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

2012; Duke University Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-1600389

1527-1900

Lisa A. Lindsay,

History of Colonial Brazil

In this contextualized biography of an eighteenth-century African healer and his forced migrations from West Africa to Brazil to Portugal, James Sweet offers a social history of slavery and freedom, an argument about the intellectual history of the Atlantic world, and a methodological model for integrating the study of Africa and the Americas. It is a history at once intimate and sweeping — a brilliant exemplar of the emerging subfield of black Atlantic biography.Born in the central region of contemporary Benin in about 1710, Domingos Álvares was the son of religious leaders and himself a powerful spiritual and political figure. Sweet considers him as an organic intellectual, with an epistemology centered on healing and community formation that was equal and opposed to the worldview of the politically dominant. For this reason, absolutist rulers targeted Domingos as a threat to social order throughout his life. As a young man, he was enslaved by authorities of the expansionist Kingdom of Dahomey, who shipped him to Pernambuco. There, he continued his healing activities while toiling on sugar plantations, until conflict with his master caused him to be sold to Rio de Janeiro. Urban slavery and an amenable master offered him the autonomy to earn money for his cures, and Domingos created a healing community, purchased freedom, and constituted a family and a group of disciples. But in freedom he was more vulnerable to the surveillance of the Catholic Church than he had been as the slave of a powerful master. In 1742, Domingos was sent to Portugal to be tried for witchcraft by the Inquisition. A year and a half later, after incarceration, torture, and trial, he was exiled to a remote area in southern Portugal. In spite of official prohibitions, Domingos continued his healing practices there, though with much less success than in Brazil. Destitute and on the run, he was arrested again in 1747. After another Inquisition trial and another 15 months imprisonment, Domingos was again sentenced to exile. He disappeared from the historical record, probably dead, en route to banishment in northern Portugal.Sweet has reconstructed this remarkable odyssey, its intellectual foundations, and the worlds that shaped it through Domingos’s massive Portuguese Inquisition file, along with sources from Africa, Brazil, and Portugal. His cross-reading of African oral traditions and travel narratives against sources on West Africans in Brazil allows for an impressive reconstruction of early eighteenth-century Dahomean history and its impact on the enslaved. Indeed, this book insistently treats Africa and Brazil together, in two ways. First, because Brazil became home to a large concentration of captives from Dahomey, “Brazilian history very much became the history of the Gbe-speaking region [of Africa], at least during the 1730s and early 1740s” (p. 140). Second, since Dahomey’s diplomatic, economic, and military strength made it a vital imperial player alongside Portugal and other European powers, linked processes of empire building, social dislocation, and transculturation unfolded in Africa as well as in the Americas.Domingos Álvares traversed the Atlantic world like few Africans of his time, and he left an extensive record partially in his own voice, but Sweet argues that his exceptional story nonetheless yields broad insights. Domingos’s intellectual framework linked the spiritual, medicinal, and political by using herbal healing and divination to address the alienation stemming from slavery and imperialism. His leadership within a community of believers and practitioners suggests that his views were widely shared, and, in fact, his clients even included non-Africans and members of the Brazilian elite. At root, his cures were threatening to authorities because they enlisted a set of powers not under official control in order to address ailments resulting from official policies. In the early eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Sweet points out, European ideological dominance was not a foregone conclusion. Domingos Álvares offered a challenge to the legitimacy of European imperial power not so much because of his medicinal cures by themselves, but because of “his ability to extract broader political meanings from ‘illness,’ imparting these meanings to his clients and building new communities around ideas of collective redemption and well-being” (p. 6).Africans like Domingos Álvares, Sweet argues, ultimately shaped the intellectual history of the Atlantic world. By attempting to ameliorate the effects of slavery, colonialism, and mercantilism, they “anticipated the ‘modern’ European anticolonial, abolitionist, and socialist movements by decades, if not centuries” (p. 231). Yet they did so not through Enlightenment ideas about individual freedom but through “alternate epistemologies of violence, rupture, memory, and the quests for spiritual and communal redemption” (p. 231). In the end, one wonders whether Sweet can have it both ways: whether Domingos’s ethic of community healing fed into the revolutionary trends of later Atlantic history, or whether instead it represented a road not taken — a weapon of intense struggle in its time, but one that was, like Domingos himself, brutalized into obscurity. In resuscitating his story, Sweet offers not only a glimpse into the intellectual life of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world but perhaps even an epistemological model for the struggles of our own time.