Chapter Twenty

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

João José Reis[1]

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 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 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 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, 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]

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]

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] 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 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 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 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 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]