People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro available in Paperback, eBook
People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro
- ISBN-10:
- 0822350408
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822350408
- Pub. Date:
- 10/10/2011
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0822350408
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822350408
- Pub. Date:
- 10/10/2011
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822350408 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/10/2011 |
| Series: | Latin America in Translation Series |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 338 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Mariza de Carvalho Soares is Associate Professor of History at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Read an Excerpt
PEOPLE OF FAITH
Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Rio de JaneiroBy MARIZA DE CARVALHO SOARES
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5040-8
Chapter One
FROM ETHIOPIA TO GUINEA
As Renaissance Europe probed its southern frontier through trade networks branching across the Mediterranean, its merchants, scholars, royalty, and commoners alike gazed in delighted wonder at the bags, chests, and bundles arriving from distant lands by ship and caravan. Precious metals, ivory, ostrich feathers, strange furs, and hides—these and other exotic stuffs were joined (and often physically conveyed) by dark-skinned slaves, who were themselves both a highly valued import commodity and a provocative object of study for Renaissance elites eager to situate themselves at the apex of a world market-geography as yet incompletely formulated.
In this period, knowledge of faraway realms was mostly obtained through the voyagers' accounts that had been accumulating in the literature since antiquity. According to Herodotus (fifth century BCE), beyond the Saharan Desert sands one could reach a region of great forests and bogs, with a vast river full of crocodiles that swam upstream, in a river flowing from the sunset to the Levant (supposedly the Niger River). The Greek historian had also alluded to entire cities of black people there; and he gave an account of the formidable Garamantes, who spent their days hunting the Troglodytes—a strange people who subsisted on snake meat and communicated with batlike squeals. Four centuries later, another Greek, the geographer Strabo (1 BCE–ACE 1), provided a harrowing description of the "numerous deserts" that formed a barrier to the exploration of "the country of the Occidental Ethiopes." By the beginning of the Christian era, Roman explorers and philosophers added their own accounts to the Greek repertoire. With those writings in hand, Pliny the Elder (first century ACE) devised his own list of the peoples inhabiting the remote area south of the Sahara.
Until the early fifteenth century, Europeans based their understanding of far-off lands and peoples on materials such as these. They had traveled only as far as the Mediterranean coast, parts of Egypt, the edge of the Sahara, and the northern stretch of the western coast of Africa (up to the Atlantic archipelagos). The Portuguese, however, were soon to open a new era in Atlantic exploration in general, and African exploration in particular. Their conquest in 1415 of Ceuta (today an enclave in Morocco), a strategic port city in North Africa, eventually came to be a vital Portuguese commercial base with established links to the Muslim world. Portugal thus had new access to the caravan routes that fanned across the north, west, and east of Africa, while it took advantage of Ceuta's seaside location to launch its own navigational forays up and down the African coast. It would be through a combination of their own actual exploration and the assimilation of Muslim familiarity with the region's physical and astronomical features that the Portuguese could, in the mid-fifteenth century, start to devise a new African geography.
To the south, the Sahara separated Portugal and North Africa from the city of Timbuktu (in modern Mali), already an important center of learning in the early fifteenth century as well as a key trading post where caravans would exchange cargo, haggle for supplies, and water their camels. The city's location—near the banks of the Niger River, and at the intersection of trade arteries bearing salt, gold, and other goods—was favorable for both culture and commerce. Salt, extracted from the mines at Taghaza (in today's Mali), was conveyed from Timbuktu on to West Africa, south of the Sahara. In exchange for the salt, as well as for other merchandise imported into West Africa, the black kingdoms sent back to Timbuktu gold, slaves, and ivory, along with particular commodities prized by the Mediterranean market (such as black pepper, cola nuts, and amber). The west coast was accessed by three land routes: one leading to Arguin (off Mauritania); one to the city of Safi; in Morocco, and one to Cantor, in the Lower Gambia. Renaissance maps suggest that due east of the Guinea Coast, if one could cross or circumnavigate the entire African landmass, lay Oriental Ethiopia, a place of Christian kingdoms where Santo Elesbão (Ethiopia) and Santa Efigênia (Nubia) originated. According to these cartographies, Guinea denominated a narrow slice of the western coast, situated at around the fifteenth parallel. Little was known of the surrounding territories or the people that inhabited them, particularly south of the Saharan sands. That would begin to change with the Portuguese arrival on the Mina Coast in 1470.
If one compares the depictions of Africa produced by European cartographers during the first half of the fifteenth century to those produced a century before, the similarity implies that European conceptions of African geography had scarcely changed in a hundred years' time. Even by the 1450s and 1460s, exploratory expeditions did not penetrate far enough to revise the boundaries established during antiquity. But if the early cartographic limits were not as yet being challenged in a fundamental way, increasing contact between explorers and the so-called native forest peoples, who had been known only from their fabulous descriptions in ancient texts, would soon transform European thought and society.
To understand this process, it is appropriate to begin with the writings of an influential contemporary, the crown's royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara (1410–74). Whatever his personal opinions or intentions, Zurara's work constitutes a detailed toponymy that gave narrative form and lexical texture to the West Coast of Africa. In a sense, Zurara initiated the entire scheme of categories and classifications that would underpin the way slavery was understood in the Portuguese Empire. The expression terra de negros (land of the negroes) already appears in his writing in the middle part of the century, designating the region to the south of what is today called the Senegal River.
THE LAND OF THE BLACK MOORS
Gomes Eanes de Zurara was the author of many books, including the Crônicas de Guiné (Chronicles of Guinea), which remained as a manuscript until 1841. The chronicle had been written at the request of King Afonso V. João de Barros cited the Chronicles in 1552, but by 1556, Damião de Góis claimed that it had been lost; the Manuscript was ultimately discovered by Ferdinand Denis in the Paris Library in 1837, and published in 1841. The book contains ninety-seven chapters, of which the first seven are devoted to lauding the notable deeds of Infante Dom Henrique (1394–1460, also known as Henry the Navigator), organizer of Portugal's seaborne expeditions of Africa. While listing Henry's lofty motivations to "search for the lands of Guinea" (gain true knowledge of the region, assess the power of the moors, search for Christian princes, save the souls of heathen), Zurara found a delicate way to suggest that Henry's underlying personal inspiration came from a different dimension altogether:
It is because his ascendant sign was Aires, which is the house of Mars, and is the exaltation of the Sun, and his Master is in the eleventh house, accompanied by the Sun. And the aforementioned Mars was in Aquarius, which is the house of Saturn, and in a place of hope, which meant that he should struggle to accomplish great feats, especially seeking things hidden to other men, and secrets according to the quality of Saturn, in whose house he is. And because he was accompanied by the Sun, and the Sun was in the house of Jupiter, he knew all of his achievements would be faithfully and gracefully done, to the pleasure of his king.
From the eighth chapter on, Zurara recounted various expeditions along the African coast. It should be emphasized that since around 1440 in Portugal, the conquest of new lands and the commerce in both gold and slaves had been tightly associated. This association had developed out of earlier strategies and victories, such as the taking of Ceuta, an important trading city, from the Spanish in 1415; and the successful crossing in 1434 of the "sea of darkness" that had swallowed many European ships around Cape Bojador, the Bulging Coast of North Africa. The first African gold in Portugal arrived in 1442 in the form of a ransom for two Moorish hostages; the gold arrived with "ten black slaves, and some trinkets produced on the coast." In 1443, when Portuguese navigators made it to the island of Arguin, a base was established to trade with the caravans for a variety of goods such as wheat, horses, pitchers, bowls, combs, bracelets, shawls, linens, eyeglasses, and needles. A year later the expeditions reached Cantor, near the borders of (as the chronicles told it) the "land of the negroes," or Guinea; it is here that the Portuguese began assembling large shipments of slaves. An African enterprise in the region lived handsomely for years through the commerce of slaves to Algarve, in the south of Portugal.
The expedition reports that Zurara compiled allowed him to interpret and demarcate the transition from Islamic Africa (including the Sahara) to the "land of the negroes" (equatorial Africa). Zurara commented on the passage of the navigator Dinis Dias across the border:
He arrived in the land of the negroes, who are called Guineans. And as we have had occasion to say several times in this narration, Guinea was the other place where the pioneers explored. We by necessity write of the land as continuous from the north to the south, but there are in essence two distinct places, marked by great differences, and lying far apart from each other.
Drawing from Dias, Zurara specified a physical marker of the border between the two regions—a pair of palm trees—which aided the explorers who soon followed, such as Gonçalo de Sintra, who took this path to pass from the "land of the moors" (Sahara) to the "land of the negroes" (Guinea). Zurara related de Sintra's journey: "The caravels having left behind the lands of the Sahara, they soon espied the two palm trees which Dias identified as the beginning of the land of the negroes." And he emphasized that "the peoples of this green land are all black [negros], and that is why it is called the land of the negroes, or Guinea, and the people are called Guineans, which means the same thing as negro." In these writings, Guinea was emerging as the uncharted land between the better-known regions of coastal Northwest Africa, and Christian Ethiopia far to the east.
Zurara terminated his account in 1448, when he replaced Fernão Lopes as the principal royal chronicler of the House of Bragança. That move was probably not unrelated to Lisbon's creation of the House of Guinea (Casa de Guiné) in the southern Portuguese city of Lagos in 1445 to better administrate its oversea activities, in particular on the African coast. Zurara soon complained that there had been a regrettable change in Portuguese strategy with respect to maritime expansion and African exploration, a deterioration that the mostly commercial functions of the House of Guinea represented. It is clear that Zurara had the ambitious sense of being the chronicler of Portugal, not merely the biographer of Dom Henrique. Nevertheless, he reiterated the broader spiritual goals attributed to Henry the Navigator in looking for Guinea in the first place, such as the possibilities of finding Christian kingdoms and of saving souls, and misconstrued the new era and its commercial goals.
This helps us understand why he would come to insist in the Chronicles on describing the inhabitants of the "land of the negroes" as Moors, a curious fact which has already caught scholars' attention. However, I argue that Zurara was neither careless nor ingenuous. The roots of his argument lie in the papal bulls of the period. The Dum Diversas of 1452 conceded the right to Portugal to conquer the Moors; and the deeply "imperialist" 1454 Romanus Pontifex gave to the Portuguese royalty all the lands discovered beyond the Capes Bojador and Num, while extending the permission to conquer "Indians" as well as Moors. Finally, the Inter Coetera of 1456 gave to the Order of Christ (with Henry the Navigator as their Grand Master) the legal and spiritual authority over lands discovered to be non-Christian. Thus, Zurara gave the Guineans the unlikely designation of Moors so that the 1452 papal bull could be used to justify and legitimize their conquest by the Portuguese Crown.
Zurara's preoccupation with nomenclature in turn helps us date the completion of the original edition of his Chronicles of Guinea, a point of contention in the Portuguese historiography. A. J. Costa has argued that the texts were written in their entirety after the death of Dom Henrique, between 1464 and 1468, while Duarte Leite suggested that Zurara began writing in 1451 and finished between 1460 and 1466. My research suggests that Leite is more accurate. But Zurara would have written his chronicles for the king after the 1452 Dum Diversas, and before the 1454 Romanus Pontifex, which is why his discourse assumed the programmatic conversion of Moors but not of Indians or heathens.
If Zurara knew how to distinguish Moors from heathens, he also called for a project to convert "Indians" (permission for which would be granted in the 1454 bull). He suggested that Indians are more easily converted than Moors because they "do not come from the lineage of Moors, but of heathen [gentios]"; thus they are more readily brought to the path of salvation. But to demonstrate how those black Africans who might not be Moors still could and should be converted, Zurara reminded his readers of how effortlessly several young boys and girls born of black African "gentio" families in the city of Lagos (in Portugal) had become "good and true Christians."
To the extent that the Portuguese efforts of the first half of the fifteenth century were, as Zurara claimed in the Chronicles, to gain true knowledge of the region of Guinea, the second half of the century would be marked by an intensification of commercial relations and the insertion of the "discovered" peoples into networks of imperial and religious power. These three imperatives were perhaps less distinguishable than Zurara tried to maintain, and he holds a complex, ambivalent legacy at the center of them.
THE MINA OF GUINEA
Zurara was later replaced as royal chronicler of the House of Bragança and High Guard of the Tower of the Tombo by Rui de Pina (1440–1523), who wrote accounts of the contemporary conquest of Kongo as well as continuing to compile information about Guinea. Two other coeval writers added to the corpus of knowledge about Guinea: Duarte Pacheco Pereira (dates of birth and death unknown), and João de Barros (1496–1570). Pereira—soldier, navigator, knight of the house of Dom João II, and inventor of the cosmograph—finished his Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis between 1506 and 1508. Named captain of the Fort of São Jorge in Mina (also known as Mina Castle) in 1519, he resided there from 1520 until 1522, when he was accused of various malfeasances and taken back to Lisbon in chains. João de Barros, manager of the Portuguese administrations for the House of India and for Mina, wrote extensively on history, although some of his work has been lost. In Asia 1a. Década, he also recounted the conquest of the West African coast and furnished detailed descriptions of Mina in particular.
By the mid-1450s, after the caravels had first reached the island of Arguin, they were continuing their southward explorations past the estuary of the Gambia River. At the time, Portugal was receiving around 800 slaves a year. In 1460, as the expeditions reached what is today Sierra Leone, Henry the Navigator died. Because he had no descendants, the crown incorporated his patrimony, which took nine years to complete; that same year, 1469, a substantial contract to develop both slave commerce and Portuguese territory in Guinea was awarded to Fernão Gomes. The five-year contract stipulated that annually, Gomes had to secure 100 more leagues of land beyond the region of modern Sierra Leone. Acting to fulfill this contract, João de Santarém and Pero Escobar reached modern Ghana by 1470, bartering for gold there, and by 1472 had arrived at the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
List of Tables ixAcknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Part One
1. From Ethiopia to Guinea 19
2. Commerce with the Mina Coast 40
3. African "Nations" and Provenience Groups Gallery of Illustrations 67
Gallery of Illustrations 101
Part Two
4. Urban Life and Brotherhoods in the City 113
5. Constructing a Religious Norm 146
6. Conflict and Ethnic Identity among Mahi 183
Postscript 223
Appendix 241
Notes 249
Bibliography 293
Index 309
What People are Saying About This
“The questions of cultural continuities and African identities in Brazil have become central to the understanding of slavery and of Afro-Brazilian life. This book, centered on one group of the so-called Mina nation in Rio de Janeiro, presents one of the best-documented, most perceptive discussions of these issues in the context of the Catholic society of Brazil. Here we can see clearly that cultures and identities were often layered and complex and adapted to local realities. This book is required reading for anyone interested in the African diaspora and questions of cultural continuities and creations.”