People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro by Mariza de Carvalho Soares (review)

In 1994, Mariza de Carvalho Soares uncovered the “Statutes of the Congregation of the Minas Makii [Mahi] Blacks” in the Brazilian National Archives, an unusual manuscript that preserved details of the lives of freed and enslaved Afro-Brazilians in the mid-1700s. That document is at the center of this newly translated book, in which the historian Soares presents a contextualized analysis of the active “reinterpretation” of their African past undertaken by those residents of colonial slave society. Drawing on further studies into lay religious brotherhoods, Soares offers valuable insights into interpersonal relationships and identity formation for a small group of Africans in Brazil and argues for a reconceptualization of ethnicity through “provenience groups” based on their African origins.

In the introduction, Soares explains her discovery of the “Mahi Manuscript” and subsequent research into the brotherhoods formed within the African slave community. She relates her surprise that a group of “Mahis” from the so-called Mina Coast of Africa developed an independent understanding of their origins and identity through the Brotherhood of Santo Elesbão and Santa Efigênia and its subgroups. In Rio de Janeiro, which had a slave population that included mostly Bantu-speaking Africans from regions near present-day Angola, further records of the Mina-Mahi Africans were scarce; Soares scoured baptismal records, marriage records, obituaries, and even wills to glean evidence for her arguments on the meaning of terms designating ethnicity and origins. In this, she emphasizes the “importance of Catholicism in the new social configurations” adopted by “those living under slavery” (p. 13) in colonial Brazil.

In part 1, Soares summarizes the difficult history of the Atlantic slave trade as the Portuguese expanded their imperial reach down the west coast of Africa and repeatedly took captive “Minas” from the Bight of Benin. She uses baptismal records to confirm the growing historical evidence for Mina presence in Rio de Janeiro, but warns that labels used to identify slaves such as nação (“nation”) and terra (“land of origin”) do not signify a stable ethnicity or a fixed cultural heritage. Instead, she develops the concept of “provenience groups” to identify Africans from recognizable cultural regions whose own efforts both preserved and transformed their religious, social, and personal identities in their new circumstances.

In part 2, she narrows her focus to the history of Rio de Janeiro and the lay religious brotherhoods established in the Roman Catholic churches there for specific African communities. Using slave obituaries, she argues that “religious practice and affiliation” were crucial for both “self-determination” and “maintenance of provenience groups” (p. 131) among slaves. Founding documents for the Brotherhood of Santo Elesbã;o and Santa Efigênia and its “Mahi Congregation” subgroups suggest that their functions exceeded religious devotion, as members created alliances and kinship within those autonomous religious spaces. To this end, Soares claims that the Mahi Manuscript may be the “most important document” (p. 183) for understanding Afro-Brazilian lives in that era. She completes this book with a new “Postscript” explaining her conclusions and expanding her account with individual biographies of two men and one woman from three different Mina subgroups.

This book provides both detailed information on the struggles of the Minas in Rio de Janeiro and a historical and theoretical framework through which to understand them. Despite the clarity of the translation, some readers may find this book challenging because of the sheer density of information. That challenge notwithstanding, Soares has written a noteworthy contribution to the study of Africans in colonial slave society.