Dancing for the King of Congo from Early Modern Central Africa to Slavery-Era Brazil

Abstract

Breathtaking parades of black kings and their courts enlivened the streets of cities in Europe and the Americas between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Sumptuously dressed queens and kings and their resplendent attendants processed to the sound of music, lifted, temporarily, from the grim the life of enslavement or institutionalized inferiority many of them lived in the age of Atlantic slavery. Drawing from a recent analysis of a prominent ritual performance from the central African kingdom of Kongo called sangamento, this article offers a new interpretation of the black kings festivals, beyond their interpretation as carnivalesque pomp emulating and destabilizing European rule. On both shores of the Atlantic, the performances combined African and European regalia and pageantry to express and enact central African collective identity, political power, and social unity. Restaging performances and reshaping ideas honed in the Kongo, enslaved central Africans not only preserved the memory of their region of origins, but also crafted empowered responses to enslavement and the colonial system at large.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this article, as well as Claudia Brittenham and the members of the Newberry Seminar in Latin American history, who kindly commented on earlier versions. I am grateful to the Iconography section of Rio de Janeiro's National Library, the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University, and the Central Civic Library of Turin for allowing me access to their collections.

Notes

1. Significant studies in Portuguese and English not quoted elsewhere in this article include the earlier works of Mulvey 1976, Scarano 1976, Boschi 1986, Karasch 1987, Reis 1991 as well as more recent scholarship by Heywood 2002 and Borges 2005.

2. I use the word heritage here to stress that the complex worldview that I refer to with the epithet of ‘central African’ could be learned in Brazil too.

3. The ability to join the associations varied among men and women, free and enslaved, due to each group's ability to pay the membership dues. Women and the freed were more likely to have the time and money to join. Elective positions were also often reserved to the free by rule or de facto ability to pay the even steeper fees. See for example Soares 2000, ch 5.

4. IANTT, Chancelaria, Legitimações de D. Sebastião, Liv. 38, fi. 17v, 16 dez. 1563 cited in Azevedo (1903, 306).

5. Information on the images appears in the introduction to a facsimile, Julião, Cunha et al. (1960).

6. The forty-two images of Brazil have been published in the 1960 facsimile.

7. Carlos Julião. Four Ports Panorama. Eighteenth-century watercolor on paper, 0.828×0.504 cm. In Lisbon: Gabinete de Estudos Arqueológicos de Engenharia Militar/Direcção de Infra-Estruturas (Reg. 8757, cota 4757-3-38-52), published in color in Lara (2007). I was able to determine the composition of the posters as a collage of cut-out watercolors while examining them in person in the summer of 2011. I wish to thank the staff of the Gabinete for their assistance.

8. See the image of the king of Kongo in the frontispiece of António de Oliveira de Cadornega's 1680 manuscript Historia Geral das Guerras Angolanas, in Lisbon's Academia das Ciencias, MS Vermelho 77 or in the mid-seventeenth-century poster in the Museo Francescano dei Frati Cappuccini in Rome published in Fromont (2011a).

9. Lara (2001, 75) quotes a description of the festivities published the same year and under the same title as a better known text (1763) that I have not been able to consult in person, describing the dancers ‘com vestido nu fingindo a África.’

10. Tinhorão (2000) studied a range of festivals in colonial Brazil involving white and black participants.

11. My translation purposely remains close to Calmon's text in order to maintain the original emphasis.

12. Lopes (2003, 193) gives a definition of rebolo.

13. Souza (2002, 216–17) gives additional examples of the luxuries showcased in the festivals. The donations also served for the manumission of some confraternity members (Mulvey 1976, 105, 124).

14. An early mention of queen ‘Xinga’ alongside the king of Congo and of the word ‘congada’ appears for example in von Martius's observations in Minas Gerais in 1818 (Spix and von Martius 1823–1830, 2:468–69).

15. José Christiano de Freitas Henriques Junior, born in 1832 in the Açores, is best known for his work in Brazil between 1862 and 1866, and in Argentina from 1867 to his death in 1903 (Lago and Lago 2005, 131–41).

16. Another photograph, signed by Arsenio da Silva, a little-known photographer, captured the same scene (Lago and Lago 2005, 140).

17. A central African axe similar to that in Figure 3 is visible in Arsenio's image.