Revista Brasileira do Caribe ISSN: 1518-6784 [email protected] Universidade Federal de Goiás Brasil

Konadu, Kwasi An Approach to the Study of Culture as People in the African World Revista Brasileira do Caribe, vol. VI, núm. 11, julio-diciembre, 2005, pp. 261-283 Universidade Federal de Goiás Goiânia, Brasil

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Kwasi Konadu Winston-Salem State University

Resumo Nos último anos, “a diáspora” e os “estudos sobre a diáspora”, além de perceberem as comunidades como imaginadas ou inventadas tem gozado de popularidade ao mesmo tempo que são objeto de crítcas. Ainda que haja uma grande proliferação de programas acadêmicos e de investigações sobre a diáspora africana, a exploração da cultura daqueles que são (supostamente) os objetos de tais esforços sofrem interpretações inexatas da cultura. Portanto, a narrativa e a identidade dos africanos são percebidas como versões plagiadas que são apresentadas através de expressões como hibridismo, criollismo e sincretismo. Os temas tratados neste artigo tratam das interpretações da cultura como um conceito polisémico ou como eixo de definição e interpretação de um habitat temporal. Reavalia-se principalmente fontes secundárias e materiais de arquivo junto com pesquisas realizadas nas regiões caribenhas, bem como no oeste da África, pretendendo-se oferecer uma exploração conjunta sobre a cultura como individuos no mundo africano (e não como “diáspora”) no contexto de estratégias socio-políticas y culturais dominantes utilizadas tanto pelos africanos como por aqueles que controlam a ordem social dentro da qual se encontram os africanos.

Palavras-chaves: Mundo africano, Teoria da cultura, Diáspora

* Artigo recebido em agosto e aprovado para publicação em novembro de 2005

Revista Brasileira do Caribe, Goiânia, vol. VI, nº 11, p. 261-283, 2005 261 Kwasi Konadu

Resumen En los últimos, “la diáspora” y “los estudios sobre diáspora”, además de centrarse en las comunidades como imaginadas o inventadas han gozado de popularidad y a la vez han sido objecto de crítica. Aún que hay una gran proliferación de programas académicos y de investigación sobre la diáspora africana, la exploración de la cultura de aquellos que son (supuestamente) los objectos de tales esfuerços sufrem interpretaciones inexactas de la cultura . Por tanto, las narrativas y la identidad de los africanos son a menudo versiones de plagios presentadas a través de expresiones de hibridismo, criollismo y sincretismo. Los temas tratados en este artículo tratan de la interpretación de la cultura como um concepto polisémico o eje definidor de la definicion e interpretación de un habitat temporal. Reevaluando principalmente fuentes secundarias y materiales de archivo junto con investigaciones realizadas en las regiones caribeñas y del oeste de África, este estudio pretende ofrecer una exploración conjunta sobre la cultura como individuos en el mundo africano (y no como “diáspora”) en el contexto de estrategias socio-políticas y culturales dominantes utilizadas tanto por los africanos como por aquellos que controlan el orden social dentro del que se encuentran los africanos.

Palabras claves: Mundo africano, Teoría de la cultura, Diáspora

Abstract In recent years, “diaspora” and “diaspora studies,” as well as thinking about communities or identities as imagined or invented, have become popular even fashionable as these imprecise notions have received their share of widespread use and some criticism. While there have been a proliferation of research and academic programs in African “diaspora” studies, the approach to the culture of those who are (supposedly) the subject of such endeavors suffer from inappropriate interpretations of culture. Therefore, the narrative and personhood of Africans are often plagiarized versions presented through the conceptual idioms of hybridity, creole-ness, and syncretism. The issues addressed in this essay are concerned about the interpretation of culture as a multilayered concept or axis around which temporal life is organized and interpreted. By reassessing mostly secondary and some archival materials in conjunction with research in the Caribbean and regions, I argue for an composite approach to culture as people in the African world (rather than “diaspora”) in the context of dominant socio-political and cultural strategies employed concurrently by Africans and those who manage the social order within which Africans find themselves.

Keywords: African world, Culture theory, Diaspora

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We are not a people of yesterday… We are not a stagnant people, hating motion… Our fears are not of motion. We are not a people of dead, stagnant waters. Reasons and promptings of our own have urged much movement on us — expected, peaceful, repeated motion… Then the time and our need for continuation called for motion. The flow of our warmest blood answered the call. We spread connected over an open land. Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons

Introduction

In recent years, “diaspora” and “diaspora studies,” as well as thinking about communities or identities as imagined or invented, have become popular even fashionable as these imprecise notions have received their share of widespread use and some criticism. African “diaspora” studies programs, departments, and scholarship have grown exponentially within the last fifteen years, a growth which witnessed the establishment of academic journals and discussion groups that regard the cumulative nature of these efforts as constituting a “field” distinct from Caribbean or African(a) studies. International initiatives such as the UNESCO Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project, which is under the broader Breaking the Silence project, are engaged in related and overlapping work as those found at York University in Canada and analogous efforts by Pennsylvania State, Yale, and Tulane University in the United States. While there have been a proliferation of research and academic programs in African “diaspora” studies, the approach to the culture of those who are (supposedly) the subject of such endeavors suffer from inappropriate interpretations of culture and, therefore, the narrative and personhood of Africans are often plagiarized versions presented through the conceptual idioms of hybridity, creole-ness, and syncretism.

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I say interpretations of culture since what and how we interpret, as ways in the process of making sense, correspond to our very modes of creating and ascribing meaning, which, ultimately, are anchored in our world-sense (i.e., our way of making sense of our reality). Thus, the issue addressed herein is not so much the meaning(s) of culture as an exercise in semantics, but rather the interpretation of culture as a multilayered concept or axis around which temporal life is organized and interpreted given that we are nothing but our culture in physiological, ideational, and spiritual terms. By reassessing mostly secondary and some archival materials in conjunction with research in the Caribbean and West Africa regions, this essay argues for an composite approach to culture as people in the African world (rather than “diaspora”) in the context of dominant socio-political and cultural strategies employed concurrently by Africans and those who manage the social order within which Africans find themselves. This essay begins by distilling two central strategies from the literature on the African “diaspora,” outlines the research perspective employed in the context of those strategies and their historical meaning(s), and then uses Brazil as a case study for the approach to culture as people argued in this paper. Finally, some conclusive remarks are offered. The imperative of a multilayered perspective on culture in the African world correspond not only to the questions of who and where are Africans and how and why did they come to be in the historical and geographical places we find them, but also the praxis of teaching and demonstrating an understanding of the concept of an African world encompassing Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, , Asia, Australia and other geo-political contexts in which communities that show evidence of historical and cultural linkages with Africa exist.1 In the Brazilian context, the recent legislation which made compulsory the teaching of African and African- Brazilian history in schools can be directly implicated on the exigent matter of African historical and cultural knowledge, representation, and propagation (see OLIVA, 2003). Embedded in the theoretical issues of and scholarly dialogues on African “diaspora” studies, preliminary

264 Revista Brasileira do Caribe, vol. VI, nº 11 An Approach to the Study of Culture as People.. research revealed two sets of emergent themes from the works of E. Kofi Agorsah, Sidney Mintz, Richard Price, John Thornton, Abdias do Nascimento, Jose Arroyo, Q. Duncan, J. Huapaya, A. Bedoya, B. Cayasso, Carlos Moore, Nigel Bolland, Robert Farris Thompson, Franklin Knight, Philip Curtin, Michael Gomez, Linda Heywood, Maureen Warner-Lewis, Joseph E. Harris, Jesús García, Tomás Chirimini, Ivan Van Sertima, Edward Alpers, Marco Cuevas, Gerdès Fleurant, Gordon Lewis, Cheikh Anta Diop, G. Andrews, F. W. Knight, I. Hrbek, and others. Those dual and simultaneous themes are “de-Africanization” strategies and goals, and strategies and goals of sovereignty and consolidation (i.e., re-Africanization). These themes, however, have not been delineated by any of the foregoing writers nor have they been fully explored as part of the larger narrative of the movement of Africans through cultural space and historical time. De-Africanization strategies and goals include the use of census and demographic data to project an image of African decline or disappearance, the consistent front-line deployment of African soldiers in colonial and contemporary wars from the Indian to Atlantic Ocean, the encroachment on African land from South Carolina to South America, and the socio-political use of “creole-ness” and hybridity (as a corollary to syncretism) to facilitate ongoing de- Africanizing, de-humanizing processes. Brazil, for instance, offers an opportunity to expose or de-mystify syncretism in the context of a racist socio-political order projected as a racial democracy which links itself to the idea of syncretism as proof of the non-existence of racism. On creole-ness, where many have essentially argued the social context encourages or discourages the retention of African culture and population density facilitates African survivals, the supposition that social orders which are increasingly and densely African over time would give rise to a “creole culture” and not the continuity of an African one is a dubious conjecture. The confusion and impreciseness of the term “creole,” a term used in specific historical instances to refer equally to humans, animals, or vegetables, is also confounded by the existence of simultaneous sovereignty

jul./dez. 2005 265 Kwasi Konadu and consolidation strategies or goals reflective of the strong tendencies among enslaved and first-generation Africans in the Americas to socialize and meet with their “country men” (SCHIEBINGER, 2004, p. 15; THORNTON, 1992, p. 163); the submerging of distinction and the establishment of Africans “nations” to maintain identity, culture, and organize politically; the African construction of a specifically African idea of “independence” as part and parcel of active “maroon” efforts which signaled a sustained politics and a concept of anti-colonial liberation (GARCÍA, 200, p.284-287); sovereignty efforts marked by quilombos, palenques, and other “maroon” communities to contemporary “Black power” or liberation movements; and the Africans’ use of their language and practice of their culture in homes, quarters, and social groups (HARRIS, 2001, p. 108). De-Africanization and sovereignty and consolidation strategies are central themes which allow for a more appropriate way to talk about the African’s confrontation with European attempts to construct a European world outside of Europe. In other words, European expansion and conquest of the Americas correspond to the African “diaspora” (west of the African continent) and the challenges of being African outside of Africa-most clearly expressed in the ongoing contestation between re-Africanization and de- Africanization strategies and goals. In the Americas, the African history of so-called Latin America is usually reduced to drums, “witchcraft,” and folklore and the fear that this region would become another Haiti remains a general and unresolved problem in “Latin American” and Caribbean historiography (GARCÍA, 2001, p. 284-286). Yet, even Haiti’s revolution has been reduced to a footnote or product of French “revolutionary” thinking, evident in notions such as C. L. R. James’ “Black Jacobins.” The reduction of African agency and culture development are conceptual as well as pragmatic issues that warrant a re-assessment in light of recent scholarship and ambivalent patterns of thinking in areas where there exist an historical and cultural African presence (e.g., THORNTON, 1992; 1998). In the Caribbean, many of these societies have been historically colored by hostility toward and

266 Revista Brasileira do Caribe, vol. VI, nº 11 An Approach to the Study of Culture as People.. ignorance of Africa and its cultures, and “at the academic and popular levels of the Caribbean there remains resistance to the suggestion or assertion of African-Caribbean linkages” (WARNER- LEWIS, 2003, p. xxiii; EASTMAN & WARNER-LEWIS, 2000, p. 403). It is not surprising then to find the same treatment of Africans in and the Caribbean in that the scholarship on those regions are often rooted in postures of a plantation genesis for the culture of so-called “African America(s)” and assumptions of no prior socialization. Consequently, personhood and identity prior to enslavement in the Americas is lost to notions of deficiency and pathology. The reification of the idea of “imported slaves”, rather than Africans who were subjected to processes of becoming “enslaved,” has been fundamental to standard scholarship absent of an interrogation of its assumptions and the evidence in support thereof. The above geographical focus on the Americas, which for some does (not) include the Caribbean, serves the purpose of further contextualizing the use of Brazil as a case study in explicating the approach to culture in this essay, rather than to obscure or undermine the reality of African movement (inhibited and on their own terms) across place and time, as well as those locales which have a cultural and historical link to Africa with enslavement not a primary facilitating agent. Brazil, however, as a site of dense African population, offer several possibilities by which to examine African culture as people in the context of a paradoxical social order that had the longest duration of chattel slavery on the America side of the Atlantic Ocean and, perhaps, the greatest level of cultural and historical continuity by virtue of the continued renewal of Africans stretching from upper-West Africa to Madagascar and parts of the East African coast to the Brazilian landscape. In explicating the context and content of the simultaneous and overlapping processes involved in the patterns of African culture development and consolidation in its confrontation with patterns of de-Africaniziation, the African experience in Brazil suggest the veracity of the concepts of cultural- historical continuity, convergence, de-Africanization, and re-

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Africanization, which all have implications for the study of culture as people in an expanding, yet consolidating and interlinked African world.

Research Perspective

Using Mintz and Price (1992) as paradigmatic of a large body of literature, since many have either embraced their assumptions and/or their conclusions, we find several, yet crucial limitations in the study of African culture. Mintz and Price employed a narrow conception of culture restricted to “institutions” regulating private and personal spheres of cultural expression, and, in their academic focus, neglected the knowledge of those enslaved and supported the misconception that solidarity was systematically and successfully undermined by the plantocracy through the separation of those who spoke the same language. Due to the preference of European “traders” for specific ports and sources and that Caribbean planters, for instance, sought particular “ethnicities,” Africans of the same speech communities persisted on plantations and neighboring plantations functioning much like a constellation of villages (WARNER- LEWIS, 2003, p. xxvii). These historical realities not only affirm bonds between so-called “ship mates”, but, more significantly, brings into focus the work of Mintz and Price as characterized by “a reductive urge to codify... carried out to such an extreme of rigidity that the unruliness of reality is too often forced into neat, mentally manipulable categories, as if such constructs can account for all emotional, physical and psychic data” (WARNER-LEWIS, 2003, p. xxviii). Using the “culture zone” concept advanced by Warner-Lewis (2003), a composite approach to African culture in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and other parts of the world transcends some of the real and artificial limitations of the “specific island” or “country” approach since the concepts of particularity and commonality are not mutually exclusive (WARNER-LEWIS, 2003, p. 29 xxix). In identifying a specific culture zone, one has to identify the specificity of the culture, isolate patterns which appear to characterize the area, whether by

268 Revista Brasileira do Caribe, vol. VI, nº 11 An Approach to the Study of Culture as People.. exclusivity or by intensity of usage through word cognition, cultural parallels within the region, establishment of links in ways of making sense of the world and cultural praxis, and the reoccurrence of symbols and artifacts throughout the area. Certainly, following Warner-Lewis (2003, p. xxix), “the cultural elements that survive do not, and cannot, reconstitute themselves in the same molecular fashion as they held prior to dislocation and succeeding cultural contacts,” but there exists the possibility of reconstruction based upon those elements or the principles underpinning those elements. The aforementioned processes, which themselves imply a transcendence of disciplinary boundaries and use of multiple skills, argue that research on culture in the African world must be nothing but multilayered in conception, approach, analysis, interpretation, and presentation. My operational definition for culture is that culture is a composite of the spiritual, ideational, and material-physical dimensions of reality and a process that provides a procedural framework for living and ways to engage, interpret or make sense of reality. In this regard, culture and history affect each other in symbiotic ways; history as occurrences or developments over a period of time in a specific locale—with or without interactions with other locales—engenders culture and culture, in turn, shapes the development of that history. Since the notion of culture implies a rationale, it also has features of material, ideational, and spiritual value, values which themselves reflect indigenous African conceptualizations of the human being as a composite of physiological, ideational, and spiritual constituents. Whereas the spiritual and perhaps ideational dimensions of culture are deep structured, “it is the material aspect of culture that is subject to the most relentless change” due to its concreteness and vulnerability (ABRAHAM, 1962, p. 29). Every culture has an ideology or fundamental framework used to interpret and response to the historical, socio-political, cosmic, and temporal environment. “Material culture” can, therefore, be considered the physical, technological or tangible aspects of life used, made, and shared,

jul./dez. 2005 269 Kwasi Konadu and include all of the physical manifestations of a culture. “Ideational culture” refers to ideas, symbols, values, principles, ways of feeling, thinking and acting, as well as a stock of knowledge and ways of making sense of the reality constructed by a group. An ideational culture embraces the temporal or physical-material dimension of the world, but goes on to accept the notion that a non-physical, immaterial reality is real and apprehensible. “Spiritual culture” constitutes larger cosmological or non-temporal elements and, in a sense, can be considered the “parent” dimension in relation to the temporal, but as part of the continuum of the material, ideational, and spiritual. In other words, if this continuum was a tree, the material would be the physical tree, the ideational would be the roots, and the spiritual would be what nourishes the roots as well as the “unseen” (underground) activities of sustainability. Thus, by way of example, Candomblé in Brazil or Santeria in Cuba can be viewed as European in terms of material culture (objects, dress) but African in relation to ideational and spiritual culture since these African spiritual-temporal expressions in the Americas are anchored in an African cultural core rather than a European one.2 Figures 1 illustrates the foregoing perspectives on culture.

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Figure 1, “the dimensions of culture: a working model,” attempts to graphically situate the above discussion, while underscoring the idea of culture as both concept and lived experience in its comprehensible depth and scope. The “cultural core” is the seed and matrix of a culture. This notion is often obscured by the idea of hybridity, which falsely presupposes that culture is self- contained and that certain cultures are and some are not “hybrid”. Notice that the three layers of culture visually correspond to (African) conceptions of the human being in terms of an outer physical layer, an ideational layer or mind enclosed by that external matter, and a deeper (spiritual) part of one’s being beyond the frontier of both. All three layers, however, are linked to a core origin and life force, and one can gauge or approximate the deep of culture as a personal or collective experience beyond the surface and the scope of culture as inherently expansible as the physical skin, the capacity of the mind and spirit, and the nature of the cosmos. Wherever identifiable African culture exists, it is not enough to assume what the layers of that extant culture means for those who live it. In order to identify “African-ness” in the lives of those who experience it—in its comprehensible dimensions of course— only a composite perspective of culture can probe the spiritual (not necessarily religious), ideational or conceptual, and material-physical contours of historical and cultural African communities. It is only through the deep combing of these dimensions will African (world) culture and, therefore, African people globally will be excavated and projected in their humanity in places where they reside due voluntarily or involuntarily factors, or a combination of the two. The research perspective advanced here is for the generation of approaches and interpretations grounded in the cultural reality under study, but this approach is not a procedure fro dissecting culture by way of the three layers or dimensions and then putting the result back together like a jigsaw puzzle. Rather, the idea is to allow one to concurrently apprehend the parts as distinct “components” and as parts of which form an inextricable whole. As one digs and uncovers a term, a ritual, a symbol, a practice expressive of any of

jul./dez. 2005 271 Kwasi Konadu the three layers of culture or a combination thereof, she or he will find it possible to approach and appreciate the depth, scope and interconnectedness of African cultural reality in those places with an African cultural and historical presence. Are there limits of this research approach? All approximations as well as sources have limitations, but as a process rather than strictly method the approach advanced here is a tool which, through case studies or global surveys, can contribute to the advancement of the study of culture as people in the African world. What follows then is a brief case study which seeks to re-interpret the African cultural experience in Brazil through a narrative informed by our approach and research perspective.

Case Study: The African Experience in Brazil

In Brazil, the deep textured patterns of African history and culture are often reduced to exoticism and reified as folklore. For instance, Africans in Brazil were not even granted a chapter in the comprehensive Manual Bibliográfico de Estudos Brasileiros (The Bibliography of Brazilian Studies) published in 1949; however, they were incorporated into the folklore section. The Brazilian tradition of “folklorizing” African culture must be viewed within the context of de-Africanization strategies on the part of the aligned forces of the national government, tourist industry, corporate businesses, and the Catholic Church, in contestation with African strategies of sovereignty and consolidation in the form of movements to create or maintain their own psychic and cultural space, identity, and history under hostile conditions. The prevailing backdrop to the contention is the propagated myth of racial democracy or harmony and the corresponding notion that the historical development and national culture of Brazil is defined by miscegenation and a general social plasticity. In the accepted narrative of Brazil, the country came into existence with the arrival of Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500. This troubled narrative is guilty of both omission and commission in that it ignores and marginalizes the indigenous and later African presence

272 Revista Brasileira do Caribe, vol. VI, nº 11 An Approach to the Study of Culture as People.. in the country which became known as Brazil. Brazil has the reputation of importing the largest number, and for the longest duration, of enslaved Africans of any colony in the Americas between the early sixteenth century and the latter part of the nineteenth century. Overall, Brazil received approximately forty percent of the total number of Africans brought to the Americas, however large that final number may be, during the life of the enslavement enterprise. The enslavement enterprise and process requires some clarification for more often than not historians and other writers have a tendency to conflate chattel slavery in the Americas and servitude or forms of “slavery” on the African continent. The issue is not that some Africans actively engaged and profited from the enslavement enterprise. The issue is talking about “slavery” as a shared human phenomenon which differs only in terms of degrees when those Africans who participated never conceived of a de-humanizing, de-culturalizing process and social order as conjured up and executed in the Americas. In other words, it is not a question of degrees of difference in relatively the same (slavery) system, but one where we are dealing with two different types of systems in thinking and implementation. The European enslavement enterprise was contemporaneous with the latter stages of the Arab enslavement enterprise, which began as early as the seventh century CE (Common era), and later surpassed the former beginning with the Portuguese. The Portuguese imported and enslaved Africans who came primarily from western Africa (e.g., Guinea, , Benin/Dahomey, Niger, and Nigeria), west-central Africa (e.g., Kôngo-Angola region), south- western Africa and the east African coast (e.g., Mozambique). The principal cultural groups represented by Africans in Brazil include the Yoruba-Nagô (Nigeria, Benin), Manding (Mali, Guinea), Hausa (Northern Nigeria, Niger), Fon-Gegê (Dahomey/Benin, Togo), Fante- Asante (Ghana), and Bantu-Kôngo (Kôngo-Angola, Mozambique). The Malês were generally any African Muslim in Bahia, and in Rio de Janeiro they were known as Alufá. Nagô is the Brazilian expression for the Yoruba, while Gegê applies to the Fon or Ewe-

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Fon of former Dahomey (contemporary Benin). The Asante or Fante, both of whom are culturally and linguistically Akan, were called “mina” (as in the “El mina” castle on the coast of Ghana), though many who fell under this category were not Asante and, in some instances, nor were they Fante. Rather, many who were referred to as “mina” were non-Akan or Africans to the east, west, and north of the forest-based Asanteman (Asante nation), which not only controlled much of what is contemporary Ghana during its peak but also play a role (along with others) in the export of Africans to the Americas. The preference of the Portuguese to acquire new enslaved Africans as opposed to growing this population locally is telling for the male to female ratio was typically 2:1, adults were more sought after than children, and the average life span of an enslaved person was approximately 15 years upon arrival in Brazil. Sugar fazendas or plantations defined enslaved life during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in the latter century there was a focus on importing Africans from the Kôngo-Angola region. The exploitation of gold and diamond deposits in the states of Minas Gerais and Goiás during the eighteenth century coincided with a calculated preference for Africans from the “costa da mina” region (contemporary Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria) and, thus, the northeast of Brazil became dominated by Africans born of this region. It should be noted that historians or writers sometimes confuse ports of embarkation with ports and areas of origin, and the invented or real place-names in Africa with those of sovereigns in terms of determining who came from where. The nineteenth century witnessed the development of the coffee industry, which became Brazil’s most profitable export. Certainly, as these industries flourished, the increased demand for enslaved African labor remained high and the Africans’ indigenous knowledge of mining, metallurgy, cattle rearing, and agriculture suited a plantocracy which concentrated, chronologically, on the production of sugar, diamond and gold, and coffee.

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The return of Africans in Brazil to West Africa-Nigeria, Togo, Benin (former Dahomey), and Ghana—from the first half of the eighteenth century to the twentieth century is a phenomenon which, in large measure, is a response to many of the issues which characterized nineteenth century Brazil. The nineteenth century is perhaps the most significant in terms of the extent of events and their implications for the history of Africans in Brazil. During this century, the focal points of enslaved labor were the coffee plantations of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The expanding area of São Paulo experienced numerous revolts and rebellions in the nineteenth century; however, the greatest number of revolts by enslaved Africans occurred on the plantations of northeast Brazil, particularly, in Salvador, Bahia, which had more than twenty between 1798 and 1841. The years 1830-1880 were characterized by numerous military conflicts in South America, including the war of the Triple Alliance in 1865-1870 wherein Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay fought against Paraguay. In all these military conflicts large numbers of African troops were deployed. A small number of “free” Africans in Brazil participated in the abolitionist movement, since this movement was largely a (white) elite one where government officials created anti- slave trade regulations and imposed related taxes to encourage planters to use European immigrant workers. Europeans were greatly encouraged to immigrate to Brazil to live and work on coffee plantations in the late nineteenth century. This critical period saw the abolition of slavery in 1888 through the Lei Áurea (Golden Law), the mass immigration of whites, the socio-political pressure on Africans to marry white (so as to “improve” the race), the denial of voting through literary requirements in the 1891 constitution, and the destruction (by fire) of most historical documents and archives related to the enslavement enterprise ordered by Rui Barbosa on May 13, 1891. At the height of European imperialism in Africa and other parts of the non-Western world, in addition to the emergence of anthropological theories linked to colonialism, Brazilian elites sought

jul./dez. 2005 275 Kwasi Konadu to address the complexion of the country by instituting branqueamento or its national program of “whitening” which anticipated the gradual disappearance of African in Brazil. Presumably faced with a “racial” threat to their social order, the whites in Brazil united on the idea of transforming Brazil into another Europe. For them, the creation of the “mulatto/a”—highly offensive terms that signify the offspring of a mule (African female) and a horse (white male)—in the words of Sylvio Romero, was a “condition of victory for the white man”. This “victory” necessitated the disappearance of the African population occasioned by institutionally encouraging massive European immigration, destruction of enslavement documents, manipulation of demographic data, restrictions on non-European immigrants, and miscegenation. It is certainly then not surprising to find that Gilberto Freyre’s Casa Grande e Senzala (“The Masters and the Slaves or Enslaved Quarters”), as Freyre is arguably the leading apologist for slavery, is one of the most widely translated works into English. Freyre’s ideas find currency in the proposition that Brazil is balanced and homogeneous; hence, a harmonious racial democracy. A consequence of the racial ideology of non-racism is its very self- denial, a posture advanced by Gilberto Freyre and Pierre Verger. Perhaps, the more profound consequence of this “non-racism” ideology is that the “black” movement in Brazil expends a great deal of energy attempting to prove to its people that their condition is a function of race since many believe racism does not exist. The severely circumscribed nature of life and living made is so that “free blacks” and “mulattos” were subject to laws that seldom distinguished between them and those enslaved. The abolishment of the enslavement enterprise ushered in no real benefits to Africans in Brazil (VIANNA, 1999, p. 184). Former enslaved Africans were confined to low-paying jobs, poor housing facilities, unemployment, limited educational opportunities, and, as a group, lacked political and economic power all behind a façade of racial equality. A good number of Africans found themselves earning their living as housemaids, civil workers, and prostitutes. During the early

276 Revista Brasileira do Caribe, vol. VI, nº 11 An Approach to the Study of Culture as People.. twentieth century, several African-Brazilian publications and organizations were established to propagate cultural and social consciousness, as well as fight against racism and impoverishment. The level of African-Brazilian activism in the 1970s was informed by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the United States, as well as the political independence movements in Africa and the Caribbean. The level of sustained activism during the twentieth century has been aimed at prevailing socio-economic conditions and cultural exploitation, and the statistics alone tell their own story. Eighty percent of all prison inmates, seventy percent of the population who live below the poverty level, the majority of the residents in the nation’s poorest housing facilities, and most of the homeless population in Brazil’s urban centers are Afro-Brasileiros or Africans in Brazil. Current discourse on policies of “affirmative action” as a form of governmental concessions may not have any real affect on the day-to-day, cultural life and death struggle of Africans in Brazil unless their movement fully de-links itself from the mythologies (i.e., popular narrative of “Afro-Brazilians”) which envelop their lives and forge a socio-economic and psychic space built upon cultural agency. The cultural reality of Africans in Brazil is inescapable and, perhaps, Abdias Nascimento’s contention, which argues Brazil is culturally and demographically an African nation, is instructive of another, yet plausible way of conceptualizing this nation (at least during the past four centuries to the present). The material culture of Africans in Brazil constitutes a corpus of physical and technological innovations or contributions to innovations in the areas of mining, metallurgy, cattle rearing and farming, agriculture, foods and cuisine, crafts and art through varied media, ritual implements and artwork, carnival or carnaval, architecture on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean (e.g., Benin), music and instrumentation (e.g., samba), capoeira, indigenous medicine, and other material-physical advancements. The ideational culture of Africans in Brazil denote those ideas, symbols, values, principles, ways of feeling, thinking and acting, as well as a knowledge base and ways of making sense

jul./dez. 2005 277 Kwasi Konadu of the world created, marshaled, and nurtured by this group in their challenge to be culturally African outside of Africa in an increasingly Europeanizing social order. This ideational culture is evident in iconographies used in socio-political and spiritual contexts, linguistic impressions upon the lexicon and pronunciation of Portuguese as well as extant Yoruba and Kikongo vocabularies that are extensive, bodies of varied and distinct African knowledges derived from West, West-Central, South and East African sources in term of cosmology, fundamental ethos or character, social and political organizing principles, and healing and holistic health. Spiritual culture in the context of Africans in Brazil correspond to the non-temporal character of Candomblé, the Xangô (Shango) tradition in Pernambuco, and Macumba, which was Candomblé transformed in Rio de Janeiro in the 1900s. Macumba developed into Umbanda in the southern parts of Brazil. But there is more to this spiritual culture than what appears to be the apparent since spirituality is an expression of culture and culture, in this sense, is not simply what one does (spiritually) but the core philosophy which underpin expressions of a spiritual nature. A very prominent idea in any discussion of Candomblé, or African culture in Brazil, is the notion “syncretism.” What is often missing in these discussions, however, is the African experience of historical harassment, restrictions and police persecution, baptisms by force, and the proselytizing efforts of the Catholic Church backed by the armed support of the state. In this socio-political context, what we have is not “syncretism” between Catholicism and African spiritual systems but rather a strategy employed by Africans to confound and circumvent oppression. Much like in Haiti and Cuba, both of which have large African populations, a deep synthesis of the main forms and principles of Yoruba, Ewe-Fon, and Bantu-Kôngo traditions occurred and this composite system was (later) partly informed by the saints of Catholicism. In fact, such a convergence occurred in the late 17th century West Africa between the Yoruba and Ewe-Fon traditions and again on Haitian, Cuban, and Brazilian soil in the decades and centuries that followed. Moreover, the large

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Kôngo-Angola cultural presence makes the argument that Candomblé is of Yoruba origins a difficult one to substantiate, since there are three branches of Candomblé, each of which are linked to specific African cultural “nations.” The Nagô and Gegê or Jeje branch is based, respectively, on Yoruba and Ewe-Fon spiritual systems, while the Kôngo-Angola branch (i.e., Candomblé de Angola) is based on Bantu-Kôngo sources. The third branch of Caboclo requires some clarification. Caboclos are analogous to the Orixás (Orishas) of the Yoruba and many, particularly in Salvador, Bahia, view these “divinities” as indigenous to Brazil.3 At the start of the nineteenth century, Candomblé were suppressed and terreiros (temples) were often raided; this persecution continued until the 1970s wherein many Candomblé adherents began to practice their spirituality in the open. From suppression to exploitation, Candomblé has since been used for tourism through the performance of “folk shows” in terreiros and within the triad of Candomblé spiritual expression there are heated debates on whether or not to discard the Catholic imagery which “masks” Candomblé.

Conclusion

The African confrontation with European attempts to construct a European world outside of Europe or the European expansion and conquest of the Americas correspond to African communities which reside in this part of the world, and these communities express the very real and historically situated challenges of being African outside of Africa in the form of an ongoing contestation between African cultural core and a foreign one. In probing some of the more notable sources relevant to the study of culture as people in the African word, it is clear to me several prior, simultaneous, and overlapping processes were involved in the patterns of African cultural autonomy and consolidation as these efforts confronted patterns of “de-Africaniziation” rather than nebulous processes called “creolization” and “syncretization.” An examination and re-appraisal of those processes through the African experience in Brazil case

jul./dez. 2005 279 Kwasi Konadu study reveal the incompatibility of the use of (the Atlantic or Indian) “oceans” as thresholds that transformed Africans into “other beings” or objects, Black Atlantic, creole-ness, hybridity, mulatto-ness, syncretism. Instead, what is more appropriate are conceptual tools such as the notions of cultural-historical continuity, convergence and consolidation, de-Africanization, and culture as multi-layered concept grounded in the material, ideational, and spiritual data related to African peoples and their movement. Movement has characterized much of African history or the African experience in the temporal, and noteworthy here are the parallel geographic movements of continental plates away from the African continent (e.g., Australia, India, Madagascar, and Antarctica drifted away from Africa earlier than South America which broke away from western and southern Africa) and the out-migration of peoples from Africa, which, cumulatively imply the crossing of cultural-geological threshold or movement (almost naturally) away from the African continent. The challenge in an expanding, yet consolidating and interlinked African world, for many, is the difficulty in comprehending “adequately the true nature of the African cultural heritage in the Caribbean [and elsewhere] without first appreciating its dynamism and its life-sustaining elements which have particularly helped it to survive far beyond the geographical boundaries of the African continent” (AGORSAH, 1999, p. 63). To that end, the research perspective and approach on culture as people—by way of three fundamental dimensions—in the African world is offered.

Notas 1 MWALIMU, J. Shujaa. Personal Communication, 2005, shared some of the ideas presented here on the topic of studying the African world. Dr. Shujaa is Director of the African World Studies Institute at Fort Valley State University, Fort Valley, Georgia. 2 Some would argue that African(a) studies scholars, such as myself, who write about African culture are “essentialist” (whatever that means) as if, in their own disciplinarily backyards such as history or anthropology, the work of Europeans who propagate Europe in aesthetics or the like are not essentialists. In other

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words, “if one can speak of European dress, food and culture, despite ethnic divergences, why then can one not speak of similar African applications” (WARNER-LEWIS, 2003, p. xxix). 3 Some regard the caboclo as indigenous Brazilian “spirits,” and others view them as ancestors indigenous to Brazil.

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