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Book Review
| Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770. By JAMES H. SWEET. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 336 pp. $55.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
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James Sweet examines ways in which Central African culture allowed slaves to fight dehumanization in Brazil. He argues that Central African (e.g., Mbundu, Ndembu, Imbangala, Kongo) religious beliefs and rituals survived in various forms during the African slave diaspora. More importantly, he argues that these beliefs and rituals provided the strongest forms of resistance against the hardships of enslavement. The argument challenges assertions that African slaves lost their cultural institutions once they were relocated to the Americas. He pieces together detailed stories using records kept by the Inquisition as well as records kept by Benedictine and Jesuit priests on Brazilian plantations. In the final analysis, the book examines slavery in Brazil from the viewpoint of the slaves wherever possible. |
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A key issue addressed throughout the book is that Westerners did and still do have problems interpreting the meaning and significance of African practices because of deeply ingrained, pervasive cultural biases. Sweet convincingly uses gender roles to describe how misunderstandings arose between slaves' and Westerners' traditional religious practices in everyday life. The author describes a third gender category in Central African religious space. Jinbandaas, as they were called, were categorized as homosexuals according to European standards. However, the category of "homosexual" ignores their important roles as traditional religious leaders and adds another stigma to their daily lives. Their religious powers were stifled, to say the least, once traded into slavery in Europe and the Americas. The Inquisition's understanding of these people as sodomites exacerbated violations of traditional kinship ties. Slaves worked to form new kinship ties and maintain old ones through whatever means they could find. Western cultural roles were not simply adopted by Central Africans under the pressures of slave life in Europe and the Americas. Their understandings were always mediated by ways of knowing and living that were familiar to them. |
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