The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil

5 Bogum and Roça de Cima: The Parallel History of Two Jeje Terreiros in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

124 5 Bogum and Roça de Cima The Parallel History of Two Jeje Terreiros in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century The Intersection of Oral Tradition and Written Sources This chapter examines historical information from the second half of the nineteenth century regarding two Jeje terreiros: Bogum in Salvador and the terreiro known as Roça de Cima (which could be translated roughly as “the upperfarm”)inCachoeira.SejaHundé(alsoknownasRoçadoVentura)arose from Roça de Cima at the end of the century. The two terreiros maintained close ties until around the 1950s. The data in this chapter comes in part from the scanty bibliography available,1 but it derives principally from the historical documents I was able to find in notary records and archives, from certain reports in O Alabama, and from surveys of the Jeje oral tradition that I have collected over the past seven years.2 ThemethodologyIused,basedoncross-referencingoraltraditionandwritten sources, was complicated by several factors. The first was the scarcity of documentsonthereligiousactivityoftheblack-mestizopopulationingeneral, and on the members of these Jeje congregations specifically. The second was the occasional reluctance of Jeje devotees and priests to speak of the history of their terreiros, great patience and persistence sometimes being necessary to gain their trust. The final difficulty was that the use of oral tradition for historical reconstruction presents innumerable problems, as Africanists have shown clearly.3 A common example is the possibility of “skipping generations” or of “ selective simplification” when recalling undocumented historical genealogies.4 The more relevant people are remembered while the less important intermediates areforgotten,resultinginincompletechronologicalorgenealogicalsequences. It is often a case not of lying but simply omitting part of the truth. In other cases, there is the use of topoi, or narrative stereotypes, which cause the transposition of events; the same stories are used to refer to different geographical orchronologicalevents,orvariationsofthesamestoryareattributedtodiverse groups. This “narrative economy” of orality can introduce distortions of both omission and invention. Oral discourse is always conditioned by the social bogum and roça de cima 125 interactions between the narrator and the listener, and often the discourse expresses the narrator’s views and ideological biases, conscious or unconscious, and serves as a strategy for legitimizing present situations based on the past or resisting competing versions. Itisthesubjectiveandoperational“reality”ofthese“historicalmyths,”independentoftheirhistoricalveracity ,that interestsanthropology.Butforhistorical reconstruction, it is important to go beyond the anthropological value of the “realities of the imaginary” and attempt to filter the information through a critical sieve, which reveals and corrects the ideological biases or distortions implicit in the discourse. To evaluate the historical reliability of oral evidence it is very important to ask the same person about the same topic on repeated occasions and to contrast this data systematically with the testimony of others. One must also identify whether the speakers were eyewitnesses to the facts or if they received the information from others. Finally, the correspondence between the oral evidence and written sources (when available) can decisively confirm an event. The present experiment revealed recurring discrepancies between oral memory and documented memory. In these cases, the written information was privileged, after evaluating its historical reliability, according to conventional methods of historiography. This does not mean that documentary evidence is not subject to possible distortions and errors, as is oral evidence. But, being documents contemporary with the facts or events, they inspire more confidence in their veracity, or at least in the probability of their veracity. In any case, the following narrative’s hypothetical “historical realism” should be read with a certain degree of caution. I merely attempt here to reconstruct or chronologicallyordertheknownfacts,inordertoofferabasisformorelengthy future research. The narrative begins with Bogum in Salvador. The Origins of Bogum and Its Activities in the 1860s The Bogum candomblé, or Zoogodô Bogum Malê Rundô, has been called the “oldest Jeje terreiro,” “centenarian,” “bicentennial,” “more than three centuries old,” and other appellations that highlight its great age.5 In a 1961 interview, the lateValentinaMariadosAnjos,DonéRunhó,thenmãe-de-santoofBogum,said it with greater prudence: “The terreiro was founded by Africans and is more than 100 years old,” which would put its foundation at around the first half of the nineteenth century.6 Another oral tradition of the terreiro dates its establishment to the end of the eighteenth century. According to this version, there was a plantation, or 126 bogum and roça de cima engenho, with a great concentration of slaves where today the Catholic University stands. It is believed...