Chapter Twenty

Domingos Pereira Sodré, a Nagô Priest in Nineteenth-century Bahia

João José Reis1

Writing biographies of slaves and freedpersons in Brazil is a difficult task. Unlike in the

United States, we do not count on slave narratives. There is Mahommah Baquaqua’s

narrative, published in Detroit in 1854, in which he describes, in less than twenty pages,

his experiences as a slave in Pernambuco province in northeastern Brazil and aboard a

Brazilian ship from which he escaped in New York City in 1847.1 Slave narratives have

their problems as historical sources, we know. Since so many were written as

abolitionist propaganda pieces, much of their content was considerably ideological. But

we cannot say they are not in great part, and some more than others, the voice of the

slave or ex-slave, and that is what makes them so fascinating.

Nevertheless slaves in Brazil were not completely silenced about their own,

individual histories. The difference is that their experiences have more often surfaced

through the writings of those who controlled or repressed them, instead of themselves or

abolitionist allies, and here I am thinking primarily about Inquisition, police, and court

records, where one finds their testimonies. These records rarely cover the full

trajectories or even provide detailed glimpses of slaves’ lives. Inquisition records, for

1 Parts of this essay were translated from Portuguese by Sabrina Gledhill. A different, longer version of it was published in Afro-Ásia, 34 (2006): 237–313. The present version was substantially edited and updated specifically as a tribute to Robin Laws’ contribution to illuminate, with his work on the African side, the Yoruba diaspora in Brazil.

1

example, were the source used for a study by Luis Mott of Rosa Egipcíaca, a West

African slave woman in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais and later a freedwoman in

Minas and Rio de Janeiro, a mystic Christian devout who had visions considered

dangerous by the Catholic Church. Ecclesiastical court records also provided

information about Caetana, the slave woman studied by Sandra Graham who contested

a forced marriage with another slave in early nineteenth-century Vassouras, in Rio de

Janeiro.2

In both cases, a large number of written or published sources on the context of

the main characters form the greater part of the narratives. The same could be said of

Junia Furtado’s work on the famous eighteenth-century Minas Gerais mulata woman

Chica da Silva, who became a powerful figure in her village as a result of her

relationship with a Portuguese diamond contractor. Furtado uses da Silva as a window

to discuss freed women of color in colonial Minas. Similarly, Zephyr Frank has studied

wealth formation among what he calls “middling groups” in nineteenth-century Rio de

Janeiro guided by the family and property history of an African freedman named

Antônio José Dutra, a prosperous barber-surgeon and leader of a music band formed by

his slaves.3

In most cases, as I have suggested, the sources offer just a glimpse of these

characters’ lives. When they become freed persons—like da Silva and Dutra—these

glimpses increase in number and may appear in different sources. This is the case with

the protagonist of this chapter, Domingos Pereira Sodré, about whom I have been able

to find vestiges in police, notary, probate, court, and parish records, ethnographic

literature, and the press among other sources. From these vestiges I have managed to

reconstruct some of his life and his context, beginning in Africa, and ending with his

death in the mid-1880s. As in the cases of Antonio Dutra and Chica da Silva, his

2

relationship with property had a great deal to do with his presence in the sources.

However, although other aspects of his life will also come into the picture to help us

better understand him, I will concentrate on his experience as a man of religion, a leader

in the Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion.

This story begins on the 25th of July, 1862, at 4:30 in the afternoon, when

Domingos Sodré was arrested as a Candomblé practitioner at his home in Salvador, the

capital of Bahia, a province in the sugar plantation region in Northeast Brazil.4 Sodré

was approximately seventy years old, and was a Nagô, a term which, as Robin Law has

shown, was created in Africa to identify Yoruba-speaking individuals, but which

became current in the New World, and with a special force in Bahia.5 Like most

Candomblé priests in nineteenth-century Bahia, Sodré was a freedman, and freed people

usually adopted the surnames of their former masters. Domingos bore the prestigious

name in Bahia of his former master, militia colonel Francisco Maria Pereira Sodré and

1 Mahommah G. Baquaqua, An Interesting Narrative: Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua, edited by Samuel Moore (Detroit: Geo E. Pomeroy and Co., Detroit Tribune Office, 1854). A new edition of this memoir was recently published by Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy. Mohammah Gardo Baquaqua, The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America, with an introduction and annotated by Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy (Princeton: Marcus Wiener, 2001).2 Luiz Mott, Rosa Egipcíaca: uma santa africana no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand, 1993); Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No: Women’s Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).3 Junia Ferreira Furtado, Chica da Silva e o contratador dos diamantes: o outro lado do mito (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003); Zephyr Frank, Dutra’s World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004).4 Chief of Police João Antonio de Araújo Freitas Henriques to subdelegado of São Pedro parish, 25 July 1862, Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia (APEBa heretofore), Polícia. Correspondência expedida, 1862, vol. 5754, fl. 214v. This incident was also discussed by Rachael E. Harding, A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 50–51, 93–96, and 193–204.5 Robin Law, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: ‘Lucumi’ and ‘Nagô’ as Ethnonyms in West Africa”, History in Africa, 24 (1997): 205–219. See also João José Reis and Beatriz Galloti Mamigonian, “Nagô and Mina: The Yoruba Diáspora in Brazil”, in Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (eds.), The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 77–110; Idem, “Ethnic Politics among Africans in Nineteenth-Century Brazil” and Maria Inês Côrtes de Oliveira, “The Reconstruction of Ethnicity in Bahia: The case of the Nagô in the Nineteenth Century”, both in Paul E. Lovejoy and David Trotman (eds.), Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 240–264 and 158–180, respectively.

3

his son and heir militia major Jerônimo Pereira Sodré. The Sodrés came from an

important lineage of sugar planters founded in the early eighteenth century, and they

owned at least three sugar plantations in the course of the nineteenth century. The

family also lent its name to Sodré Street, which exists to this day in Salvador. At the

time of his arrest in 1862, the Candomblé man, Domingos, lived on a corner of this

street, within sight of the former Sodré mansion, then occupied by the slave-owning

family of the young, prominent abolitionist poet Castro Alves.6

PICTURE OF THE STREET WHERE SODRÉ LIVED

Sometime between 1815 and 1820, the African captive who became the slave

Domingos in Brazil was imported and put to work as a plantation hand in Santo Amaro,

perhaps the most important sugar district of Bahia at the time. However, by the time he

was granted his manumission in 1836, he may have already been living in Salvador. His

years of servitude in Santo Amaro in a large sugar plantation of over 120 slaves fell

during a period of great slave agitation in Bahia, which started with a conspiracy in

1807 and lasted until the mid-1830s, totaling more than thirty revolts and conspiracies

both in Salvador and the plantation zone, the Recôncavo. In Santo Amaro, where Sodré

lived, and the neighboring district of São Francisco, slaves revolted in 1816, 1827, and

twice in 1828. In January, 1835, Salvador became the stage for a rebellion—led by

Muslim Africans but with non-Muslim participation as well—that lasted several hours

and resulted in at least seventy rebels killed during the fight. The rebellion was quickly

controlled, hundreds of slaves and freed people arrested and tried; four were executed,

6 Mario Torres, “Os morgados do Sodré”, Revista do Instituto Genealógico da Bahia, nº 5 (1951): 9–34; APEBa, Matrícula dos engenhos, livro nº 632, registros nº 424 (engenho Trindade) and 643 (engenho Cassuca); Mario Torres, “Os Sodrés”, Revista do Instituto Genealógico da Bahia, nº 7 (1952): 106; “Inventário do Dr. Antonio José Alves”, Anais do Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia, 30 (1947): 56–57; Waldemar Mattos, “A Bahia de Castro Alves”, idem, 278.

4

while others were punished with whippings (as many as 1,200), prison terms, and

deportation back to Africa, the latter only applying to African-born freed persons.

Although short lived, the revolt had widespread and enduring repercussions in Bahia

and other provinces of Brazil. Most of these rebellions were staged by Nagô Africans,

that is, by Sodré’s African nation.7 There is no record of his involvement in any of them,

like there is of other non-Muslim Nagô slaves and freedmen. His manumission,

obtained one year after the 1835 revolt in Salvador, suggests that he had chosen to

overcome slavery individually and through peaceful means. Unfortunately, I have not

been able to find his manumission documents, and have yet to determine whether he

purchased his freedom or was freed by his master gratuitously, perhaps through a

testament written by the colonel when he died in 1835. If he paid, he may have done so

with money earned from ritual services he offered.8

MAP OF THE RECÔNCAVO and SSA

We know something about Sodré’s African background. In his 1882 will he

declared that he had been born in the port city of Onim (Lagos, present-day Nigeria) of

parents who he indicated—by mentioning their Portuguese names—were also sold in

Brazil as slaves.9 Located in the lagoon complex on the Slave Coast in the Bight of

Benin, Lagos would become the most active slave port in the region during the last three

decades of the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil, that is, from the 1820s through the

1840s.10

7 On the Bahian slave revolts, see João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1993).8 The police officer who arrested Sodré gives 1836 as the date of his manumission, information he obtained from the freedman’s freedom’s papers, which I was unable to locate. Sodré’s name, however, is included, next to the name of his master, in an index of manumissions obtained between 1836 and 1841. See APEBa, Índice de cartas de liberdade, maço 2881.

5

Sodré and his family may have been victims of a dispute for the throne of Lagos

that probably began in the mid-1810s between two half brothers, Osilokun and Adele,

the former being a rich merchant involved in the slave trade. Adele, who had occupied

the Lagos throne for a decade, lost his kingdom on the battlefield and went into exile in

Badagry, his mother’s homeland, where he became the ruler, and sustained a protracted

war against Lagos—besides other lagoon powers such as Porto Novo—until

approximately the mid-1830s, when he managed to recover the Lagosian throne.11

Prisoners of these conflicts—and Sodré was probably one of them—were sold to

Atlantic slave traders, which explains reports from the area in 1823 of both local

conflicts and the presence of a slave ship owned by one of the most powerful Bahian

slave traders at the time, José de Cerqueira Lima.12 However, not all of the captives sold

in Lagos were victims of this local, and relative minor conflict compared to what was

going on in mainland Yorubaland. Here the civil wars that followed the decline and

final collapse of the Oyo kingdom, from which wars Badagry and Lagos were not

absent, contaminated the whole region, from north to south, and produced tremendous

destruction, human displacement and many thousand captives for the Atlantic traffic, a

process Robin Law discussed in his classic The Oyo Empire.13

9 APEBa, Judiciária. Testamentos, nº 07/3257/01 (Sodré’s will). 10 See Robin Law, “Trade and Politics Behind the Slave Coast: The Lagoon Traffic and the Rise of Lagos, 1500–1800”, Journal of African History, 24 (1983): 321–348; and Robin Law and Kristin Mann, “West Africa and the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast”, William and Mary Quarterly, 56: 2 (1999): esp. 322ff. 11 On this conflict, see Robin Law, “The Career of Adele at Lagos and Badagry, c. 1807–c.1837”, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 9: 2 (1978): 35–59; and Kristin Mann, “The World the Slave Traders Made: Lagos, c. 1760–1850”, in Paul E. Lovejoy (ed.), Identifying Enslaved Africans: Proceeding of the UNESCO/SSHRCC Summer Institute (Toronto: York University, 1997): 201–204, 207. Kristin Mann kindly allowed me to read a revised version of this paper, which is a chapter of her forthcoming book on Lagos. 12 Report by José Maurício Fernandes Pereira de Barros to the Minsiter of Foreign Affairs, 21 Sept. 1867, Arquivo Histórico do Itamarati (AHI), Comissão Mista, lata 64, pasta 1, maço 3.13 Robin Law, The Oyo Empire, c. 1600 – c. 1836: A West African Imperialism in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: Claredon, 1977).

6

David Eltis has estimated that, between 1801 and 1850, 285,000 captives, almost

all Yoruba-speakers, were sent to the Americas through Lagos, mainly bound for Brazil.

Between 1800 and 1850, approximately 300,000 Yorubas were specifically exported to

Bahia through Lagos and other ports of the Slave Coast.14 Sodré and his parents were

among those impressive numbers. The Yorubas or Nagôs came to represent close to 80

percent of the African-born slave population of Salvador in the early 1860s, and they

had brought with them the religion of the orisas, the gods whose worship would become

hegemonic among other African traditions in Bahia in the course of the nineteenth

century.15 Domingos Sodré, whose Yoruba name I ignore, was an expert in this

religious culture.

Sodré was accused of receiving goods stolen by slaves from their masters to pay

for his services as a diviner and medicine man. Candomblé, the term to this day used to

identify one of the main branches of Afro-Brazilian religions, was the term used by the

provincial chief of police to refer to both Sodré’s ritual practices and to his house, where

those practices took place. He lived in a populous neighborhood of Salvador, next to a

convent and seminary where Catholic priests were trained. Sodré’s residence was a two-

story building that he rented from a wealthy, traditional sugar-planting family.16

14 David Eltis, “The Diaspora of Yoruba Speakers, 1650–1865: Dimensions and Implications”, in Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (eds.), The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 24, 31, 38.15 On the “nagôization” of Bahian Candomblé in the nineteenth century, see Luís Nicolau Parés, “The Nagôization Process in Bahian Candomblé”, in Falola and Childs (eds.), Yoruba Diaspora, 185–208. For a general view of nineteenth-century Candomblé in Bahia, see Harding, A Refuge in Thunder; Renato da Silveira, O candomblé da Barroquinha: processo de constituição do primeiro terreiro baiano de Keto (Salvador: Maianga, 2006); and Luís Nicolau Parés, A formação do candomblé: história e ritual da nação jeje na Bahia (Campinas: Editora da UNICAMP, 2006). That almost 80 percent of African slaves in Salvador were Nagôs, see João José Reis, “A greve negra de 1857 na Bahia”, Revista USP, 18 (1993): 28. See also Maria Inês Côrtes de Oliveira, “Retrouver une identité: jeux sociaux des africains de Bahia (vers 1750 – vers 1890)” (Doctorat, Université de Paris IV - Sorbonne, 1992), 107.16 One newspaper affirms that Sodré occupied only the basement of this building, but the information seems to be wrong. See Diário da Bahia, 28 July 1862. On these basement residences, which were usually occupied by freed persons and slaves, see Ana de Lourdes Costa, “Ekabó!: Trabalho escravo e condições de moradia e reordenamento urbano em Salvador no século XIX”, MA thesis, Faculdade de Arquitetura da UFBa, 1989.

7

Apparently other Africans lived in his house as tenants, since he alleged that he could

not open several trunks found there by the police because he did not have their owners´

keys.17 His building was probably similar to others in the district, which had been

converted into tenements by their African residents.

A local newspaper labeled these buildings “veritable quilombos,” referring to

maroon settlements usually located in the countryside or the outskirts of urban areas.

The use of this term to define these residential arrangements suggests that they

represented spaces of African resistance in the urban area, including resistance to a

growing bourgeois vision according to which the city should be culturally and even

demographically de-Africanized, at a time when at least 15 percent of Salvador’s

population of some 80,000 inhabitants were African-born, being slaves or freed persons,

and at least another 58 percent Brazilians of African descent. These African households

were usually headed by an individual who figured as the official tenant responsible to

negotiate and pay the rent to a landlord. He would make at least part of his living from

subletting rooms to fellow Africans.18 Sodré may have played that role in one of these

urban quilombos, which in his case also functioned as a Candomblé cult-house, not in

the sense, however, of a temple staffed with initiates who regularly danced to the gods,

had a calendar of festivals, a hierarchical structure and so on. There is indirect evidence

that Sodré had links to one or more temple or terreiro, but at home he apparently held

only his private practice as a diviner and “sorcerer.”19

According to a police report, in Sodré’s house “several articles of witchcraft

were found…in extraordinary numbers,” in addition to personal belongings, including

jewels and two wall clocks, which the police suspected to be stolen property.20 Among

17 Subdelegado Pompílio Manuel de Castro to Chief of Police of Bahia province, 26 July 1862, APEBa, Polícia. Subdelegados, 1862–63, maço 6234.18 O Alabama, 6 May 1869.19 For a discussion of the formation of convent-like Candomblé groups of initiates in Bahia, see Nicolau Parés, A formação do Candomblé.

8

the jewels were coral and gold necklaces, silver chains and rings, including an object

whose description roughly fits a balangandã, which consists of a silver chain that holds

a cluster of charms in the shape of different kinds of fruits and animals, besides figas,

which is a good luck charm in the shape of a clenched fist with the thumb clasped

between the fore and middle fingers. The balangandã served as an amulet as well as an

object of personal adornment worn by African and creole freedwomen around their

waists. In addition to freedom, they signified material success and prestige within the

African community.21

Some of these objects may have belonged to one of the five persons—three

women, two men, all Africans, and a 15-year-old creole boy—arrested in Sodré´s house.

The list included an African slave woman by the name of Delfina, probably the same

Maria Delfina Conceição who, nine years later, now a freedwoman, married Sodré. At

the time when she was arrested, Delfina most likely already lived as if she were free,

except that she had to pay her master a weekly fee from her earnings as an African cloth

(or pano-da-costa) merchant.22 “To pay the week” was a rather common arrangement

between masters and slaves in Brazilian cities, villages, and less often in the

countryside. In the case of Delfina there are other clues indicating that she lived with

20 Subdelegado Pompílio Manuel de Castro to Chief of Police of Bahia province, 26 July 1862, APEBa, Polícia. Subdelegados, 1862–63, maço 6234.21 On balangandãs, see contemporary accounts by James Wetherell, Brazil. Stray Notes from Bahia (Liverpool: Webb & Hunt, 1860), 72–74; and Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, Os africanos no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 4th ed., 1976), 119. The scholarship on balangandãs includes Eduardo França Paiva, “Celebrando a alforria: amuletos e práticas culturais entre as mulheres negras e mestiças do Brasil,” in Ístvan Jancsó and Íris Kantor (eds.), Festa: cultura e sociabilidade na América portuguesa (São Paulo: Hucitec/Edusp/Imprensa Oficial/Fapesp, 2001), 505–518; Simone Trindade Silva, “Referencialidade e representação: um resgate do modo de construção de sentidos nas pencas de balangandãs a partir da coleção do Museu Carlos Costa Pinto,” Dissertação de Mestrado, Faculdade de Belas Artes da UFBA, 2005. 22 On Delfina’s marriage to Sodré, see Arquivo da Cúria Metropolitana de Salvador (ACMS heretofore), Livro de assentos de casamentos. São Pedro Velho, 1844–1910, fl. 128v. On occupation and residence of Delfina’s master, see Almanak administrativo, mercantil e industrial da Bahia para o anno de 1863, organizado por Camilo de Lelis Masson (Bahia: Typographia de Camillo de Lelis Masson e Co., 1863), 405.

9

Sodré at the time of their arrest. Among the personal belongings found by the police

there were bed sheets marked with the initials D. S. (for Domingos Sodré) and D. C.

(for Delfina Conceição). Common among white Bahian families, this method of

marking property was unusual among Africans, especially enslaved ones like Delfina.

Much more common was Sodré’s written will (or testament) dated 1855 which he kept

inside a small, shining wooden box that the police also found in his house in 1862.23

PICTURE OF A GLASS BOX TO SELL CLOTH AND BALANGANDÃS

Delfina used glass boxes like these to sell African cloth in the streets of Salvador.

As for the ritual objects the police confiscated with Domingos, there were four

metal rattles, several small swords or cutlasses (without the cutting edge), fifteen pieces

of cloth decorated with cowries, a quantity of loose cowries, and a gourd filled with a

white powder and other “mystic ingredients,” in the words of the police scribe. These

objects, particularly the swords and decorated cloth, were orisa symbols and attire worn

by the initiated when possessed by an orisa, which indicates that Sodré had connections

to established Candomblé temples in Salvador where possession ceremonies were

performed. Several Yoruba deities hold swords as emblems: Ogun, god of iron and war;

Sango, god of thunder and justice; Esu, trickster god of the crossroads, the messenger;

Oya, goddess of storms; Osun, goddess of fresh waters, among others. The cowries

were sea shells of a certain shape used as currency in Yorubaland and other West

African societies, and perhaps because they signified wealth they were used to adorn

and empower different ritual objects, in addition to being instruments of divination,

namely the sixteen cowries or erindinlogun method.24 Also found with Domingos were

23 See “Cópia do Auto de busca e achada”, 25 July 1862, APEBa, Polícia. Subdelegado, 1861–62, maço 6234.24 See William Bascom, Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from África to the New World (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1980).

10

wooden representations of African deities and a metal statue to which the chief of police

referred as “a small devil made of iron.”25 Probably also referring to this and maybe

other sculptures a local newspaper mentioned “lascivious figures capable of adorning a

temple of the god Pan or Priapus.”26 If we combine the newspaper’s information with

that of the chief of police, there was among the objects confiscated with Sodré at least

one representation of Esu, who is usually represented with an erect penis like the Greek

god Priapus, and who since the eighteenth century was associated by Europeans with

the devil both in Brazil and in Africa.27

Although Esu is present in several different aspects of Yoruba religion, this Esu

image may be taken as one of the evidences to suggest that Sodré was a babalawo, or

priest (always a man) of Ifa, or a devotee of Orunmila, the god of divination, fate, and

wisdom, one of the most important members of the Yoruba celestial pantheon. Esu is an

important factor in the divination process; there are myths about him providing Ifa with

the palm nuts used for divination, and he eventually became an instrument of Ifa’s

demands and sanctions. Being as he is an intermediary between the devotee and other

gods, Esu is the first to be informed about the result of a divination session, and the one

who delivers the prescribed sacrifices and punishes those who fail to offer them upon

indication by Ifa. And Ifa is essential to Yoruba life.28 Thomas Bowen and William

25 Chief of Police Henriques to the director of the War Arsenal, 26 July 1862, APEBa, Polícia. Correspondência expedida, 1862, vol. 5750, fl. 326v26 Diário da Bahia, nº 170, 28 July 1862.27 Pierre Verger, Notes sur le culte des Orisa et Vodun à Bahia, la Baie de Tous les Saints, au Brésil, et l´ancienne Côte des Esclaves en Afrique (Dacar: IFAN, 1957), 120–122, reproduces passages by European travelers in West Africa who associated Esu, Elegbara, or Legba (an equivalent term used in Dahomey) to the devil. One such commentator, Pruneau de Pommegorge, who live in Whydah between 1743 and 1765, just like the Bahian newspaper, described Legba as “a Priapus god ... with his main attribute, which is enormous and exaggerated in comparison with the rest of the body” (Verger, Notes, 120). US Baptist missionary Thomas Bowen also associated Esu with Satan: T. J. Bowen, Adventures and Missionary Labours in Several Countries in the Interior of Africa from 1849 to 1856 (London/Edimburg: Frank Cass, 1968 [1857]), 317. On Brazil, see Antonio da Costa Peixoto, Obra nova da língua geral de mina (Lisbon: Agência Geral das Colônias, 1943–44 [1741]), 32, where the author identifies “Leba” (Legba) with the “Demônio” (Devil).

11

Clarke, US Baptist missionaries who visited Yorubaland in the 1850s, noted the

extraordinary popularity of Ifa divination everywhere they went. Bowen mentioned “the

great and universally honored Ifa,” and Clarke described the cult of Ifa as “one of the

main branches” of Yoruba religion.29 Ifa was especially held to be responsible for good

results in marriage and birth. Ifa divination crossed the ocean to the New World to

become preeminent in both Brazil and the Caribbean, especially Cuba. In Bahia it was

mentioned by the satirical newspaper O Alabama in 1867 in an allegorical story told in

verses about an African diviner hired by the police chief to discover, through Ifa

divination, the perpetrator of a crime. The newspaper, however, used the term Fa,

probably indicating the Fon equivalent to the Yoruba Ifa.30

In the above mentioned poem, the diviner uses obi (kola nuts) in his divination

session. However, the most common instrument of Ifa divination is a set of sixteen

loose palm nuts, which may have been registered in the 1862 police report among

“insignificant objects” found in Sodré’s house. At the same time, the “silver chain with

several objects” they also confiscated is reminiscent of the opele, which is made with

eight halves of palm nuts, another important Ifa divination tool. Finally, one of the short

swords confiscated by the police may have been an Ada Òòsa, an emblem of Ifa. The

rattles and powders complemented Sodré’s divination arsenal.

PICTURES OF EXU WITH THE ERECT PENIS, COWRIE SHELLS, THE IFA

SWORD, PALM NUTS AND AN OPELÊ

28 See Wande Abimbola, Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus (Ibadan: Oxford University Press Nigeria, 1976. 29 Bowen, Adventures and Missionary Labours, 317; William W. Clarke, Travels and Explorations in Yorubaland, 1854–1858 (Ibadan, Ibadan Universisty Press, 1972), 279. 30 O Alabama, 3 Sept.1867, 7.

12

There is more direct evidence that Domingos Sodré was an important diviner.

The arresting police officer defined him as the “chief of the order of divination and

witchcraft” in Salvador, which is a strong statement placing the freedman in the

leadership of a religious organization, even if an informal one. Referring to his ritual

paraphernalia, the police reported that they were “used for witchcraft and divination,

with which the said African used to entertain those who sought him…to know their

future.” Finally, the arresting police officer reported, “This African man is known by the

name of father [papai] Domingos, and has established his reputation as diviner.”31 The

title of papai or pai meant (and still means) that he was a high male authority in the

world of Candomblé. The word is a direct translation of the Yoruba term baba, or

father, which forms the expressions babalorisa, a priest of the orisas, and babalawo,

specifically a priest of Ifa, in the latter case literally, “father of the mysteries or of

knowledge.”32 In fact, the word baba, as John Peel suggests, “carried connotations of

priority, dominance, leadership, or superior efficacy in any sphere, human or

otherwise.”33

The babalawo formed a priestly class considered of utmost importance in the

everyday life of Yoruba peoples. Their prestige resulted from the Yoruba custom of

consulting Ifa for nearly any important decision in their lives. Before marriage, before

the birth of a child, at the birth of a child, in the successive stages in the life of an

individual, before appointment of a king, or of anyone to any post, before a trip, in times

of crisis, of illness, “at any and all times Ifa is consulted for guidance and assurance,”

writes Bolaji Idowu.34 One can therefore imagine the importance of diviners for the

31 Subdelegado Pompílio Manuel de Castro to Chief of Police of Bahia province, 27 July 1862, APEBa, Polícia. Subdelegados, 1862–63, maço 6234.32 Michka Sachnine, Dictionaire usuel yorùbá-français (Paris/Ibadan: Karthala/IFRA, 1997), 69 and 73.33 J. D. Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 72.34 E. Bolaji Idowu, Olódùmarè: God in Yoruba Belief (London: Longmans, 1962), 77–78.

13

large Nagô community of Bahia. Nevertheless, if the insistence of the sources on his

position as a chief diviner suggests that Domingos Sodré was a babalawo, we should

not discard the hypothesis that he was an expert on the less prestigious sixteen-cowries

divination system, or that he combined both divination systems. As I mentioned earlier,

loose cowries were found among ritual objects in Sodré’s house.35

Sodré came from Lagos, where, like other Yoruba kingdoms, the art of

divination was widely appreciated, and a diviner could reach a position of preeminence

in state affairs. According to Yoruba historian A. B. Aderibigbe, the Ifa oracle

represented “the most important piece in the king-making machine” in nineteenth-

century Lagos, where accusations of witchcraft confirmed by a babalawo easily ruined

the reputation of powerful people.36 Sodré grew up in a place where divination played a

tremendous social and political role, and he may have been trained to perform this role.

Such training meant assiduous dedication to memorize more than a thousand verses

represented in the figures formed by throwing either the sixteen loose palm nuts or the

palm half-nuts chain. Even the sixteen cowries method required the memorization of

hundreds of verses. These Ifa verses tell the stories of gods, ancestors, and

anthropomorphic animals and plants involved in situations similar to those faced by the

person seeking the service of diviners. The stories would also recommend specific

offerings to appease this or that god or goddess on behalf of the devotee.37

Sodré may have begun his education as a diviner in Lagos, but a babalawo’s

training continues throughout his life by means of periodic interaction with other Ifa

priests. Acquired knowledge could be updated and reenacted within the specific Yoruba

35 On the hypothesis that Nagô diviners may have developed a hybrid divination system in Bahia, see Julio Braga, O jogo de búzios: um estudo da adivinhação no candomblé (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1988), 78–79.36 A. B. Aderibigbe, “Early History of Lagos to about 1850”, in A. B. Aderibigbe (ed.), Lagos: The Development of an African City (Lagos: Longman Nigeria, 1975), 16–17.37 Abimbola, Ifá; Bascom, Sixteen Cowries.

14

cultural context in Africa, but under slavery in Brazil part or even most of the Ifa

memory may have been lost due to its less frequent and more restricted use by the slave

diviner. In any case, to become a papai, or baba, in Bahia, surrounded as he was by no

less than ten thousand Yorubas accustomed to consulting diviners, Sodré had to be a

competent one, an expert tried and tested by numerous orisa priests and by his own

clients. Even if he adapted his knowledge to the local conditions, even if he changed

much of the orthodoxy of the Ifa system, there must have been some sort of collective

control and approval of his performance as a Nagô diviner. In sum, no one could be

called a papai undeservedly in Bahia.

In addition to the 1862 police report, there is more evidence that Sodré was a big

man in the world of Bahian Candomblé. In 1864, 1865, and 1870 a papai Domingos

appeared in the pages of O Alabama, once protecting a corrupt public administrator in a

fictive satire, and twice presiding over Candomblé ceremonies, one of them a ritual

celebrating the seventh anniversary of the death of a famous African priest by the name

of Chico Papai, therefore another local baba.38 Diviners like Sodré were respected,

sought after and flattered by the chiefs of Candomblé temples because of their ritual

knowledge and acumen but also because, through their consultations, clients were

advised to go to this or that temple or terreiro where specific gods could be more

competently served. These temples’ high priests therefore depended on good relations

with diviners to empower their ase, namely the spiritual foundation of their altars,

through offerings brought by a growing number of devotees and clients as well as—and

this was even more important—by recruiting initiates.39

38 O Alabama, 23 June 1870, 14 Sept. 1864, and 12 August 1865.39 On the dialectics of strengthening the gods through offerings, see Karin Barber, “How Man Makes God in West Africa: Yoruba Attitudes Towards the Orisa”, Africa, 51: 3 (1981): 724–745.

15

At the time of his arrest in 1862, the police pointed out Sodré’s association with

other African priests. The young slave named João, who was arrested along with him,

belonged to Manoel Joaquim Ricardo, a Jeje or Gbe-speaking freedman who was also

accused of owning “a house for that kind of meeting,” meaning a Candomblé house.

According to the police, Sodré entertained “close relations” of friendship with him.40

Before the final prohibition of the slave trade in 1850, Manoel Ricardo had worked as a

merchant engaged in the transatlantic commerce in slaves and other African goods—

probably including ritual objects and ingredients—in association with another freedman

who traveled to the West Coast of Africa regularly. In 1845, now a freedman, Ricardo

owned seventeen slaves, and he and his former partner disputed in court ownership of

two of them when their business venture ended in less than amicable terms.41

Another friend of Sodré, the Hausa freedman Cipriano José Pinto, owned a small

shop in Salvador where he sold a variety of national, European and African products,

including African cloth, berimbaus (the one string arc, a percussion instrument which is

played to accompany capoeira martial arts movements), besides shoes, rosaries,

mousetraps, toothbrushes, fishhooks, and so on. In 1852 Pinto was arrested because his

landlord sued him for being behind on his rent; his merchandise was confiscated and he

fled to a plantation district in the Recôncavo to escape his creditors. Besides his

landlord, several other people alleged that he owed them money, including Domingos

Sodré, who claimed to have lent him a large sum “out of friendship.”42 We know of

Pinto’s involvement with Candomblé because the police arrested him for a second time

some months later on lands that belonged to a sugar plantation where he had set up a

Candomblé house. There the police confiscated a large amount of ritual goods,

40 Subdelegado Pompílio Manuel de Castro para o Chefe de Polícia da província da Bahia, 26 de julho de 1862.41 APEBa, Judiciária, 51/1821/04.42 APEBa, Judiciária. Tribunal da Relação. Execução cível, 22/0768/14 e 12/411/14.

16

including offerings of palm oil, rum, chicken feet and blood, stones, and animal bones.

They also found a bag full of Arabic writings which indicate that our Hausa priest

directed what is called in the oral tradition of Afro-Brazilian religions a mussulmi

(Muslim in Hausa) Candomblé, one probably rooted in the Hausa Bori possession cult.

Unfortunately for Pinto, just after his arrest rumors of an impending African

insurrection took over Salvador. The police became so nervous about public order that

more than one hundred copies of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin were

confiscated from local book sellers to avoid that abolitionist propaganda eventually

reached the slave quarters. Many freed Africans joined Pinto in jail. Nine months after

his arrest, Pinto was expelled from the country, in early 1854.43

The same fate awaited another associate of Sodré. According to a Catholic

newspaper, Antão Teixeira, also named as one of Sodré’s “partners in religion” in 1862,

was expelled from Brazil in 1875, because he allegedly bewitched a local political boss.

Teixeira left Brazil with a reputation of being “one of the most infamous sorcerers of

the capital” of Bahia in his time, according to an early twentieth-century local

historian.44

Sodré’s association with these Candomblé experts suggests that he belonged to a

religious network, probably one of many in Bahia at the time, a network that did not

lack its economic aspects as the dealings between him and Pinto indicate. That Pinto

was a Hausa, Ricardo a Jeje and Sodré a Nagô adds an interesting inter-ethnic angle to

their relationship in a context where ethnic communities around different locally

reconstituted African nations provided the cultural rationale for much of the religious as

43 Cecília Moreira Soares, “Resistência negra e religião: a repressão ao candomblé de Paramerim, 1853”, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, 23 (1992), pp. 138–140; APEBa, Polícia, vol. 5645-1, fls. 34v–35; Antonio Peixoto de Miranda Neves to Chief of Police, 7 August 1854, APEBa, Polícia. Cadeias, 1850–54, maço 6270.44 João da Silva Campos, “Ligeiras notas sobre a vida íntima, costumes e religião dos africanos na Bahia”, Anais do Arquivo do Estado da Bahia, 29 (1943): 304.

17

well as secular life in Bahia at the time.45 The fact that Domingos Sodré did not act

alone made him a dangerous fellow in the eyes of police authorities.

However, the time had passed in Brazil when people were accused and punished

by the Portuguese Catholic Inquisition for strictly religious crimes, in this case

witchcraft. African religions appeared in the police records as means of committing

more prosaic crimes, like disturbing public order with their drumming sessions, and

illegal medical practice, for example. In the case of Domingos, the accusation was

receiving stolen goods as payment for his ritual services. The man who asked the chief

of police to arrest Sodré, a customs officer, alleged that a slave woman of his had stolen

money and other goods from the house to pay the papai for his services. The chief of

police wrote that she and other slaves acted in this way to obtain “their freedom through

witchcraft,” which suggests that the threat to slavery explained the repression against

Candomblé, in this and other instances. The chief of police was keen on this point when

he wrote: “these superstitions are much more damaging in a country in which a large

part of its wealth is employed in slaves.”46

It was a rather common, though not unanimous, opinion at the time that

Candomblé and slavery did not mix. The police officer who arrested Cipriano Pinto in

1853 considered him dangerous because the rich sugar plantation region where he

established his candomblé house was peopled by “a great number of Africans,” and

therefore the police needed to avoid “the bad results that could perhaps obtain from

similar clubs.”47 The police worried that the African candomblé would become a rebel

organization leading up to a slave revolt similar to those that had plagued the region

along the first half of the nineteenth century. Nothing indicates that such was Cipriano’s

45 See Oliveira, “Retrouver une identité”.46 Chief of Police João Antonio de Araújo Freitas Henriques to subdelegado of São Pedro parish, 25 July 1862, APEBa, Polícia. Correspondência expedida, 1862, vol. 5754, fl. 21547 Gustavo Balbino de Moura e Camira to the delegado of São Francisco do Conde village, 15 March 1853, cited in Soares, “Resistência negra e religião”, 139.

18

intention, despite the supposedly subversive Arabic written papers found with him and

which the police immediately linked to the 1835 Muslim rebellion.

Although Candomblé could get involved with a slave revolt, like one that

exploded in 1826 in the outskirts of Salvador, the relationship between Candomblé and

slave resistance in general followed a different, less dramatic path.48 For instance, the

belief that witchcraft could help slaves obtain manumission, tame, and even kill their

masters was widespread. Sodré was suspected of the first two sins against slavery.

Freedom and witchcraft were related because Sodré could prepare offerings to the gods

and special potions, presumably to be given to masters to weaken their willpower when

the time came for their slaves to negotiate manumission, a common situation in the

world of urban slavery, or for masters to write wills and choose which slaves should be

freed upon their deaths, a typical Catholic protocol to avoid the flames of Hell. But the

taming of a master could go on a different direction as well, like controlling his wrath

against slaves who stole from him, idled, or escaped. And often slaves absconded to

attend Candomblé ceremonies, including initiation rites that could last for weeks and

even months. They then returned to slavery and an irate master who needed to be dealt

with.

To protect slavery, an exemplary punishment had to be given to Sodré and his

party. First, it was important to attack the symbols of his African religion. His ritual

objects were all burned. Those made from metal were taken to the War Arsenal to be

melted in its furnaces, which made sense because the fight against Candomblé signified

a kind of war for many Bahians. The prisoners of this war were punished with twelve

strikes of a ferule on the palms of their hands, a common domestic punishment: these

included the slave Elesbão, a man of about fifty, the slave woman Delfina (Sodré’s

partner), aged about thirty-seven, and João, fifteen, the only creole in the group. By law,

48 On the 1826 revolt, see Reis, Rebelião, 100–105.

19

freedpersons could not be punished with beatings, and so the freedwoman Inês’s

punishment was six nights in jail. Sodré spent just four nights in prison, for apparently

the police could not prove that he fenced stolen goods. All prisoners were released, but

Sodré had to sign, in the presence of the police chief himself, and through a

representative—for he could not write or sign his name—a “Term of Obligation,” which

was read to him, in which he promised to abandon his Candomblé practices and find “an

honest” job, or he would otherwise be expelled from the country.49

I suspect that, besides the lack of evidence of a crime, someone protected Sodré

from a harsher punishment. While the police concentrated their efforts in inquiring

about his deals with slaves, people from other walks of life attended his divination

sessions. According to a local newspaper, besides Africans, “clean people wearing ties,”

meaning whites, sought out the papai’s services.50 Sodré was only following widespread

practice when he served these clients. In 1868, another newspaper made a list of types

who attended a Candomblé house in the same parish where Sodré lived, and the ilk

included “married ladies who seek specific (ingredients) which would make their

husbands remember their conjugal duties; slaves who seek ingredients to tame the

willpower of their masters; women who seek means of becoming happy, and even

businessmen to obtain good business results!”51 At this time in Bahia some whites had

already become mediums and honorary members of Candomblé communities. O

Alabama tirelessly accused policemen of allowing and even belonging to the religion.

One subdelegado, or district police officer, was even denounced for having been

possessed by an African spirit during a public ceremony which he attended in the

company of his family.52

49 See several letters by the police chief to the jailer at the correctional house between July 26 and 31, 1862, APEBa, Polícia. Correspondência expedida, 1862, vol. 5756, fls. 140v–149. APEBa, Polícia. Termos de fiança, 1862–67, vol. 5651, fl. 88v.

20

Maybe among the white folks who looked for advice from Sodré was Antonio

Pereira de Albuquerque, a lawyer and the district police officer of São Pedro parish,

where Sodré lived. On leave from his post when the diviner was arrested, and precisely

at the time of his arrest, Albuquerque was serving as Sodré’s attorney on a case in

which the papai had sued another African freedman whom he accused of stealing a

large sum of money from a manumission society that the diviner headed.53

This takes us to another, related issue. Sodré’s name comes up frequently in the

notary and court records, and not as a defendant. These were cases involving property,

and they show how freely he could move around in the world of legitimate, respectable

society in Bahia, just as these people sought his service as a Candomblé specialist.

Sodré especially befriended or was acquainted with people in a position to help him

with his legal dealings, such as the district police officer who was his lawyer. The

district bailiff as well as the parish clerk was also among his friends: the bailiff testified

against the freedman sued by Sodré whom I just mentioned, and was accused by this

defendant’s lawyer of being at Sodré’s house all the time and half drunk for that matter.

On the other hand, the parish clerk, the son of a former slave trader, a man of Italian

descent, was a groom at Sodré’s wedding to Delfina in 1871.54 These were people who

could have given him a hand when he was arrested in 1862. I did not include his former

master among them because he lived on his sugar plantation at the time, rarely visited

the city, and his name was never mentioned in connection to any of the many deals the

diviner registered with the notary public. Sodré was apparently no client of his former

master as so many freed persons were in nineteenth-century Bahia.

50 Diário da Bahia, 28 July 1862.51 O Alabama, 2 Sept. 1868.52 João José Reis, “Candomblé in Nineteenth-Century Bahia: Priests, Followers, Clients”, in Kristin Mann, Edna G. Bay (eds.), Rethinking the African Diáspora (London: Frank Cass, 2001): 116–134.53 APEBa, Judiciária. Tribunal da Relação, 1860, 26A/921/16, maço 3537.54 Idem; ACMS, Livro de assentos de casamentos. São Pedro Velho, 1844–1910, fl. 128v.

21

Sodré moved more freely among Africans, and here he was not just a religious

leader, as his leading position in a manumission society shows. Manumission societies

or juntas de alforria were groups usually formed along ethnic lines that functioned as a

credit institution: slaves borrowed from it to pay the full price or part of the price asked

by masters for their manumission, loans that should be repaid, sometimes at high

interest rates. Freed persons who had already paid their debt could keep up their

membership as a form of investment, which made the junta more than a manumission

venture. The money was collected throughout the year and then redistributed in the form

of loans and drafts. The institution seems to have been inspired in the Yoruba

eşuşu societies, although its existence was not restricted to the Nagôs.55 Of the

little that we know about the junta´s modus operandi in Bahia, its leaders were paid to

collect, hold, protect the money, and redistribute it in the form of credit and profits in a

general annual meeting with members. In the case of Sodré’s junta, someone was hired

to help Africans with calculations, and this role fell on the bailiff I just mentioned as his

associate.

Sodré made at least part of his living in the manumission business in two ways:

as a priest and as the organizer of a junta. The two ends of the venture never came to the

attention of the police, but it is not difficult to imagine that part of the money the papai

received from slaves went to the manumission society, and not to pay for divination

sessions or other ritual services. Here is, in sum, how he probably operated: he advised

through divination that slaves join the society he headed, and through offerings paid for

by their slave clients he worked to appease the gods and prepared potions to soften the

masters’ mood when time came for slaves to negotiate the terms of their freedom. We

55 Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966 [1897]), 119. See also João José Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil: a história do levante dos malês em 1835 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003), 365–367.

22

thus come to a full cycle, which normally began with a divination session and ended

with a manumission document registered by the notary public.

However, if Sodré participated in the business of freedom, he also had a foot in

the slave regime. He owned slaves just like many African freed persons did in Brazil.

In December 1850, he bought a slave woman by the name of Esperança (which

translates as Hope!), age 32, who had a liver disease. Esperança appeared once again in

the notary records five years later, when she received her freedom without condition or

payment, but “for her good services,” according to the papai’s own words. That same

year, 1855, Sodré owned two other slaves that he also manumitted, a woman by the

name of Umbelinda, and a nine-year-old creole boy called Theodoro. I have not been

able to discover the terms of Umbelinda’s freedom, but Theodoro received his freedom

without charge. Sodré alleged that he cherished the boy for having brought him up, and

released him under the condition that he stayed with Sodré, respected and served him

well until he (Sodré) died. Childless as he was, a situation Yorubas abhorred, Sodré may

have chosen Theodoro to be his surrogate son. But the sentiments and expectations set

down in both letters of manumission I found—those of Esperança and Theodoro—did

not make Sodré an original master: we can find such expressions everywhere in

manumission records. They were typical.56

56 APEBa, Livro de notas do tabelião, vol. 295, fls. 134–134v (Esperança’s bill of purchase); APEBa, Livro de notas do tabelião, vol. 319, fls. 165v–166 (Esperança’s manumission paper); APEBa, Livro de notas do tabelião, vol. 320, fl. 72 (Theodoro); APEBa, Índice de cartas de liberdade, maço 2882 (Umbelinda). On slave manumission in Bahia, see Kátia Mattoso, “A propósito de cartas de alforria”, Anais de História, 4 (1972): 23–52; Stuart Schwartz, “The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: Bahia, 1684–1745,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 54: 4 (1974): 603–635; and Mieko Nishida, “Manummission and Ethnicity in Urban Slavery: Salvador, Brazil, 1808–1888”, Hispanic American Historical Review, 73: 3 (1993): 361–391. On African ex-slaves who owned slaves, see for example Reis, Rebelião escrava, 33, 367–370; Maria Inês C. de Oliveira, O liberto, seu mundo e os outros (Salvador: Corrupio, 1988); Mieko Nishida, Slavery and Identity: Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Salvador, Brazil, 1808–1888 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 88 and passim. For Rio de Janeiro, see, among others, Frank, Dutra’s World.

23

It is puzzling, however, why Sodré decided to free these slaves all at the same

time and at least two of them without charge. Was he going through some crisis of

consciousness, a moral or ideological crisis? Was he trying to overcome the

contradiction of working towards freedom as a priest and a leader of a manumission

society on the one hand, and being a slave master on the other? Or perhaps he was

having another kind of crisis, a spiritual one, which can be explained by the timing of

his gesture. An older man, more than sixty years of age, Sodré may have thought that he

would not live much longer, and his gesture may have been a preparation for a good

death—a Catholic death, of course. That he was preparing for his death in 1855 is also

suggested by a will written that same year which the police found among his belongings

in his house in 1862. This will, which has since disappeared, was dictated and approved

by the same notary public that registered his slaves’ manumission documents. The

making of a will represented another important step toward preparing for a good death,

for besides disposing of one’s property—which included manumitting slaves—it

contained items related to the funeral rites, and the names of the dead and the saints who

were to be honored with masses, so they could intervene before god on behalf of the

testator.57

Sodré was not, after all, exclusively a Candomblé devotee. Like many Africans

in nineteenth-century Bahia, he had also adhered to Catholicism. Although his1855 will

has disappeared, in another one written in 1882 he declared he was a “true Christian,”

with unusual devout emphasis at this point in the history of Brazilian attitudes toward

death. He also remembered that he had been baptized as a Catholic on his master’s

Trindade (Trinity) plantation. He mentioned his marriage, which, according to an

ecclesiastical registry written by the parish priest, ended “some years of illicit

57 On attitudes toward death as viewed through wills, see João José Reis, Death is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2003). esp. chap. 4.

24

relationship” with his wife Delfina Conceição. Besides, he asked that his Catholic

Brotherhood of Black People of the Rosary accompany his body to the cemetery to be

buried alongside his ritual brothers. Twenty years earlier, when arrested, the police

found the walls of his living room covered with framed pictures of Catholic saints, in

addition to a well-kept oratory. This was the room where his marriage ceremony took

place some years later. While these saints occupied the living room, the orisas occupied

the back rooms. The fact that one religion was on display and the other kept secret had

obvious strategic reasons, but doesn’t mean that Sodré only pretended to be a Catholic.

He was baptized, married and died a Catholic, though not just as a Catholic. That was

Brazil then, this is Brazil today.58

Nevertheless, Sodré’s crisis in 1855, if any, did not make him abandon

completely his life as a slave master, for I found the manumission record of yet two

other slaves he owned, Ozório, an African man of unknown origin, and Maria, of the

Nagô nation like him. Ozório paid 528 mil réis for his manumission in March, 1862,

almost four months before Sodré’s arrest, and Maria was freed in 1877 against the

payment of 500 mil réis (approximately US $225.00). Unfortunately, I have not been

able to establish whether either of them had already been his slave in 1855 or were

bought afterwards.59 After 1877 the known recorded property history of Sodré did not

include slaves. In 1874 Sodré and his wife bought a small house in Salvardor’s central

parish of Sé, which they sold two years later. This same year, 1876, he bought another

house, which he sold ten years later, in 1886, and with the money he opened a savings

account for Delfina Conceição in a private savings bank, the Caixa Econômica. This

58 APEBa, Judiciária. Testamentos, nº 07/3257/01 (Sodré’s will); “Cópia do Auto de busca e achada”, APEBa, Polícia. Subdelegado, 1861–62, maço 6234 (police report); ACMS, Livro de assento de casamentos. São Pedro, 1844–1910, fl. 128v (Sodré’s marriage). Harding, A Refuge in Thunder, 50–51, also discussed the spacial division between Catholicism and Candomblé in Sodré’s house.59 APEBa, Livro de notas – 1877, vol. 365, fl. 28, and vol. 511, fl. 28v.

25

bank was founded in 1834, but only during the second half of the century began

expanding its clientele to include small customers such as Sodré, and even poorer ones.

In the 1870s, for example, slaves had savings accounts at the Caixa Econômica that

would eventually be used to buy their manumission. Ironically, this bank competed

with, and may have suffocated the African credit societies like the one Sodré once

headed.60

Eight months after having invested in the Caixa Econômica, in early May 1887,

Sodré died of apoplexy at the estimated age of 90 years in the same rented house where

he was living when arrested in 1862 (he never moved to the houses he had bought in

1874 and 1876). His wife Delfina Conceição followed him one year later, at 83, having

lived long enough to see the abolition of slavery in Brazil on May 13th, 1888. Just like

him, she was buried in the Brotherhood of the Rosary cemetery.61

Domingos Sodré was typical among African slaves who had managed to obtain freedom

and a small measure of prosperity in Imperial Brazil. He owned slaves, he bought

houses, he rented another one (with running water), and he had a bank account,

although not everything at the same time. But he conquered these things through

unconventional methods, or at least methods that were not at the disposal of the

majority of freed people, who worked mostly in commerce and urban services. He

stands out as an important religious leader, although his ability to influence and

organize others was not limited to the religious domain. He may have used his religious

authority to become the chief of a manumission society formed by other Nagô members. 60 “Escritura de venda, compra, paga e quitação que fazem Domingos Pereira Sodré e sua mulher Maria Delfina da Conceição a José de Oliveira Castro etc”, 14 July 1876, and “Escritura de venda, compra, paga e quitação que fazem Elpidio Lopes da Silva e sua mulher D. Maria do Carmo de Almeida a Domingos Pereira Sodré etc”, 13 December 1876, APEBa, Livro de registro de escritura, nº 479, fls. 30v-31 and 54-54v, respectively On the Caixa Econômica in Bahia, see Waldir Freitas de Oliveira, História de um banco: o Banco Econômico (Salvador: Museu Eugênio Teixeira Leal, 1993), cap. 1.61 APEBa, Judiciária, 07/3000/08.

26

His role as the head of a manumission society suggests that his charisma had other

forms of expression. The bridge he built between these two activities suggests he was

cunningly able to interpret the world in which he lived. He could negotiate positions

and relations both inside and outside the African community. His ritual practices, and in

this he was not alone, attracted white clients as well as Africans and Brazilian blacks.

Many white individuals also crossed his path in non-ritual circumstances, which is clear

in the notary, court and ecclesiastic documents where his name appears repeatedly. This

social and cultural boldness was reflected in the religious sphere, since he apparently

moved between Candomblé and Catholicism without much difficulty, although

carefully so as not to mix up orisas and Catholic saints. He can be better defined as a

cultural mediator than as an assimilationist.

Of course this also tells us something about Brazil at the time. Unlike the United

States, where the development from a society with slaves into a slave society eliminated

most of the social leverage the early free and freed blacks possessed, mature slave

society in Brazil, for reasons beyond the scope of this essay, seems to have reserved

more breathing room for those who could be considered “Atlantic creoles” in Ira

Berlin’s sense of the term—African-born persons familiar with the language and culture

of the wider world, in both margins of the Atlantic.62 It goes without saying that life was

not rosy for former slaves in Brazil, especially if they were African-born. They lacked

many of the civil and political rights that even Brazilian-born freed persons enjoyed.63

The persecution and suppression of their religion shows how feeble their gains could be.

But here again there was no clear-cut rule: the presence and even the adhesion of

Bahians to Candomblé—including a few white men of prestige, authority and power—

62 See Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America”, William & Mary Quarterly, 53: 2 (1996), 251–288.63 Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Negros, estrangeiros: os escravos libertos e sua volta à África (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985), 68–81.

27

existed side by side with repression. It was precisely by exploring this ambiguity that

Candomblé leaders like Sodré managed to profess, protect, and expand their religion.

Sodré was himself a paradoxical figure. Both his ritual performance in Candomblé and

his secular practices in a manumission society helped slaves in their battles and

negotiations with masters, and at the same time he was a slave master himself.

Paradoxical, I have said, but maybe Domingos Sodré was just a good devotee of Esu,

the trickster god, the unpredictable master of crossroads.

28