Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770

Exploring the cultural lives of African slaves in the early colonial Portuguese world, with an emphasis on the more than one million Central Africans who survived the journey to Brazil, James Sweet lifts a curtain on their lives as Africans rather than as incipient Brazilians. Focusing first on the cultures of Central Africa from which the slaves came — Ndembu, Imbangala, Kongo, and others — Sweet identifies specific cultural rites and beliefs that survived their transplantation to the Afri...