Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

THE CONTEXT OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC 43
traditions of royalty converged in the celebration of these ‘African kingdoms’ under the mantle of the
Church. Marina de Mello e Souza has shown the cultural hybridity of the congadas and concluded that the
black king was a ‘symbol of a mythic and homogenized Africa. 63 The black brotherhoods not only
represented ‘the triumph of a continuing strategy to preserve a link to Africa’, but constituted an
‘intercontinental web’ created by Atlantic creoles that stretched from Lisbon, São Tomé, Angola to Brazil. 64
In fact not only the Congo slaves elected their kings, but those from other ‘nations’ as well. As recent
research on brotherhoods in Rio de Janeiro shows, other particular ethnicities were maintained and
developed under the umbrella of the universalistic Catholic Church. The confraternity of St Elesbão and St
Ephigenia, founded in 1740, admitted slaves from the Mina Coast, from Cabo Verde, São Tomé and
Mozambique, but excluded initially the Angolas, creoles and mulattos (cabras). Several ‘kingdoms’ or
‘follies’ (reinados or folias) were created within that brotherhood, resulting in—first—a subdivision
between the members from the Mina Coast and all the others, each group electing its own royal couple. As
further conflicts developed among the different ethnic groups subsumed initially under the general
denomination Mina (such as the Agolin, the Dagomé and the Maki), a number of smaller folias were
subsequently created, regrouping several, or in the case of the Maki, only one of these smaller West African
nations. 65
What is the significance of this development of neo-African ethnic identities within the colonizer’s
institutions? At first sight one might be tempted to read it exclusively as a sign of the slaves’ cultural
resistance. Some data indeed suggest that the religious institutions organized along ‘national’ boundaries
allowed the preservation of older, African practices. Brotherhoods, or smaller congregations such as the
‘kingdoms’ they contained, were sometimes accused by outsiders—including slaves belonging to other
‘nations’—of perpetuating ‘superstitious’, e.g. African religious practices. This kind of ‘retention’ would
support the idea of slave ‘deception’. Furthermore, congregations and brotherhoods also fostered the
development of new, colonial identities, which constituted ‘extensions’ of originally African ethnicities.
Thus, parallel to the process of inter-African syncretism occurring in the proto-candomblés, the reapproximation
and eventually the fusion of groups that shared common cultural traits or a similar history of
enslavement resulted in the formation of colonial, neo-African ‘nations’ such as Angola, Congo and
Benguela. These, in effect, substituted the original ethnicities. A similar amalgamation resulted in the
emergence of Nagô and Jeje identities for West Africans and their descendants. It is therefore important to
emphasize that Nagô, for instance, is not just a Brazilian term for the Yoruba in West Africa, but rather the
result of a specific, colonial process of ethnogenesis. Therefore the emergence of the Nagô in Brazil, the
Yoruba in what is now Nigeria or the Lucumi in colonial Cuba are the result of parallel developments
within the Black Atlantic. 66
On the other side it is absolutely clear that slaveholders and authorities often encouraged the formation of
these compartmented slave ‘nations’ as a means of social control. As already discussed in relation to the
batuques, celebrations such as the elections of a ‘Congo King’ were allowed because they seemed to
perpetrate ethnic divisions among slaves and to stabilize the otherwise fragile domination of a relatively
small white minority. It is thus difficult to locate the emergence of neo-African identities within a simple
dichotomy of resistance versus accommodation, since different readings of the same phenomenon are
possible: they served purposes of self-affirmation for slaves and freed persons, but they were also used by
elites as a tool of social control. What is clear, however, is that these ‘extended’ neo-African identities
acquired new meanings in the colonial context. As the example of the brotherhoods shows, the relations
between slave religion and Catholicism, and between slave and broader popular culture were complex and
intertwined. Often specific features of slave culture and religion were embedded into wider manifestations.