Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (review)

This book is part of a growing scholarship emphasizing cultural aspects of south Atlantic history and the importance of African culture in the formation of the Atlantic world. The book mixes long discussions of well-known aspects of slavery with fresh and novel materials about Africans in the Luso-Atlantic world drawn primarily from the archives of the Portuguese Inquisition.

Despite the many citations of primary sources, some of them used before to the same ends by other scholars, the first three chapters are really a recapitulation of a generation of scholarship on the contexts of Brazilian slavery. The argument, that not even considerable efforts at resistance could halt slavery's erosion of African structures of kinship and community, would be accepted by most students of the subject, although at times the evidence is more complex than the author is willing to admit. For example, Sweet emphasizes the freeing of the aged, but almost all quantitative studies have demonstrated that adult women under age forty-five and children composed the majority of freed people. Attempts at the quantification of manumission and discussions of mortality rates that do not take the age structure into consideration are not particularly helpful. Over all, these three chapters are derivative and might have been reduced to a single introductory chapter without much loss to the book's argument.

The heart of the book and its real contribution lie in the following five chapters that seek to demonstrate the vitality of central African religious ideas and practices in Kongo and Angola, Portugal and Brazil. Using interesting materials from inquisition trials, the author attempts to show continuities of African belief and practice as well as their impact on Portuguese popular religiosity. Argument in this context sometimes exceeds evidence. The inquisition sources, which can be problematical, might have merited some discussion, but a wealth of detail on African religion is provided nonetheless.

In its stress on continuity, the book is an attack on the classic formulation of "Creole" cultures in the diaspora by Mintz and Price, and it selectively draws its inspiration from the work of Thornton. But unlike Thornton, Sweet presents an African culture that is far more pristine when it arrives beyond the sea, and he has considerable doubts about Thornton's emphasis on the depth of Central Africans' Christianization before their arrival in America.¹

On the other hand, although Sweet seems much influenced by Thornton, he does not mention Thornton's emphasis on the centrality of slavery in African societies. Sweet argues that African religion was invariably a tool of resistance against slavery and played a "counter- hegemonic" role in Brazil, but if Thornton is correct about slavery, these same belief systems must have been an element that reinforced inequalities in their societies of origin. Thus, their role in resistance would be, in fact, a creolization. This contradiction underlines one of the problems in the new diasporic cultural histories, the changing valence of cultural features in different metropolitan and colonial contexts.