Africa Liberating in the Americas
Candomblé is a religion that gives reverence to, and communicates between, life and death, earth and cosmos, and the supreme universal power. It offers spiritual salvation from a world rampant in material-capitalist disillusion. The religion also provided a pathway to venerate the collective and individual identity and liberty of Africans and their descendants during colonial and post-colonial Brazil. Priestesses, priests and followers spoke many Yoruba words and phrases during religious ceremonies. Similar aspects of Candomblé and Tupi-Guarani religious beliefs facilitated a cohesive existence between Africans and indigenous peoples in Brazil. L. Nicolau reminds us that:
“Candomblé, despite its predominate African leadership and black participation base, was a source for an increasingly mixed-race clientele, including mulattos and even whites, belonging to all social and legal statuses (slaves, freed and freeborn). Candomblé does not seem to have developed merely as a ‘refuge’ for subjugated and enslaved blacks, or as a closed exclusivist ‘space of blackness,’ but it seems to have also used a socially inclusive strategy that is still operating today, accepting and taking in individuals of all colours and social backgrounds.” (NICOLAU, 2002: 154)
It can be said that Candomblé presents a new state of religious affairs and social interaction amongst oppressed groups that didn’t reflect the views of the dominant class. Vehemently opposed to its unifying power, the elite, latifundio class counterattacked. They denounced Candomblé as being black magic – a heinous cult to be feared, fought and abolished in order to preserve a form of Catholicism that showed little concern toward systemic, brutal oppression and injustice. Religious defiance of the oppressed despite legal prohibition of their belief highlights a fundamental praxis of liberation theology.
“O sujeito da práxis é o sujeito vivo, necessitado, e por isso cultural, em último termo a vítima, a comunidade das vítimas” [The subject of the praxis is someone who is conscious and in need, hence, a cultural representation; Ultimately, it is the victim – the community of victims.” – (translated from Ética da libertação na idade da globalização e da exclusão)] (DUSSEL, 2007: 530).
“They denounced Candomblé as being black magic – a heinous cult to be feared, fought and abolished.”
When subjugated groups take the initiative to free themselves by creating a reality that’s uniquely their own, in this case an African religious worldview, it can be assured that we’re referencing a praxis for liberation theology. The victims shed the oppressive, religious veil that had been complacent to their anxiety and suffering. In doing so they release a historical ethos based upon a deliberate act that represents some of the finest ideas in any civilized society – freedom, equality and justice. Whereas these concepts had been utilized to only benefit an elite minority and maintain despotic forces in Brazil and other slave regimes throughout the Western Hemisphere, the emergence of African-based, syncretic religions caused an abrupt split from the religious and social status quo championed by the dominant class. Candomblé, Santeria, and Voodoo fostered concepts of freedom, equality and justice that favored marginalized groups. Antonio Rufino Vieira reminds us that:
“(…) libertação ocorre quando os valores de liberdade, igualdade e fraternidade (a herança tricolor, como precisa Bloch), são despojadas da conotação abstrato-formal que a burguesia lhes dá, orientando, portanto, a uma real libertação, aquela em que o homem oprimido se realiza enquanto homem” [(…) liberation occurs when values such as liberty, equality and fraternity (the tricolor alliance suggested by Bloch) are removed from the formally abstract connotation bestowed upon them by the bourgeois class and orientated toward real liberation, the kind in which the oppressed man realizes his potential as a man (translated from Marxismo e filosofia latino-americana: uma aproximação dentre Ernest Bloch e Enrique Dussel)] (VIEIRA, 1975: 137).