Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (review)

The Portuguese Inquisition was in many respects a fundamental crime against humanity, but for the historian, as James Sweet amply illustrated in this remarkable new book, it is also a treasure trove of historical information. Thanks to a bulky case in the Inquisition archives in Lisbon, readers can witness the transatlantic life story of the African-born healer Domingos Álvares, whose principal work was carried out in Brazil and in Portugal. Álvares’ story can hardly be called typical, and Sweet makes no attempt to use it as a generalization about slavery or the slave trade. Rather Álvares was a special person, a healer, a thinker, and amazingly resourceful, whose story might be read as an adventure had it not had a sad ending.

In brief, thanks to some careful sleuthing by Sweet, we can establish that Álvares was probably born in the land north of the West African kingdom of Dahomey, enslaved in a war during the 1720s, and transported, like so many others from that region, to Brazil. There he demonstrated great powers as a healer and soon had a large clientele of all races who were convinced that his powers to heal, whatever their religious source, were efficacious. However, there were those in the Church who were convinced that Álvares’s practice was a form of witchcraft. He was arrested in Rio de Janeiro, tried in Portugal, and sentenced to exile in southern Portugal. Throughout, when not in prison, Álvares managed to keep his healing practice going. Sweet manages to take this bare-bones biography and flesh it out to tell a variety of stories: of healing practices in the Ewe-Fon region of modern day Bénin, of slave life in Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro, of the complex interactions of race and status in Brazil, the compelling arts of healing, and the intolerance of the Church. While some of the interpretive interpolations are speculative, and in the African case, substantially speculative for the specific case of Álvares, they are not false as a general picture of all the conditions.

Sweet generally views Álvares’s practice, and to some degree African healing practices in general, as forms of resistance to oppression. The resistance narrative, which he locates in Africa as well as in Brazil and Europe, overshadows other elements of the story. Álvares managed to become prosperous through the fees he charged; he won the affection of a large community of people, including some quite important and powerful Portuguese; and he built a small family in Brazil. These aspects of his career, while acknowledged, tend to be subsumed into the pattern of resistance. In this element of Sweet’s analysis, this reviewer finds him a bit heavy handed: though it is quite possible that Álvares may have viewed his practice as essentially resistant, his testimony and reported actions do not show this. But history is always a bit clouded, and Sweet is quite justified in believing that one need not trust the record of the Inquisition as a literal reading of one man’s inner thoughts. A person as enterprising and attuned to his situation as was Domingos Álvares would not advertise a subversive program to the authorities.

Domingos Álvares is a fine, well-constructed and cogently argued piece of microhistory. In the best traditions of microhistory it tells a compelling small story that illustrates a larger picture. Sweet accomplishes this by unraveling a great many threads in the course of one life in the slave trade and of slavery itself, a story which so often is told only in statistics and generalities.