued that the project would anger and drive the simbi away.83 It could be argued that Lowcountry simbis functioned similarly to West-Central African simbis in that they allowed newcomers to root themselves in a land that lacked adequate ancestral burial grounds, at least with the earliest arrivals. Given that most of the Lowcountry simbis existed on lands near the oldest plantations, it seems probable that they made themselves known to enslaved people during the earliest days of settlement. Through the simbis and the continuation of West-Central African burial practices, enslaved people in the Lowcountry claimed their place on the landscape and maintained the connection between West-Central African ancestors and their children in exile.84 The forest furnished important resources as well. Enslaved people extracted medicinal herbs from the woodlands, and in coastal areas took around three quarters of the animals they consumed from nearby forests and marshes.85 In this regard, enslaved men came to know the forested wilderness of the Lowcountry through hunting. From the earliest days of settlement, enslaved hunters displayed their prowess. According to an act in the early eighteenth century, enslaved people could receive bounties for killing large predators such as wolves, panthers, bears, and wild cats.86 Further, an observer during the 1770s commented that a “dextrous negroe will, with his gun and netts, get as much game and fish as five families can eat.”87 Many planters employed enslaved men exclusively as hunters and as 83 William M. Mathew, ed., Agriculture, Geology, and Society in Antebellum South Carolina: The Private Diary of Edmund Ruffin, 1843 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), pp. 164–167; F. W. Bradley, “‘Knowing Yarbs’ Means Ability to Heal with Medicinal Herbs,” Charleston News & Courier, 19 February 1950; and the John Bennett papers, South Carolina Historical Society. 84 On burial practices, see Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 1983), pp. 132–142. Creel provides general observations on West Central African influences on Lowcountry perceptions of death in Peculiar People. For interpretations of simbis in other parts of the Americas, see the essays by Wyatt MacGaffey and Robert Slenes in this volume. 85 Rawick, American Slave, Vol. 2, pt. 1, pp. 221–222; Drums and Shadows, p. 57; and Wood, Black Majority, 120–121, 289–292; and Elizabeth J. Reitz, Tyson Gibbs, and Ted A. Rathburn, “Archaeological evidence for subsistence on coastal plantations,” in Theresa A. Singleton, ed., The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life (New York: Academic Press, 1985), p. 184. 86 Thomas Cooper and David J. McCord, eds., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina (Columbia, SC: A. S. Johnston, 1836–1841), Vol. 2, p. 216. 87 Quoted in Wood, Black Majority, p. 117.

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guides for their hunting parties.88 Other enslaved people took up the hunt as a matter of necessity. In general, plantation rations in the Lowcountry included very little meat, if any.89 To compensate for this want, some men used the time after they completed their daily tasks to seek out prey.90 The experience obtained during these excursions gave some men the knowledge and inclination to abscond, such as a fellow called Jack, considered “very expert in hunting.” Also, an African renamed Titus, adorned with “country marks down the sides of his face,” failed to return to his Santee River plantation after leaving for a hunt.91 As in Africa, learning to hunt represented a transition into manhood and remained a male pursuit.92 The older fathers, many of them Africans, taught young males the art of the hunt. Aaron Ford, born during the last years of slavery, stated, “I remember my grandfather all right. He the one told me how to catch otters. Told me how to set traps.”93 In addition to traps, novice hunters in the Lowcountry learned to use snares, guns, and dogs to bag a variety of birds, small mammals, and even alligators. WestCentral African men, the fathers of so many Lowcountry-born generations, likely provided much of the instruction for activities such as hunting during slavery days.94 Indeed, their descendants continued to use the KiKongo verb tangisa, meaning “to teach,” into the twentieth century.95 In particular, West-Central Africa fathers taught their Lowcountry progeny to utilize the Kongo kulula bird trap. Such traps, regarded as “very simply constructed” by the mistress of a Georgia plantation, served to catch such species as the partridge, pigeon, and quail, some of the birds most often 88 Duncan Clinch Heywood, Seed from Madagascar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937), pp. 117–127. 89 Johann Martin Bolzius, “Johann Martin Bolzius answers a questionnaire on Carolina and Georgia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 14:3 (1957): 235–236; and Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1969 [1837]), pp. 107, 274–276. 90 Philip D. Morgan, “Work and culture: the task system and the world of Lowcountry blacks, 1700 to 1880,” William and Mary Quarterly, 39 (1982): 563–599; and Judith A. Carney, “From hands to tutors: African expertise in the South Carolina rice economy,” Agricultural History, 67:3 (1993): 1–30. 91 SCG, 1 May 1749; South-Carolina and American General Gazette (SCAGG), 3 April 1777. See also Georgia Gazette (GG), 5 April 1765. 92 Stuart A. Marks, Southern Hunting in Black and White: Nature, History, and Ritual in a Carolina Community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 93 Rawick, American Slave, Vol. 2, pt. 2, p. 62; Vol. 3, pt. 4, p. 57; Vol. 2, pt. 2, p. 75. See John Campbell, “‘My constant companion’: slaves and their dogs in the Antebellum South,” in Larry E. Hudson, Jr., ed., Working Toward Freedom: Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1994), pp. 57–58. 94 Betty Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 46. 95 Turner, Africanisms, p. 202.


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taken by enslaved people. People in the Lowcountry continued to call these birds by names derived from their KiKongo equivalents – kinkwawi, wela, and kimbimbi – long after the end of slavery.96 Other animals commonly caught by enslaved people included rabbits, opossum, raccoons, otters, and squirrels.97 One industrious hunter, Charles Ball, set traps in the swamps of the Lowcountry three nights a week up to 3 miles from his residence. His efforts yielded two or three meals of raccoon, opossum or rabbit every week.98 Some hunters knew how to trap more elusive game such as the fox. One of these experts, Gabriel Myers, used a dead mouse dangled from a strand of spider web to bait the trap buried under a thin layer of sand. Additional bait included charred yams, which Myers claimed the fox could not resist. Master hunters recognized that each animal responded to particular lures and adjusted traps appropriately.99 Enslaved people and their free descendants used mice and related rodents for more than bait. They ate them. Rats, which often burrowed in the banks around rice fields, became a regular source of food.100 Johann Martin Bolzius wrote during the 1750s that enslaved people “sometimes roast mice” when they desired meat.101 The remains of cotton and rice rats and deer mice recovered from sites inhabited by enslaved people during the early nineteenth century indicate that the estimated meat yield from these vermin compared favorably with other wild sources such as birds and fish.102 Additionally, Lowcountry residents used the KiKongo words gone, puku, and xiji to name rats.103 Given that no other African terms for this important source of protein were retained in the Lowcountry African lexicon, it 96 Ibid., pp. 196, 204; John A. Scott, ed., Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, by Frances Anne Kemble (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), p. 58; and Rawick, American Slave, Vol. 3, pt. 4, p. 71. 97 Rawick, American Slave, Vol. 2, pt. 1, pp. 156–157, 185, 191; Vol. 2, pt. 2, pp. 75, 138, 166; Vol. 3, pt. 3, 159; Vol. 3, pt. 4, pp. 71, 101, 128, 234. 98 Ball, Slavery, pp. 262–263, 274. 99 Rutledge, God’s Children (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947), p. 127. 100 Heyward, Seed, p. 167; and Mamie Garvin Fields, Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir (New York: Free Press, 1983), pp. 128–129, 133. 101 “Bolzius,” p. 236. 102 Michael Trinkley, ed., Archaeological and Historical Examinations of Three Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Rice Plantations on the Waccamaw Neck (Columbia, SC: Chicora Foundation, 1993), pp. 197–201; Natalie Adams, Michael Trinkley, and Debi Hacker, eds., In the Shadow of the Big House: Domestic Slaves at Stoney/Baynard Plantation, Hilton Head Island (Columbia, SC: Chicora Foundation, 1995), pp. 103–108; and Michael Trinkley, ed., Archaeological Investigations at Haig Point, Webb, and Oak Ridge, Daufuskie Island, Beaufort County, South Carolina (Columbia, SC: Chicora Foundation, 1989), pp. 172–192. 103 The first word gone comes from ngone, the KiKongo name for “the forest rat, the largest of the rat species” (Turner, Africanisms, p. 194). Puku (also kapuku and mpuku) derives from the KiKongo word mpuku, both meaning “rat” (Turner, Africanisms, p.199; Laman, Dictionnaire, p. 587). The third word xiji (also jiji) comes from the KiKongo name for the palm rat, nxiji (Turner, Africanisms, p. 202; Laman, Dictionnaire, pp. 660, 769).

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appears certain that West-Central Africans taught their Lowcountry progeny the methods for capturing and consuming these rodents. Many West-Central African captives certainly knew how to use firearms as well. Just as the West-Central African soldiers who led the Stono Rebellion demonstrated their expertise with the weapons and tactics of warfare current in West-Central Africa at the time, West-Central African hunters in the Lowcountry would have put similar knowledge to work as they pursued their prey with guns. While many whites in South Carolina and Georgia expressed strong reservations about granting enslaved men access to guns, planters showed little inclination to disarm their servants. Most likely, they cared more about reducing expenditures for food.104 In any case, laws allowed enslaved people to keep and use guns as long as certain restriction were followed.105 These weapons not only enhanced a hunter’s ability to pursue large animals, but also magnified his reputation. Long after plantation hunters died, people remembered them for the size and exceptional sonic discharge of their guns as much as for their aim.106 A number of fugitives took guns to assist them in their escape. Peter, a West-Central African, fled with two other men and “took with them two guns and a cutlass.” Another example relates that a man “with a Spanish accent, having been several years at the Havanna” ran with a gun and shot pouch.107 While these men were interested in resisting capture, it seems more likely that they intended to shoot animals, not people. Indeed, hunger presented as much a threat to fugitives who took to the wilderness as did search parties. Maroon communities used their guns and other weapons more assertively to raid plantations for supplies as well as to fend off attempts to reenslave them.108 Like hunters in West-Central Africa, enslaved hunters in the Lowcountry relied greatly on their dogs for success. In the absence of guns, dogs provided necessary assistance. As one song intoned: “Wish I had a hundred head o’ dog/ And half of them was hound/ I’d take ‘em back in my ‘bacco field/ And run the rabbit down.” They not only tracked down animals, but also chased them up trees until enslaved hunters arrived to finish the job. In some cases, dogs did the killing themselves. Dogs also warned enslaved people of 104 Georgia Gazette, 14 December 1773. See also Wood, Black Majority, pp. 124–130; and Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), pp. 117–119 105 Cooper and McCord, Statutes, pp. 7:345, 353–354, 372, 386–387, 422; and Allen D. Candler, The Colonial Records of Georgia, 18 (Atlanta, 1904–1916): 117–119. 106 Rutledge, God’s Children, pp. 82–83. 107 SCGCJ, 18 April 1769; and GG, October 1764. 108 SCAGG, 13 May 1774; and Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, p. 450.


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the presence of dangerous predators, both animal (such as panthers) and human (such as night patrols). The mutual dependence of hunter and dog created a strong bond not easily broken in life or death.109 With traps, snares, guns, and dogs, enslaved men in the Lowcountry exploited the forest and surrounding wilderness to improve their lot in several ways. As such, hunting activities helped enslaved people achieve a certain level of self-sufficiency. The chase also afforded enslaved men opportunities to earn the respect of their peers. Just as important, hunting provided a context in which enslaved men passed on knowledge that originated in Africa to their Lowcountry-born sons and grandsons. CONCLUSION

The concepts and activities that Africans and their descendants in the Lowcountry associated with the forest show that West-Central Africans played leading roles in shaping the human–nature nexus within the diverse enslaved population. Certainly, people throughout Africa lived with many similar thoughts and activities concerning the interaction between people and nature. In the Lowcountry and other parts of the African–Atlantic Diaspora, these beliefs and practices coexisted and then merged to form regionally specific traditions. On the coastal plain of South Carolina and Georgia, the constant and sizable presence of West-Central Africans throughout the days of slavery allowed them to uniquely influence the ideas, practices, and things that made up the Lowcountry–African cultural tradition. From the tools and techniques of hunting to the names of animals and nature spirits, West-Central Africans bequeathed to later generations a legacy that remained strong well into the twentieth century. 109 Song rendered by Louisa Brown in Rawick, American Slave, Vol. 2, p. 1, pp. 115–116. Campbell, “Companion,” pp. 53–76; Ball, Slavery, pp. 389–392; and G.S.S., “Sketches of the South Santee,” American Monthly Magazine, 8 (October, November, 1836); reprinted in Eugene L. Schwaab, ed., Travels in the Old South: Selected from Periodicals of the Times (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), pp. 18–19.

12

Liberated Central Africans in Nineteenth-Century Guyana MONICA SCHULER

Figure 12.1. Map of Guyana showing the plantation belt settled by liberated Africans.

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320

Central Africans in North America and the Caribbean INTRODUCTION

British slave trade suppression not only changed patterns of slave trading in Africa, as Joseph Miller points out in this volume, but also diverted thousands of Africans bound for Brazil or Cuba to a British traffic in indentured Africans. Between 1841 and 1865, Africans liberated from slave ships by the British Anti-Slave Trade Squadron were transported first to Sierra Leone, St. Helena, or Rio de Janeiro, and from there to the Anglophone Caribbean and Guyana as indentured laborers.1 Socially, culturally, and economically, little or no distinction existed between those Africans who were enslaved and those who were “liberated.” Both groups originated either in West Africa (notably the Bight of Benin) or West Central Africa and worked on plantations under comparable conditions. Thus the study of liberated Africans adds depth and texture to what we already know about Africans in Guyana. Following the lines of inquiry suggested by Miller, this examination of liberated West Central Africans in Guyana uses archival and oral narratives to explore the changing worlds of liberated Africans as slaves and plantation laborers, and their attitudes toward captivity and separation from Africa. Liberated Central Africans contributed simultaneously to the entrenchment of certain West Central African sociocultural practices, to the reinvigoration of pan-African consciousness, and to a critique of slavery and indentured labor. A comparison of the 88,712 Africans taken to Guyana during slavery (1676–1808) and the 13,563 liberated Africans taken there reveals differences in the representation of West and Central Africans regions, with important consequences for Guyanese culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gold Coast inhabitants and West Central Africans, 30% and 21% respectively of all disembarked slaves, constituted the first and third largest components of the Guyana slave population. A residual category, “Africa Unspecified,” was second with 22%.2 West Central Africans were 1 Monica Schuler, “Recruitment of African indentured labourers for European colonies in the nineteenth century,” in Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour Before and After Slavery, ed. P. C. Emmer (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1986), p. 130. The former Dutch colonies of Demerara, Berbice, and Essequibo were occupied by Britain in 1796 and became united as British Guiana in 1831; Winston F. McGowan, “The African slave trade to Guyana,” in Themes in AfricanGuyanese History, eds. Winston F. McGowan, James G. Rose, and David A. Granger, (Georgetown: The Free Press, 1998), pp. 28–30. 2 Of the other named geographical groups, Sierra Leone followed West Central Africa with 7.66%, the Bight of Biafra with 6.91% and Bight of Benin with 6.43%. Berbice acquired 2,666 West Central African and 1,950 Gold Coast slaves and retained its West Central African majority in 1819. Barry W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 1984), p. 133. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein,

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a significant minority among Guyana slaves in terms of their activities. In 1763–1764, for instance, they allied with slaves from the Gold Coast to wage a major war in Berbice, and in 1813 they took a leading role in the reorganization of African ethnic welfare companies in Berbice and Demerara.3 Having withdrawn from the slave trade early in the nineteenth century, the Gold Coast contributed no liberated Africans to Guyana, whereas West Central Africa contributed at least 60% (8,478) of the 13,563 liberated Africans arriving between 1841 and 1865. These included 1,578 from Rio; 391 from slave ships condemned by Guyana’s Vice-Admiralty Court in 1842; 5,812 from St. Helena, and 697 from Sierra Leone.4 Guyana had a population of 100,600 at the time of full emancipation in 1838, 98,000 of whom were black. Between 1841 and 1851, when the Africa-born portion of the population decreased to 7,083 or 17% the first 7,168 liberated Africans began the process that Linda Heywood perceptively calls “the re-Africanizing of Guyana (see Table 12.1).” With 86,455 people, the Guyana-born (Creole) population continued to outnumber Africans after 1841, but a preponderance of local people did not mean isolation from African ancestral culture and institutions.5 Rather, predominantly black villages were and still are divided into “ethnic” quarters where many liberated Africans settled in the nineteenth century, reinforcing the communities and culture that African slaves and their descendants had established previously. eds., The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), hereafter cited as Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. Statistics cited from the database refer to the number or percentage of slaves disembarked unless otherwise indicated. Note that not only did slave ships deposit slaves at “Demerara,” the main “port,” but at three other subsidiary locations in Demerara, Cummingsburg, Kingston, and Stabroek. These are listed separately from “Demerara” in the database. 3 See Monica Schuler, “Akan slave rebellions in the British Caribbean,” Savacou 1(1970):18, 20; Berbice Criminal Court Investigation, February 1814, GNA; H. W. Bentinck to Earl Bathurst, 22 February and 29 April 1814, CO111/81; James Rodway, History of British Guiana from the Year 1668 to the Present Time, 3 vols. (Georgetown: J. Thompson, 1891–1894), Vol. 2, pp. 297–298. 4 Central Africans are likely to have been undercounted by Sierra Leone and Guyana officials. James Crosby, “Statement of the total number of immigrants introduced into the colony of British Guiana from the 1st Jan. 1835 to the 31st Dec. 1864,” 4 January 1865, CO111/350, has a total of 13,264 liberated Africans. My total is higher than Crosby’s by 299 despite my exclusion of 91 Africans who arrived in 1838, 819 from Nassau (1837–1846) and the Cape Verde islands (1856, 1858). However, I added 391 from slavers condemned locally, and the final 42 who arrived from St. Helena in 1865. Liberated African ethnic statistics were compiled from governors’ dispatches in CO267 (Sierra Leone), CO111 (British Guiana), CO247 (St. Helena), and CO386 (CLEC) in the Public Record Office, Kew; The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, No. 2177; and from correspondence and newspapers in the Guyana National Archives, Georgetown (GNA). In 1919, the Guyana archivist published an article based on government records. See J. Graham Cruickshank, “African immigrants after slavery,” Timehri, 3rd Series, 6 (September 1919): 77 (reprinted in David A. Granger, ed., Scenes from the History of the Africans in Guyana [Georgetown: Free Press, 1999], pp. 21–37). The West Central African slave trade that supplied these Central Africans is discussed in Joseph Miller’s chapter. 5 9,278 West Indian immigrants were probably divided between Africans and Creoles. See Table 12.1 of this paper.

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Central Africans in North America and the Caribbean Table 12.1. African and African-Descended Population of Guyana 1851

Origin

Number

Natives a Natives of Barbados Natives of other W. I. Islands African immigrants Old Africans Second West India Regiment b Third West India Regiment b Total

86,455 4,925 4,353 7,168 7,083 369 298 110,651

a b

African-Guyanese (Creoles), not aborigines. Mostly Africans.

Liberated Central Africans would have discovered older compatriots, perhaps Kongo welfare company activists of the 1810s or their children who had maintained a functioning Central African social base. Miller’s characterization of ethnic slave networks as “ephemeral” needs reexamination in light of information from Guyana. In the 1980s, village descendants of liberated West Central Africans proved valuable repositories of cultural and social orientations, practices, and memories, providing insights into the nature of Central African relations in both preemancipation and postemancipation plantation environments and supplementing the considerable data we have about their liberated African ancestors. LIBERATED AFRICANS

Gender imbalance in the slave trade and Sierra Leonian women’s aversion to plantation labor meant that approximately 70% (8,240) of the 11,740 liberated African immigrants for whom gender information is available were males.6 No attempt has been made to calibrate gender with age because 6 Compare with nineteenth century recaptive African shipments in Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, where 68.50% and 74.70%, respectively, were sent to Sierra Leone and St. Helena. An immigration law required one third of liberated African immigrants to be female. See Monica Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo”: A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841–1865 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 17, 18, 22; Schuler, “Recruitment of African indentured labourers,” p. 130.


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immigrant age statistics are incomplete and unreliable, and the line between adulthood and childhood fluctuated between 12 and 14 years as labor needs dictated. A large number of recaptive children, 36% and 53%, respectively, who were taken to Sierra Leone and St. Helena were probably tempted to emigrate by extravagant offers such as a beaver hat “full, full” of money for a mere week’s work. Relatively few married couples or families emigrated.7 The extent to which illness and death – the journey to the other world –pervaded the slave and liberated African immigrant experience is significant for their later elaboration of African worldviews in Guyana and the Caribbean. Mortality for recaptives taken to St. Helena and Sierra Leone averaged 9% and 10%, respectively.8 Nor were the liberated African depots, notably the deplorable Rupert’s Valley Station in St. Helena, or emigrant ships much better. St. Helena, which became the site of a British ViceAdmiralty Court in 1840, was a barren, rocky, windy south Atlantic island unsuitable for permanent settlement. Here the British took slaves captured south of the equator and held them in an offshore hulk, a hospital, or in unsanitary huts in Rupert’s, “a desolate valley running down to the sea between bare and bleak hills approached only by a winding path cut in the rock.” Most observers commented on the arriving Africans’ skeletal appearance. Rupert’s Valley, reached after crossing the sea or Kalunga, the name for the watery boundary between this and the other world, must have seemed like Mputu, the land of the dead, to West Central African newcomers. In 1860, an Anglican bishop, who recognized the classical Greek version of the concept, watched the “gaunt skeleton forms” of 500 young recaptive newcomers who would soon be bound for Guyana, “crawling on the beach” at Rupert’s Valley, and he compared them to “Charon and his crew of shades.” Out of 4,908 people admitted to Rupert’s Valley between September and March 1849, 3,394 had to be hospitalized and 1,283 died. Many survivors were permanently blinded by ophthalmia or sunk in depression. St. Helena’s Colonial Surgeon attributed the high mortality rate at Rupert’s to many causes, but placed “the depressing moral influence of fear and anxiety” at the head of his list.9 The detention of 7 See Schuler, Alas, pp. 23–25, 114; Charles Elliot to Duke of Newcastle, No. 25, 28 March 1864 and enclosures, CO247/100; Patrick Ross to Earl Grey, No. 11, 22 November 1849, and enclosures; “Papers relative to emigration from Africa to the West Indies,” PP 1850 (643), XL, p. 364; Elliot to Newcastle, No. 10, 26 January 1864 and enclosures, CO247/100; L. Crookall, British Guiana; or, Work and Wandering among the Creoles and Coolies, the Africans and Indians of the Wild Country (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), pp. 108–109. 8 Mortality statistics are from The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. 9 Schuler, Alas, pp. 27–28. “Report of the liberated African establishment, St. Helena: Dr. Vowell’s Report,” and “Extract of a report of Dr. Rawlins, 25 May 1849,” in Ross to Grey, No. 7, 12 June 1849, “Papers relative to emigration from Africa and the West Indies,” PP 1850 (643), XL, pp. 364,

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survivors at Rupert’s ranged from 1 to 7 months and up to 1 year for the seriously ill.10 In Sierra Leone, where settlement was an option, confinement in the Liberated African Yard soon became a strategy for pressuring people to emigrate. After 1844, they could be held incommunicado, accessible only to military and labor recruiters from 1 to 3 months pending the arrival of immigrant transports. Those who refused to emigrate or enlist in the military were released into the general population without financial support.11 On the 76 immigrant transports to Guyana, 30 incurred no deaths whereas 30 others had mortality of 3% or less, better than the Jamaican African immigrant ship record.12 The 10 vessels listed in Table 12.2 had mortality rates between 4% and 21%. Not surprisingly, it was mostly new recaptives who died. Even where mortality was low or nonexistent, many were debilitated at embarkation and hospitalized upon arrival.13 Ten of the 436 Growler passengers who arrived in Guyana from Sierra Leone in August 1847, for example, died in the general hospital, another 46 expired after allocation to estates, and nine were still incapacitated by illness at the end of 1847. Although some form of diarrhea was the major cause of death, plantation nurses ascribed the demise of 18 Growler children on four East Coast Demerara estates to “African cachexy.” As Dr. George Bonyun, the physician who reported on it, realized, cachexy described extreme debility usually “induced by bad and insufficient food.” But as in St. Helena, cachexy was considered “more frequently . . . the consequence of great and continued fear. The victims of ‘obeah’ [witchcraft],” the doctor explained, “are thus destroyed.”14 From the outset, therefore, African immigrants associated the misfortune of enslavement and the malnutrition that visibly sucked the

10

11 12 13 14

387; enclosures in Ross to Grey, No. 7, 21 May 1850, CO247/74; “Return of Africans brought to St. Helena and their disposal from 9 June 1840 to 31 December 1849,” in Ross to Grey, No. 16, 6 June 1850, CO247/74; Bishop Piers Claughton to Rev. W. T. Bullock, 29 December 1859 and 17 January 1860. D8 USPG letters from Natal, St. Helena, Sierra Leone, Mauritius, 1850–1859; Edward Griffith, R.N. to Lt. Colonel Clarke, 9 September 1850, in No. 15, Separate, Slave Trade, Lt. Colonel R. Clarke to Grey, 25 September 1850, CO247/74. Over 500 recaptives sailed on the Broughton Hall in January 1860; see James Crosby to Governor’s Secretary, 4 February 1860, in Henry Wodehouse to Newcastle, No. 17, 6 February 1860, CO111/326. See Col. Hamelin Trelawny to Stanley, No. 10, 23 February 1843, CO247/59; Report of Thomas Goodwin, Missy Catechist, St. Helena to USPG for Quarter Ending 30 June 1870, E24 USPG Missionary Reports, 1868–1869; Bishop Thomas Welby to Newcastle, 27 February 1863, D25 USPG letters Received. St. Helena 1860–1870. Schuler, Alas, pp. 25–26. Schuler, Alas, pp. 115–117. See Ross to Grey, No. 7, 21 May 1850, CO247/74, for disputes between the station doctor and the Collector of Customs over liberated Africans’ fitness to travel. Appendix No. 5, “Africans brought by Her Majesty’s steam ship Growler,” and George R. Bonyun, M.D., “Remarks to accompany table A,” in Light to Grey, No. 10, 11 January 1848, CO111/250. Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 181, discusses cachexia.


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Table 12.2. Liberated African Immigrant Ships With Over 3% Mortality

Ship

Port Embarked

Dois de Fevreiroa

Rio

Name unknownb

Rio

Arabian IV c Zulmeira d

Sierra Leone Rio

Margaret II c

St. Helena

Growler f

Sierra Leone

Arabian IX g Helena h Una i Reliance j

Sierra Leone Sierra Leone Sierra Leone St. Helena

a

Date

1841 May 1842 Oct.–Nov. 1844 Feb.–Mar. March 1846 Aug.–Sep. 1847 Jul.–Aug. 1848 Feb.–Mar. Mar.–Apr. Apr.–May Nov.–Dec.

No. Embarked Deaths % Died

Hospitalized

154

9

5.8

6

140

14

10.0

—

267 156

23 11

8.6 7.0

46 —

351

16

4.5

—

456

20

4.3

25

260 121 240 231

22 12 52 20

8.5 9.9 21.6 8.6

44 18 38 15

Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. No. 2105; W. B. Wolseley, Circuit Magistrate’s Journal, 1841, Gazette and General Advertiser, 36, 5530 (16 Nov. 1841): 3–4; Light to Lord John Russell, No. 57, 19 May 1841 and enclosures, CO111/178. b Light to Stanley, No. 195, 2 Dec. 1842 and enclosures, CO111/194. c Light to Grey, No. 57, 2 Apr. 1844 and enclosures, CO111/253. d No. 2308 in Transatlantic Slave Trade Database: Light to Stanley, No. 72, 2 Apr. 1844, CO111/210. e John B. Beresford, M. D., “Health Officer’s Register,” and John P. Van Rossum to Humphrys, 10 Sept. 1846, in Light to Grey, No. 190, 17 Sept. 1846, CO111/236. f Appendix No. 5, “Africans Brought by Her Majesty’s Steam Ship Growler,” and Bonyun, “Remarks to Accompany Table A,” in No. 10, Light to Grey, 11 Jan. 1848, CO111/250. g R. B. Perry and Edward Duke Bach, in “Minutes of Enquiry Relative to the Causes of Mortality on Board the Transport Barque Arabian on her Passage to Demerara from Sierra Leone, 20 March 1848,” in A. Lyons and J. McLeond to Walker, 30 Mar. 1848; Humphrys to Walker, 28 Apr. 1848, and Daniel Blair to Light, 24 Apr. 1848, GNA. h Johnstone to Walker, 19 Apr. 1848, “Report on the Arrival of the Brig Helena,” with enclosures, GNA; Light to Grey, No. 69, 28 Apr. 1844 and enclosures, CO111/252. i Johnstone, “Health Officer’s Report of Immigrants by the Ship Una,” in No. 9 Light to Grey, 17 May 1848, CO111/253; J. Wigley to Humphrys, 6 May 1848, GNA; and CLEC, 10th General Report, PP 1850 [1204] XXIII, p. 140. j Walker to Grey, No. 166, 29 Dec. 1848 and enclosures, CO111/260; CLEC, 10th General Report, PP 1850 [1204], XXIII, p. 141. Source: Gazette and General Advertiser, 36, 5530 (16 Nov. 1841); CO111/194, No. 57, 5/19/1841; CO111/ 194, No. 195, 12/2/1842; CO111/253, No. 57, 4/2/1844; CO111/210, No. 72, 4/2/1844; CO111/236, No. 1909/17/1846; CO111/250, No. 10, 1/11/1848; CO111/252, No. 69, 4/28/1844; CO111/253, No. 9, 5/17/1848; CO111/260, No. 166; GNA, Lyons & McLeod 3/30/1848, Humphrys 4/28/1848, Blair 4/24/1848, Johnstone 4/19/1848, Wigley 5/6/1848; PP 1850 [1204], XXIII, CLEC, 10th General Report; Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, Nos. 2105, 2308.

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life out of its victims with the fearsome work of witches, a theme that recurs in the liberated African experience. Miller makes a sound case for the ever-evolving nature of African ethnic or geographical identities, yet he notes their utilitarian nature. This was also the case with liberated Africans for whom “ethnicity” was probably the most useful factor in recruitment, labor, and social, economic, and political organization. In 1985, Central African descendants recalled the following groups: Zombo, Yaka, Mbomo (Mboma?), Zomo (?), and Nsundi, Modongo (“strangers” from north and east of the Congo estuary), Madinga Kongo (Madinga, a distinctive Central African dance style and another word for the Jamaican ancestral rite, Kumina) and Mundela Kongo (mundela or mundele: white person; “Mundele Kongo,” not a known KiKongo expression, may have described Luso-Africans).15 Africans’ ethnic connections had been institutionalized earlier in slave-era Guyana and in Sierra Leone, reinforced by the associations of shipmates who had “walked in the same boat” and therefore were fictive kin. These probably formed the basis of the friendly societies that flourished openly from the 1840s on.16 In Sierra Leone, such mutual aid companies also facilitated laborrecruiting activities as West Indian labor promoters selected interpreters and delegates from representative ethnic groups in Sierra Leone and/or Guyana. Although the Guyana immigration department initially assigned liberated Africans to specific estates for a year, in practice, liberated Africans escaped indentures for the first 9 years of immigration.17 An inadequate supply of immigrants, planter competition for labor, and immigrants’ own inclinations made delegates and their compatriots, especially Kru men and Sierra Leonians, remarkably mobile. They manipulated ethnic networks 15 Guyanese ethnic names were provided by Mavis Morrison of Annandale and Messrs. Pere, Carmichael, and Scott of Seafield. Europeans and their Euro-African offspring lived in the hinterland of Luanda and in the Ovimbundu states of Bihe, Wambu (Huambo), and Mbailundu. See Joseph C. Miller,Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade: 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 28–30, 238, 254–263. Mulattoes acquired white status, culture and dress, usually as servants, with some priests and soldiers. Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 201–202; Kenneth M. Bilby and Fu-Kiau kia Bunseki, “Kumina: A Kongo-based tradition in the New World,” Les cahiers du CEDAF 8, 4 (1983): 107, n. 33, pp. 77, 84–85. 16 See Cruickshank, “Among the ‘Aku’ ” pp. 76–77, “British Guiana, table A, half year ending 31st December 1847,” in Light to Grey, No. 49, 1848, CO111/151; Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 162–163, 170; William R. Hamilton, “Sierra Leone and the liberated Africans,” Fisher’s Colonial Magazine and Commercial-Maritime Journal, 7 (1841): 27, 34–35 and 8 (1842), 41; John Peterson, Province of Freedom: A History of Sierra Leone, 1787–1870 (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp. 190–213, 220–228, 259–271. 17 Cruickshank, “African Immigrants,” p. 82.


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to locate shipmates, elicit information about employment, reduce contract duration, raise wages, control labor management, acquire land, secure repatriation opportunities, and to sample, control, and change work locations. These strategies, together with immigrant Africans’ “rapid amalgamation with the native black population” (some of whom were actually Africaborn), explain to a large extent the ability of Central Africans to establish community life in Guyana and influence Guyanese culture. “Amalgamation” was also the goal of planters. They assigned young Africans to the care and tutelage of an old African man or woman. “The pride of those old people in their charges’ progress – in the way they could say the alphabet or repeat the Lord’s Prayer – is described as touching,” Cruickshank wrote in 1919. On Rosehall estate, an old Kongo man played his drum to cheer up newcomers, (see Figure 12.2), and old Kongo people acted as interpreters.18 Together with ethnic mentoring, planters also provided ethnic self-management in which ethnic representatives directed work crews, a system deprecated by one planter as “this many-headed system of inspection . . . unfortunately . . . rendered necessary by the circumstances of the times.”19 When such strategies, combined with competitive wages, housing, and schools, proved inadequate, planters demanded tougher laws to stabilize the immigrant labor force. In 1848, 3-year voluntary indentures existed. In 1850, a 1-year indenture was legislated, but the Colonial Office refused to approve compulsory 3-year contracts until 1854. That year, Ordinance 7 enforced mandatory 3-year contracts followed by two 1-year contracts that could be commuted for a fee. In 1856, in order to tie youths to a single employer, Ordinance 2 required immigrants under age 14 to be indentured until age 18. By then, immigration from Sierra Leone had ceased, the last shipment having arrived in October 1852. Thereafter, African immigration meant only West Central African immigration from St. Helena. In 1863, the extension of indentures to 5 years had no significant impact. Fewer slaves were being sent to St. Helena, and 16 shipments of 2,374 West Central Africans sailed between 1856 and 1865. The last ship, the Athletae, sailing to 18 Monica Schuler, “Liberated Africans in nineteenth century Guyana,” The 1991 Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture (Mona, Jamaica: Department of History, University of the West Indies, 1992), pp. 2–3. Brian L. Moore, Race, Power and Social Segmentation in Colonial Society: Guyana after Slavery, 1838–1891 (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1987), pp. 140–141, described comparable immigrant Portuguese mobility. Liberated Africans’ mobility contradicts the common assertion that employers and officials discriminated in favor of the Portuguese. George Bonyun, M.D. to Henry Light, 6 January 1848, in Light to Grey, No. 10, 11 January 1848; Cruickshank, “Liberated Africans,” pp. 77, 83. 19 H. Von Griesheim of De Kinderen, in Rev. James Aitken, “A Voice from the Past,” Timehri, 3rd ser., 4 (1917): 134.

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Figure 12.2. A Kongo musician in Guyana, c. 1919 (courtesy of Free Press Publishing).

Guyana with Indian immigrants, stopped at St. Helena and took on board the final 42 Central Africans to go to Guyana.20 20 Schuler, “Liberated Africans,” pp. 3, 15, n. 10 and 11; CLEC, 13th General Report, 1853, PP 1852–53 [1647.] XL. p. 158; GNA: Crosby to Walker, 22 March 1865 and enclosure, J. W. Thompson to Crosby, 17 March 1865, CO386/188.


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Liberated Africans established new ethnic communities on rented or purchased land on the outskirts of plantations or in the ethnic quarters of existing villages. They could be found all over the coastal and riverain plantation areas. Employment opportunities on nearby sugar plantations and relatively low land values attracted many Africans to Canal No. 1, a former coffee district on the West Bank of the Demerara River. By 1849, not only Central Africans but also Yoruba, Kru, Portuguese, and East Indians had joined Guyanese in the purchase or rental of farms ranging from a few to 20 acres for plantain, root crop, coffee, and rice cultivation. Bagotville, a Canal No. 1 village of 3,000 founded earlier by former slaves around a London Missionary Society chapel, had several hundred liberated Africans and an equal number of Portuguese.21 By 1881, 44 Kongo people rented or owned land at Geneve estate on Canal No. 1 while working at Le Desir estate and West Coast Demerara sugar properties. As Walter Rodney vividly described, Guyana is below sea level, with massive drainage problems. When the Geneve Kongo could not pay their drainage taxes, they lost control of Geneve, which became known as “Congo Heart Burn.”22 Kongo reputations for occult powers have survived in the Canal.23 In 1841, some of the 145–150 people from Benguela brought from Rio de Janeiro on the slaver Dois de Fevreiro were located on Plantation Overwinning in Berbice. At the end of the century, a small community with a London Missionary Society chapel still inhabited Overwinning village.24 Other West Central African centers existed on Wakenaam Island, Mara, Enmore, Lusignan, and Annandale estates, among others. In establishing such communities, West Central Africans and others built on overlapping shipmate ties and ethnic ties. They attempted to restrict marriage to the ethnic group, although the shortage of women made this difficult. Intermarriage and cohabitation therefore occurred with Africans 21 Schuler, “Liberated Africans,” pp. 3–5; Cruickshank, “Among the Aku,” p. 74. 22 Rodney, Guyanese Working People, pp. 1–18. Although some Indians began rice farming at Vive la Force in Canal 1 in 1853, it was not until the empoldering of the canal began around 1891 that significant numbers were attracted to the area; see J. A. Veerasawmy, “Noitgedacht murder,” Timehri 3rd ser., 6 (September 1919): 115; Robert James Moore, “East Indians and Negroes in British Guiana: 1838–1880” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Sussex, 1970), p. 235. 23 Elliott P. Skinner, “Ethnic interaction in a British Guiana rural community: a study in secondary acculturation and group dynamics” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1955), p. 254. 24 “Dois” is spelled “Dous” in The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, No. 2105. It embarked with 500 people at Benguela and lost 125 at sea. Many of the Rio recaptives taken to Guyana in the 1840s and 1850s were embarked at Benguela, a port that still attracted Rio slave merchants, although fewer than in the eighteenth century. See Miller’s Table A and discussion in this volume. See Table B and W. B. Wolseley, Circuit Stipendiary Magistrate’s Journal, 22 June to 1 July 1841 inclusive, in Gazette and General Advertiser, 36, 5530 (16 November 1841): 3–4; and Crookall, British Guiana, pp. 108–109, for the Central Africans of Overwinning.

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in general and, inevitably, with the local community.25 Occasionally cohabitation occurred with non-Africans. In 1847, for instance, a liberated African woman and Indian man from Lochaber estate, Berbice, were reported to have “two remarkably handsome and well made children.”26 As late as 1901, however, Guyana Kongo weddings still attracted Central African guests from a wide area.27 HISTORICAL MEMORIES

Language West Central African languages were still spoken in twentieth-century Guyana. A Guyanese Bretheren missionary in Angola recalled conversing in Mbundu with two elderly Ovimbundu women who had been captured in Bihe.28 Three traditions concerning language survival operate among liberated Central African descendants in Guyana and the Caribbean. One is that African languages died because the original immigrants, wishing to maintain their privacy, used them to discuss private matters and preferred not to teach them to the younger generation, fearing that children would divulge their affairs to plantation overseers. As a result, the languages died with them. A second tradition states, on the one hand, that favorite grandchildren learned an African language from hanging around their grandparents and, on the other, that some children jeered at adults speaking an African language and therefore did not learn anything.29 A third tradition concerned the circulation of African language primers by itinerant traders, missionaries who had been to Africa, or Garveyites who provided African language instruction as part of their nationalist agenda.30 25 Schuler, Alas, pp. 66, 70–71, 151–152 n. 26; interviews with Mavis Morrison and her friends in Annandale, 1985. 26 Bonyun, “Remarks to accompany table A,” enclosed in Light to Grey, No. 10, 11 January 1848. 27 “Peculiar native wedding ceremony,” Daily Chronicle (Wed. 19 June 1901). Thanks to Sister Noel Menezes, for providing me with a copy of this article. Shipmates regularly attended each others’ family weddings and funerals in Siera Leone; Hamilton, “Sierra Leone and the Liberated Africans,” Fisher’s Colonial Magazine and Commercial-Maritime Journal, 8 (June 1842): 41. 28 A Guyanese missionary, George R. Murrain, worked in Angola in 1913. I am grateful to Linda Heywood of Howard University for sharing this anecdote from John T. Tucker – A Tucker Treasury, ed. Catherine Tucker Ward (Windfield, British Colombia: Wood Lake Books, 1984), p. 111. A liberated African, James Nott, probably a Mende, was also a Brethren minister in Guyana; see Henry W. Case, On Sea and Land, On Creek and River: Being an Account of Experiences in the Visitation of Assemblies of Christians in the West Indies and British Guiana; with Reminiscences of Pioneer Missionaries and the Slave Trade Formerly Carried on from Bristol (London: Morgan and Scott, Ltd., office of The Christian, 1910). 29 For Jamaica and Trinidad, see Schuler, Alas, pp. 82–83; Bilby and Bunseki, “Kumina,” pp. 63–92; Maureen Warner-Lewis, Guinea’s Other Suns (Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1991), pp. 27–29. Mavis Morrison of Annandale is the source for children’s jeering. 30 For instance, Rev. Murrain of the Brethren could have been a conduit for books. I learned about Garveyite language instruction while at Annandale.


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Language retention and propagation were important to some Creole Africans, as illustrated by the existence of a handwritten KiKongo-English vocabulary. Mavis Morrison allowed me to copy the two remaining pages of an original six-page lexicon that had been written years before by a friend from Mahaica. Since the wordlist is merely a fragment of the original lexicon, no attempt has been made to draw conclusions concerning the selection or the inclusion of invented words. Although some of the words appear to be invented, Professor Wyatt MacGaffey identified the vocabulary as essentially “good KiKongo words with more or less correct meanings.” MacGaffey suggests that the vocabulary is a dialect of the Ngoyo area on the north bank of the Congo River, possibly from Boma, a leading mid-nineteenthcentury slave exporting center and the de facto capital of Ngoyo.31 The list is reproduced in Table 12.3 approximately as it was recorded, with translation and comments added in columns three and four. The enumeration of words is original and indicates a progression from a religious to a secular vocabulary. Names Immigrants retained African personal names for use among themselves, while also adopting the names of estates, their managers, or owners.32 Thus Jungu took Elliot, the surname of the Ogle estate manager, as his first name, and Smith as his surname, because the manager did not want to share a surname with his servant. Later, Jungu decided, “This na’ correspond,” and he reversed the order of the names. Mrs. Morrison had four names: Miriam, Mavis, Mary-Anne, and Mamatch, or “last born,” the name by which she was known most of her life. A selection of West Central African immigrant names can be found in Table 12.4. The original spelling has been retained. It is hoped that this sample will encourage scholars interested in naming practices to examine the Liberated African Department registers from which most of the names are taken. John Thornton comments that these are genuine Kongo names, many of which appear as last names in an early twentieth century compilation of clan personal names as well as on a 1774 baptismal list. Starting in the sixteenth century, most Kongo people and some non-Christians in Angola acquired Christian saints’ names. Double and single Christian names were found among both elite and commoner Mbundu in Angola. Thus it is 31 Mbanza Kongo traded with Boma; see Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 222. My thanks to Wyatt MacGaffey for translation and notes supplied 26 September 1999. 32 Cruickshank, “Liberated Africans,” p. 78.

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Central Africans in North America and the Caribbean Table 12.3. A Kongo-Guyanese Word List a

African

Zam-bee Mi-ambeh Moh-lundeh Gambia Con-ga-long-Goon-ga Zam-bee in Gambia Mo-an-na Put-too Pum-beh Condam-buah

Yu-diam Sangah Tuyah Lakah Gun-deh Me-an-eh Neng-uah Lun gah Bee-zee Mungah Beezee-mungah Chenga Swick-e-dee Swick-e-dee mochenga Fam-what Zun-doh Zowah Quenda Gungah Ca-lan-go To wee-dee-weh (tu-hwidie c ) Vundeh

MacGaffey Translationb

English Meaning

1 2 3 4 5

Almighty God Son & Spirit Church Church Church

6 God in Church or house 7 Child 8 People 9 Praise 10 Dog

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Nzambi ? ? ? Kongo dia Ngunga ?

Mbanza Kongod

mwana mputu e

child, person pauper e

nkondi a mbwa

“nkondi in form of dog, which some were”

House ? Smoke ? Match tiya Light nlaku Leppa (leper?) ? Breast [ma-]bene Blood menga Gold lunga Salt mbizi Fish mungwa Saltfish mbizi a mungwa Cane cenga [chenga] Sugar sukadi (Fr. sucre) Sugar cane Deft (deaf?) fwa matu Invalid zoonda c Stupid zowa Come & go kwenda Bell ngunga Calling & ringing ? Stop – finish – done hwidi c

32 Kill

God

vonda

fire

breast blood bracelet meat, fish salt salt fish sugar cane sugar to be deaf sick person c to be stupid to go bell finish c to Kill

f


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Table 12.3. Continued

African

Moon-de-leh Doon-doo Yal-la Ki Vulla Ma-zah Kung-ah Bunga Gangoo Sum-bee D. Kan-da D. A. (?) Co-leh-leh Pwantee (pwaac )

a b c d

e f

MacGaffey Translationb

English Meaning

33 European or White People 34 Coulard (colored) people 35 Red 36 Rain 37 Water 38 Song 39 Bring out or raise 40 Sense 41 Send (buyc ) 42 Letter 43 A Friend 44 Soldier 45 Police

mundele

white person

ndundu

Albino

? mvula maza nkunga ?bonga ngangu f sumbie kanda ? olele phwaac

— rain water song, music to take, pick up intelligence letter, book — how are you? hat(cap?)c

Collected from Mrs. Mavis Morrison, Annandale, East Coast, Demerara, in 1985, and reproduced as closely as possible to the original, including spelling and numbering style. Wyatt MacGaffey provided the translation and notes, 26 and 27 Sept. 1999. Kifindi Bunkheti suggested these translations. Most writers assume that ngunga means bell here, as in church bell, hence “Kongo of the (church) bell,” from the large number of Kongo churches. MacGaffey considers this “probably a missionary fantasy” and suggests, instead, “the original (Mbanza) Kongo, ngunga = taproot.” But see No. 29 above. Mputu can also be a short form of Mputulekeezo, meaning Portuguese. See MacGaffey, Religion and Society, p. 62. Nkondi: name for a type of Kongo nkisi or charm shaped most often like a terrifying human but also like a dog or leopard and used to seal agreements and hunt witches and evildoers. See Wyatt MacGaffey, trans. and ed., Art and Healing of the Bakongo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 121–122.

not surprising that two men from the Brazilian slaver Graça, who went to Guyana on the ninth voyage of the Arabian in 1848, had Christian names: John Francisco (No. 79584) and Antonio (No. 79588). “John” may have been a clerk’s translation of the Portuguese Joao. Francisco was a common Portuguese Christian (i.e., first) name but not a standard Portuguese surname. Six men from the David Malcolm immigrant ship from St. Helena who

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Central Africans in North America and the Caribbean Table 12.4. Selected West Central African Immigrants Names

Name

From Sierra Leone a Roger Stewart-I, 13 Oct.–17 Dec. 1844 Cabondoo b Roger Stewart-III, 18 Aug.–19 Sep. 1845 (from Uncas No. 3484, unknown brigantine, May 1845) Mareambar Marbango Vengoo Fartartar Lembar b Rufus, 13 Sep.–13 Nov. 1845 Carsungu Pardie Arjubba Pembar b Arabian IX, 23 Feb.–18 Mar. 1848 (from Graça No. 3613, Aug. 1847 & Malaga No. 3670, Dec. 1847) Kangar Carzangar John Francisco Antonio Maryaingee Zambee Gangar Zingar Cabongo Pollah Mazekah b Helena, 30 Mar.–18 Apr. 1848 (from Graça No. 3613, Aug. 1847 & Malaga No. 3670, Dec. 1847) Carpalay Swow Ketutee Katriuna Caryougo Gomar Panzoo Bandoo Mafullah Simbah Pembah Atusabbah

LAR No.

Male

Female

Age

—

M

—

—

75385 75459 75495 75792 75768

M M M M —

— — — — F

31 26 27 11 23

79477 79576 79584 79588 81977 82139 82165 82192 82198 82642 82673

M M M M M M M M M — —

— — — — – — — — — F F

19 24 24 22 2-? 26 26 27 26 14 14

79622 79777 79821 79649 79891 82400 82201 82390 82424 82522 82273 82676

M M M — — M M M M M — —

— — — F F — — — — — F F

20 13 10 17 8 6 10 8 8 9 20 13


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Table 12.4. Continued

Name

LAR No.

Male

Female

Age

796656 82278 82302 82377 82485

— M M M M

F — — — —

20 12 7 14 7

M M — — M

— — F F —

23 22 12 15 13

— M M M M M M

F — — — — — —

12 20 14 14 20 16 20

M M — —

— — F F

— — — —

b

Una, 11 Apr.–5 May 1848 (from Graça No. 3613, Aug. 1847 & Malaga No. 3670, Dec. 1847) Marhaccalur Tonyeh Beelar Sambah Mayaller From St. Helena c Hamilla Mitchell, 29 Jul.–26 Aug. 1856 Chaba Malenfoo Bambia Mavoongoo a Dominick Daly, 29 Mar.–21 Apr. 1858 Labella Kingkala Coossoo Pembar Pembalala Endokee (Ndoki?) a David Malcolm, 26 June–5 Aug. 1862 Meather Coaah James Boomgah Felix Mocaoomb Saul Chumboo Archibald Wangie Napoleon Kaboongoo Festus Fungee c Reward, 16 Sep.–20 Oct. 1863 Kazoongah Matambah Enzambah Vallah

a

Names of deceased people from ship surgeons’ lists. Random list of recaptives in the Sierra Leone LAR who emigrated to Demerara or Berbice. c Names published by Cruickshank, “African Immigrants,” pp. 77–78. Source: CO111/220, No. 30, 2/15/1845; CO111/226, No. 255, 12/18/1845; CO111/336, No. 156, 8/10/1862; CO386/162, No. 47, 5/6/1858; CO111/336, No. 156, 8/10/1862; SLA, Liberated African Register, Vol. 15, 1845–1848; TransAtlantic Slave Trade Database, Nos. 3484, 3613, 3670, 4874; Cruickshank, “African Immigrants,” pp. 77–78. b

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died at sea had African second names, and with the exception of Napoleon Kaboongoo (Napoleon being an unsurprising choice for a man stationed on the island where Napoleon Bonaparte died), English first names – James Boomgah, Felix Mocaoomb, Saul Chumboo, Archibald Wangie, and Festus Fungee. The African second names are probably not family surnames but appellations chosen to demonstrate a particular descent pattern. The English names probably resulted from a longer than usual residence in St. Helena, the men having left in mid-1862, only 3 years before the last recaptives went to Guyana. Two men (Nos. 82139 and 82165) from the Brazilian slaver Malaga from Loango, who sailed on Arabian-IX in 1848, had names with a religious association – Zambee (Nzambi, God) and Gangar (Nganga, priest). Endokee (Ndoki, witch), a man from the 1858 St. Helena immigrant ship Dominick Daly who might have been sold as the result of a witchcraft accusation, may have believed that he was indeed a witch.33 Enslavement and Deliverance Narratives Because liberated African immigrants were both enslaved and wage laborers, coerced and voluntary migrants, they had acute memories of the slave trade as the genesis of Guyana’s liberated African community. The trade was a turning point and a formative force in their lives. Separation from family, the journey into slavery, the work they had to perform, and attempts to escape are therefore major sites of memory and ritual and the stories they bequeathed to descendants or acquaintances. The slave trade inspired two kinds of historical narrative. The first are personal historical experiences of named Africans, developed scenarios whose episodes unfold in a meaningful manner, protected from improvisation by their recitation in a circle of knowledgeable friends who serve as sounding boards for the narrator. They are carefully memorized authentic accounts of enslavement and migration to Guyana, the “First-Time” of a specific immigrant family, describing candidly the role of Africans, even of relatives, in the narrators’ enslavement. Immigrants transmitted such life-transforming experiences to their children as precious legacies, possibly the narrators’ sole valuable possessions, to be safeguarded and passed on to posterity. They may employ allegory, but they are not allegories. 33 John Thornton’s comments were communicated by Linda Heywood on 23 May 2000. John Thornton, “Central African names and African-American naming patterns,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 50, 4 (October 1993): 728, 730, 733–739. Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, No. 3670, Malaga of Belorou; SLA, Liberated African Register, Vol. 15, 1845–1848 for the Arabian IX; Hincks to Newcastle, No. 156, 16 August, 1862, CO111/336 for the David Malcolm; Walker to Stanley, No. 47, 6 May 1858 and enclosures, CO111/162 for Dominick Daly. MacGaffey, Religion and Society, pp. 164–165, explains that one had only to dream of eating human flesh or unwittingly eat some as animal meat, to be judged or believe oneself guilty of witchcraft.


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The second category of historical narratives, allegories, are stock tales about migration, repatriation, ritual, and occult powers that interweave cosmology and history. They relate collective experiences in code and allegory, preserving collective memory through a process of “mnemonic streamlining” whereby “whole groups of traditions . . . abraded to anecdotes, are set up and contrasted so that in every account details are sharpened, altered or left out to imprint the mark of their association to other accounts.”34 Such narratives probe the deeper meaning of enslavement, exile, and exploitation, and ultimately “define what they [enslaved or liberated Africans] are and clarify their options for their future.” Thus the two types of narratives help explain and enrich one another.35 A typical nineteenth-century liberated African narrative tradition originates with the large number of Central African children pawned by family members as collateral for a loan, a well-documented practice. The availability of European goods on credit encouraged heavy borrowing and ultimately an uncle’s forfeiture of a child, the least valuable member of a family. The forfeited child could then be deported as a slave.36 At least three debt slavery episodes related by liberated Central Africans in Guyana have survived. The earliest version originated with two or three children from a group of 77 juveniles from Cabinda, rescued in 1842 from a Spanish schooner found drifting off the Essequibo coast. The report does no more than record their claim that they were enslaved to defray family debt.37 Near the end of the century, an anonymous London Missionary Society deacon from Overwinning, Berbice, the twenty-first and youngest child of a family from Boma, the Congo River entrepot, described his enslavement and recapture experiences for a missionary. The deacon asserted that he had been surrendered to Portuguese slave traders to discharge a family debt, and with 50–100 men and boys, was led in chains to a ship in whose hold they were dumped like “bags of rice . . . one upon another.” In about a week’s time, the British Navy rescued and escorted the slaves to Sierra Leone, where the deacon attended a school for liberated African orphans. Sometime between 1843 and 1845, when Guyanese and West Indian agents were permitted to recruit 34 Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 21–22, 89–90, 126, 139–146, and Joseph C. Miller, “Introduction,” The African Past Speaks, ed. Joseph C. Miller (Hamden, CN: Archon Books, 1980), pp. 7–8, 32, 33–52. 35 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition, pp. 20–21. 36 Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death, pp. 158–159, 106, 234–236; Robert W. Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500–1891 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 102; Jan Vansina, The Tio Kingdom of the Middle Congo, 1880–1892 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 366. 37 See Cruickshank, “African Immigrants,” p. 77n, and Light to Stanley, No. 80, 29 April 1842, CO111/190.

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immigrant labor from the schools, he and his schoolmates agreed to emigrate against the governor’s advice.38 Michael Gomez affirms that in North America “[t]ransported Africans and their progeny [my emphasis] were intimately acquainted” with the facts of African complicity in enslavement, and he particularly cites the 1858 case of some enslaved children landed in Georgia who “were careful [my emphasis] to mention that uncles were sometimes the ones who pawned the children.” Gomez’ acceptance of the authenticity of the children’s personal version of enslavement has tended to be overshadowed by his judicious and masterful deconstruction of Afro-North American parables of enslavement as a selective, symbolic discourse on the deeper meaning of servitude, which now tends to be portrayed as a sweeping denial of the existence of any reliable enslavement narratives.39 Yet the existence of allegorical communal narratives does not obviate the deliberate transmission of distinctive personal experiences of enslavement. Nor does it strain belief that offspring protected this precious inheritance from any “intergenerational crafting” as the concrete experience of a family founder, as his or her personal history. Jungu’s Narrative of Sale by an Uncle. In the twentieth century, Guyanese Central Africans continued to relate both empirical and allegorical slavery narratives. An example of the former is the detailed story that Jungu (d. 1933) related to his youngest daughter, Mavis Morrison, who became its custodian. Jungu also identified an uncle as his seller, explaining that this uncle handled the transaction because in his society, brothers were responsible for each other’s children. Jungu seemed unaware that a family debt could have been involved in his sale, however.40 [T]he big brother responsible for the small brother home, you get it? And the small brother responsible for the big brother home. . . . they can order anyone to go with him anywhere. So the uncle – is the small brother brother – take the small brother child – the son – and they always go on Friday, go hunt.

Jungu’s uncle convinced him that they were going hunting, but instead led him to the waterfront and delivered him to a slave merchant. But one day, the big brother came and ask for him [the nephew] to go. . . . As usual, he asked to go with him. He say, “Boy, come we go take a walk today.” Not tell the father nothing, where he carry him. He take a walk, but not in the farm, but he tell he is the farm they going. When they go . . . they get past the farm. So he asked the question, he say, “How far you going? He say, “Just ’til I meet” – in their 38 Crookall, British Guiana, pp. 108–109. 39 Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, pp. 199–210. 40 The more common pattern in Central Africa was for a maternal uncle to handle the transaction.


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language – “Just ’til I meet.” And when they go, go so till the boy see a boat, a big boat in the middle of the sea. He say he never see none [before]. . . . [He] ask he uncle, “That is what, uncle?” He say, “Is a boat.” He say, “What ’e doing there?” He say, “Come let us go, you going [to] know is what.” Well, in the place, they make a place like a platform, they stretch like a – I going say stelling [Guyanese dock]. Well, he see – when he walking up, walking up, he see some people, and standing at this place, so he know – he ask the question, “What they doing there?” He say, “You come along, we going.”

Jungu believed that coming from a society where commerce involved barter, his uncle wanted to acquire some cash. “But they do not know ’bout money,” Mrs. Morrison stated. “The first time the uncle will get money in his hand – is the boy – they do not know ’bout money. They do [know] ’bout swapping. And after he hear about this thing, and he want to see money, he carry the boy with him.” This explanation was probably a surmise on Jungu’s part, however. A child might not have been aware of any family debt, and his uncle and the merchant conducted their transaction at a distance and out of earshot. When they meet [arrived], he see some people hand tie, there one side. . . . Yes, woman and man, sometimes little girls, little boys. . . . Eh, eh, well, he see the man come up to he [the uncle] . . . well, they leave the boy here, and he go stand a little further, and he [the uncle] just go to the man. He aint know what the man give he [the uncle], he say, but he see the man come and put a chain in his hand, a chain to he.

Jungu described the scene at the shore, his boarding of a small boat that ferried him to a ship waiting offshore, and his anguished parting from his uncle. Well, was time for the boat to leave, is a small boat there a’ stelling side, and the big boat there a’ the ocean. They put he inside there. . . . Enough of them, plenty of them. They take them out to the side, ’cause the boat can’t come in inside. He say that he watch, he cr-y-y, all he cry, he crying, he crying, he crying. “Uncle, how you go, ow uncle. Well them a fool he, – coax he, coax he, coax he – until they get to the boat. Well, get into the boat, all of them one-one they come out – so they [were] chain[ed] on their hand – chain. He say they get this chain in their hand, they chain them to the post, in the steamer – boat. They chain them to the post, and when they chain them there, ahm, they can’t get to jump overboard. You understand?

Slaves were never unshackled close to the shore, according to Miller. In addition to chains, Jungu described a type of restraint that is not mentioned in other slave ship narratives – the seating of Africans in wet tar spread on the deck to prevent their jumping overboard.41 41 Tar, available for caulking, was also burned to fumigate slave holds. Miller, Way of Death, pp. 409, 412, 413. Most shipboard revolts occurred close to the African coast to increase chances of escape.

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But when he went to the boat, he say . . . he see enough ladies and gentleman sit down flat. And where they sit down, [it] is tar. You know? Well, he don’t know what is it. But when, later on, he say he come, he say they say that them is the one who want to jump over the boat. They chain their hand, and still and still they wrench their hand to jump over. You know, they don’t want to go. So they throw some tar and then put their biti there. They got to dirty, pee right there because they can’t get up. Well, then, now, they started to, the boat started to leave, he started to cry, that he leaving home. But when they meet a certain place, the place named St. Helena. When they meet a certain place, he hear they get freedom.

With the mention of St. Helena and Demerara, the narrative becomes somewhat confused. It hints that the slave ship collected slaves at other places after Jungu boarded it, and this process becomes conflated with the voyage to St. Helena, the discovery of their freedom, and the subsequent journey to Demerara. One needs to remember the “half-bewildered condition of . . . Africans landed . . . on a strange shore [St. Helena], and kept in a sort of bondage.” Jungu’s insistence that “they didn’t loose them” immediately is therefore accurate.42 During the chase and capture, Jungu and the other slaves would have been in the ship’s battened hold oblivious of seizure by the British Navy. His daughter explained, They in the boat, you know. And they, the head one, all of them, they say they freedom. The morning when they wake they tell them about freedom, everybody get freedom, but they didn’t loose them. . . . They didn’t loose them. The freedom, them have to meet at Guyana, where, every place they call in, they [were] sold. . . . But he and his friend[s] and his companions, them, who all live a’ one place, they meet in Guyana. Where they going, they picking up people from certain place, he say not Africa alone, no. . . . After then, he says that coming down, they meet in Georgetown. But they get their freedom in boat, but they didn’t loose them there.

Like many recaptives, Jungu did not accept the British explanation of indenture as a legitimate reimbursement of transportation costs to Guyana, so he described their acquisition as a sale. “When they come there, now, after they go so far, they [the planters] have to get back their money what they sell this people for – what they buy this people for. Well, when he come now, he say he come to a manager, Elliott [’s] estate.” Johannes Menne Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 165. 42 “Report of the Liberated African Establishment, St. Helena, Dr. Vowell’s Report and Collector’s Observations, and Extract of a Report of Dr. Rawlins, 25 May 1849,” in Ross to Grey, No. 7, 12 June 1849, “Papers relative to emigration from Africa and the West Indies,” PP 1850 (643.) XL, pp. 361–377, 381–386.


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That was Ogle, now a residential suburb of Georgetown, the capital of Guyana. Some of Jungu’s shipmates were hired with him. Louisa, Uncle Keke, Uncle Dallah, Auntie Mafuta, and Auntie Rose (pronounced Laws with a lisp that Mrs. Morrison mimicked and described as typically Kongo) moved away when they became adults, but they kept in touch with each other. After 4 years, Jungu became technically free, but the Ogle manager kept him on, claiming he was too young to be on his own. He gave Jungu some clothing, money, and a room in a long “range” (the typical Guyanese single-story sugar workers’ barracks). “Boy, you must behave yourself good, and every morning you must come and see me.” Jungu attended school half-days and worked first in the manager’s house and then with the estate’s mules, which pulled the sugar cane punts along the estates’ canal system, and he eventually became head mule boy.43 “They say Kongo like rum,” Mrs. Morrison mused, and to celebrate his freedom, Jungu and “he mati Kongo they a tek they snaps [rum]. He . . . come home drunk, and . . . people a call them ‘Kongo tar ass,’ come here a’ drink rum.” The epithet referred to the traces of tar from the slave ship that some Central Africans still bore on their bodies after arrival in Guyana. “Tar ass” resembled the “salt water” nickname attached to African newcomers during slavery, meaning “bumpkin” or “uncivilized.” When the tipsy Jungu struck a pregnant woman for calling him “Kongo tar ass,” the blow killed her, but her baby was delivered and survived. Jailed for 21 days, Jungu escaped trial for murder because his employer argued that “he is a indentured, he na know better.” He never drank rum again.44 “A first class drummer,” Jungu owned three drums: the rondel, the tampalin, and the sassi suziana, which Morrison described as a small instrument with a high, rapid staccato sound.45 Jungu left Ogle and “roamed from Georgetown . . . ’til Mara [a Berbice River plantation that employed many Africans]. He get children all about . . . all about he get children, over West Coast, he get children.” Finally, at the age of 50, he married Mavis’ mother, Elizabeth King (d. 1966), the 25-year-old daughter of an African woman and a man from Buxton. Eventually Jungu settled at Annandale estate village. The last of his children by his wife was Mavis (Mamatch). She claimed 43 Managers and missionaries financed estate schools attended by liberated Africans. See Schuler, “Liberated Africans,” p. 5; Bonyun, “Remarks to accompany table A,” in Light to Grey, No. 19, 11 January 1848, CO111/250; Rev. Thomas Bell to Light, 12 January 1846, in Light to W. E. Gladstone, Separate, Blue Book Report, 31 March 1846, CO111/232. 44 It was in order to explain why Jungu stopped drinking that Mavis Morrison mentioned the Kongo tar ass incident, and it was in order to explain the genesis of the expression that she recounted the story of his enslavement. 45 Another Central African drummer identified his drums as the tuta, the ja, and the base.

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that both parents died at advanced ages – her father at 115 years old in April 1933 and her mother at 105 years of age in 1966. Sense Man and Ruler Collaborate with Slave Traders. In 1985 at Seafield on the West Coast of Berbice, three Central African descendants, Mr. Carmichael, Mr. Scott, and Mr. Pere, assembled by a respected Guyanese elder statesman who also introduced me to Mrs. Morrison, reminisced about the old Kongo immigrants and their own life experiences. Mr. Carmichael related how in Africa, a local wise or “sense” man played a role in tricking people into going down to the seashore where Spanish slave traders were waiting to seize them. This is a variant of numerous slave narratives that relate not only that white men tricked Africans into captivity with displays of consumer goods ranging from red cloth to trinkets, but like enslavement for debt tales, also implicate an African middleman. All stylized, allegorical narratives, therefore, do not disregard “African agency and collusion.” As the following Guyanese tale relates, the village ngangu, or Sense (i.e., wise) Man assisted Spanish slavers in entrapping their victims. As Mr. Pere used the term, ngangu does indeed refer to intelligence, wisdom, or knowledge, but he is described as flying. Ngangu and nganga, priest or magician, are related, so the two terms seem to be combined here to suggest a wise man whose trickery derived from magical powers symbolized by the ability to fly. You know, a village always have Sense Man – [Mr. Pere: “Gango, man, gango!”] – and the Sense Man he flying – We came here by Spañol. When the Spañol they go to Africa, they try and intermingle with the Sense Man, and the Sense Man go in the village – a Big Man, you know – and they talk to you, come and say, come let we go a seashore, or you change a certain thing a seashore, and they allow you to go, or you allow yourself to go with them. When they go to Spañol they just hold you. . . . And put you inside the ship. So we came here. . . . Yes, trickery through the Sense Man.

Mr. Carmichael’s narrative took another occult turn when it described slave ship conditions. Magical powers of escape came into play as he touched on a common theme about people who found slavery intolerable but managed to fly away from the ship because they had observed a salt taboo despite being fed salted fish and meat. This short narrative, along with the lengthier “Carrion Crow” that follows it, exhibits many stock elements of other liberated African deliverance tales. These include unbearable slave ship or plantation conditions, hard labor, nostalgia for home, fidelity to African customs, ritual singing, ring dancing, drumming, and salt avoidance (believed to keep the body light), and transformation into a bird, sometimes a dove, but often a vulture (Carrion Crow in Guyana), which was associated


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with occult powers. Missing is the counter “science” of slave ship captains, slave owners, or employers who understood the deadly nature of salt and deliberately plied Africans with it to destroy their occult powers. This is implied, however, by emphasis on some slaves’ deliberate abstention from salt.46 Flight from A Slave Ship. This brief narrative was a group effort. Mr. Carmichael led off: In coming in the ship, as far as I understood, it was very agering [haggarding? i.e, exhausting?]. It wasn’t sweet. They packed like sardine in the ship. And some of the, even the slave, they didn’t know the sat – [?]. And some of them just – [E. Kwayana interjected:] “They need magic!” “Yes, magic. And some of them just fly away and they go right back. . . . They knew their little thing, yes, and they fly away.” [Mr. Scott explained the nature of the magic:] “They say they didn’t eat salt at the time, they didn’t eat salt yet. So they are light! [laughter].”

The deacon’s and Mr. Carmichael’s descriptions of slave ship conditions are good examples of mnemonic streamlining. In order to evoke the long ocean voyage of tightly packed slaves, each fused the horrors of the slave voyage into a single clear metaphor rooted in the personal experience of both listeners and narrators. Rice bags tossed and piled up in a cart or ship were a common enough sight in a rice-producing country like Guyana. Imported canned European sardines were a staple food of working-class Guyanese; pungent, oily, lying side by side, and sealed in a shallow little tin, they were apt symbols of slaves in a ship’s hold. Carrion Crow’s Flight to Africa. Mavis Morrison heard the tale “Carrion Crow” from her father. Morrison described Carrion Crow, who traveled on the same ship as Jungu, as a mysterious, imperious and antisocial Obeah man, a “sky-pilot,” as other Guyanese might have referred to him.47 During the voyage he kept to himself, silently staring into space. He observed his country’s customs, however, even though his neighbors found them repellent. He na eat nothin’. He don’t eat salt. . . . But . . . he kept in Guyana the same rule as they have in his country. . . . He don’t eat salt, he don’t eat too much of flesh, but he want play boss of them. 46 The Guyanese deliverance narrative that exhibits all of these characteristics is contained in Peter Kempadoo, “Recordings of folklore, drama and music made in Guyana, 1971–3,” University Library, University of Guyana, 1974, K104. 47 See Elliott P. Skinner, “Ethnic interaction,” p. 221.

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People found his deliberate flaunting of good manners offensive, a sign, perhaps, of a wild, unsocialized force in their midst. As a guest at wedding feasts, for instance, he nah take knife, he nah tek fork, he tek he teeth feh cut de meat. And you got to eat it. . . . if you refuse, you dead tomorrow morning. . . . he always put head ’pon de table [to eat?], he cut with he teeth, he tek he hand an’ put plantain and put rice. You got feh eat and you boss[ed].

Children who encountered Carrion Crow, died, it was believed. “He was a wicked man, me daddy say. He wicked.” Every day people buried a child. Everyone, even the estate manager, feared him, and he was a bad worker. Carrion Crow has affinities with the North American figure, King Buzzard, an African ruler who sold people to white slave traders who decided to enslave him as well. When the ruler died, neither heaven nor hell wanted him, and he was condemned to wander alone forever as a buzzard, “known to all de sperrit as de King Buzzard.”48 Carrion Crow, however, knew the correct ritual to grow his own wings and get himself back to Africa. One day, he called Jungu, ‘“Bro Jungu, me wan’ go home. . . . This country too hard for me.’” So he sent invitations to all the Kongo from Georgetown to Berbice to attend a farewell dance. They were happy to see him go. On the day before the dance, he dug a long ditch (“hole”). Among the Kongo, some rituals require a trench to define the boundary between this world and the next, to indicate “the possibility of passage.”49 The trench obviated the necessity of a river or other body of water. He buy 2 yards [of cloth?] . . . and he tie he waist, tie up all he waist, he tek out [i.e., painted?] he skin, he tek out he toes and he face mark so, all over. At five a.m., he tek a chime [gong], and ‘bong-bong-bong-bong-bong.’ He come out and he say ‘Well, today is my last day.’ And he say he want a little food ’til [at?] twelve o’clock. And from twelve you have to sing until six. You going eat breakfast [Guyanese lunch] and come out back again. . . . He beat the drum and said: ‘This drum got to knock so ’til me meet where me a’ go.’

Carrion Crow set the time of departure for six o’clock. Next he roped off a dance enclosure, known as a ganda in Guyana, from which he barred spectators. Outsiders (Mondongo) could not enter the dance ring but had to “stand one side.” Like the trench, the ganda was a microcosm.50 48 Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, pp. 207, 210–211; Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 4–7. 49 MacGaffey, Religion and Society, pp. 107, 116. 50 Ganda: a proto-Bantu word meaning “social group,” “quarter inhabited by a House,” “clan,” “enclosure of a leader,” “quarter of a village,” “camp.” See Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 268–269.


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The drumming started in the morning. Everyone there danced. At noon, Carrion Crow went inside, ostensibly for a quick lunch. He returned with his body fully painted: “[H]e skin get red, white and blue and black and you know like a’ paint. Nobody no paint am,” the story goes. Mrs. Morrison thought it must be a jumbi. The colors indicate Carrion Crow’s preparedness for a journey to the other world, Africa. White was the other world; black was this world; red, associated with blood, birth, death, sunrise, and sunset, marked the transition between white and black.51 He commanded: “throw rum right round, throw rum, throw rum! I going away now, now, now! He a go ’way.” As the men and women sang, This man a dance, he dance . . . from there up to that hole [ditch], and da man jump in the hole. When Carrion Crow jump in that hole, when everybody a’ knock and dance at the corner – nobody can’t go in a de ring, the ganda, they dance with they back up [back-to-back?].

The core characteristics of deliverance texts suggest multicultural convergence, especially in the descriptions of preflight ritual. In another Guyanese flight tale, Kramanti (Akan) slaves from the Gold Coast also danced backto-back in a ring prior to flying away. “You see when they want to fly, they mark a circle, and they [stand] back-to-back. And soon as they back-to-back, they use the leg, and they use the [hands?], and they gone!”52 Carrion Crow come out in the ganda: Kumunge, kumunge. Carrion Crow say, ‘Jungu boy, I going now.’ Vupatap-vupatap-vupatap, three times jump in-a hole. Well them got for sing now. They take heavy rum you know. They sing, they sing, they sing, they sing. . . . when they look, they see . . . Carrion Crow in the air, in the air, this man get wing and this man go-o-o-one. If you hear this drum, if you hear this drum. . . . This man g-o-o-o-o-ne. This man g-o-o-o-o-ne. At six o’clock, [Jungu] say, he [Carrion Crow] hand [arm] swell so [sprouting wings?]. . . he ask what o’clock, they say six. One minute past six, he cut out. Everybody sit down and rest. That’s how dey get rid out of Carrion Crow. . . . He is the onliest African [who] come at Guyana – the only one [to] go back. He fly. Carrion Crow. Wing, I tell you, wing! He get de two foot, he get wing.”53 51 See MacGaffey, Religion and Society, pp. 45–46, 52, 110–111. According to MacGaffey, there is no KiKongo word for blue. Acording to Devisch, the Yaka describe blue as the color of “the sun . . . about to rise” from the water of the underworld. See René Devisch, Weaving the Threads of Life: The Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical Healing Cult among the Yaka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 65, 67–69. 52 Kempadoo, “Recordings,” K104. 53 Compare with the Kramanti flight narrative “The drum, the drum, the drum does lift them! The drum does lift them! And when they reach, they know.” Kempadoo, “Recordings,” K104. In Jamaica’s liberated Central African immigrant community, two Bobangi, Manoka Mvula and George Minott, tried to fly back. Minott climbed a tree, shouted “good bye, everybody!” jumped off, but fell. Manoka Mvula, a renowned rainmaker, stood on a coconut tree stump, recited lengthy prayers in “language,” but as his wings did not sprout sufficiently, he too fell. See Bilby and Bunseki, “Kumina,” pp. 22–23, 44–45.

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In fact, 990 liberated Africans have been documented as returning to Africa at government expense by 1856, and an unknown number arranged their own passages between 1858 and 1864. The Guyana government continued to receive petitions for repatriation in the 1870s and 1880s.54 The returnees’ ethnicity is not known, but the likelihood is that they included some Central Africans. The great majority of liberated Africans remained in Guyana, where these deliverance narratives formed a significant critical discourse on enslavement, immigration, working conditions, and thwarted escape. WITCHCRAFT, RITUAL, AND BOUNDARY CROSSING

Such traditions are mediums for popular social theories and cosmologies.55 The deliverance narratives’ symbolism locates the slave and immigrant experience within a tradition of parallel worlds of the living and the dead, separated by a permeable body of water, which extraordinary people could cross. Any new or significant happening can be comprehended in terms of passage between the two worlds, which are associated with familiar geographical features, including Africa and Europe, or Africa and America. The concept is of primary importance for Africans’ efforts to understand their enslavement and immigration experiences. At one and the same time migration across water connotes a journey to the other world and a journey into enslavement. It features in Caribbean flight narratives, in African thought about Europe and America, and in African Diaspora peoples’ idealization of Africa and expectations of return. Guyana’s ecology, with its abundance of rivers and canals, would have reinforced such connections between enslavement and deliverance. Central African descendants told Guyanese folklore researcher Kean Gibson that the old Kongo used to perform riverside rites (similar to Carrion Crow’s?) in the hope of returning to Africa.56 Maintenance of contact across the cosmic divide represented by water or the grave seems to be the main point of the Komfo ritual in Guyana. In 1920, Vincent Roth watched an old Kongo man named Doom perform the rites in front of the Gold Office in the North West District mining town of 54 See Schuler, “Liberated Africans,” pp. 12, 21 n. 83 for returnees. 55 See Vansina, Oral Tradition, pp. 10–11, 21–22, 89–90, 126, 139–146; MacGaffey, “Oral Tradition,”International Journal of African Historical Studies, 7, 3(1975): 417–424; MacGaffey, Custom and Government in the Lower Congo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 17–35; McGaffey, Religion and Society, pp. 58–61, 195; Joseph Miller, ed. The African Past Speaks (Hamden, CN: Archon Books, 1980), esp. pp. 7–8, 33–52. 56 Personal communication. See Gibson’s Cinema Guild video, “A celebration of life,” which deals in part with Kongo rites in contemporary Guyana.


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Arakaka. First Doom drummed and then waltzed jerkily down the road to the cemetery, followed by 50 spectators who ran back in terror at whatever it was they saw there. Doom danced back as before, bearing croton leaves. He struck the drummers with the leaves and struggled with them until they seized the leaves. Then he dropped to the ground and crawled back and forth before resuming a circle dance. A month later the same ceremony occurred but with the added feature of dancing by a self-described Obeah man dressed in a white gown who moved “with very rapid short steps that were remarkable in that the movements of the limbs ceased at the thighs.” Roth’s description of Doom as a village type, the “local ‘Congoman,’” suggests that by 1920, such Central African survivors, possibly the only remaining Africans, were stock figures in rural areas, and the rites at which they officiated and descriptions of their trance visions could have been interpreted as flight to Africa.57 While it is deceased persons who characteristically cross the barrier between the two worlds, occult powers derived from salt avoidance, initiation, and correct ritual are believed to imbue some of the living with sufficient lightness of body to soar swiftly like angels or birds. The air or water, as Kongo-Guyanese waterside rites of return testify, are routes to what Fernandez, referring to Gabon’s Bwiti cult, calls the “spiritual Archimedian point,” the “original and final place” – the land of white-looking (i.e., European) water spirits, spirits of the dead.58 A Kongo-Guyanese cautionary tale of dealings with a water spirit may be understood as a parable of the unpredictable, dangerous nature of commercial transactions with European traders at the water’s edge. The story concerns a man in Africa who daily visited a pond behind his house where a water mumma delivered money to him on a golden plate. Witches can use doped coins to ensnare their victims, however. One day the man failed to return from the pool, dragged down to the other world by the treacherous water mumma, consumed by his desire for gold like the people who were enslaved through their attraction to Spanish trinkets.59

57 Vincent Roth, Tales of the Trails (Georgetown: The Daily Chronicle, Ltd., n.d.), pp. 77–79. Roth’s association of Komfo with the Kongo confirms Kean Gibson’s contention that it is a Kongo, not an Akan observance as other scholars such as Brian L. Moore, Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism: Colonial Guyana 1838–1900 (Jamaica: The Press University of the West Indies, 1995), pp. 139–142, insist. The Komfo drummers pictured in Moore, p. 141 closely resemble a Kongo musical ensemble witnessed by this author at Annandale, East Coast Demerara, in 1985. 58 James Fernandez, Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 491–493; MacGaffey, Religion and Society, p. 81, and “Kongo and the king of the Americans,” p. 181. 59 Mavis Morrison, Annandale, 7 April 1985. MacGaffey, Religion and Society, p. 246.

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Central (and West) Africans believe that wealth, health, and social harmony are finite and can be achieved abundantly only at someone else’s expense, through the misuse of occult powers. In this view, the slave trade transformed Africans into traffickers in human flesh as well as commodities for consumption on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1844, Central African newcomers in Sierra Leone refused to emigrate to Guyana on the grounds that their heads would be boiled to make medicine to boost white men’s intelligence, and their blood used to dye British soldiers’ coats to make them brave.60 In their search for meaning in enslavement, Africans manipulated the slave voyage and the crossing from this world to the next as a paradigm, an initiation, and a prophecy. Witchcraft led to enslavement across the water, and either exceptional people (like Carrion Crow) could marshal occult power to recross Kalunga personally or ritually, or else a redeemer would lead Africans back to an idealized Africa identified with Zion, Jerusalem, or Ethiopia. Like Africans in 1768 Martinique who expected to be ransomed by an anonymous African monarch,61 Africans and Creoles in Guyana and the Caribbean looked to local or external leaders (including British monarchs) to protect or free them. With the failure of Marcus Garvey’s Atlantic and Caribbean shipping line in 1926, the water-crossing cliché became associated with Haile Selassie, a sovereign African king crowned emperor of Ethiopia in 1930.62 Selassie’s appeal to people who had adopted the Bible as their personal deliverance text was his legitimacy as a supposed descendant of David and Solomon, predicted by Psalm 68:31, “Ethiopia [i.e., Africa] shall soon stretch out her hands to God.” Central Africans formed the nucleus of the Rastafarian movement that emerged around 1930 in eastern Jamaica. They propagated the idea of Selassie as King Zambi (KiKongo: kinzambi, God; formerly the most remote or “highest spiritual authority”), an apocalyptic World Emperor who would restore them to Africa and restore Africa to greatness. Selassie was expected to fetch his scattered subjects in a huge modern ship or a whole flotilla, either in 1934, the anniversary of slave emancipation, or in 2000. When the ships failed to materialize in 60 R. G. Butts, the Guyanese labor recruiter, secured immigrants only when the governor held recaptives incommunicado to all except labor recruiters. See Butts to Young, 23 July–7 August 1844, in Light to Stanley, No. 200, CO111/213; Butts to Young, 13 March 1845, in Light to Stanley, No. 57, CO111/221; Schuler, Alas, pp. 25–26, 28, 134 n. 74; Miller, Way of Death, pp. 4–5, 32, 147–149, 157–158, 389, 409–410, 413–414, 425–426; MacGaffey, “Kongo and the King of the Americans,” pp. 174–177. 61 See L. Peytraud, L’esclavage aux Antilles françaises avant 1789, d’après des documents iné dits des archives coloniales (Paris: Hachette, 1897), p. 372. 62 Tony Martin, Race First (Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1986), pp. 12–13, 16–17, 49–50, 151–167.


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1934, Rastafarians apparently planned to clear a path with their beards and walk across the sea to Africa. Selassie was also imagined as a “sky pilot” steering an airplane, as in the Revivalist and Rastafarian hymn, “When my pilot come, I’ll take an aeroplane ride, I will be happy with the King right by my side.”63 Guyana’s black nationalist Jordanite sect, which predated the Rastafarians, shared their Afrocentric, Ethiopian, millenarian, and political orientations. Jordanites interpreted Revelations 18 to mean that sinners would be destroyed but people in Zion Village, founded by their leader, would be spared. They rejected white hegemony, revered Selassie, opposed the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and supported African independence. In 1941, a Jordanite preacher was arrested for allegedly identifying Queen Victoria as the Whore of Babylon.64 Salt And Subordination People believed that masters or employers deliberately subverted the ability to fly or walk back to Africa by misusing occult power. They sucked the life out of Africans and also fed them the standard salted food of the slave ship and the plantation. You see . . . they [the African slaves] learn to fly, they know to fly. This flying business is to go ’way, but people [slaveowners] use it to suck . . . the evil part of it is to suck.65

In order to return home to Africa, people must abstain from salt, however. Salt is a multilayered, ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory sign, traits typical of symbols that express values about life. Such symbols are openended and therefore subject to reinterpretation.66 Since Europeans and West as well as Central Africans made similar associations between witches and salt avoidance, and since Central African exposure to European folkways 63 Ken Bilby, “Jamaica,” in Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae, ed. Peter Manuel (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), pp. 146–150, 159–164; see p. 61 for the airplane song. Barry Chevannes, Rastafari: Roots and Ideology (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994), pp. 33, 42, 110–117, 121–143, 155, 157–158, 161, 179–180, 241–244, 248; Kenneth Bilby and Elliott Leib, “Kumina, the Howellite Church and the emergence of Rastafarian traditional music in Jamaica,” Jamaica Journal, 19:3(1986): 22–28. 64 Many Guyanese were Garveyites and appear to have read some of the same esoteric texts as other black nationalists. Martin, Race First, pp. 12, 110–140, 151–167; Mattias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 12–98, 119–134, 160; Judith Roback, “The white-robed army: cultural nationalism and a Guyanese religious movement in Guyana” (Ph.D. diss., McGill University, Montreal, 1973), pp. 1, 30, 38–46, 51–52, 66; 80–82; Roback, “The white-robed army: an Afro-Guyanese religious movement,” Anthropologica, n.s. 16:2 (1974): 241, 253–254. 65 Kempadoo, “Recordings,” K104. 66 Vansina, Tio Kingdom, pp. 234–237.

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began in Africa, it is difficult to distinguish the origins of Guyanese beliefs about salt.67 Salt can be said to be used to “sweeten” people, making them docile and submissive. The Guyanese Kramanti flight narrative previously referred to states, for instance, that once slave owners realized that Africans had the power to fly away, “they say, ‘well look, the only thing can keep them sweet is to give them salt.’”68 Like abstention from sexual relations, salt avoidance was associated with strengthening rituals and the assumption of occult powers (such as witches possess) by Central Africans embarking on difficult occult tasks. People also could protect themselves from attacks by witches by ingesting or applying salt, for witches also believed that salt would make them lose their occult powers. Thus, they were said to avoid people who had been touched with salt. For this reason, the Kongo were attracted to the Roman Catholic baptismal rite, considering the application of salt on the tongue more significant than immersion or sprinkling with water. Despite missionaries’ condemnation of the belief in the mid-1600s, the preferred Kongo term for baptism until the early twentieth century was “eat salt,” a loaded term that can mean to become like Europeans or to lose one’s power by associating with “ordinary,” or uninitiated, people.69 Salt was also a preservative of fish or meat in Africa and the Americas, and the deliverance narratives mention it in the form of heavily salted fish and meat fed to slaves. So closely connected are meat, fish, and salt in the Central African-Guyanese mind, that Mavis Morrison’s KiKongo-English word list in Table 12.3 confuses salt with the meat and fish preserved by it. Only when the desire is to say “salt fish” (mbizi a mungwa) does the lexicon get it right. Central Africans associated fish with the dead and therefore with vulture and witch food. Many believed that the salted meat eaten and served to them by Europeans was actually human flesh. Since the slave trade was believed to provide African flesh for European witches, then to “eat salt” might have meant to eat inadvertently the same African flesh (but salted) that European cannibal witches were believed to relish.70 Overdependence on salted and dried diets contributed to Vitamin C deficiency or scurvy, a 67 Moore, Colonial Guyana, p. 147; Roback, “White-robed army,” p. 245; Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), pp. 154–156, 160–161, which also includes European beliefs and practices; Thornton, Africa and Africans, p. 8. 68 Kempadoo, “Recordings,” K104. 69 Thornton, Kongolese Saint Anthony, pp. 17, 149–150, 175, 206; Anne Hilton,The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 98; Fernandez, Bwiti, p. 303; Skinner, “Ethnic Interaction,” p. 235; Moore, Colonial Guyana, p. 147; Roback, “White-robed army,” p. 245. 70 Schuler, Alas, p. 96; Bilby and Bunseki, “Kumina,” pp. 21–22; Miller, Way of Death, pp. 5, 418–421, 425–426; MacGaffey, Religion and Society, p. 133; MacGaffey, Modern Kongo Prophets, p. 134.


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disorder that causes joint pain, bleeding gums, tooth loss, paralysis, and scaly gray or white skin and that killed nearly 15% of slaves in Postma’s sample of Dutch slave cargoes.71 The deliverance narratives also associated salted slave food with sickness, lethargy, and heaviness that prevent flight, and scholars have debated whether a connection existed between slaves’ salt-rich diet and hypertension.72 Salt has another association with the slave trade. As “probably the first commodity involved in long-distance commerce,” rock salt and sea salt were used as currency to buy gold, grain and kola nuts, horses, and, in both West and Central Africa, slaves.73 The connection between salt and the slave trade could not have escaped Central Africans who went to Guyana in the nineteenth century. “Gone to fetch salt in . . . Boma,” the slave trade port, was a Kongo euphemism for death. Salt thus joined cloth and cowrie shells as currency and as a symbol of colonial labor extraction and separation from Africa.74 CONCLUSION

Twenty-one percent of all disembarked African slaves and 60% of the liberated Africans taken to Guyana were from West Central Africa. Guyanese oral evidence attests to the persistence at the end of the twentieth century of 71 Significantly, African newcomers in Rio de Janeiro’s slave market attributed their whitish crusty skin (called sarna or mal de loanda in Brazil) to the salted food fed them on the slave ship. Excerpt from Robert Walsh, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829, 2 vols., II in Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil, ed. Robert Edgar Conrad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 51, which describes the slaves’ appearance; Karasch Slave Life, pp. 35, 40, 166, 179, 182–183. Postma, Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, p. 246. 72 Schuler/Carmichael, Schuler/Scott interviews, Seafield, Berbice, 1985; Kempadoo, “Recordings,” K104. Thomas W. Wilson and Clarence E. Grim, “The possible relationship between the Transatlantic slave trade and hypertension in blacks today,” in The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, ed. J. Inikori and S. Engerman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), pp. 350–353. The authors suggest that attempts to replace salt lost through excessive sweating, vomiting, and diarrhea on slave ships and during “seasoning” by providing extra salt to slaves might have contributed to hypertension in African Americans. The connection remains controversial, however. 73 Miller, Way of Death, pp. 37, 56-57, 64, 143–144, 214–215, 236, 274–276, 395, 396, 402–404, 685; Ralph A. Austen and Jonathan Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers: The Duala and their Hinterland c. 1600-c. 1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 28, Table 2.5, 49, 54, 71–72, 199 n.6, 205 n. 96; E. Ann McDougall, “Salts of the Western Sahara: myths, mysteries and historical significance,” International Journal of African Historical Studies, 23:2(1990): 235–236, 239–241, 250, 255, 256; and “Salt, Saharans and the trans-Saharan slave trade: nineteenth-century developments,” in Slavery and Abolition, 13:1(April 1992): 61–80; Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 42–43; 45–46, 57, 206, 220. 74 Wyatt MacGaffey, “The West in Congolese experience,” in P. D. Curtin, ed., Africa and the West: Intellectual Responses to Western Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), p. 55; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, pp. 199–209; Abiola Félix Iroko, “Cauris et esclaves en Afrique occidentale entre le XVIe et le XIXe siècles,” in De la Traite a` l’Esclavage, ed. Serge Daget, 2 vols., (Nantes: Centre de Recherche sur l’Histoire du Monde Atlantique, 1988), vol. 1, pp. 199–200.

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Central African identity, historical memory, and worldview. West Central African identities have always been fluid, as Miller suggests, and their worldview “constantly influenced by practical situations,” to which society responded by “ceaselessly alter[ing] the application and derivations of . . . [its] principles, changing as situations and evolving experience dictated,” as Vansina understood, but still preoccupied with the archetypal crossing in slave and immigrant ships.75 To understand what liberated Central Africans thought about their journey from Africa and their sojourn in Guyana or any other part of the Americas, we must study their narratives of enslavement and deliverance, of crossing and recrossing oceans between two incompatible worlds – Africa and America, heaven and hell.76 APPENDIX: ABBREVIATIONS These acronyms are used in the footnotes and tables: CLEC, Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners (London); CO, Colonial Office Papers (Public Record Office, Kew Gardens); GNA, Guyana National Archives; LAR, Liberated African Register (Sierra Leone); PP, Parliamentary papers; SLA, Sierra Leone archives; USPG, United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. 75 Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests, pp. 98–99. 76 Research for this paper was funded by grants from a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1980–1981, a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in 1984–1985, a Wayne State University Humanities Center Fellowship in 1996, and Wayne State University Summer fellowships. I wish to thank the liberated African descendants who allowed me to interview them in the 1980s, but especially Mrs. Mavis Morrison of Annandale and Mr. Carmichael, Mr. Scott, and Mr. Pere of Seafield for sharing their memories. I also thank Mr. Eusi Kwayana of Buxton, the staff of the Guyana National Archives, the University of Guyana Library and Linguistics staff and students, Sister Noel Menezes and Winston McGowan of the History Department, and Sister Celine Kirsch, and Kay Johnson for proofreading, Wyatt MacGaffey for help with the KiKongo vocabulary and criticism of the paper, Kifindi Bunkheti for additional translation, and Osumaka Likaka of the Wayne State University History Department for numerous fruitful discussions. All errors are my responsibility, of course.

13

Combat and the Crossing of the Kalunga T. J. DESCH OBI

This paper investigates the underexplored Central African contribution to New World culture in terms of martial arts and the spiritual underpinnings of their ritual practice. There is a growing body of literature on the martial art of capoeira Angola in Brazil, but being written in isolation from the wider world of capoeria’s cognate and reflective forms in the Atlantic world, none has dealt with capoeira Angola’s African background beyond speculation.1 In contrast, this current discussion will root itself in the combative and philosophical traditions of Central Africa and then look outward to Martinique, North America, and Brazil.2 This broad perspective is important for highlighting the fact that these arts were thriving even in places such as Virginia and Martinique where Central Africans did not constitute the dominant pluralities of the enslaved African population. In this light these martial arts are properly viewed not as residual by-products of the demographic clustering of Central Africans, nor as “retentions” or “memories” doomed to fade, but rather as living traditions that spread from enslaved Central Africans to other 1 The only scholarship in the existing literature that deals effectively with the African background of capoeira Angola are the works of Robert Farris Thompson and Daniel Dawson. This current study is greatly indebted to both their mentorship and their pioneering work on black material arts in the New World. Robert Farris Thompson, forward to J. Lowell Lewis, Ring of Liberation: Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian Capoeira (Chicago: Unversity of Chicago Press, 1992), xii–xiv.; Robert Farris Thompson, Dancing Between Two Worlds: Kongo-Angolan Culture and Americas (New York: Caribbean Cultural Center, 1991); C. Daniel Dawson, Capoeira Angola and Mestre João Grande: The Saga of a Tradition, the Development of a Master (New York: C. Daniel Dawson, 1993). The African background of capoeira has become very politically sensitive since this art that was previously suppressed as an Africanism was radically de-Africanized and transformed into a national artform by the populist politics led by Getúlio Vargas. See T. J. Desch-Obi, “Capoeira and Cooptation: From African ‘national’ subcultures to a Brazilian national form,” paper presented at African Studies Conference, University of California, Los Angeles, 15 April, 2000. 2 I will use the term “Central Africa” here in reference to the region more accurately described as West Central Africa, and the term “Central Africans” to denote the Bantu-speaking population of this region. I will also use the terms Kongo and Kongolese to refer to all KiKongo-speaking peoples, rather than specifically to the Kingdom of Kongo.

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Africans and their descendants, and eventually even to people of European descent. During the dynamic spread of this martial art in the Americas, the central fighting system of the tradition remained remarkably constant in most areas while the practice rituals of the system were influenced by the dynamic religious practices they interacted with in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet even then these combative practice rituals in the Americas could not be fully understood apart from the underlying Central African cosmology that linked human combat to the interplay of spiritual forces from across the kalunga, or the threshold between the lands of the living and the dead. Many of the preceding contributions to this book have highlighted the diversity and dynamic nature of precolonial cultural practices in Central Africa, yet there were also a number of shared concepts that linked these local particularities into a larger region for study. John Thornton’s chapter on religious and ceremonial life illustrated the existence of dissenting religious beliefs in Central Africa. In this regard, the Central African religious tradition is no different than the Judeo-Christian tradition with its myriad of diffusing groups and theologies, all emanating from an inherited group of theological concepts. In Central Africa, one of these common inherited paradigms revolved around the concept of kalunga. This term was used throughout the Central African region to mean the sea, rivers, the world of the ancestors, and God. These various meanings for kalunga were reconciled by the common cosmology represented in the Kongolese cosmograms that symbolized the nature of the cosmos in miniature. There were numerous varieties of Kongo cosmograms, but of particular interest are those involving counterclockwise circles and crosses. Fu Kiau Bunseki explains that these cosmograms represented the nature of the universe, which the Kongolese understood as paralleling the counterclockwise movement of the sun.3 Within the counterclockwise movement, a cross could be drawn or implied. The horizontal line of this cross, referred to as the kalunga, was linked with the rivers, or the sea, which was believed to form a line between this world and the next. The point corresponding to cardinal East was linked with conception, whereas cardinal North represented maleness, noon, and one’s peak of physical strength. From there to the cardinal West point represented a phase of decline reaching death at the kalunga line. This “death” was actually for Kongolese people just a passage through the kalunga to the spirit 3 Fu-Kiau Bunseki, “Kongo Cosmology,” paper presented at the Conference Path and Direction, University of the District of Columbia, June 1995. While I will be citing the English texts of other authors below, the seminal work informing them on this subject is Fu-Kiau Bunseki’s, N’Kôngo ye Nza yakun ’zungidila/Le mukongo et le monde que l’enournait (Kinshasa: Office national de la recherché et de developpement, 1969).

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world, an inverted world of white clay. Regeneration in the spirit world continued to the southern point, corresponding to “midnight, femaleness, south, the highest point of a person’s otherworldly strength.”4 According to art historian Robert Ferris Thompson, for the good and heroically strong Kongo person, completing the cosmic circle by returning to the cardinal East point represented eternal life: The Kongo yowa cross does not signify the crucifixion of Jesus for the salvation of mankind; it signifies the equally compelling vision of the circular motion of human souls about the circumference of its intersecting lines. . . . The four disks at the points of the cross stand for the four moments of the sun, and the circumference of the cross the certainty of reincarnation: especially the righteous Kongo person will never be destroyed but will come back in the name or body of progeny.5

While some ancestors might be reborn into the land of the living, all had the power to affect events in the land of the living. Thus, Kongo cosmograms were more than mere symbols; they could also be ritually activated to mediate power between the spiritual world of the ancestors and the world of the living.6 However, it was not only through cosmograms that the Central Africans believed they could cross the kalunga to gain access to spiritual power. A number of agents could bring the spiritual power from beyond the kalunga to bear on the world of the living. The three major players in this universe were the chief, the witch, and the ritual expert, and among some Central African groups the prophet/diviner was distinguished as a fourth group. The chiefs were believed to access power from across the kalunga by means of their lineage ancestors, who interceded on behalf of the entire community. A chief ’s association with lineage ancestors linked him to the power of death, and he was expected to use this power to kill antisocial elements and witches. On their part, witches drew on the powers of the dead (through “ghosts” or nzumbi among Kongolese), but for their own selfish ends and at the cost of the rest of society. Finally, between these two stood the ritual experts, called nganga or kimbanda, who worked on behalf of individuals or groups of clients.7 The nganga and kimbanda drew on ancestral power 4 Robert Ferris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 109. 5 Ibid., pp. 108–109. 6 Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The Bakongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 43; Thompson, Flash, pp. 109–110. 7 While these three major offices were ubiquitous in West Central Africa, their local expressions varied between different language groups. For example, among Kikongo speakers nganga (expert) implied a “medicine man” (ngang’ a n’kisi or ritual expert at sacred medicines, nganga a mbuki or herbalist, nganga a ngombo diviner, etc.), whereas among some Ovimbundu speakers such helpful ritual specialists were called kimbandas and witches were termed nganga. Furthermore, these groups interacted and influenced each other as in the case the Kikongo word for profit, ngunza, which

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to divine and/or resolve the physical and spiritual problems of the client. The Kongolese divided this last office into nganga (ritual experts) who create sacred medicine figures called minkisi to protect their clients from harm or to hurt their enemies, and ngunza (prophets/diviners). The ngunza or prophet drew on the healing power of bisimbi spirits to heal individuals and society of witchcraft.8 As a result of these various spiritual intermediaries, there was a constant antagonism between those individuals that used the power from across the kalunga for good, which for Central African peoples meant for the good of the community, and those who used the power for the selfish desires of an individual, which was considered evil. This understanding of spiritual antagonism was reflected in the KiKongo term for ritual, mvita, which literally meant war.9 Just as this Central African ritual system was conceptualized in terms of warfare between these opposing forces, so too was human combat considered inseparable from the interplay of these religious forces. For Central African warriors, a war’s outcome was ultimately determined on the spiritual level. This belief ran so deep among West Central Africans that once two armies engaged, it was not uncommon for the losers of the initial melee to flee as it was considered futile to resist since the outcome of the battle – which had already been determined on the spiritual plane across the kalunga – was evident in the first clash. For Kongolese this often took the form of harnessing ancestral power through special war charms. Miller notes that warfare preparation for the seventeenth-century Mbundu primarily consisted of intense rituals to draw on ever-more powerful forces from across the kalunga to secure a victory: Thus for days and weeks before a battle, the Mbundu conducted rituals which, they believed, could determine which army would prevail, arming themselves with the best magical charms available, waiting for omens to indicate the most propitious moment to attack, and cementing their good relations with spiritual forces which could turn the actual battle in their favor.10

MacGaffey suggests was borrowed from the Ovimbundu in the sixteenth century, although the office itself predated the adoption of the new term. Daniel Adolphus Hastings, “Ovimbundu customs and practices as centered around the principles of kinship and psychic power” (Ph.D. diss., Kennedy School of Missions, 1933); Wyatt MacGaffey, “The religious commissions of the Bakongo,” Man, 5 (1970): 28–29. 8 Wyatt MacGaffey and Michael Harris, Astonishment and Power : The Eyes of Understanding Kongo Minkisi (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), pp. 39–40. 9 Ibid., p. 61. 10 Joseph C. Miller, Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 239.


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Such preparations were not a simple task, as there was always the possibility that enemies could access forces even more powerful than their own; thus the importance of ritual war experts.11 This paradigm linking combat and the crossing of the kalunga could also be found as far south as the highlands. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many warrior-kings on the southern highland plateau would not declare war without first approaching their kalunga, the holiest place of their palace. This kalunga shrine housed the ritual emblems and relics of their ancestors and thus acted as a bridge to the spirit world. It was believed that all who approached the kalunga apart from the king would die from such direct contact with the land of the dead. Even the king approached only on special occasions of communal calamity such as drought or war. On declaration of war the king approached the kalunga to petition the royal ancestors in the other world to battle for his warriors on the spiritual plane.12 In the kingdom of Ecovongo (Bie), these most sacred relics of the kingdom could only be touched by the highest ritual expert in the land, who carried them into battle in a vanguard unit also consisting of a war general believed to embody the spirits of human sacrifices, and the general’s hand crack troops. The king and the main army remained at a distance and would not engage in combat if his crack troops broke.13 Thus it was essential for such elite warriors to be well prepared ritually and militarily. Although not a ubiquitous practice in Central Africa, many warriors from the interior of the Loango coast to the highlands were both physically and spiritually prepared for battle through a martial art that was linked to the cosmological paradigm of crossing the kalunga. As a combat system, the art of ngolo and its cognates utilized kicks and powerful headbutts for attack and acrobatic evasions for defense.14 These attributes were developed in a number of training exercises, one of which was the ritual practice with a partner inside a circle of singers who were at the same time potential combatants. Individual singers/fighters took turns leading call and response 11 It is not surprising that in areas where Catholicism was fused with Central African beliefs, the world of the ancestors across the kalunga that could be petitioned of aid in war was expanded to include Catholic saints. 12 Maria Gomes, “A autoridade da ombala nos Nyaneka-NKumbi: estrutura, funcionamento, e influência na vida deste povo no passado e no presente,” These de licenciatura, Agostinho Neto University, Lubango (1993), 24. 13 Hastings, “Ovimbundu customs,” pp. 42–43. 14 The name of the martial art actually varied by region, but the term ngolo will be used here because it is the form by which it is best known in the New World. It is important to note, however, that the ngolo is only one manifestation of a much wider Central African tradition that includes numerous cognates.

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songs in which all those present answered back with the chorus. Once the music reached its crescendo, a pair of fighters would enter the circle, dancing and swaying to the music as they squared off. One adept would launch an attack normally consisting of a circular sweep or kick, often with the hands supporting the body weight. The defender either crouched low to the ground to duck under the kick, or blended with the attack in such a way that he could respond with a smooth counterattack. The two continued in a cycle of attacks, defenses, and counterattacks in a flow that allowed them to display their technique, trickery, and finesse. The encounter ended when one or both of the two felt that their engagement had come to completion. The two then rejoined the circle to allow another pair to enter the circle.15 This ritual circle, or elola, was designed to bring the practitioner into the spiritual world through “circling,” or physically enacting the counterclockwise cosmograms to draw on spiritual power. This involved counterclockwise movement around the elola. Such enactments of cosmograms were believed to give the fighter spiritual power for combat. The techniques of the combative system itself reflected the kalunga paradigm, with fighters predominantly using their feet to fight, often supporting their weight on their hands and kicking while upside down. In this way they ritually mirrored the ancestors, as the other world across the kalunga was believed to be an inverted one. These kicks from an inverted position were considered among the most powerful techniques in the ngolo arsenal. From an edic perspective, the precarious nature of such an inverted position could not have allowed for the generation of much power in contrast to the power of a kick launched from a normal upright position. However, the power referred to by ngolo exponents was rather the more important spiritual power derived by harmonizing the body with that of the ancestors. Some fighters sought even deeper connections to ancestral power through ritual initiations. Instruction in the martial art and its most important festivals were linked to male and female rites of passage.16 Beyond this community initiation, full mastery of the art was relegated to those who had been further intiated into the art as a sacred profession. This ritual process involved having a cross drawn on their heads in white powder, the color of crossing the kalunga.17 After 15 Angola Field Journal 1993. 16 In some areas of West Central Africa, the mastery of the martial art was almost exclusively a male phenomenon, while in many other areas I encountered a number of female masters. See T. J. Desch-Obi, “Gender in African combat traditions,” unpublished manuscript. 17 See Anita Jacobson-Widding, Red-White-Black as a Mode of Though: A Study of Triac Classification by Colors in the Ritual Symbolism and Cognitive Thought of the Peoples of the Congo (Uppsala: University of Stockholm, 1979).


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completing the ritual, these fighters could tap directly into the superhuman combat abilities of ancestral ngolo fighters.18 In addition to being a system of unarmed combat, the ngolo was also one of a number of forms of training that developed an extreme defensive dexterity known as sanguar that was an essential part of warfare in Central Africa. Pero Rodrigues, a missionary in Angola in the late sixteenth century, noted that Central Africans did not use defensive armor; rather “all their defense rests in sanguar, which is to jump from one place to another with a thousand twists and such agility that they can dodge arrows and throwing spears aimed at them.”19 Such ability was often demonstrated in an armed war dance known as nsanga. Father Lorenzo, a Capuchin missionary in Central Africa in the early eighteenth century, notes that “then some of them commenced to ‘sangare’ that is, to make controtions to demonstrate their force and their dexterity.”20 Collective nsanga, called sangamento, involved dancing out large-scale encounters during ritual contexts such as Imbangala initiation ceremonies, the feast day of Saint James – patron saint of the Kongo kingdom, or prior to war.21 These large gatherings, which Cavazzi describes as military reviews, allowed rulers to evaluate and reward their troops. Yet these were not formally ordered processionals implied by the term military review. While participation was a demonstration of group loyalty to the officiating ruler, individuals also exhibited their dexterity in their own nsanga solos against imaginary foes in attempts to outshine their rivals for the praise of the ruler.22 For many Central African warriors, the nsanga may have been the last dance they performed on African soil. While their relationship to spiritual power took on local expressions, all Central Africans saw such dances as an essential part of the ritual preparation for battle.23 Thus Central African 18 Angola Field Journal 1996. 19 Pero Rodrigues, “História da residência dos Padres da Companhia de Jesus em Angola, e sousas tocantes ao Reino e conhavquista,” in António Brasio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana. IV (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1954), p. 563. 20 Lorenzo da Lucca, Relations sur le Congo du père Laurent de Lucques (1700–1717) ed. and trans. J. Cuvelier (Bruxelles: Institute royal colonial belge, 1953), p. 47. 21 Cavazzi saw such large-scale ritual combat primarily as a form of loyalty. He defines sangamento, the Portuguese derivative of nsanga, as “to have faith” (ter fé ) or “to show oneself faithful” (mostrar-se fiel ). Cavazzi de Montecúccolo, Giovanni Antonio, Descricão histórica dos três reinos do Congo, Matamba e Angola (Lisbon: Junta de Investigaç o˜ es do Ultramar, 1965), p. 151. 22 This often rose beyond the level of friendly rivalries. Some individuals took this opportunity to settle personal grudges and Cavazzi notes that such events usually ended with at least a dozen murders having been committed in the frenzy of the dance. Cavazzi, Descricão, 152; Personal communication, Ras Michael Brown, 8 June 2000. 23 In some cases war dances were seen as omens of bravery and success, while in other cases they could be a form of breaking the effects of an enemies charms. See for example, Miller, Kings and Kinsmen, pp. 245–246; John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, 1914), pp. 192–193.

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armies would always dance before they left on a campaign. Claridge notes that it was not uncommon for wars in KiKongo-speaking areas to begin by the two groups sending their war leaders to meet in a final attempt at peaceful terms. Barring this, the two would set a luala, or prearranged battle ground, and ritually begin the war by attempting to draw blood in unarmed combat, after which they would return to their communities to prepare their armies by means of nsanga and other ritual means.24 When two armies engaged each other, the conflict often began with a brief volley of arrows before clashing in an open formation that allowed for skill in hand-to-hand combat.25 Yet the real damage came not in this opening confrontation, but when one side broke from the initial melee and the conquerors mowed down the fleeing forces. Many of the war captives of such a loss would be fed into the trading networks that funneled enslaved Africans by trade caravans to the coast, where they would be boarded onto European ships headed for the New World. Given the widespread warfare in Central Africa resulting from Portuguese conquests, the political reconfiguration of African polities in relation to the trade, and the widespread Imbangala militancy noted in the chapters by Thornton and Miller, war captives undoubtedly constituted a large percentage of the enslaved Central Africans sent to the New World.26 Such enslaved warriors carried with them to the New World their martial arts, military dances, and their religious worldview. For many enslaved Central Africans, the kalunga concept that linked the sea and the spirit world also shaped their initial fears of making the middle passage. Whites were perceived as coming from the sea, and thus from the spirit world. However, their blood-red skin and their unsatiable appetite for captives identified them as the people of Mwene Puto, the Lord of the Dead, whose minion took captive Africans back across the sea and ate them.27 Many were in fact killed in the process, their human potential being eaten by the middle passage. But for the survivors of the harrowing 24 G. Cyril Claridge, Wild Bush Tribes of Tropical Africa; an Account of Adventure & Travel amongst Pagan People in Tropical Africa, with a Description of their Manners of Life, Customs, Heathenish Rites & Ceremonies, Secret Societies, Sport & Warfare Collected During a Sojourn of Twelve Years (London: Seeley, 1922), pp. 207–208. 25 For a fuller description of warfare in Central Africa, see Thornton, “The art of war in Angola, 1575–1680,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30:2 (1988): 360–378. 26 See Thornton’s argument that African military service was the means by which many if not most of the Africans found themselves enslaved prior to the Haitian Revolution in “African soldiers in the Haitian revolution,” Journal of Caribbean History, 25:1 (1994): 59. For a less military oriented description of the slaving system in Angola see Joseph Miller, The Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 27 Miller, Way of Death, pp. 4–5; The fear that whites were cannibals was not limited to Central Africa. See, for example, the fears of Equiano in Paul Edwards ed., The Life of Olandah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa the African (London: Longman, 1988), p. 22.


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journey across the sea and the subsequent seasoning process, their emergence on the other side of the Atlantic represented not their physical death but their social birth into a new social world of racial slavery. Many naturally responded to the trials of this oppressive situation out of their own cultural paradigms. This was the case for many Central Africans and their descendants in North America, whose faithfulness to their unique cosmological system was evidenced in the numerous ritual grave markings reflecting the vibrancy of this cosmology in the United States.28 Thus the ritual antagonism between the forces of good and evil extended into North America as well as the rest of the New World where enslaved Central Africans were brought. With these religious notions came the Central African combative system that was perpetuated in North America as knocking and kicking, in Brazil as capoeiragem, and in Martinique as a composite form called ladya. In Brazil, the martial art of capoeiragem or capoeira Angola was centered in the city of Rio de Janeiro, which Joseph Miller’s piece has already shown to have received most of its captives from Central Africa.29 While the martial art would not have been part of the cultural patrimony of all the Bantu speakers sent to Rio from Luanda and Benguela, it quickly spread to other Central Africans, representing one of many primary divisions that were broken down between various Central African groups that would have seen themselves as separate groups in Africa but eventually came together to form what Robert Slenes calls the “Bantu supernation” in Brazil.30 The martial art along with other Central African contributions such as batuque and samba would eventually become national symbols of Brazilian culture. The martial art of capoeiragem (or capoeira Angola, as it was called in Bahia) was essentially the same combat form as the ngolo, using headbutts and footstrikes from an inverted position while defending with acrobatic evasions. The art was highly repressed through most of its history as an unsightly vestige of Central African culture that the white ruling class hoped to exterminate. After its co-optation by populist politics in the 1930s and 1940s, the art form was subsequently promoted as a national form along with a Brazilian origin myth that enslaved Africans in Brazil created the art as a way to defend themselves while their hands were chained together.31 This new 28 Elizabeth Fenn, “Honoring the ancestors: Kongo-American graves in the American South,” Southern Exposure, 13:5 (Sept.–Oct. 1985): 42–47; Thompson, Flash, pp. 132–142. 29 See Miller’s contribution to this volume. ´ 30 Robert W. Slenes, Malungu, Ngoma vem! Africa encoberta e descoberta no Brazil (Luanda: Museu Nacional da Escravatura, 1995). 31 See, for example, Anne Dimock, “Capoeira Angola,” in Lynn Shapiro, ed., Black People and their Culture: Selected Writings from the African Diaspora (Washington DC: Festival of American Folklife, 1976), p. 123.

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creation myth is not historically plausible for two reasons. First, most bondsmen were chained by the legs rather than the hands, because a bondsman chained by the legs can still work and not run away.32 Second, bondsmen were only chained under very limited conditions, and in these cases, the practice of even ritual forms of capoeiragem would have been prohibited, not to mention the fact that many of the techniques would have been impossible to execute while shackled.33 Rather, this fighting style was a direct continuation of the Central African martial art tradition. The characteristic kicks in capoeira Angola’s arsenal are all identical to the engolo’s inverted kicks designed to draw on power from across the kalunga. Such movements, central to the capoeira Angola’s combative arsenal and aesthetic, is found in no other martial art tradition in the world besides the Central African tradition. While numerous scholars outside of the tradition and unfamiliar with African martial arts have had a longstanding debate about the arts’ origins, the emic tradition in capoeira Angola has always been clear on the issue. The name of the art itself, capoeira Angola, reveals its Angolan heritage. The late Mestre Pastinha (Vincent Ferreira Pastinha) – the codifier who opened the first capoeira Angola academy in 1935 in São Salvador, Bahia – was the student of an Angolan slave named Benedito, who taught him that capoeira Angola came from the ngolo dance.34 Other African Brazilians referred to the art by another Bantu term, cungú. But in either case, the art was attributed to the enslaved Central Africans credited with introducing the art to Brazil.35 Similarly, the oral tradition of the African-American martial art known as knocking and kicking in the United States claims to have been brought over by enslaved Africans. A technical analysis of the art clearly shows that it too is an expression of the same Central African combative system.36 This is not surprising since South Carolina, the epicenter of knocking and kicking, was – like capoeiragem’s epicenter of Rio de Janeiro – an area that received more captives from Central Africa than any other region.37 Yet the art also 32 J. Lowell Lewis, Ring of Liberation: Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian Capoeira (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 90. Also the elaborate neck collars with forked appendages that were a common punishment for runaways would have made head butts difficult to execute. 33 Mary Karasch, personal communication, 17 August 1999, Thomas Holloway, personal communication, 12 October 1999. 34 Dawson, Capoeira Angola, p. 8; Mestre João Peequeno (João Pereira dos Santos), personal communication, 7 March 1991. 35 For a fuller discussion of the Central African origin of capoeiragem and the historiography of alternate creation myths, see T. J. Desch-Obi, “Angola and ‘a luta brasileira’: a question of origins,” paper presented at the Conference Enslaving Connections: Africa and Brazil during the era of the Slave Trade, held at the Nigerian Hinterland Project, York University, Toronto, Canada, October, 2000. 36 Knocking and Kicking uses the same arsenal of Kicks and headbutts as the ngolo. The term Knocking refers to the headbutts and kicking to the Kicks of the art. 37 Joseph Holloway, Africanisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 7–9.


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spread to areas such as Virginia, where Biafrans rather than Central Africans constituted the most represented Africans in the bonded population.38 Martinique’s bonded community, unlike that of Virginia, South Carolina, or Rio de Janeiro, does not appear to have had any a dominant plurality from any region of Africa.39 Even with the data from W. E. B. Du Bois Institute’s Transatlantic Slave Ship Database, it is hard to give a detailed description of the ethnic makeup of Martinique’s bonded community because Martinique was also a major center of reexportation to other islands.40 Such reshipments aside, arrival patterns show that Central Africans arrived in numbers only surpassed by those from the Bight of Benin.41 These Central Africans introduced the combat system of ladya, although by the twentieth century it has subsumed a number of other fighting styles such as cocoyé or ronpoin. Yet even in its later creolized form, the ladya arsenal drew predominantly, if not exclusively, from the combat systems of Central Africa, merging art forms that were related but had been practiced separately in Central Africa.42 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these martial arts were passed down in a number of contexts, one of the most important being secret societies that grew out of mutual aid societies that may have come together along lines of African regional origin.43 In North America this involved secret societies that passed on the ngolo combat system under the term knocking and kicking. Knocking and kicking was so linked to the ritual leaders of these groups that John Gwaltney defines it as “the ancient martial art practiced 38 Chambers, Douglas, “He gwine sing he country: Africans, Afro-Viginians, and the development of slave culture in Virginia, 1690–1810” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1996). 39 No region of Africa supplied more than 30% of the Africans sent to Martinique according to Phillip D. Morgan, “The cultural implications of the Atlantic slave trade: African regional origins, American destinations, and New World developments,” in David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Portland: Frank Cass, 1997), p. 125. 40 David Eltis, personal communication, 14 October 1999. 41 These figures are drawn from the W. E. B. DuBois Institute’s database. I would like to thank David Eltis and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall for sharing with me their breakdowns of this trade by periods. 42 A number of authors suggested that ladya is West African in origin. Katherine Dunham suggested it originated in the Igbo mgba or Yoruba gidigbo, while Josy Michelon argued that it was a descendant of the kadjia and kokoule wrestling forms of the Basantché and Kotokoli peoples from the Bight of Benin. However, such West African wrestling forms played very little part in the artform prior to ladya incorporation of other African-derived artforms in the first half of the twentieth century. Katherine Dunahm [under pseudonym Kaye Dunn], “L’Ag’ya of Martinique,” Esquire, 12:5 (1939): 84–126; Josy Michalon, Le Ladjia: Origine et pratiques (Paris: Editions caribéennes, 1987). 43 Early references to maltas in Brazil suggest that they grew out regroupings in Brazil based roughly on region of African origin and knows as “nations.” For example, Reverend Robert Walsh was probably referring to clashing malats when he noted the different ethnic groups of Rio engaging “in feuds and combats, where one, or even two hundred of a nation on each side are engaged.” R. Walsh, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829 (London: Frederick Westley & A. H. Davis, 1830), Vol. I, p. 330

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by slave clergy and their followers.”44 Similarly, in Martinique the covert rituals of clandestine societies were the context most associated with ladya, which, according to Jacqueline Rosmain, was “the most secret dance.” She contends that only those initiated into it knew the martial art form, and noninitiates knew it only by its distinctive rhythms.45 In Brazil, the combat system of capoeiragem was used by secret societies of bondsmen called maltas as a form of avenging transgressions against members of their community. Itier appears to be referring to them when he reports of secret slave societies linked with unsolved murders “often led by free blacks, whose purpose was the protection of the slaves.”46 The performative practice of the art set to music – the jogo de capoeira or vadiaça˜ o de Angola – was practiced by the young initiates of the maltas, whereas fully initiated members, or capoeiras, used the art in real battles and assassinations.47 By the early twentieth century at least the ritual practice of all three arts had also moved out from the clandestine practices of secret societies to more open spheres. In Martinique, a danced ritual form of practicing the ladya known as damnye became openly executed in public festivals. In North America, while the complete combat system was still known only to initiates, the art was also practiced openly (though disguised as dance) in Christian dance circles. And while Brazil’s maltas would eventually perform important political functions in Rio de Janeiro after the 1860s, they suffered intense repression in the Republican era. Capoeiragem only resurged in Bahia after being co-opted and ideologically de-Africanized by Vargas’s populist politics in the 1930s and 1940s. Thus, the jogo de capoeira left the domain of the maltas and resurged in Bahia, where the ritual practice became increasingly associated with Candomblé. Yet despite the influences of the new social contexts of these combat forms in the Americas, they continued to be practiced in rituals based on the Central African cosmological paradigm linking combat to the crossing of the kalunga. In Martinique, the Central African belief that a combat’s outcome was predetermined on the spiritual level was enshrined in the first component of a danmye encounter, the monte, or prefight preparation period. During the monte, the fighters went to a quimboiseur, or ritual specialist. The term 44 John Langston Gwaltney, Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (New York: Random House, 1980), p. xvi. 45 Jacqueline Rosemain, La Musique Dans La Société Antillaise (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986), pp. 21, 69. 46 Jules Itier, Journal d’un Voyage en Chine en 1843, 1844, 1845, 1846, 3 vols. (Paris: Dauvin et Fontaine, 1848–1853), vol. 1, p. 62. 47 For more on the maltas of Brazil, see Thomas H. Holloway, “‘A healthy terror,’ police repression of capoeiras in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 69:4 (1989): 637– 676 and Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro 1808-1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 298–299.


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appears to be derived from the Central African term, kimbanda, who among ngolo practitioners in Central Africa not only prepared charms and cured injured combatants, but was also the final arbiter that oversaw the actual ngolo combat ritual. A quimboiseur of Martinique would prepare a danmye fighter by providing them with charms or having them access otherworldly power through other rituals.48 When the danmye practice ritual proper began, like the elola of ngolo, it was enacted in a ritual circle of singers who were at the same time potential fighters. Two fighters would enter the ronde, or circle, in a series of ritual gestures, and then they would engage in simulated combat until another pair were ready to enter. As with the ngolo the emphasis was on the legs, with kicks, crouching, or acrobatic defenses, and dancing throughout the engagement. The presence of the Central African cosmic circle was most evident in the ritual entrance to the center of the ronde. Thompson suggests that an opening pose in danmye called the parada (standing with the left arm akimbo and the right hand upward) was believed to throw the spiritual power of the fighter against his opponent as in the Kongo religious gesture telama iwimbanganga.49 Upon entering the circle the danmye adept also completed the kouri la ronde, a counterclockwise run around the circle. Thompson sees strong Central African roots in this practice: The first thing players of ladya do is to run in a mystic circle to “close” their bodies off from emanations of jealousy and envy, according to Eugine Mona, himself a deeply versed player with a Kongo tree-shrine to his ancestors in his yard.50

This counterclockwise circle brought the fighter into contact with supernatural power from across the kalunga. Once inside the ronde, danmye masters were able to tap into ancestral power. Danmye expert Albert Belocian explains that only fighters who were initiated into the knowledge of how to tap into ancestral power via what he calls “danmye secrets” were real danmye fighters. He maintains that such ancestral powers could be used to overcome or even paralyze any opponent relying merely on physical skills.51 Raoul Grivalliers, an elder in the danmye community of Morne des Esses, maintains that despite his small stature, in the ronde of danmye, he can tap into powers with which he can overcome opponents of any physical size. As he emphatically affirmed, “with prayers and [danmye] secrets I could lift my house.”52 48 49 50 51 52

Albert Belocian, personal communication, 3 August 1993, Forte-de-France. Thompson, Dancing, pp. 5–6. Ibid., p. 7. Albert Belocian, personal communication, 3 August 1993, Forte-de-France. Raul Grivalliers, personal communication, 15 August 1993, Morne des Esses.

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In North America, knocking and kicking was practiced in two separate ritual settings. The art was practiced during the meetings of what can only be described as African-American secret societies, and in such cases the art was practiced in the same ritual circle as the ngolo, with two fighters training together in the center. After the Second Great Awakening, a number of these clandestine African-American societies began to take on a Christian outlook, and the art found a second covert context in the Christian ring shouts. Although there were a great deal of variations, the ring shout was most often a ritual in which bondsmen would form a circle and dance counterclockwise. The dance was accompanied by the clapping of hands and the beating of poles against the ground in African polyrhythmic patterns. Sterling Stuckey, who has investigated the circle rituals of many cultural areas in Africa and the New World, concludes that, above all, it was the Central African cosmology that informed the ring shout: There is, in fact, substantial evidence for the importance of the ancestral function of the circle in West Africa, but the circle ritual imported by Africans from the Congo region was so powerful in its elaboration of a religious vision that it contributed disproportionately to the centrality of the circle in slavery. The use of the circle for religious purposes in slavery was so consistent and profound that one could argue that it was what gave form and meaning to black religion and art.53

While it drew on Central African precedents, Michael Gomez suggests that the ring shout was adopted as a ritual uniting all bondsmen. Despite the presence of Christians from Central Africa, it was only after conversions to Christianity in North America reached significant levels after 1830 that the ring shout was taken up by black Protestant groups.54 While the practice was gradually subsumed under the umbrella of North American Christianity, the ritual retained its African pattern of dancing a counterclockwise circle to access spiritual power. Those who entered this cosmic circle often achieved ecstatic contact with the other world. Marshall Stearns describes a ring shout witnessed in the 1950s: The dancers form a circle in the center of the floor, one in back of another. Then they begin to shuffle in a counter-clockwise direction around and around, arms out and shoulders hunched. A fantastic rhythm is built up by the rest of the group standing back to the walls, who clap their hands and stomp the floor. . . . Suddenly sisters and brothers scream and spin, possessed by religious hysteria, like corn starting to pop over a hot fire.55 53 Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalistic Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 11. 54 Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 244–263. 55 Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 12–13.


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The religious hysteria mentioned by Stearns was called “getting happy” by the dancers themselves and was in form very similar to African possession dancing, but it was attributed by Christians to the Holy Spirit. It was manifest by jumps, kicks, and any number of bodily contortions. For practitioners of knocking and kicking, this was a context in which their martial art could be practiced covertly. Upon entering the cosmic circle, they would absorb the power of the spirit world as they practiced the techniques of their art. Some praise houses attempted to mediate the apparent contradiction between their African tradition of worship through dance and Protestant ideas of dance being sinful by maintaining that the ring shout was not a dance as long as the feet were not crossed during the shout. Thus, it may have been in part due to the exhibition of the knocking and kicking technique called “cross-stepping” – a sweep in which the foot swung along the ground in front of the support leg to trip an adversary – that such praise houses instituted the role of watchman.56 As one poor fellow interviewed by Courlander found out, the watchman was a type of bouncer who expelled those who repeatedly crossed their legs: Well don’t you know, them folks all shouting, rockin,’ and reelin, and me in the middle; and I ask you if it wasn’t the Holy Ghost that come into me, who was it? These feet of mine wouldn’t stay on the ground in no manner, they jumped around and crossed and over, back and forth, and the next thing I know they turned me out of the church.57

Yet possibly unknown to the watchmen and other observers, some dancers were displaying not only their religious zeal, but also their martial skills disguised as dance.58 Despite the potential regulation of techniques such as the “cross-step,” fighters continued to covertly display their art in the sacred space of the shout. Thus, even in the Christian context, knocking and kicking remained linked to the Central African paradigm of the counterclockwise circle that joins this world to the world of spiritual power. In Brazil, the songs that accompany the ritual practice of capoeira Angola reflect the numerous levels of influence from various religious traditions. The Central Africans who introduced the combat system to Brazil left their mark on the songs of the art, which repeatedly mention Kongo, Luanda, and 56 This watchman was far from universal; some groups avoided criticism by having clandestine shouts and dancing as they pleased, whereas in others offenders were simply scolded with the admonition, “Look out, sister, how you walk on the Cross/Your foot might slip and your soul get lost.” Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to the Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1979), p. 142. See also Florence Renee Williams, “The nineteenth century Afro-American ringshout and twentieth century boogaloo: an historical and comparative study” (MA thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1988). 57 Harold Courlander Negro Folk Music, USA (New York: Dover, 1963), p. 195. 58 Herman Carter, Personal communication, 26 March 1994.

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Benguela.59 One song even referred to the lemba Kongo healing society.60 But while the Central Africans were the acknowledged masters of capoeira Angola, the widespread influence of the Yoruba religious system that was syncretized with Catholic saints in the various nations of Candomblé also left a mark on capoeira’s musical tradition. Presumably this influence dates to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when capoeiragem was nearly eliminated in Rio de Janeiro and resurged in the state of Bahia, where Yoruba and other West African groups had arrived in the largest numbers.61 Candomblé left its mark through the numerous capoeira Angola songs that refer to Yoruba deities under the guise of Catholic saints. Finally, even evangelical Christianity left such a mark, with Christian capoeira Angola adepts such as Grandmaster João Pequeno ( João Pereira dos Santos) composing songs to Jesus Christ. However, beneath such historical accretions, the essential basis of the jogo de capoeira lies in the Central African principles of the cosmic circle. As with engolo circle, the roda or circle of capoeira Angola was made up of singers who are at the same time potential fighters. In the nineteenth century the circle was directed by a Central African drum, which was replaced in the twentieth century by the urucungo, a Central African bow now popularly known by the misnomer berimbau. In the more recent form, the roda began with the singing of a ladainha, or litany that was always completed with a chula, salutations repeated by the whole chorus. These salutations often begin with praises to God (Deus do Céu) or the singer’s master, and they went on to salute past masters, places of historic importance to capoeira Angola, and ancestral figures in general. This litany of salutations usually included the line “volta do mundo,” which instructed the players to travel around the world. Again, this idea reflected the Central African concept of the counterclockwise circle being the cosmos in a microcosm. Similarly, the roda of capoeira Angola was understood as life in microcosm, with the lessons learned inside the roda to be applied to daily life. It was also understood as a semisacred place that was not to be entered without spiritual preparation. Out of reverence for this fact, the two fighters would not enter the roda immediately, but first enacted the preceito, also referred to as rezando (praying) or esperando o santo (waiting for the saint).62 This preceito varied according to the fighter, but it 59 Gabriela Tiggs, “The history of Capoeira in Brazil” (Ph.D diss., Brigham Young University, 1990), p. 30. 60 Thompson, Dancing, 7. 61 Perre Verger, Trade Relations between the Bight of Benin and Bahia 17th to 19th Century, trans. Evelyn Crawford (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1976). 62 Edison Carneiro, Religões Negras e Negros Bantos (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizaç a˜ o Brsileira 1981), p. 213.


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often included prayer, making the sign of the cross, or drawing cosmograms on the floor. The actual entrance into the roda was referred to as the saida (exit), not only because the adepts were leaving the foot of the musical bow, but also because they were leaving the outside/mundane world and entering the spiritual world of the roda. This world could only be entered by “circling” – a movement through an upside-down position with the hands on the ground – which transported the two inside the circle where the encounter took place. In the movement known as volta do mundo (circle the world), the counterclockwise circle of the Kongo cross was directly traced as the two adepts ran counterclockwise around the roda during their encounter. In contrast to the mundane world, in the upside-down world inside the roda the feet replaced the hands as the major tools of articulation/expression. This reflected both the Central African kalunga paradigm, and the martial philosophy summarized in the Kongo proverb “Mooch mu tunga, malu mu diatikisa” – Hands are to build, but feet are to destroy.”63 Capoeira Angola’s use of the feet in circular movements, especially those in which the adept stood on his hands for support, harked back to the concept of walking in the “other” world across the kalunga. Thus capoeira adepts used Central African leg techniques that reflected Central African cosmological system and allowed them to maximize their spiritual power by walking in the other world. Masters such as Curió (Jaime Martins dos Santos) or João Pequeno ended the cosmic circle of the roda with a closing ritual. As in the North American ring shout, the musicians/singers took their turn to make the counterclockwise circle around the last two persons engaging each other in the roda. This closing action in which the roda itself makes the counterclockwise journey, instead of the two practitioners, symbolically represented circling back to the world of the normal/living, and the return journey was marked by a song wishing all a safe return: soloist: Adeus, Adeus chorus: Boa viagem soloist: Eu vou m’ebora chorus: Boa viagem

goodbye goodbye pleasant journey I’m going away pleasant journey

And with the master’s cry, “ie!” the music and movement stopped and the ritual travel to the spirit world came to an end. Although these martial arts of the African Diaspora are normally presented as secular and unrelated, from a wider perspective it becomes clear that it was the Central African cosmology that shaped the unique form of 63 Dawson, Capoeira Angola, p. 130.

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the Central African martial art tradition that spread to the Americas with enslaved warriors. These fighters were among those Central Africans who bonded together into mutual aid societies that simultaneously perpetuated Central African philosophical and combative systems in the nineteenth century. By the following century these arts were sharing social spaces with new religious traditions. Danmye fighters sought the assistance of the AfricanMartinican quimboiseur tradition in the monte prefight preparation period. Knocking and kicking in one of its contexts was practiced to the songs of African American spirituals in the ring shout. Similarly, many of capoeira Angola’s songs mark its evolution in a religious world dominated by Catholic and Yoruba-based religious systems. Yet beneath the influences of alternate religious practices, the underlying Central African concept of the cosmic circle as a means of entering the spirit world was present in the ritual practice of these arts. Thus to ignore this spiritual dimension of these martial arts is to fundamentally misunderstand the history and significance of this Central African contribution to New World culture.64 64 A dept of gratitude is also owed not only to the gracious informants who openly shared their knowledge, but also a number of funding sources. Interviews with capoeira masters were conducted during a 13 month research project in Nigeria and Brazil as a Benjamin Trustman fellow in 1990– 1991. Information on knocking and kicking was primarily collected during two research trips, in 1991 and 1993; the latter funded by the UCLA Center for African American Studies and Institute of American Cultures. Information on the n’golo and its cognates is based on a number of research trips beginning in 1993, and culminating in 15 months of fieldwork from 1996–1998 in Zaire, Congo, and Angola jointly funded by the Social Science Research Council and the Institute of International Education Fulbright Fellowship Program. Finally, a special thanks to Fu-Kiau Bunseki for his guidance on Kongo cosmology.

Index

Afonso I, King of Kongo, 84, 85, 86, 272 Afonso, King of Loango, 89 Africa, 320, 346, 348 East, 130, 132, 139 Africa, idealized and identified with Zion, Jerusalem, Ethiopia, the Other World, Heaven, 345, 347 African Americans, 3, 291 African “nations,” in the American Diaspora, 154, 326 Angola, 24, 49, 50, 51, 61, 62, 160, 161, 162, 166, 168, 171, 235, 239, 240 Arará, 236, 240 Benguelas, 51, 125–26, 128, 136, 138–139 Biafara, 235, 236, 240 Bran, 236, 239, 240 Cabundá, 164, 166, 168 Carabal´ı, 229, 240 Congo, 40–42, 44, 47, 56, 61, 62, 126, 130–133, 136, 138–139, 145–146, 148–149, 151, 154, 168, 170, 181, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 236, 237, 238, 240 Congo/Mondongo, 237 Congo/Solongo, 228, 238 Dagome, 171 Gege, 166 Goyo, 240 Hausa (Usá), 133, 137 Jeje, 126 Ketu, 166

Luango, 240 Mandinga, 228, 236 Manicongo, 231 Mayumba, 232 Mina, 236, 240, 161, 162, 168 Mondongo, 238 Mumbat/Mumbata, 231 Mumboma, 231 Mungundu, 231 Musicongo, 231 Nago, see Yoruba Popos, 240 Rebolo, 164, 166, 168 Soso, 231 Sozongo, 231 Tapa, 126, 137 Wolof, 234, 240 Yoruba, 166 Zape, 236 African slaves, 121 Africans, 118–119, 121–130, 132–133, 136–137, 144, 148, 338 Africans, Central, 342, 346, 348 Africans, liberated, 320, 324, 325, 331, 337, 346, Africans, liberated, Central, 341, 349, 350 Afro-Brazilians, 9, 97 Afro-Lusitanians, 98, 99, 102, 111, 113 afterlife, 74 agregados, 121, 144 agriculture, maroon, 232 Aguiar, João Dias de, n. 15, p. 127

371

372

Index

Aguirre, Michael Xavier de, 127 Akan, 23, 293, 345. See also Gold Coast Alachua, 232 Alagoas, 159 albinos, 218 All Souls Day, 85 alligators, 311, 314 altars, 79 Alvares, Pedro Ferreira, 144 Amaral, Il´ıdio do, 92. Amazon River, 124 Ambaca, (Mbaka), 47, 95, 194 Ambriz, 37, 39, 60 “Ambundu” (ethnic designation), 51, 52, 53. See also Kimbundu (language), Mbundu Ana, (Ana Afonso de Leão), Queen, 283 ancestors, 79–80, 82 Angola, Alonzo, 2 Angola Ame, 299, 300 Angola, Antonio, 144 Angola, Caetano, 141 Angola, Ignacio, 2 Angola, Isabel, 144 Angola, Joanna das Neves de Naç a˜ o, 143 Angola, João, n. 25, 134, 139 Angola, José Soares, 141 Angola, Manoel, 134, 139, 143 Angola, Miguel, 141 Angola (Portuguese colony), 28, 45–48, 83, 91, 92, 93, 99, 101, 113, 124–126, 128, 130–36, 138–142, 144–149, 151,158, 172, 228, 225, 302; Catholic church in, 102, Bishop of, 110 “Angolas”, see African “nations” in the American Diaspora Anta, 142 Antonian Movement (Kongo), 196, 208, 284 Antonil, André João, 160 “Anzicos”, see Mundongues (ethnic identity), Teke Apalachicola River, 232 Arakaka, North West District, Guyana, 347 Araxá, 136–138, 140 Arévalo, Manuel Garc´ıa, 237 Arraias, 120, 122, 136–138, 140, 142

Asia Botte, 80 asiento, 235 Assumar, Conde de, 161, 162, 169 Atlantic Slave Trade, see Slave Trade Ayres da Silva, Luiza (Krahô), 139 Bahelele Ndimansa, 72 Bahia, 27, 28, 31, 51, 60, 124–127, 160, 224 Bahoruco mountains, 234, 236 Ba´ıa das Vacas, see Benguela Bailundu, see Mbailundu Bakongo, see Kongo Baltasar, King and/or Saint, 164, 168, 178, 180 Bamadona, 220–23 Bambara, 293 Bampangu, see Mpangu Bango a Kitama, 77 Banguela, Antonio, 143 Banguela, Banguella, Bonguela, 130–133, 138 Banguela, João, 143 Banguela, Maria, 143, 146, 148 Banguella, José, 141 Banguita, 138 bankita, see nkita Bantu languages, 38, 186 “Bantu”, in Brazil, 56, 61, 62 Baptism, baptismal rite, 123, 127, 130–134, 143–147, 350 Baptista, Joanna, n. 6, p. 121 Barbados, 61, 297, 299 Barra, Goiás, 144 Barreiras, Bahia, 127 basimbi, see simbi Basundi, see Nsundi Battel, Andrew, 77, 79 battles, mock, 159, 180 batuques, 100, 164, 177, 178 Beatriz (or Beatrice) Kimpa Vita, 196, 197, 270, 271, 281, 282, 284 Bel-Air, 275 Belém, Pará, 121, 124–126, 128, 135, 138 Bellgarde-Smith, Patrick, 268 Bengo River, 79, 86, 296

Index Benguela, 27, 31, 48, 51, 53, 54, 60, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 99, 106, 113, 125–126, 128, 136, 138–139, 157, 296, 329 Benguela, Maria, 135 “Benguelas”, see African “nations” in the American Diaspora Benin, 23, 126 Berbice, 321, 329, 330, 337, 342 Bight of Benin, 320 Bight of Biafra, 299, 304, 320 Bihe (Bié), see Viye bilongo, 281 birds, 309, 311, 314, 317 Birmingham, David, 240 bisimbi, see simbi Bissau, 124–125 Black Atlantic, 7 Black (prêto), 119, 122–123; blacks of the coast, 135 Black regiments, see Henriques blacksmith kings, 235 Bockie, Simon, 73 Bois Ca¨ıman, ceremony of, 253–54 Boma (Mboma), 296, 337 Bomfin, 136–138, 140 Bonsy, 77. See also Bunzi Botelho da Cunha, João, 127 Bourdieu, Pierre, 278 bozales, 233, 238 Brandão, Carlos Rodrigues, 149 Bras´ılia, 118, 124 Brazil, 8, 10, 92, 94, 105, 113, 118, 149, 353, 361–362, 363, 364, 367–369 Northeast, 126 Brazilians, 121–122, 145 British Caribbean, see Caribbean British Navy, 337, 340 British Vice-Admiralty Court, 323 Brooklyn, 226 brotherhood (irmandade), 8, 144, 148, 154, 157–158, 179; feast day celebrations in, 157–158, 161; in Europe, 157, 158; of the apostles St. Philip and St. James, 166; of Bom Jesus, 166; of Our Lady of Belem, 168; of Our Lady

373

of Good Death, 166; of St. Efigenia and St. Elesbão, 168. brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary, in Africa, 158; in Bahia, 160, 161; in Minas Gerais, 161–163, 175–176; in Europe, 158; in Pernambuco, 160, 168; in Rio de Janeiro, 164 Buakasa, Tulu kia Mpanzu, 73 Buç a, 130–132 buffalos, 309 Bundu dia Kongo, 72 Bunseki, Fu-Kiau, see Fu-kiau Bunseki Bunzi (Funza, Funzi, Funzu, Lusunzi, Mangundazi), 76, 205, 206, 208, 213, 214 burials, 135 Busa, 137 Cabinda, 28, 55, 56, 57, 60, 62, 124–126, 128, 130–132, 139, 196, 336 caboclos, 180–181 Caboré, 133 cabra, 141, 145 Cabrera, Lydia, 233 Cabunda, 138–139 Cachaç a, 143 Cacheu, 124–125 cacique, 234 Caconda, 27, 51, 95, 98 Cacongo (Kakongo), 77 Caetano, Matheus, 108 Calabar, 126 Calmon, Francisco, 169, 170 Cambambe, 87, 95 Cape Lopez, 28 Cape Verde, 139, 141 Capelle, district, 74 Capelle, Frans, Dutch factor, 77, 80, 83 Capitaç a˜ o, 119 capitães-mores, 98, 99, 104, 109, 110, 112, 113 Capoeragem (capoiera Angola), 353, 361–362, 364, 367–370 Capuchins, 101, 107, 284 Caribbean, 23, 223. See also Antilles (French), Spanish West Indies

374

Index

Carmelites, 107 Carmichael, Mr. of Seafield, West Coast Berbice, 342 Carmo, 118, 120–121, 135, 139, 142 Carmo, Maria do, 144 Carolina (Brazil), 120, 122 Carolina and Georgia Low Country, 28, 290–317, passim Carretão, 120, 122 Carrion Crow, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346. See also Mr. Carmichael’s narrative, deliverance Carroll, Patrick, 238 Cartagena, 2, 26 Casange, Cassange, (market), 48, 133, 138. See also Kasanje Castello da Vide, Rafael, 256–57 Castelneau, Francis de la Porte de, 177 Catalão, Goiás, 148–149, 151 Catholic Church, 144, 156, 163 Cattle ranches (fazendas), 142 Cavalcante, 118, 120–122, 136–138, 140, 142 Cavazzi, Giovanni Antonio da Montecuccolo, OFMCap, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 87, 88, 359 Cédras, Raoul, 276, 284 Cemeteries, see graves chapel boys, 83–4 Charleston, 58, 305 charms, 80, 310, 356. See also nkisi Chatelain, Heli, 190–92, 193, 194, 199 Chavanate, see Xavante Chekoke, see Kyocke Chesapeake, 28 Christianity, in Africa, 17, 72, 78, 80, 83–90, 94, 102, 109, 157, 254–58 Christiano Jr., 178, 179 Christians, 95, 98, 110 cimarrones, 232 Claver, Pedro, 2 Cofre del Perote, 239 Cokwe, 54 Colón, Diego, 234 Comarca do Norte (Tocantins), 120, 136–139 Comarca do Sul (Goiás), 120, 136–137, 139

Comunda, 138 Conceiç a˜ o, 120, 122, 136–138, 140 Concordat of 1860, 265 congado/a, 149–151, 153, 175 Congo Heart Burn, 329 Congo man in Guiana, 347 Congo River, 74, 78, 186, 200, 331, 333 Congo, King of, 150–151 Cordial de Sá family, 108 corevelation, 84, 87 coronations, Castelneau’s description of, 177; in Bahia, 160, 166; in Minas Gerais, 161, 162, 163, 177; in Recife, 160, 166; in Rio de Janeiro, 164, 170–171, 180; in Santo Amaro, 170; legal acceptance of, 177; prohibitions of, 161, 163, 178, 180; Rugendas’ depiction of, 173, 174 Corpus Christi, 233 corsairs, 235 Cortona, Serafina da, OFMCap, 76, 79, 80 cosmogram, Kongo, 230 cotton, 292, 304 Courtin, Jacques, 258–59 cowrie shells, 351 creole (creolization), 5, 12, 13, 15, 122, 185, 321, 322, 348 crioula, 143, 146 Crioula, Joaquina, 134, 141 Crioula, Quiteria, 134 crioulo(s), 131–132, 134, 141, 145, 148, n. 38, p. 149, 160, 166, 168 cristãos novos, see New Christians Crixás, 119–120, 122, 136–138, 140 crucifix, 110 Cuanza, see Kwanza Cuba, 37, 58–59, 226 cucumbi, see dances, Afro-Brazilian Cueva Maldonado, Archbishop Francisco de la, 236 Cuiabá, 124, 129 cumbe, 227 Cunha Manuela Carneiro da, 121 curadeiras, 105, 112 Dande River, 86 Dahomey, 4, 223, 224, 225

Index dances, African (tango, guaguancó, columbia, macuta), 105, 233; of Congo, 164, 166, 170, 175, Afro-Brazilian, batuques, 164, 177, 178; congado/a 153, 175; cucumbi, 153, 170n62, 180; maracatu, 153; mozambiques, 153; quicumbi, 170; talheiras, 170 Danmye, see ladya Dapper, Olfert, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81 Davidson, David Michael, 124–125 Day of Kings, 164, 176, 178, 233 Deagan, Kathleen, 230 Debret, Jean Baptiste, 166, 167, 178 degregados, 94, 95 deliverance narratives, see flight Dembos, 86, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111 Demerara River, 321, 324, 329, 340 Descourtilz, Etienne, 247, 254 Descourvières, Jean-Joseph, 256–57 Desemboque, 120–121, 136–138, 140 Devil, the (Christian), 81 Dias de Novais, Paulo, 86 Dicomano, Raimondo da, OFMCap, 251, 256–57 Dimba (valley), 292 Diogo I, King, 86, 89 diseases (of liberated Africans), 323–234 diviners, 214, 218 dogs, 309, 314, 316, 317 dolphins, (Sotalia brasiliensis and Sotalia fluviatilis (tucuxi ), 185 Dominicans, 158 Dompète, Dom Pèdre, 247–48 DuBois, W.E.B., 3 Duro, 120, 122, 127–128 Dutch (as slavers), 26, 27, 28, 47–49, 56, 61 dwarfs, 214, 218 Ecovongo, see Viye Elephants, 309, 310, 311 Elola, 358 empacaceiros, 106 Encoge, 95, 110 engenhos (sugar plantations), 141–142 English (as slavers), 27, 28, 31, 49, 56, 57, 58, 61 Enriquillo, 234

375

entambes, 99, 100 escravos ladinos, 95, see slaves estates with liberated Africans, 329 Ethiopia, 348 Europe, 5 Europeans, 94, 98 Ewbank, Thomas, 178 Faria Baretto, Dionisio, 88 Ferguson, Leland, 230–1, 237 Fernandes de Oliveria, Mário António, 92 fiador do quartamento, 146 filhos da terra, 94 Flores, 120, 122, 136–138, 140 foodways, 105 forested areas (Central Africa), 38, 40, 47, 56, 61, 62 Foundry House, n. 29, 141; n. 31, 143 Franciscans, 107 free blacks, 121, 140, 144, 146, 148, 160, 166, 173, 178 freedom, purchase of, 122, 136, 143–144, 146 French (as slavers), 28–31, 49, 54, 55, 56, 61, 62 Fu-kiau Bunseki, 72, 354 Funzu (Funzi), 76, 214. See also Bunzi Gaeta, Antonio da Napoli, OFMCap, 87 Gambia, 302 ganda, dance ring in Guyana, 344, 345 Ganzambumbo, 76 Garcia II, King, 81 Garvey, Marcus, 348 Garveyites, 331, 349 fn. 64 Gender, 139–40, 143, 322 Geneve Kongo, 322 Georgetown, 340, 341, 344 Gibson, Kean, 346 Giraldin Odair, 135 n. 26 God, 76 Goiânia, 130 Goiás City of, 133, 148–149 Goiás, 15, 118, 122–124, 126–130, 137, 148–149; map of, 117 Gold, 118–119, 126–129, 136, 141 n. 29 n. 31, 143 n. 31, 144, 146

376

Index

Gold Coast, 23 (slaves from in Guyana), 320, 321, 345, 346 gold mining, 118–119, 121, 129–130, 142–143. See also Akan (West Africa), Minas Gerais (Brazil) Gombea Muqueama, Dembo, 113 Gómez de Sándoval, Governor Diego, 235 Gomez, Michael, 338 graves, 79–80, 109, 231, 307, 313 Great Britain, see English, West Africa Squadron Guadeloupe, 62 Guanabacoa, 233 Guanabara Bay, 128, 183, 185, 199, 206–207. See also Rio de Janeiro Guaporé River, 124 guerra preta, 103, 106, 107, 113 Guilloux, Mgr., 275 Guinea, 124–125, 128, 137–138 Gulf of Guinea, 23 Gullah Jack, 231, 290, 312 Gullah Joe, 290 Gumbiri, 77 guns, 309, 313, 316 Guyana, 11, 17, 320, 323, 324, 326, 328, 330, 333, 336, 337, 340, 341, 342, 348, 351 gypsies, 94 Haiti, 348 Haitian Revolution, 11, 112, 265, 270, 271, 279 Haitian Voudou, 11, 16 Harvard Data Base, 8, 237, 321 Hausa, 126, 133 Havana, 35, 226, 233, 316 Heaven, 85 Hell, 85 Henriques, 148–149 n. 38 Herskovits, Melville J., 223, 224, 267 Heywood, Linda, 321 Higgins, Kathleen, 121 Highland plateau (central highlands), western central Africa 26. See also Bihe, Caconda, Mbailundo, Ovimbundu, Umbundu, Wambu Hilton, Anne, 196

Hispaniola, 234 Holo, 107 hospices, 102 Howard University, 3 Humbe, 51 hunting, 290, 308, 309, 310, 313–314, 315, 316, 317 Hutim, José Francisco, 130, 141 identity in Africa, 22, 37–39, 41, 44, 56–57, 59–60, 62–63, slave, in Brazil, 185. See also African “nations” Igbo, 293 Imbangala, 46, 47, 49, 82–3, 87, 88, 106, 240. See also Kasanje Imbomba, 77 immigrants, liberated Africans, 334–335 indentured labor, 320, 327 Indians, 124, 134, 139, 148 indigo, 292 indultos, 231 Ingolombe, 109 irmandade, see brotherhood Isabel, Princess, 149, Itapicuru River, 128, 151 n. 42 “Jagas”, see Imbangala Jamaica, 11, 61, 297, 299, 348, 349 Jansen, John, 73 Jerusalem, 348 Jesuits, 101, 103, 118, 160 Jesus Christ, 100, 224 Jews, 94 Jinga, see Matamba; also Njinga, Nzinga John Forbes & Company, 232 Johnson, Amandus, 75, 76 Jornal, 143 n. 31 Jordanite sect, 349 julgados, 119, 121, 139 Julião, Carlos, 164–165 Jumbi, 345 Jungu, 331, 338–340, 341, 343, 344 Kaboko, 77 Kahenda, 107 Kakongo (also Cacongo), 88 Kakulu ka Kahenda, 74

Index Kakulu ka Oximi, 76 kalubungu, 191 kalula, 314 kalunga, 75, 118, 151 n. 42, 200, 295, 311, 323, 348, 352–360, 364–365, 369 kanga, 281, 282, 283, 284 Kasai River, 40, 49, 56 Kasanje, 49, 54, 88, 105, 106 Kavuna Simon, 212, 213 Kayapó, 148 Kenga, 77 kianda, 190, 192, 194. See also simbi Kibenga, Pedro Constantinho da Silva, 284 Kikokoo, 78 Kikongo language, 44, 72, 73, 84, 86, 88, 186, 229, 241, 295, 326, 332, 348 kilombo, child precursor of twins, 216 kilombo, runaway camp, 240 kilundu(s), (nature spirit/s), 76, 77, 88, 307 kimbanda, (ritual experts), 93, 103–105, 355, 366 Kimbundu language, 44, 73, 78, 79, 80, 86, 186, 191, 223. See also Mbundu Kimpa Vita, see Beatrice kimpasi, 82, 196–197, 281 kinda, 192, see simbi kindoki, 217. See also witchcraft King Buzzard, see Carrion Crow King George’s War, 300, 303 King of Congo (in the Americas), 153, 154, 155, 166, 168, 181–182, 297; as leader of uprising, 176; Koster’s description of, 172; in Minas Gerais, 173–176; in Recife,171–172; in Rio de Janeiro, 170–171, 180–181; Rugendas’ description of, 173; in Santo Amaro, 169–170 King Zambi, 348 kingdoms, in Africa, see Political systems kings, black (reis negros), 153, 154, 155, 156; as leaders of quilombos, 162; as leaders of rebellions, 160, 161, 162, 163, 166, 168, 178, 181; power of, 168–169; von Martius’ description of, 173, 175 Kingsley, Zephaniah, 231 kinship (African), see Identity in Africa

377

Kisama, 106 kiteke, 76, 78, 88 kitembela, 79 kitome, 78, 79 Kitouba, 77 kituta, 190, 192, 194, see simbi kixila, 77, 82 kiximbi, 190, 192, 196. See also simbi knocking and kicking, 362–367, 370 komfo ritual, 340 Kongo/Congo, Kingdom and people, 23–24, 39–41, 43–44, 48, 49, 54, 72, 73, 75, 78, 80, 82, 83–5, 86, 87, 89, 92, 105, 111, 155, 156, 157, 159,188–189, 193, 195, 218, 223, 224, 225, 228, 266, 274, 359. See also Bakongo, Kikongo language Kongo (Madinga Kongo, Mundele Kongo, 326, 327, 329, 341, 344, 347, 350 Kongo dia Nlaza, Emperor of, 86 Kongo musician, 328 Kongo religion, 282, 283, 285 ‘Kongo tar ass’, see Jungu; tar on slave ships Kongo wedding, 330 Kongo, Kings of, 155, 156, 157, 159 Kongo-Guyanese word list, 332–333 Koster, Henry, 172, 173 Koudjay, 284 Krahô, 139 Kru, 329 Kuba, 48 Kubango River, 38 Kumina, 326 Kunene River, 26, 31, 38 Kwa River, see Kasai River Kwanza (Cuanza) River, 23, 38, 86, 88, 113 Kyocke, 77 ladinos, 95, 104, 136, 185 ladya, 363–366, 370 Lafaye, Jacques, 272 Lagoa Feia, 127 Laman, Karl, 72, 192, 193, 195, 199–201, 205, 206, 310 Lampadosa Church, 168, 178 Languages (African, spoken in Guyana), 326 Lecum, R. P., 279

378

Index

Lemba, 214, 223 Lencastro, Governor, 93, 108 Liberated Africans, see Africans, liberated Libolo, 130, 147 Lima, 26 Loango (kingdom), 49, 56, 72, 73, 75, 78, 80, 82, 83–5, 86, 87, 89, 218 Loango Coast, 28, 31, 49, 56, 58, 61, 128, 296, 309, 336, 357. See also Cabinda, Loango (kingdom), Malimbo, Mayumba, Vili Loje (river), 296 Londa, 212 London Missionary Society, 337 Lorenzo, Father, 359 Lozi (Luyana), 54 Luala, 360 Luanda (São Paulo d’Assumpç a˜ o de – Portuguese port), 24, 31, 46–7, 52, 58, 61, 86, 96, 97, 101, 105, 106, 108, 112, 113, 128, 139, 153, 191, 296 Luanda, island, 24 “Luandas” (ethnic designation), 48, 51 Luccock, John, 183, 184, 185, 190, 198, 199, 201, 204, 205–207, Lunda, 49. See also mwaant yaav, Ruund Luso-African feudalism, 92 Luso-tropicalism, 92 Lusunzi, 76. See also Bunzi Luvale, 54 lwa, 211, 219, 223, 224, 225 Lwena, 54 Maç anbi, 133 Macaya, 270–271 MacGaffey, Wyatt, 73, 186, 187, 193, 196, 197, 204, 229, 279, 331 Macota Cabassa, 113 Madeira, 94 Madeira River, 124 maestro da igreja, 255 Makandal, Franç ois, 250–53, 258, 260 Makenda, André, 73 Malebo Pool, 38, 39, 49, 56 Malimbo, 28, 31 Mamazamba, 274 Maniel José Leta, 236

manieles, 227 mapasa, 213 maracatu, 153 Maramba, 77 Maranhão, 124–128, 135 Maranhão River, 118–119, 124 marasa, 224 Maria, daughter of João Angola, 134 maroons, 124, 227, 312, 316, 318 maroon leaders (in Hispaniola, Diego Guzman, Diego Ocampo, Juan Vaquero, Lemba, 234); (in Mexico, Yanga, Francisco de la Matieza), 239; (in Colombia, Domingo Bioho/King Benkos, 239, Domingo de Padilla/Angola, 240) marriages, 134, 144–146, 148 martial arts, 360 Martinique, 62, 348, 353, 363–365, 370 Martius, Karl Friedrich Philipp von, 173 Massangano, 95, 96, 113 Matadi, 216, 219 Mata Makala ma Mpasi, 73 Matamba, Kingdom of, 48, 54, 57, 86, 88, 175 Mato Grosso, 118, 124, 129 matrilineage, 214 Matudere, 240 Mayombe, 41, 42, 56, 77 Mayumba, 28 Mbailundo, 51, 105 Mbaka, see Ambaca Mbanza Kongo, 84, 156, 308 Mbrije River, 35, 296 Mbumba (rainbow), 248–49 mbumbas (country people), 90 Mbundu (region and ethnicity), 44–47, 75, 79, 82, 86, 139, 188, 190, 192, 193, 194, 223, 330, 333. See also Kimbundu Mbwela, 110 Mbwila, 107, 110 McAlister, Elizabeth, 296, 284 Mearim River, 128 Meia Ponte (Pirenópolis), 118–122, 127–128, 136–138, 140 Mende, 293

Index Mercies, Our Lady of, 148 Métraux, Alfred, 217, 223, 225, 265, 266, 267, 277 mfinda, feenda, finda (forest), 290, 291, 294, 295, 310 Middle Passage, 305 Military dances, 360 Miller, Joseph C., 112, 128,187–188, 320, 322, 326, 339, 352, 356, 360, 361 Mina, Joaquina, 143 Mina, Miguel, 141 “Mina/Minas”, 36, 126–128, 130–138, 141, 143–148, 161, 162, 168 Minas Gerais, 31–2, 51, 61, 118, 121, 124, 128,160–163, 169, 172, 173–176, 186, 188 mining towns, 118–119, 124, 135, 148 minkisi, see nkisi Mintz, Sydney, 187 missionaries, 102 mnemonic streamlining, 343 mocambo, as character in ritual drama, 170 mocambos, as runaway slave community 95, 154 Moêno-Bengo, 100 Mofumbe, 138, 140 Moleques, 127 Mondongo, 344 Montesarchio, Girolamo da, OFMCap, 78, 81 mooyo, 281 moradores, 98, 102, 108 Moraes Filho, Alexandre José de Mello, 164, 178, 179, 180, 181 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric Louis-Elie, 246–48, 258 Morrison, Mavis, 331, 338, 339, 341, 343, 345, 350 Mortality (Middle Passage), 26 Moucumba, 131–132 Mozambique, 31, 58, 126, 130–132, 139, 148–149 mozambiques, 153 Mpangu, 187–188, 191. See also Bampangu Mpinda, 40, 47–48 Mpombola, 310 Mputu, 323

379

Muanda Nsemi, 72 Muene Puto, 360 mulattoes, 93, 96, 97, 98, 141 Mundele Kongo, see Kongo Mundele Mundongues (ethnic identity), 56 Munjollo (Tio slaves) Manjolo, 130–132 music, 105 music, in feast day celebrations, 164, 170, 173, 174 (illus), 178, 179 (illus); maracatu, 153 musical instruments, African (conga, mambisa, tumba, bongós, claves), 150–151, 233 Mutecos, 138–139 Mutemo, 86 Muxima, 87, 95 mwaant yaav, 49 mwana wa nlongo, 212, 213 Nagano, 137 Nago-Yoruba, 126, 130–132, 135, 137–138, 141, 143, 145, 166 names, Central African personal, lists retained in Guyana, 333–335 naming practices, Christian, in Africa, 102–103, 108–109 narratives, deliverance, 336, 343; historical, 337, 338 Natal, 125–126 Natividade, 118, 120–122, 126–127, 134–138, 140 naturães da terra, 104 Naviez, 76 Ndala a Kabasa, 76 Ndembu, 42, 46 ndoki, 336, see witch, witchcraft, kindoki, wanga Ndongo, Kingdom of, 76, 87, 88, 235 ndudu, 213 Negro Fort, 232 Netherlands, see Dutch New Christians (cristãos novos), 94, 95 New Orleans, 58, 62 New Spain, 272 Neyba, 238 nfinga Kongo, 308 nfinga Ngula, 308 Nganga a Muloko, 81

380

Index

nganga ngombo, 81 nganga nkisi, 222 nganga nkita, 222 ngangas, in general, 224, 233, 312, 336, 342. See also kimbandas Ngangela, 47, 55 ngangu sense, intelligence, see Guyanese “sense man,” 342 Ngola a kiluanje, 23–4, 28 ngolo, 357–359, 361, 368 Ngoyo, 88, 213. See also Cabinda ngunza, 355 n. 7, 356 Niger Delta, 13 Nigeria, 224 Njinga/Nzinga/Xinga, Queen, 42, 49, 87, 88, 175 nkangi kiditu, 254, 257 nkisi/minkisi(min’kisi), 77, 80, 82, 85, 212, 222, 223, 224, 231, 237, 241, 249, 252–53, 256, 281, 356 nkita, 78, 220, 222, 223, 224, 307. See also simbi, territorial deities Nkondu, 212, 225 North America, 344 nsanga, (dance), 359–360 Nsevo, 78 Nsi Kwilu, 81 Nsundi (Basundi), 78, 188, 191 Nsuzi, 215 Nzadi Basin, 292, 296 Nzambi a Mpungu, (Nzambe mpungu), 75, 76, 269, 279, 336 Nzinga, Queen, see Njinga Nzinga, twin born with umbilicus around neck, 215, 218 nzunga, 356 Obatala, 225 Obeah, 324, 343, 347. See also witchcraft Occupations of slaves and freedpersons, 141–143 Ogun, 224, 273 Olinda, 127, 172 Oliveira, Maria Ines de, 126 Omari-Obayemi, Mikelle, 224 ordeals, 82, 251 orisha, 224

Ortiz, Fernando, 233 Ouidah, 28, 36 Our Lady of Altagracia, 277 Our Lady of Conception, 111 Our Lady of Mount Carmel, 276, 277, 280, 283 Our Lady of Perpetual Help, 274, 275 Our Lady of Pinda, 274 Our Lady of the Rosary, 148–149, 151, 160, 172, 173 Ovando, Governor Nocolás de, 234 Ovimbundu, 49, 51, 58, 330 pakèt Kongo, 281 palenque, 227 Palma, 122. See also São João da Palma Palmares, 49, 118, 159, 161, 227 Palmie, Stephan, 241 Palo Monte, 226 Pará, 124 Paracatú, 128 Paraná River, 129 Parco, Rosario dal, OFMCap, 255 Parda, Joaquina, 141 Pardo/as, 119, 121–122, 127, 144–145, 166, 170, 171, 172 Parna´ıba Piau´ı, 124–126, 128 Parna´ıba River, 128–129 Paulistas, 129 Pawnship, 121 Pensacola, 232 Pere, Mr. of Seafield, 342 Pernambuco, 26, 27, 31, 48–9, 51, 61, 62, 124–127, 160, 168, 171 pessoas de obrigaça˜ o, 121 Petro, 223 Piau´ı, 127–128 Pilar, 119–122, 127, 136–138, 140, 142 pilgrimage, 280 Pinto, Luiza, 112 Plaine-du-Nord, La, 272 Pombal, Marquis de, 163 pombeiros, 51, 96 Pompo, 77 Population statistics, 119, 121–123 Porpoise, see dolphin Port-au-Prince, 226, 275, 284

Index Pôrto da Estrêla, 128 Porto Real/Imperial/Nacional, 120, 122, 136–140 Portugal, Portuguese, 23, 94, 118–119, 121, 123, 141, 156 prêt savanne, 262–63 pretos calçados, 96 pretos velhos, 153 Price, Richard, 187 Price-Mars, Jean, 267 Prospect Bluff, 232 Puerto Rico, 36 Purgatory, 85 Queen of Congo, 170, 172, 173, 174, 176 Queen Victoria, 349 queens, 160, 161, 162, 163, 168, 178; as leader of quilombo, 162 quilambas, 106 quilombo(s), quilambolas, 9, 118, 122–123, 134, 144, 148, 160, 169, 227; in Minas Gerais, 162; festivals known as, 153. See also Palmares Quilombo dos Palmares, see Palmares quimbares, 96, 103 quimboiseur, 365 Quinto, 121, 128, 141 Quionzo, 87 Rada, 223 Rastafarians, 348, 349 rats, 292, 308, 315 Rebolo (Rabello, Robôllo. See also Libolo), 130–132, 147, 164, 166, 168 recaptives, Africans, see Africans, liberated Recife, 124, 166, 171, 172; Dutch Recife, 159 Registries, baptismal and death, 130, 134–135 n. 26; 136, 139, 143–144, 148 Regla, 233 reinado, see coronations Reis Congos, 16 Religious brotherhoods, black (Royal Congo cabildo, 233; Cabildo Rey Mago San Melchor, 233; 236)

381

Revolts, slave, 207 Reyes, D´ıa de, see Day of Kings Ribas, Oscar, 92 Ribeiro, Manuel SJ, 74, 76, 88 rice, 292, 298, 299–300, 311, 315 ring shout, 366–367 Rio das Velhas, 120–121 Rio de Janeiro, 27, 31, 51, 52, 55, 58, 61, 97, 124, 128–130, 132, 139, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 170, 171, 186, 188, 206, 207, 329, 351, 361 R´ıo de la Plata, 26, 31 roças, 142–143 Rodney, Walter, 329 Rodrigues de Meneses, 99 Romaine-la-Prophétesse, 259, 270, 271 rosary brotherhoods, see Brotherhoods of Our Lady of the Rosary rosary, 84 Rugendas, João Maur´ıcio, 173, 174 rulers, African, 156–157 Rupert’s Valley, 323, 324 Ruund, 49, 54, 57, 58 Sabará, 112, 121 Sabarû, 137 sacraments, 100 Saint Benedict, 151, 160, 170n62, 180 Saint Domingue, 28, 57–58, 62, 235, 243–45, 250–54, 258–64, 266, 269, 272, 276, 277, 279 Saint James the Greater (Sen Jak), 266, 272, 273, 276; feast of, 359 Salazar dictatorship, 92 salt, 349–350 salt and slave trade associations, 351, salt avoidance and vulnerability, 342, 343 salt ingestion, subordination, 349–350 Salvador, 124, 126–127, 130, 132, 135, 138–139, 161, 166, 172 Salve Antonia, 283 San Basilio, 239 San Lorenzo de los Negros de Mina, 236 Santa Anna (St. Ann), church of, 130, 134 n. 25, 144, 146, 150 Santa Cruz, 118, 120, 122, 136–138, 140, 142

382

Index

Santa Luzia, 118, 120, 122, 136–138, 140, 142 Santer´ıa, 226 Santo Amaro, 169–170, 175 Santos, Luis Gonç alves dos, 128, n. 17, 149 n. 38 São Domongos, 127 São Félix, 120–122, 127, 136–140, 142, 143 n. 31 São Francisco River, 31, 127 São João da Palma, 136–138, 140 São José de Tocantins, 128 São Luis, 124, 127 São Paulo, 129, 134, 186, 188, 207 São Tomé, 23–26, 43, 44–46, 60, 126, 158 Saut-d’Eau (Ville-de-Bonheur), 276 Savona, Cherubino da, OFMCap, 255 Sebastyén, Eva, 10 Selassie, Haile, 348 self ethnographers, 72, 73 Seminole, Black, villages (Bowlegs Town, Pilaklikaha, Payne’s Town, Mulatto Girl’s Town, King Heijah’s Town, Bucker Woman’s Town, Boggy Island, Big Swamp), 231–2 Senegambia, 28, 299, 303 “sense man,” (ngangu), 336, 342 Sephardic Jews, 26 Serro do Frio, 161, 162 Seville, 23 Shango, 224 shipmates, 320, fn. 26 ships, immigrant, 324, 333 ships, slave Arabian IV, 333, 336 Athletae, 327 Graça, 333 Malaga, 336 use of tar on, 339, 341, fn. 44 shrines, 76–77 Sierra Leone, 13, 299, 303, 321, 323, 324, 326, 327, 348 Silva Corrêa, Elias Alexandre da, 99, 100, 101, 107, 109 Silva Lundû, Rita da, 135

Silva, Bartolomeu Bueno da, 129 silver (Spanish, New World), 26 simbi, (kisimbi, basimbi, bisimbi ), 193, 196, 197, 198, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 219, 223, 224, 225–226, 307, 312, 313, 356. See also territorial deities sizas (sales taxes), 130, 136, 139, 143 Slave Coast (West Africa), 28. See also Ouidah Slave trade, 123–124, 126–129, 130, 133, 139, 292, 296–297, 311, 336; statistics, 23–41, Appendix, suppression of, see West Africa Squadron slave traders (Portuguese), 337 slavery, 158, 158, 160, 161, 297, 317; Christianity and, 158, 160, 173; rebellions, 160, 161, 162, 176; runaways, 159, 160, 162; slave ports, 160, 163 slaves, 93, 95, 97, 339, 340 Songa, 138 Sonho, see Soyo Souloque, Faustin, 278 Sousa Coutinho, Francisco de, 96, 99, 107, 109 South Atlantic System, 7 South Carolina Lowcountry, 10, 17, 112 Souto, Sebastião, 86, 89 Souza Pereira, Niomar de, 151 Soyo, 274, 275, 276 Spain, 44–46. See also Spanish West Indies, Seville, Lima, R´ıo de la Plata Spaniards (as slavers), 56–58 Spanish West Indies, 23. See also Cuba, Puerto Rico spirits, African categories, 75–79, 223 wicked, 80–81 St. Augustine, 228 St. Francis of Assisi, 111 St. Helena, 320, 321, 323, 326, 327, 333, 336, 340 Stanley Pool, 139 “States”, in Africa, see Political systems Stono, 228 Stono Rebellion 303

Index sugar, see producing regions (Bahia, Caribbean, Pernambuco, São Tomé) Suwannee River, 232 Sylva, José Porto da, 146 syncretic religions (regla de palo-monte, palo mayombe, zarabanda, santer´ıa), 233 Taino Indians, 234 tambas, 99, see entambes tar, see ships, use of tar on tata, 301 Tavares, Pero, SJ, 77, 87, 88 Teke, 39. See also Mundongue, Tio territorial deities/spirits, in Africa, 76–79, 194, 196–201, 205, 207, 293, 307, 310, 312. See also simbi, nkita, kinda, kiximbi, kituta Thompson, Robert Farris, 73, 231 Thornton, John, 48, 156, 197, 186, 228, 237, 270, 276, 281, 331, 354, 360 Tietê River, 129 Tio, 139, 222. See also Teke Tiriko, 78 Tisserant, R. P., 278 Tocantins (state), 118; map of, 117, 137, 149 Tocantins River, 118, 124, 128, 139 “Tomista” (São Tomé traders, planters), see São Tomé Tortuga, 235 Toxosu, 224 Tra´ıras, 118–122, 136–138, 140, 142 transmigration of souls, 74 trapping, 298, 309, 314–315, 317 Trinidad, 11 Tuckey, J. K. 200–201, 202, 203, 205 Turner, Victor, 197 twins, 211–226 umbrellas, 164, 165, 177 Umbundu language, 48, 93, 186 undamento, 108 Ungaro, Bernardo OFMCap, 89 United States, 3 Upper Guinea Coast, 124, 139, 304

383

Urban slavery, 44–46, 52–53 Usá, see African Nations, Hausa Vansina, Jan, 352 Vasconcelos, Governor, 97, 100 Vatican, 277, 278 Vazconcelos, Antonio de Melo e, 146 Vera Cruz, 26 Vermelho River, 118 Vessey, Denmark, 312 Vila Bela, 124 Vila Boa, 118–121, 123, 126–134, 136–144, 146 Vila de São João, 120 Vila Rica (Ouro Prêto), 128 Vila Vilar, Enriqueta, 239 Vili, 49, 56–57 violence, and slaving, 40, 44, 46–7, 56, 57–59, 60 Virgin Mary, 84, 85, 272, 274, 275, 276, 277, 282. See also entries under Our Lady Viye, 54, 105, 357 Vodou (Vaudoux), 265, 267, 268, 275, 277, 278, 244, 246–54, 259–61 Wakenaam Island, 329 Wambu, 51 wanga, 269. See also witchcraft war (in western Central Africa), see violence water spirits (in Guyana), 346, 347, 348 Weisman, Brent, 232 West Africa (West Africans), 2, 8, 9, 124–126, 128, 130, 132–139, 141 West Africa Squadron (British), 31–35 West Africans, in Brazil, 51. See also “Minas” West Central Africa, 8, 17 Windward Coast, 303 witchcraft and enslavement, cannibalism, and vampirism, 324, 326, 346, 347, 348, 350 witchcraft, 81–83. See also ndoki, kindoki, wanga witches, 355

384 Withlacoochee River, 232 women, 47, 59–60, 94, 98, 100, 123, 143, 215, 330, 217, 219, 220, 300, 301 Wood, Peter, 228 Woodson, Carter G., 3 Woodson, Drexel, 268 Works Project Administration, 6 Xavante (also Chavante), 134, 139, 145–146, 148 Xavier, Francisco, 92

Index Yaka, 326 Yemoja, 225 Yoruba, 4, 13, 130, 138, 214, 233 Zaire River, see Congo River Zambi, 348 Zambia, 215, 216 zanges, 225 Zary, district, 77 Zion, 348, 349 zizimina, 81 Zombo, 326, 348

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