Celebrating Candomblé in Bahia
Our intrepid editor-in-chief, Henry Louis Gates Jr., investigates the African roots of Brazil’s Carnival.
When the 10.8 million African slaves disembarked from the hell-hole of the slave ships of the Middle Passage, they discovered that they had not sailed alone. In spite of the horrendous conditions onboard ship (15 percent of their countrymen died en route), many aspects of their various African heritages and cultures managed to survive with them: their music, the foods they could recreate out of the plants and animals in the New World, their aesthetic sense; but most of all, their belief systems, their religions, and their gods. And of all the religions that they carried with them, one would prove to be most resilient and useful to them, most universalizing and cosmopolitan. And that would be the Ifa-based religions of the Yoruba and Fon peoples, from western Nigeria and Dahomey. Their orishas or deities would retain their African names, characteristics, and functions, but assumed new forms in the alien and hostile world of slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. These manifestations of Ifa would come to be called Candomblé in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba, Vodun in Haiti, and Hoodoo in New Orleans, modified from their original forms with influences from other ethnic groups and traditions, especially those of the Bakongo from Kongo-Angola, in the same way that regional variations arose as the Roman Catholic Church spread itself through Europe and the Middle East.
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