Candomblé

Origins

Candomblé is an Afro-Brazilian religion of song, dance, prayer and healing, centred on Salvador in the state of Bahia. It grew out of the religious practices of enslaved Africans from several peoples, among them the Yoruba, Fon, BaKongo and Hausa. According to the historian Rachel E. Harding, it took shape in northeastern Brazil in the late 18th and 19th centuries. It became firmly established in the early 1800s as large numbers of captives arrived from the regions of the Oyo and Dahomey empires. The Engenho Velho community in Bahia, founded around 1830, is perhaps the oldest Candomblé house in Brazil.

Nations and deities

Candomblé houses (terreiros) belong to "nations" that reflect different African heritages. Duke University's Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic project describes three main ones:

• Ketu/Nagô, which honours the Yoruba-derived orixás. It is the most prestigious and most imitated nation, and it has much in common with Cuban Santería.
• Jeje, which honours the Fon-derived voduns.
• Congo/Angola, which honours Kongo-related inquices.

The orixás are understood to govern the forces of nature. They include Xangô (Shango), Iemanjá and Oxalá, the father of the orixás. In public ceremonies, drumming calls the deities, and initiates dancing counterclockwise may go into trance, understood as possession by an orixá. Animal sacrifice and offerings are central to the practice.

The question of origins

Scholars disagree about how Candomblé was formed. Older accounts, and reference works such as Britannica, describe it as closely based on Yoruba orixá worship. In The Formation of Candomblé (UNC Press, 2013), the historian Luis Nicolau Parés challenges that assumption. He argues that the vodun practices of the Jeje, Dahomean Africans who arrived in the early 18th century, played a critical role in shaping the religion.

Women's leadership

Most devotees are women. Many terreiros have long been led by a senior woman initiate, the mãe de santo (also called iyalorixá), who serves as spiritual mother of the house. Scholars have often described Candomblé communities as spaces where women held unusual authority in Brazilian society.

Persecution and recognition

Enslaved Africans were baptized by force and could not worship openly. Many linked their deities to Catholic saints, a practice scholars call syncretism; Oxalá, for example, is often identified with Jesus. The Catholic Church discouraged Candomblé, and in the 1920s and 1930s police in Salvador and Recife regularly raided terreiros, seized ritual objects and jailed worshippers. Attitudes began to shift in the 1930s, when scholars at two Afro-Brazilian congresses argued that Candomblé was part of Brazil's African heritage.

In 1984 Brazil's heritage agency, IPHAN, listed the Terreiro da Casa Branca in Salvador's Engenho Velho da Federação district as national heritage. It was the first Candomblé house to receive that recognition. Today Candomblé faces competition from Brazil's growing Pentecostal churches, which Duke's project says have brought "antagonism and displacement."