Exploring the cultural lives of African slaves in the early colonial
Portuguese world, with an emphasis on the more than one million Central
Africans who survived the journey to Brazil, James Sweet lifts a curtain
on their lives as Africans rather than as incipient Brazilians. Focusing
first on the cultures of Central Africa from which the slaves
came--Ndembu, Imbangala, Kongo, and others--Sweet identifies specific
cultural rites and beliefs that survived their transplantation to the
African-Portuguese diaspora, arguing that they did not give way to
immediate creolization in the New World but remained distinctly African
for some time.
Slaves transferred many cultural practices from their homelands to
Brazil, including kinship structures, divination rituals, judicial
ordeals, ritual burials, dietary restrictions, and secret societies.
Sweet demonstrates that the structures of many of these practices
remained constant during this early period, although the meanings of the
rituals were often transformed as slaves coped with their new
environment and status. Religious rituals in particular became potent
forms of protest against the institution of slavery and its hardships.
In addition, Sweet examines how certain African beliefs and customs
challenged and ultimately influenced Brazilian Catholicism.
Sweet's analysis sheds new light on African culture in Brazil's slave
society while also enriching our understanding of the complex process of
creolization and cultural survival.
