Divining Slavery and Freedom: The Story of Domingos Sodré, an African Priest in Nineteenth-Century Brazil by João José Reis (review)

Readers will celebrate the publication of this translation of João José Reis’s groundbreaking study of religion, culture, and society in nineteenth-century Bahia. The present volume is dedicated to Stuart Schwartz and Katia Mattoso—two of Reis’s teachers. With this study, he proves himself their worthy heir and sets the benchmark for a creative blend of microhistory and rich sociocultural contextualization. The story begins with an arrest for “vile” practices associated with witchcraft—which was the way Domingos Sodré’s religious activities as a leading figure in the local Candomblé scene were parsed by the local chief of police. This arrest, which ultimately did little to alter Domingos’s life path, opens up a rich terrain for cultural and social analysis backed by a truly remarkable range of interlocking documents. Owing to the constraints associated with short book reviews, what follows will merely sketch some of the major themes in Reis’s study. It would be impossible, in just a few words, to do justice to the complexity of the story of Domingos as it unfolds in H. Sabrina Gledhill’s fine translation.

The first major theme centers on religion and religious practice with reference to both African antecedents and Bahian realities. Reis shows how Candomblé might have been practiced and by whom (mostly African men, the leadership coming mostly from the ranks of freedmen). He also demonstrates the range of responses to African religious activity on the part of the authorities—from bitter repression to episodes of negotiated tolerance. What comes through in these pages is the power of African belief systems transposed to Brazilian contexts. Men like Domingos Sodré manipulated material and spiritual realms in order to cure, to curse, and, most interestingly, to ameliorate the condition of slavery. This last aspect of his activities included the use of spiritual knowledge and divination to assist in the quest for manumission among the slaves who numbered among his followers. It also included techniques for taming masters (amansa-senhor) through the use of spells and concoctions. Living with slavery was a constant struggle, and one in which the spiritual realm might be just as important as the material.

A second theme surrounds the origins and social background of Domingos Sodré. Through a combination of documentary evidence and careful intuition, Reis reconstructs the birth and life journey of this remarkable African priest from his birthplace near Lagos, Nigeria, to the cane fields near Salvador, and finally to his becoming an independent black man of means in the city itself. Domingos nearly saw it all, living to within a few years of abolition. He participated (or claimed to have done so) in the struggle for Brazilian independence; he gained his freedom; and he eventually married twice in the Catholic faith, though he had no children with either partner. Along the way, he accumulated a modicum of wealth, including the ownership of a variety of slaves and various urban properties. Yet, at his death, he left his second wife, Maria da Conceição, with only a modest sum invested in the Caixa Econômica to carry her through her last years. As successful as he was, it was a tenuous kind of stability he was able to carve out in Bahian society, and not one that went uncontested, as his arrest and other legal battles suggest.

The third and last theme to be highlighted in this review is the theme of community. Only a scholar with the experience and insight of Reis could pull together all of the strands of this story and weave an image of a complex human community. The triumph of the book, from this reviewer’s perspective, is the way Reis shows the many, and at times contentious, ways that Africans like Domingos forged networks of solidarity and social...