Rhythms of Resistance: African Musical Heritage in Brazil: African Musical Heritage in Brazil

by Peter Fryer

Overview

African rhythms are at the heart of contemporary black Brazilian music. Surveying a musical legacy that encompasses over 400 years, Rhythms of Resistance traces the development of this rich cultural heritage.

Acclaimed author Peter Fryer describes how slaves, mariners and merchants brought African music from Angola and the ports of East Africa to Latin America. In particular, they brought it to Brazil - today the country with the largest black population of any outside Africa. Fryer examines how the rhythms and beats of Africa were combined with European popular music to create a unique sound and dance tradition. Fryer focuses on the political nature of this musical crossover and the role of an African heritage in the cultural identity of Brazilian blacks today.

Rhythms of Resistance is an absorbing account of a theme in global music and is rich in fascinating historical detail.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745307312
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	05/20/2000
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Peter Fryer (1927-2006) was a British writer and journalist, whose coverage of the arrival of citizens from the Caribbean onboard the HMT Empire Windrush led to a deep and long-lasting interest in the histories of Black Britons. In 1984, he wrote the classic book Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (Pluto, 2018).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Heritage of Nigeria and Benin: Music for Worship

African-derived religions in Brazil

The African-derived Brazilian religions have been called 'the main matrix of Afro-Brazilian identity', and I refuse to belittle them with the disparaging term 'cults'. For they are not, as many suppose, a mere collection of superstitions; they furnish 'a coherent philosophy of man's fate and the cosmos'. But they are not one homogeneous whole. They are an entire cluster of belief systems, differing in all sorts of detail from area to area and even from house of worship (terreiro) to house of worship within one and the same city – and in Salvador alone there are (or were in the early 1980s) over 900 registered houses, though many of them have departed from tradition in one way or another. It had been estimated in 1942 that there were then 67 terreiros in the city, divided among 17 different nações (the average number of devotees per terreiro was put at 300). Such a remarkable growth rate suggests that, together, the African-Brazilian faiths, in their various forms, must have constituted one of the world's fastest-growing religions for at least 40 years of the twentieth century.

These faiths have complete local independence, there being no central authority to co-ordinate their activities or to rule on tradition. And they display varying degrees of syncretism with Roman Catholicism, to whose more flamboyant aspects they have proved highly receptive. At first, such syncretism had the purpose of camouflaging African forms of worship and thus limiting persecution by Roman Catholic priests and by police of what was for long a major focus of slave resistance and therefore a forbidden faith in Brazil, prohibited as mere witchcraft and rendering its adherents liable to excommunication, refusal of communion, arrest and imprisonment. As Roger Bastide puts it: 'Originally the saints were merely white masks placed over the black faces of the ancestral deities ... [T]he whites had to be given the impression that the members of the 'nations' were good Catholics.' In Brazil the African deities are called orixás (from Yoruba òrìs.à); each is identified with one or more Catholic saints, each saint being essentially 'the Portuguese name of the orixá'. These identifications are not at all consistent from area to area: in Salvador, for instance, Ogun, Yoruba god of iron and war (Ògun), is identified with St Anthony, in Rio de Janeiro and Recife with St George; in Salvador Oxóssi, Yoruba god of hunters (Osoosì), is identified with St George, in Rio with St Sebastian, in Belém not only with the latter saint but also with his sixteenth-century namesake King Sebastião of Portugal (1554–78). In both Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, the Yoruba arch-divinity Orixalá (Òrìsàálá or Obàtálá), is identified with Our Lord of Bomfim (Jesus Christ). Each orixá is characterised by particular symbols: colours, songs, anecdotes, objects, animals, plants and atmospheric phenomena. And each devotee has a guardian orixá which he or she 'receives' while in trance.

It is impossible to draw hard-and-fast dividing lines between the various African-Brazilian religions, many of which are fluid and still evolving. There has been, and there still is, much borrowing and exchange of ritual and songs. The least affected by such borrowing and exchange is candomblé, which may be called the classical African-Brazilian religion. It is the one closest to Africa in language, pantheon, liturgy, musical instruments and musical styles. One widely accepted explanation of its name is that it combines three African words: ka, which in the Kimbundu language of Angola means 'custom'; ndombe, which in the same country's Kikongo language means 'a black person'; and ilé, the Yoruba word for 'house'. Together these give the meaning: 'house of black customs'. There is however an alternative, though similar, explanation: that it combines the word candombe (from Kimbundu kanome, a kind of drum dance, and a word still used in Uruguay) with Yoruba ilé. Insome ways candomblé resembles vodoun in Haiti, which is largely Dahomean (i.e. Fon); 11 but, being largely Yoruba, candomblé is still more closely paralled by Santeria (properly, Regla de Ocha) in Cuba, especially by the Lucumi tradition, and by Shango in Trinidad.

The latter takes its name from Songó, Yoruba deity of thunder and lightning, as does the Xangô tradition in Pernambuco, Alagoas and Sergipe, one of four regional variants in Brazil of the classical candomblé of Salvador. The earliest known picture of black musicians and dancers in Brazil (Fig. 1), dating from c. 1640, portrays what is probably a Xangô ceremony in Pernambuco. This watercolour was painted by the German traveller Zacharias Wagner or Wagener (1614–68), who lived in Brazil from 1634 to 1641, during the quarter-century (1630–54) of Dutch rule over the north-eastern part of the colony. It shows an orchestra of two drums and what appears to be a notched scraper. One of the participants in the counter-clockwise ring dance is shaking a tambourine. Wagner wrote of this 'Negro Dance':

When the slaves have performed their very arduous task for a whole week they are allowed to do as they please on the Sunday. Usually they gather in certain places and, to the sound of pipes and drums, spend the entire day in disorderly dancing among themselves, men and women, children and old people, amidst continual drinking of a very sweet beverage called Grape [i.e. garapa ]: they spend all the holy day dancing thus without stopping, frequently to the point where they no longer recognise each other, so deaf and drunk have they become.

But what the seventeenth-century German observer interpreted as deafness and drunkenness was more probably the state of possession attained by devotees at the Xangô ceremony. Although the last speakers of Yoruba in Recife died some fifty years ago, many of the songs in the Xangô ritual are still sung in that language. An important part of the ritual involves the washing of the devotees' heads with the juice of sacred leaves.

Each of the other three regional variants of candomblé has a large admixture of Fon (Dahomean) beliefs and practices. One of these, in the northern state of Maranhão, is known as casa das minas or tambor-de-mina. In the state capital São Luís and the surrounding area there is an enclave of Fon influence. Here, besides a large number of Catholic saints, African deities known as budus or voduns are worshipped, one as Legba Bogui, others under such Brazilian names as Pedro Angaço and Maria Barbara.

Another regional variant of candomblé is the highly syncretised batuque of Pará and Amazonas (not to be confused with the secular dance of the same name). Yoruba-derived, but with much Fon influence, this faith is said to have been taken to Belém around the beginning of the twentieth century from São Luís de Maranhão. Originally called babaçuê or babassuê, batuque admits Amerindian and vulgarised Roman Catholic elements, besides certain traditions which can be traced to the Iberian peninsula. African deities are here joined by Amerindian spirits called encantados. Umbanda and, through umbanda, spiritism (both to be described later) have also had a major influence on batuque since the 1950s; in the past 50 years personages and rituals have been freely borrowed from the umbanda faith of Rio de Janeiro, and correspondingly greater emphasis has been placed on healing. Batuque rituals begin with a ceremony called bater-cabeça ('knocking the head'), in which devotees salute a food offering placed in the centre of the room by kneeling and touching their heads on the floor.

Lastly, a variant of candomblé in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul is also called batuque by outsiders, but devotees themselves call it pará. Far from Brazil's main centres of African settlement and therefore relatively isolated, pará retains in its pantheon some Dahomean deities little known in the northeast, such as Mawu and Aïdo Wëdo, the rainbow serpent.

In one direction candomblé shades off into macumba. This fusion of Yoruba, Kongo-Angola, Roman Catholic and Amerindian influences is strongest in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo and São Paulo; its name, confusingly, is sometimes used as a synonym for candomblé or indeed for any African-Brazilian religion. Originally called cabula, macumba is a twentieth-century development reflecting 'a new social structure born of industrialisation and the rise of great sprawling cities after the First World War'. In some areas the macumba deities have lost their African names: in the Espírito Santo city of Vitória, for instance, only the exús – incarnations of Exú (Yor. Èsù), messenger of the gods, trickster, and guardian of crossroads and entrances – retain such names. In Rio, on the other hand, according to Robert Farris Thompson, 'the ecstatic songs of the macumba cult ... are peppered with Ki-Kongo healing terms and phrases', and Kongo charms (minkisi) are called by such names as Zambi, Bumba and Lemba.

In another direction candomblé shades off into umbanda, a tradition which emerged in the 1920s and is seen by some nowadays as Brazil's national religion. In the Kimbundu language the word umbanda means 'the art of healing' or 'traditional medicine' or, perhaps more precisely, 'to work positively with medicines', and Brazilian umbanda was originally a largely Angolan tradition but gradually came under Yoruba influence. It also borrowed from astrology and from the 'spiritism' of the French engineer Allan Kardec (1804–69), who claimed that spirits had dictated his books to him, and whose teachings had begun to attract middle-class followers in Brazil in the 1860s. Umbanda adds to the African pantheon various Brazilian personages, notably the pretos velhos ('old black men'), whose names, such as Pai Kongo de Arunda and Pai Joaquim de Angola, sufficiently indicate their origins. These souls of dead Kongo-Angola slaves are portrayed in statues and statuettes as elderly pipe-smoking black men and are seen as the embodiment of meekness, wisdom, kindness and forgiveness, and the givers of good advice. There are female black elders, too, such as Maria Konga and Maria Kambinda. Umbanda's Pomba-Gira, wife of Exú, takes her name from the Kikongo expression mpamba nzila ('crossroads'). In yet another direction candomblé shades off into candomblé de caboclo, whose pantheon includes Amerindian deities with names in the Tupí language or in Portuguese. Variants of candomblé de caboclo include catimbó (or catimbau; originally santidade) in the north-eastern states and pagelança or pajelança in Piauí, Pará and Amazonas. In 1977 the term candomblé de caboclo was said to be 'far less definite' than it had been 30 years before, and in the subsequent 20-odd years it has no doubt become less definite still.

Little seems to be known about the tambor-de-crioulo of Maranhão, one of Brazil's least studied popular religions. It is said to show much Dahomean influence and to use hymns in the Portuguese language, 'with texts of an essentially secular nature', resembling in mood and structure the rural samba of São Paulo state (see p. 102).

At the most obviously African end of this enormous and variegated spectrum – or perhaps I should say at its centre, where the closest linguistic, liturgical, musical and choreographic links with Africa are maintained – is what I have been calling the classical candomblé faith practised in the city of Salvador. This comprises six distinct traditions, four of which derive from the Yoruba of Nigeria and Benin:

1) The Nagô or Ketu tradition. This is the candomblé ritual claiming the largest number of followers and includes songs sung in archaic Yoruba. Many people of Yoruba descent in Benin describe themselves by the Fon term Nago or Anago; Ketu refers to the ancient Yoruba kingdom of Kétu.

2) The Ijexá tradition. This ritual, too, includes songs sung in archaic Yoruba and takes its name from another ancient Yoruba kingdom: Ìjèsà.

3) The Egba tradition. This minor Yoruba ritual takes its name from the Yoruba sub-group known in Nigeria as Ègba.

4) The Efan tradition. Another minor Yoruba ritual, named after the Yoruba sub-group known in Nigeria as Èfòn.

5) The Gêge (i.e. Ewe) tradition. This derives from the Fon of Benin and includes songs sung in the Fon language, which is closely related to Ewe and is sometimes classified as one of its dialects.

6) The Kongo-Angola tradition. Known in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro as Angola, this ritual in fact borrows much from Yoruba practice.

Of all the orixás, the one whose influence has spread most widely in Brazil is Yemanjá. A great many inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro throw flowers into the sea for her on the last night of each year, and many young Brazilian women of European descent will tell you: 'Eu sou uma filha de Yemanjá' ('I am a daughter of Yemanjá'), a statement which does not necessarily connote active participation in her rituals. She is Yemonja, Yoruba goddess of waters both fresh and salt, from whose body flow all rivers and lagoons and the sea itself. At the same time she is an Angolan water spirit and is identified variously with Our Lady of the Conception and Our Lady of the Navigators; outside candomblé, her icons generally portray a young woman of decidedly Marian and European appearance. She also has something about her of the mermaid and the European water-sprite, though she does not wholly share the Lorelei's malevolence. Her dance represents the sea's tumbling movements, and she rustles her skirts to imitate the waves. She is Brazil's goddess of the sea.

African-Brazilian religious music

In all African-Brazilian religious ceremonies, wherever they are located on this spectrum, music is of supreme importance. Its primary function is to summon the gods, and without it worship could not take place. Three conical drums known collectively as atabaques are used in candomblé ceremonies: the largest, about 1.1 to 1.4 metres high, is called rum (Fon hun, and pronounced 'hum' in north-east Brazil) or ilú (Yor. ìlù); the medium-sized one is called rumpi (Fon hunpevi); and the smallest is called lé. As was said in the Introduction, these drums are of the West African hollow-log type, though nowadays in Brazil they are usually made from barrel staves. The largest drum has a head of deer- or calf-skin about 35 to 40 cm in diameter; goatskin is used for the other two. For Nagô (Ketu) and Gêge rhythms the drumheads are secured with pegs inserted in the body of the drum near the top and are struck with sticks (oguidavis, from Yor. ò igi dá wiwo.), usually made of hardwood. For Kongo-Angola and caboclo rhythms, where the drums are struck with the hands, the drumheads are secured with cords fixed halfway down the drum to a skin-covered cord or hoop, held in place and tuned by wedges driven between it and the wood; thus secured, the drumheads are better able to withstand the heavy battering they receive.

The drums are treated with great reverence. They are 'baptised' soon after being made, with a godfather and godmother to sponsor them. They are 'dressed', or encircled with a long band of coloured cloth, adorned with beads and shells, called ojá (Yor. òjá, the sash that Yoruba women tie around the waist, both for ornament and to honour the gods; it may also be used to suspend a child against the mother's body and is thus 'a sign of nurturing, care, and life'; in Salvador it decorates altars as well as drums). To renew their power, the drums are 'fed', with chicken's blood, oil, honey and holy water, at an annual ceremony. The master drummer (alabê, from Yor. alá agbè) plays the largest drum; his part is relatively intricate, while the two smaller drums generally repeat a single steady rhythm. Though the drums are made by a cooper, the master drummer has to know how to repair them when necessary, and it is said that an alabê who cannot head a drum, or take it apart when it must be repaired, is unworthy of being a drummer.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Rhythms of Resistance"
by .
Copyright © 2000 Peter Fryer.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Table of Contents

Maps 
 List of illustrations
 Preface
 Introduction 
 1. The heritage of Nigeria and Benin: music for worship
 2. The Angola heritage: capoeira and berimbau 
 3. The 'Angola warble': street cries and worksongs
 4. Brazil's dramatic dances 
 5. Three vanished instruments 
 6. The African dance heritage
 7. Brazil's Atlantic dances 
 8. The emergence of Brazilian popular music 
 9. Maxixe and urban samba
 Appendix A: Continuity and change in the music of the Kongo-Angola culture area
 Appendix B: African musical instruments in Brazil
 Appendix C: The Brazilian musical heritage in Nigeria and Benin 
 Appendix D: The music and dance of Cape Verde
 Appendix E: Relaçaõ da fofa que veya agora da Bahia: extract 
 Discography 
 Notes
 Index

Editorial Reviews

"The greatest strength of Fryer's book is that it explains the African contribution to Brazilian popular music within a transatlantic framework involving multidirectional, triangular flows of cultural contact between Africa, Europe, and the Americas."—Luso Brazilian Review

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