Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil (review)

Out of the intersection between the growing popularity of lay devotion in early modern Catholicism and the enormous forced migration of Africans to Brazil came the processions and festivals in honor of Our Lady of the Rosary—the reinados and congados—the subjects of this book. Brazil, the largest slave society in the Americas, and Minas Gerais, site of one of the first gold rushes in modern history, were profoundly influenced by Christianity and the slave trade. So too were the slaves of the many different African homelands, as well as their descendants born in Brazil, as they sought to survive in this new, dehumanizing world. Drawing on shared traditions and beliefs that originated in Africa, and accepting Christianity, slaves and free blacks in Minas Gerais founded, joined, and sustained black lay brotherhoods devoted to Our Lady of the Rosary. In these organizations, the festivals of coronation grew to become spaces where a new identity and community emerged and was affirmed. By combing archives for records of lay brotherhoods in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and by interviewing and observing members of several groups today, Elizabeth Kiddy combines historical and anthropological research to tell a continuous story of creation, adaptation, and survival in one of the rich spiritual traditions of Brazil.

The reinado and the congado have deep roots, as Kiddy shows, and are interwoven with the history of African peoples, Western Christianity, and the local history of Minas Gerais. The earliest brotherhoods of the rosary arose in Western Europe, owing to the growing popularity of the rosary. Anyone could join, provided that he or she prayed to a rosary every day. By the end of the fifteenth century, blacks in Lisbon had created their own "Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Blacks"; this began a pattern for independent black lay brotherhoods in the Portuguese colonial world and for the belief that Our Lady of the Rosary was especially protective of blacks. The brotherhoods appeared in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais when the gold rush caused an enormous in-migration of prospectors and slaves. Despite the chaos of this time, lay brotherhoods formed in all of the principal towns and in many of the smaller communities, and quickly became an important part of religious devotion for all—masters and slaves, whites and blacks, rich and poor. The early brotherhoods were racially integrated, but gradually black lay brotherhoods began to split off. In these black lay brotherhoods the reinado, or the celebration in honor of Our Lady with its lavish processions, sung masses, sermons, and the coronation of kings and queens was of highest importance. "Ambassadors" or representatives from different brotherhoods associated with different African nations participated in these processions with their retinues and instruments, thus becoming a group of dancers, which collectively became known as congados.

The lay brotherhoods flourished well into the nineteenth century. But the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century brought new challenges as membership in the brotherhoods began to fall and as the Vatican sought to Romanize the Catholic Church and to exercise greater control over the brotherhoods. In Brazil the festivals of the brotherhoods began to be seen as antiquated and superstitious vestiges of the past after the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the fall of the empire in 1889 heralded a new, modern age. During the Estado Novo of the 1930s, the introduction of Catholic Action brought repression of lay brotherhoods. Along with a strengthened Catholic Church hierarchy in Brazil, the Estado Novo successfully halted many festivals of coronation in Minas Gerais in the 1940s. After the 1940s, many of the links between the festivals of coronation and the brotherhoods were broken, causing the reinados to be seen as simply congagos, i.e., elements of folklore, divorced from religious belief and practice. Today, the festivals still continue in Minas Gerais among persons...