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Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil

2006; Duke University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2006-065

1527-1900

Sandra Lauderdale Graham,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Community fashioned from a “remembered African past” (p. 160) is what Elizabeth Kiddy is after when she writes about Africans and their descendants as participants in the Catholic brotherhoods of the rosary in Minas Gerais, Brazil. She ranges ambitiously over three centuries, narrating the ups and downs of the brotherhoods from the eighteenth century through to independence, the Empire, and the Estado Novo and on up to our own times. In the frontier mining towns of Minas Gerais, where priests were scarce or absent, the brotherhoods became centers of religious practice, organized by the lay faithful who built churches and hired their own chaplains, the first rosary brotherhood being established in São João del Rei in 1708. The brotherhoods’ autonomy was increasingly curtailed by a Roman Catholic Church jealous to reestablish authority over what it regarded as dangerously independent parishes and theologically dubious practices. Throughout the nineteenth century, priests took a larger role in administering the brotherhoods, sparking controversy and a jockeying for power, but the church stopped short of repression. In the early twentieth century, rosary brotherhoods continued to celebrate their feast day with drumming, dancing, and the ritual crowning of black kings and queens. Toleration turned to repression in the 1940s, however, when an archbishop set out to “combat” (p. 189) the profane practices of the brotherhoods, bringing a halt to the coronations. Not until after 1950 did these celebrations reappear as institutions that were “vibrant, but separate” from the church (p. 189). By the mid-1990s, when Kiddy conducted her fieldwork, rosary festivals were organized by a secular association; the church asserted these celebrations had nothing to do with the feast of the rosary, while local people insist they continue to express their devotion.The institutional unfolding of rosary brotherhoods is not, however, Kiddy’s principal concern. Rather, she aims to retrieve the workings of African culture in a transplanted Brazilian setting, using the interpretive categories of memory and community. It is a challenging task, given the opacity and fragmentary nature of the sources, and here she runs into trouble. Instead of honing these categories to do the delicately precise work she requires, they remain somewhat blunt tools of analysis. Take the notion of memory. Should we understand it as the actual remembering of past experience or as an invented past cobbled together from disparate experiences, too remote to be actually remembered and shaped over time into a coherent and increasingly mythicized past? She wants to show that Christian teachings of Portuguese Catholic missionaries to Africa — Angola, Congo, and the Mina coast — beginning in the fifteenth century mixed with African influences, and that Africans forcibly transported to the mines of central Brazil turned to Christianity to make sense of their New World experience. In the early eighteenth century, when shiploads of Africans were imported to work the booming mines, memory could and probably did function as actual remembering. However, the paucity of sources makes it difficult to know, since the few remaining descriptions of the ceremonies (written primarily by foreign travelers in the nineteenth century) are too slanted or too brief to supply the needed detail. Kiddy must instead rely on a few occasional and cryptic provisions for the election of royalty inserted by the brotherhoods in their statutes. But even in the early years of mining, as Kiddy points out, the Minas slave population was heterogeneous. Representing “a complex array of loyalties, language groups, customs, and world view” (p. 39), they then mixed with Brazilian-born slaves sold from the sugar plantations of Bahia, making their diversity even more evident. As the gold was depleted and the need for fresh supplies of Africans dwindled, and as older Africans died, the remaining slaves were more likely Brazilian born, with no direct experience of Africa — a process that intensified with time. It was finally race and color, more than a proximate African heritage, that defined the participants in the brotherhoods and their surviving ceremonies. How in these circumstances can we usefully speak of a “shared” African past (p. 5)? Surely, the notion of an invented past would serve her better.Kiddy similarly underutilizes the idea of community. Her view is that enslaved Africans and the many generations of their descendants forged, through their devotion to Our Lady, a community of blacks. The problem is how to identify and trace the workings of community. Where do we look? Kiddy tells us: in kinship relations, which she does not pursue, and in the constructions of hierarchy, presumably a measure of differentiation within a community, displayed not only in the election of administrating officials in the brotherhoods, or in the election of royalty, but also in burial practices. The more-valued graves were within the church and closer to the altar. The greater the number of masses said for the soul of the dead, the more candles lighted, the longer the funeral procession of mourners, and the more alms distributed, the more satisfying the burial. Here, the sources from the brotherhoods themselves could have been supplemented with other sources. João Reis, writing about Bahian rituals of death, found rich evidence in last wills and testaments, in which those who prepared for death — to be sure, these include only free-born blacks and mulattoes and manumitted slaves — often scripted their own funerals. Family ties and the fictive kinship ties of godparenthood — with their implied hierarchies of patronage, even among slaves — can be reconstructed from baptismal and marriage records kept by parish churches, while postmortem inventories reveal family ties and the uneven accumulation and distribution of property. In these ways, she could establish the networks that connected (and divided) members of the brotherhoods beyond their devotional duties, adding another dimension to the complex world embraced by the rosary brotherhoods.Histories of the Atlantic world — of the exchanges in peoples, cultures, and goods that circulated among Europe, Africa, and the Americas — must juggle daunting layers of complexity teased from imperfect sources. Blacks of the Rosary joins this growing body of scholarship and, as with all good histories, is necessarily incomplete, pointing forward to further questions and further research.