By MARCIO DOS SANTOS*
It is not a challenge to value African culture in Brazil, it is, first of all, to understand where this culture is
On November 03rd — Black Awareness Month — students who participated in the first day of the Enem exam were challenged to write an essay on the theme: “African Heritage in Brazil”. In my opinion, the theme brought with it a significant amount of difficulty, since it talks about something complex, which starts from a historical process permeated by agreements and disagreements, and what is worse, it risks obscuring an issue that is more immediate in our society due to the damage caused by a past that lasted more than three hundred years. That is, another legacy, the slavery legacy that has been erased from history in recent years and faces problems of emptying out causes defended by its descendants in contemporary times, marginalized by this process. It is not a challenge to value African culture in Brazil, it is, above all, to understand where this culture is.
I read some texts, from some teachers, including, about the essay topic citing artists like Emicida, who is not African, and referring to cultural manifestations like funk and rap — which are also not originally African — as a kind of resistance of this culture still denied in our country.
We must understand culture as the “result of multiple, sometimes contradictory, concepts”, according to the dictionary of historical concepts authored by Kalina Vanderlei Silva and Maciel Henrique Silva (Ed. Contexto, 2013, p. 85), the authors assert, still on the same page of the dictionary, that “the simplest meaning of this term states that culture encompasses all the material achievements and spiritual cultural aspects of a people”, this concept is attributed to Edward Taylor in the XNUMXth century.
Regarding this, we can still state that “This definition was challenged by Franz Boas, as he found in it characteristics of a hierarchical ordering of cultures as if Western culture were above the others. Franz Boas continues to state that every culture has its own history, which develops in a particular way and cannot be judged based on the history of other cultures.” This thought influenced works such as Casa Grande and Senzala by Gilberto Freyre. But we need to understand that the presence of Africans in Brazil has, first and foremost, a historicity, and it is about this historicity that I intend to talk, because the fact that this country was a European colony (Portugal, 16th-19th centuries) and that blacks were an important part of the formation of our people, as many authors point out, for example, among others, Gilberto Freyre (Casa Grande and Senzala), Darcy Ribeiro (Formation of the Brazilian people) Lilian Moritz Schwarcz (Show of the races), the North American historian specializing in the History of Brazil at the beginning of the last century, Thomas Skidmore (Black in white) and so many other thinkers on the problem of black people in Brazilian society, I still find it very difficult to talk about an African cultural heritage in Brazil, since this culture has undergone a process of deconstruction, hybridization and acculturation, the same having happened to the country's native peoples.
In this regard, we must ask whether the same is not true of European culture, which does not seem to be the case, since the language we speak is Portuguese and Brazil is a Catholic country, with an increasing growth of Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches that were formed as a by-product of Protestantism, which have a European base.
Upon arriving on American soil, in line with historian Charles Boxer in his work Brazil's golden age, where the author focuses on the eighteenth-century period of Brazilian colonization, a reference is made, in the first chapter of the book, to the fact that Africans, who would now be slaves, had their names changed through rebaptism, where they received Catholic names, just to illustrate the violence suffered from the moment these men and women crossed the Atlantic in the ships that the author calls slave ships — due to the high mortality rates of the individuals who were brought to the continent as slaves. The name is our identity, just as our language is the most striking feature of our culture; renaming slaves was also synonymous with the objectification that these people went through, who were exploited in various ways by the Europeans who considered themselves their masters.
The slave quarters were home to enormous cultural diversity among their members, so much so that it was sometimes impossible for some to communicate with each other due to language differences, which seems to have been intentional, precisely because it ensured the possibility of disarticulation between Africans who, eventually, wanted to rise up against their masters. There are several episodes of masters who beat these people to death, and many others that refer to sexual violence practiced against African women, which ended up giving birth to illegitimate children who were seen, at the time, as mulattos, where the skin color, if lighter, guaranteed the child the possibility of a better life than that of its enslaved mother. The dark-skinned “mulatto” had a different fate. Aluízio de Azevedo worked on this issue well in his book the mulatto, where a man seeks acceptance and the love of a white girl in the north of the country, and, although he studied and was educated according to high European customs, in addition to having possessions, the simple fact of being a dark-skinned “mulatto” prevented him from realizing that love that for him was forbidden by the simple fact of his skin being dark.
Of course, we cannot forget that black people in Brazil contributed greatly to the formation of our culture, as is the case with samba — which originated in the slave quarters — and capoeira. This samba would later be appropriated by the white elites during Carnival, still during the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas' Estado Novo, which aimed to domesticate what, for our elites, was considered savage. Religions of African origin, such as Candomblé and Umbanda, emerged, but it is important to clarify that these religions are of African origin and that they do not exist and have never existed in Africa. Therefore, they are an Afro-Brazilian cultural manifestation that only has credit for its existence in Brazil, largely, of course, due to the process of assimilation and acculturation that African culture underwent in the country. The fact that we have a religion in Brazil like Candomblé and other cultural and artistic manifestations like samba, only shows the resilience of black people in the face of adversities encountered in a territory hostile to their cultural expressions and how they found their forms of resistance.
Today, according to a report by the BBC Brasil portal, Catholicism and other religions of Christian origin are the fastest growing in Africa, while Christianity is plummeting in Europe. The report is from September 8, 2019, from which I highlight an excerpt: “Another study, published by the Center for Applied Research in the United States, indicated that between 1980 and 2012 the number of Catholics in the world increased by 57% to 1,2 billion, but the growth was only 6% in Europe, compared to 283% in Africa. The study estimates that the continent is home to almost 200 million Catholics (almost the entire population of Brazil)”. In addition to the Catholic Church, the presence of the IURD in countries such as Angola also needs to be pointed out, since the influence of the church in that country has generated enormous conflicts between Angolan and Brazilian missionaries, according to the portal The Intercept Brasil in a report entitled “Reversal in Angola: Edir Macedo regains control of the Universal in the Country” on May 3, 2024.
Such questions only reinforce the idea that talking about African cultural heritage in Brazil is almost impossible, due to the process of dismantling this culture that was erased for centuries, not representing a challenge to the culture of this continent in this country, but the challenge itself in the sense of finding this culture in a genuine way, and this problem occurs, today, in the African continent itself, victim of centuries of colonialism and neocolonialism suffered by the European imperialist countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. We can certainly talk about an Afro-Brazilian culture, but as for an African culture, from what I explained above, it seems difficult to me since we do not find it, apparently, in its original form anywhere in the country.
I conclude by stating that we know very little about a culture that is truly African in origin in Brazil and in the world and that, therefore, we cannot discuss this heritage in Brazil. In fact, talking about this obscures another heritage in the country, one marked by violence and crime against a wide variety of ethnic groups — as it is more appropriate to say — which were the more than three hundred years of slavery that were part of this country, where its harmful consequences are observed everywhere and where, systematically, several government actors and organizations sought to hide this that is part of our recent past. In the Anthem of the Republic — almost only a year after the abolition — we read in one of its verses “We do not even believe that slaves once existed in such a noble country”. I see these as the marks of forgetfulness, typical of a people who owe much to the African heritage that was erased by several of our social actors in a long and systematic process of forgetting.
*Marcio dos Santos is a history teacher at the São Paulo State Network (Seduc).
References
SILVA. Kalina Vanderlei and SILVA, Maciel Henrique. Dictionary of Historical Concepts. 3rd ed. Contexto Publishing House. 2013.
RIBEIRO. Darcy. The Brazilian people: The formation and meaning of Brazil. 1st ed. São Paulo. Companhia das Letras Publishing House.
SCHWARCZ. Lila Moritz. The spectacles of races: scientists, institutions and the racial question in Brazil – 1870 – 1930. São Paulo. Companhia das Letras 1993.
SKIDMORE. Thomas E. Black and White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. 1st ed. 2012.
FREYRE. Gilberto. The Big and Sensible House: Formation of the Brazilian Family under the Patriarchal Regime. 51st ed. Rev. São Paulo. Global 2006.
AZEVEDO. Aluizio. The mulatto. 1857-1913. Cultural Circle. 2010.
VELLOSO. Mônica Pimenta. Intellectuals and the cultural policy of the Estado Novo. Journal of Sociology and Politics no. 9, 1997.
BOXER. CR Brazil's golden age: growing pains of a colonial society.
2nd ed. National Publishing Company. 1969.
Websites:
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https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-49598865
https://www.intercept.com.br/2024/05/03/reviravolta-em-angola-edir-macedo-retoma-
universal-control-in-the-country/https://www.letras.mus.br/hinos/hino-da-proclamacao-da-republica/
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