The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil

1 Between Two Coasts: Nations, Ethnicities, Ports, and the Slave Trade

1 “African” Nations and “Metaethnic” Denominations This chapter reflects on the so-called Jeje nation based on an analysis of the context of West Africa and the historiography of this ethnonym in relation to the slave trade. Before evaluating who the Jeje were, however, it is important to understand what the term nation meant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Along with other terms such as country or kingdom, nation was used at that time by slave traders, missionaries, and administrative officials from the EuropeanfactoriesalongtheMinaCoasttodesignatediverseautochthonouspopu lations . The initial use of nation in the context of West Africa by the English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese resulted from a sense of collective identity thenprevalentintheEuropeanmonarchicstates,anidentityprojectedontheir commercial and administrative enterprises along the Mina Coast. These sovereign European states found a strong and parallel sense of collective identity among West African societies. This identity was based, above all,onkinshiprelationshipstocertainchieftainciesnormallyorganizedaround monarchical institutions. Additionally, the collective identity of West African societies was multidimensional and articulated on various levels (ethnic, religious , territorial, linguistic, and political). First and foremost, group identity derived from kinship ties among associations of families recognizing a commonancestry .Religiousactivityrelatedtothecultofcertainancestorsorother spiritual entities was thus the vehicle par excellence of ethnic or communal identity.1Belonging to suchagroupwasnormallysignifiedbyaseriesofphysical marks or scarring on the face or other parts of the body. Language and city or territory of residence were also important factors and denominations of group identities: in West Africa there exists a nomenclature by which cities share the name of their inhabitants.2 Finally, political alliances and tributary dependencies of certain monarchies also formed new and more inclusive “national” identities. 1 Between Two Coasts Nations, Ethnicities, Ports, and the Slave Trade 2 between two coasts These diverse collective identities were subject to historic transformation resulting from factors such as alliances through marriage, wars, migrations, aggregationofslavelineages ,appropriationofforeignreligiouscults,andpolitical changes. In many cases, groups adopted names used for them by neighboring peoplesorexternalpowers.Theseexternalnamesoftenencompassedmultiple, originally heterogeneous groups. It is from this perspective that one should view the formation of a group of African “nations” in the context of colonial Brazil. In the sixteenth century the expressions “gentio da Guiné” (gentile or heathen from Guinea) or “Negro da Guiné” (black from Guinea) were used to refer generically to all Africans. But even by the first half of the seventeenth century distinctions emerge between thevariousnations.InRecife,in1647,duringthewarwiththeDutch,Henrique Dias, head of the Regiment of Black Men, wrote in a letter, “The regiment is comprised of men from four nations: Minas, Ardas, Angolas, and Creoles.”3 The mention of Creoles (crioulos,* referring to descendants of Africans born in Brazil) as a “nation” suggests that as early as the seventeenth century this concept corresponded not to political or ethnic criteria prevalent in Africa but to distinctions elaborated by the dominant classes in the colony, which served the slave-based society. André João Antonil, a Jesuit priest who lived in the seventeenth century and published Cultura e opulência do Brasil (Culture and Opulence of Brazil) in 1706, wrote: “And because often [the slaves] are from different nations. . . . Those who come to Brazil are Arda, Mina, Congo from S. Tomé, from Angola , from Cape Verde, and some from Mozambique, who come on ships from India.”4 In the eighteenth century the expression “gentio da Guiné” gradually disappears, although “gentio da Costa” (gentile from the Coast) was still common in Salvador, and the classification of Africans according to nation seems to become more common, coinciding with the increase and diversification of slave trading, which came to include a wider variety of routes and ports of origin. Thenamesofthenationsarenothomogenous,asseenintheAntonilquotation , and can refer to ports of embarkation, kingdoms, ethnicities, islands, or cities.Slavetradersandownersusedthesenamestoservetheirowninterestsof administrativeclassificationandcontrol.Inmanycases,theportorgeographic area of embarkation appears to have been one of the principal criteria in the development of these categories (Mina, Angola, Cape Verde, São Tomé, etc.). These denominations, therefore, did not necessarily correspond to the ethnic self-denominations used by Africans themselves in their regions of origin. As Maria Inês Cortes de Oliveira points out, the African nations, “as they came between two coasts 3 to be known in the New World, did not preserve in their names, nor in their social compositions, a correlation with the forms of self-ascription then in use in Africa.”5 It should be emphasized that this process may not have been quite so unilateral or so radical, for in some cases the names used by the slave traders actually corresponded...