People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (review)

In 1994, Soares was amazed to discover a reference to the "Statutes of the Congregation of the Minas-Makii Blacks in Rio de Janeiro" (1786). Written by a congregant from the enslaved and subsequently freed Africans of the "Kingdom of Makii" (modern-day Benin), the nearly seventy-page document situated the group in Rio de Janeiro. Theretofore, slave populations in colonial Rio de Janeiro were believed to have been almost exclusively of Bantu origin. Thus began the research that culminated in this book.

The methodology is particularly interesting. Soares searched for traces of the Mina-Makii in every possible type of documentation. Within Africa, she investigated the slave trade on the Mina Coast and looked in vain for evidence of slaves exported to Rio de Janeiro in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. However, she managed to find slave baptism records for the Rio parish of the Se that listed slaves whose mothers' port of departure from Africa was Mina. Marriage and burial records and wills also yielded slaves and ex-slaves identified as Mina. Soares also found documents indicating that by 1740, at least four established lay Catholic brotherhoods existed among the Mina blacks in Rio. She surmised that membership in a brotherhood was the principal route to social prominence for African slaves or ex-slaves. Hence, brotherhoods became the focus of her research.

A central concept in this work is provenience, which refers to places or social groups from which African people were taken as slaves; "provenience" is an attribute of identity. Soares investigated how the Mina constructed their group experience in a state of captivity, using provenience as an anchor. The analysis also centers on social groups (brother-hoods) that reflect the deliberate choice of Mina to be associated with others of similar origin (thus differentiating her approach from that of Rodriguez, Bastide, or Herskovits).¹

In the second half of the book, Soares combines the search for Mina with an urban history of Rio de Janeiro during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She pays particular attention to the numerous chapels connected to small black brotherhoods in the urban periphery. Although never more than 10 percent of the slave population in Rio, the Mina-Makii had a strong presence. Church burial records surprisingly indicate that about half of the Mina burials were women. Since about two-thirds of imported slaves were male, women apparently had a special prominence in the urban black churches. Wills from the Mina demonstrate that many women were remarkably successful in accumulating property and active in promoting the brotherhoods. Black lay brotherhoods in Rio de Janeiro engaged in elaborate festivals, processions, and funerals; the election of kings and queens; and the organization of royal courts. This book about a minor group of slaves and ex-slaves provides considerable insight into the social organization and customs of slaves in the colonial city.