Carnivals, Dance, Music, and Martial Arts
Black festivities were not limited to Christmas. Several other festivals carried elements in common with the processions of folia de reis. Brazilian Carnaval is one of these festivals.
Enslaved, freed, and free Black populations were the main participants in Brazilian carnaval, a festival that, like New Orleans’s Mardi Gras, is celebrated still today everywhere in the country from Saturday until Tuesday, the last day before the beginning of Lent. Carnaval derives from the Portuguese entrudo, a popular festivity held three days before the beginning of Lent, brought to Brazil by the Portuguese from the islands of Madeira, Azores, and Cape Verde in the seventeenth century. But unlike the folias de reis, the entrudo was not an organized and hierarchical celebration. During the entrudo, people took to the streets and participated in mock battles with buckets of water and limões de cheiro, scent-filled wax balls. In his travel account Voyage pittoresque et historique au BrĂ©sil, Jean-Baptiste Debret explained that “the only preparations for the Brazilian carnaval consist of manufacturing limões de cheiro, an activity performed by everybody, including the family of the small capitalist, the poor widower, the free Black women who brought two or three friends, and finally the Black female slaves of the rich households who, two months prior to the festival, amass money to buy wax provisions.”63According to the same author, during carnaval, Black men would gather early in the morning around the market and the fountains and start throwing water and tapioca on Black women. However, he also mentions that these activities created disorder. As more aggressive confrontations took place, public authorities exerted greater control over the festivities. Slowly, this once spontaneous festival, originally celebrated mainly by Black people, became an organized festival that would also attract people of higher classes all over the country.
During the nineteenth century, enslaved people developed other forms of gathering, celebrating, and resisting in Brazil. One of these manifestations is jongo (or caxambu), an Afro-Brazilian dance and music style associated with enslaved West Central Africans and their descendants who toiled in the coffee plantations of southeast Brazil during the nineteenth century. Men and women gathered in a circle (roda) usually around a bonfire, dancing, drumming, and clapping their hands, while a couple dances in the center of the circle, following the rhythm of the music. Jongo survived after the end of slavery, but it was largely neglected among the younger Black generations during most of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, since the 1990s, several communities of descendants of enslaved people in the ParaĂba Valley have recovered the tradition and today organize festivals promoting the ancestral dance in urban and rural areas in Rio de Janeiro.64
Like jongo, the first documented references to capoeira date back to the early nineteenth century. Evolving from various combat games introduced in Brazil by enslaved West Central Africans and their descendants, capoeira emerged in urban areas where, during the nineteenth century, it was practiced by enslaved, freed, and free Black and mixed-race men.65 Because capoeira was initially a Black martial art used for self-defense and in street fights, Brazilian authorities considered it a dangerous activity that should be repressed.
Over the years, capoeira gradually incorporated music as well as body movements from other dances and Asian martial arts introduced in Brazil in the early twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, capoeira has been increasingly accepted and embraced by white Brazilians, and today it is practiced in several contexts, even by women. Ultimately, capoeira gained great popularity in Brazil as well as internationally, including in several African countries. It is especially notable in that capoeira’s trajectory shows that cultural transfers from Africa to the Americas did not follow a linear direction but rather a circular model.66
Gathering to drink, eat, dance, sing, and celebrate saints helped bondspeople survive the ordeals of slavery in the Americas. In Cuba, the Catholic mutual aid societies and cabildos de naciĂłn (societies that, like Catholic lay brotherhoods, allowed Africans to gather along ethnic lines), also elected kings of Congo.67 These organizations allowed for the emergence of SanterĂa (also known as Regla de Ocha, Regla de Ifá, or LucumĂ) and Palo Mayombe (also Palo Monte or Reglas de Congo), Afro-Cuban religions incorporating elements of Yoruba and Kongo religious systems.68 In Brazil, Black brotherhoods that very often preserved the connections among men and women sharing the same languages and ethnic backgrounds favored the development of the first temples of CandomblĂ© in Bahia during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Embracing elements of West African religions such as Vodun and Orisa and incorporating elements of Native American cosmologies and Catholicism, enslaved Africans and their descendants formed CandomblĂ© shrines that were organized according to deities (orixás) and “nations” associated with their region of provenance on the African continent. After the abolition of slavery, the need to reestablish bonds disrupted by the slave trade encouraged a recuperation and reinvention of African bonds as well. Hence, several leaders of these temples, such as the aforementioned freedman Bamboxê Obitikô (who is buried in the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Black Men), traveled back and forth from Brazil to the Bight of Benin.69 Likewise, under similar contexts, Africans and Afro-Brazilians created other shrines associated with West African and West Central African religious systems in Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco, Maranhão, and Rio Grande do Sul, giving birth to CandomblĂ© temples and other Afro-Brazilian religions such as Batuque and Umbanda.Catholic lay Black brotherhoods (with their saints, church buildings, and masses) and CandomblĂ© temples shape the ways slavery is still remembered and commemorated in Brazil’s public space today. Let us take again the example of the brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Black Men that also became a popular tourist landmark and an important place of Black cultural assertion in Brazil at the end of the 1980s. The church celebrates Black masses on Sundays and Tuesdays. The service includes dance, food offerings, and music performed by brotherhood members who play drums, tambourines, and agogôs (from the Yoruba word agogo), an idiophone consisting of a single or double bell.
All these elements associated with Black festivals were not part of the traditional masses but rather related to a broader movement of Black culture assertion, which was initiated among Catholic youth groups that emerged during the final years of the long civil-military dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985.
During this period, through the activity of other Black organizations, including Carnaval groups such as the renowned Ilê Aiyê and Olodum, new members associated with local CandomblĂ© temples and whose parents and grandparents had not been historically affiliated started joining the brotherhood. Recognizing how Catholic Black confraternities contributed to the survival of their ancestors, today’s members of the brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Black Men do not conceive Catholicism and CandomblĂ© as mutually exclusive. Therefore, the church’s Black masses are part of a broader set of initiatives that during the 1990s aimed at revitalizing Salvador’s historic center. One of these events is the celebration of Blessing Tuesday (Terça-Feira da Benção), organized by the famous carnival and musical group Olodum, which led the brotherhood to celebrate every Tuesday a Black mass honoring the Black Saint Anthony of CategerĂł. Although this mass is quite similar to Sunday mass, on Tuesdays the members of the brotherhood share dozens of loaves of bread with a crowd of excited attendants, including tourists, who sing and dance to songs commemorating the slavery past, celebrating Black culture, denouncing the persistence of racism in Brazilian society but also conveying a message of self-esteem.70