African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil

Introduction: Brazil’s Black Rome and the Remaking of Bahian Regional Identity

Introduction Brazil’s Black Rome and the Remaking of Bahian Regional Identity Brazil’s northeastern city of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, stands out as one of the most prominent points of reference within the African diaspora. The city, also often referred to as “Bahia,” is known for hosting a vibrant, complex, and historically rich African-Bahian culture. Salvador’s carnival draws more than two million people into the streets and showcases Afrocentric carnival clubs such as the blocos afros and afoxés, including the four-thousand-strong, all-male afoxé the Sons of Gandhi (Filhos de Gandhy), comprised almost exclusively of men of African descent. Salvador has nearly as much claim as Rio de Janeiro to samba, the music and dance quintessentially associated with both Brazil and African Brazilians. The heavily percussive fusion known as samba-reggae, a racially politicized offshoot of samba, has captured the imagination and diasporic sensibilities of Michael Jackson, Paul Simon, and Quincy Jones, all of whom traveled to Salvador in the 1990s. The most well known ensemble of samba-reggae, the street performing group Olodum, consists largely of African-Bahian teenagers. Capoeira, an African-Brazilian martial art, the practice of which is both competitive and playful, also evolved in Bahia. The cultural-spiritual foundation of African-Bahian culture, including samba-reggae, capoeira, and many aspects of Salvador’s distinctive carnival , is Candomblé, an African-Brazilian religion akin to Voodoo or Santeria . Candomblé’s cosmology, iconography, and ritual draw heavily on West and west-central African traditions. The temples of Candomblé worship (terreiros or casas in Portuguese) have since the early nineteenth century provided institutional support to African slaves, free blacks, and generations of African Bahians, allowing them to reshape their cultural heritage and identity around cultural references to Africa. Links between Candombl é and other expressions commonly understood as cultura negra (black 6 7 6 7 2 · African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil culture), such as samba, capoeira, and the batucadas (all-male percussive carnival clubs) remained strong through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This African-Bahian heritage is particularly on show during Salvador’s numerous popular religious festivals. Moreover, the food associated with Bahia’s African-Bahian community and the women who cook it, known as Baianas, have come to characterize Bahia both within Brazil and internationally. Traditionally the Baianas (frequently women of some standing within the hierarchy of Candomblé) dressed distinctively in styles based on West African fashions and peddled food as their primary source of income. Nowadays a small number of these Baianas accept commissions from the Bahian state to work in the historical city center, posing for photographs with tourists for a fee. So close is Bahia’s association with traditions typically described as African that Brazil’s diplomatic corps and even former president Lula da Silva have employed this regional heritage in carefully scripted diplomatic efforts to woo African trading partners.1 In very meaningful ways, Bahia has been associated with African-Bahian culture. Consequently, Bahia occupies a place of honor and privilege within the African diaspora. As Candomblé has been a vital institutional support at the center of this diasporic cultural richness, it fits that Salvador is known as Brazil’s “Black Rome,” as Candomblé priestess Mãe Eugênia Ana dos Santos (1869–1938) proclaimed in the 1930s.2 This contemporary association between Bahia and African-Bahian culture , however, boasts a more nuanced—and more fraught—nineteenthand twentieth-century lineage than the city’s tourist board would have one believe. With this book I return to the historical moment, roughly the years between 1930 and 1954, when a discourse of cultural inclusion was created and when the foundations for Salvador’s subsequent configurations of cultural politics were established. Before 1930, Bahian elites cultivated a largely antagonistic position toward African-Bahian practices, and the press, politicians , and the police criticized, repressed, and persecuted public expressions of African-Bahian culture. However, a close analysis of Salvador’s major popular festivals (from the Portuguese phrase for these events, festas populares), including carnival, reveals how a number of factors came together after 1930 to foster the incorporation of markedly African-Bahian practices into newer formulations of Bahian regional identity and “Bahianness ” (in Portuguese, baianidade). Focusing on the festivals and the components of African-Bahian culture within them reveals the extent to which Salvador’s African-Bahian working-class men and women (which includes those who worked in the informal economy) were involved in this...