Patricia de Santana Pinho is Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies at the State University of New York at Albany.

Mama Africa

REINVENTING BLACKNESS IN BAHIABy Patricia de Santana Pinho

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4654-8

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………..ixIntroduction…………………………………………..1CHAPTER ONE Bahia in the Black Atlantic…………………23CHAPTER TWO Afro Identity Made in Bahia………………….63CHAPTER THREE Africa on the Body………………………..101CHAPTER FOUR Africa in the Soul…………………………147CHAPTER FIVE Milking Mama Africa………………………..183Epilogue………………………………………………217NOTES…………………………………………………225REFERENCES…………………………………………….239INDEX…………………………………………………257

Chapter One

Bahia in the Black Atlantic

The sea: a shelter within reach. -“Jeito Faceiro,” by Jaupery and Pierre Onassis, Olodum

It is undeniable that a wide range of cultural elements brought to the Americas by enslaved Africans have endured throughout centuries of colonialism and oppression. A mere glimpse at many, if not most, Latin American cultures reveals the persistence of African features in the way people walk, dance, speak, pray, prepare their meals, and produce music. However, while we can easily identify this “Africanness” and sometimes even trace its origins back to specific African ethnicities, it is not possible to pin down the exact way in which Africanisms have been rearranged, reassembled, recycled, and ultimately reinvented in the New World. Rather than searching for the roots of what is considered black in Latin American cultures, I contend it is more important to understand the meanings of Africa and Africanness for contemporary black peoples in the diaspora.

The notion of Africa has been central in the construction of black identities in the Americas. The diaspora’s longing for Africa has generated several versions of what I call the myth of Mama Africa. This belief has been significant in the development of diasporic discourses and representations of blackness. The search for Africa in Bahia, and specifically in the city of Salvador, the locus of Brazil’s most celebrated black culture, currently led mainly by the blocos afro, has made Salvador even more “Africanized.” In turn, Bahia’s increasing aura of blackness has rendered it extremely attractive to those in search of its purported Africanness, as can be seen in the ever-growing number of African American roots tourists. In essence, the diaspora has also searched for Bahia, a search that has shaped Bahia’s position within the black Atlantic network that connects the imaginaries of blackness and Africanness.

The Myth of Mama Africa

Africa has functioned as a fundamental source of inspiration for black cultures in the diaspora. Colonization of the New World and its consequent scattering of enslaved Africans prompted attachments to a lost homeland that would later become known as Africa. The Africa I speak of here is not the vast contemporary continent that is home to dozens of different countries and hundreds of different ethnic groups. Even when its heterogeneity is recognized, black communities in the diaspora still predominantly envision Africa as a unified entity. Whether conceived of as tribal or as the birthplace of great civilizations, this imaginary Africa is linked to the past and to the ancestors, but is ultimately loyal to its present-day descendants, whether they inhabit the continent or not. What matters is that Africa resides in the fertile realm of Afro-descendants’ imaginary.

Grounded in history, memory, and imagination, Bahian cultural producers draw cultural elements from local and transnational sources to compose the myth of Mama Africa. Among the various local producers of discourse, ranging from Candombl temples and capoeira schools to intellectuals and politicians, the blocos afro are unquestionably major creators of the myth of Mama Africa in Bahia. This myth, as put forward by the blocos, is predominantly centered on the black body, for which it establishes an ideal combination of appearance, essence, and tendencies. As a magical entity that supposedly lives in every black person, Mama Africa feeds the body, nurtures the soul, and brings into being the inherent African character, advancing the idea that for a black appearance there is a corresponding black essence.

Representations of Africa have held great importance for the deterritorialized and reterritorialized black groups of the American continent. Initially, however, the nostalgia and depression felt by the enslaved did not express a longing for Africa itself, since this notion did not yet exist among those who only later would identify themselves as “Afro-descendants.” The recurrent longing for home, which in Brazil was often called banzo, reflected instead the desire to return to one’s village, community, the place of origin from whence one had been forcefully taken, but which for the enslaved was not yet called Africa. The notion that Africans and their descendants in the diaspora shared a common “African” identity started in the mid-nineteenth century but only began to take clear shape later in that century, mainly through the writings of pan-Africanist intellectuals (Howe 1998; Gilroy 1993a). At that time, Africa was imagined almost exclusively within the limits of Pharaonic Egypt. The grandeur, wealth, and scientific discoveries attributed to Egyptian civilization is a common theme to this day, inspiring several strands of Afrocentric discourse, including those of the blocos afro.

Arising initially among Caribbean scholars and soon blossoming in several parts of the Americas, pan-Africanism called for the unification of the African continent and its concrete and progressive alliance with a united diaspora. Since then, Africa has existed as an “imagined community” (Anderson 1991) for dispersed blacks. We could also call it-and perhaps more appropriately-an “imaginary community,” since, unlike a nation-state, and except for very specific cases such as the creation of Liberia and the migration of Afro-Brazilians to the Bight of Benin, Africa did not become a place of return for the majority of the black diaspora. Nonetheless, Africa continued to be imagined from afar as a homeland and as a central ingredient feeding the imagination and cultural production of diasporic Afro-descendents.

In the 1910s and 1920s, the ideas proposed by the Jamaican leader Marcus Garvey influenced blacks in Jamaica, the United States, and Africa, giving birth to a transnational alliance and creating a black movement of global proportions. Garvey had a worldwide impact by defining a universal connection among dispersed blacks. He contended that black people, regardless of where they live, are all children of Mama Africa and are thus siblings who share the same African affiliation. Among his objectives, Garvey wanted Africa to become a black nation with international power, a place to which blacks could return (Barret 1988). As dispersed Afro-descendants strove to both restore and regain Mama Africa, they would simultaneously strengthen their own position in the world: “Sons and daughters of Africa, scattered though you may be, I implore of you to prepare. Prepare in all ways to strengthen the hands of Mama Africa. Our mother has been bleeding for centuries from the injuries inflicted upon her by a merciless foe. The call is for a physician to heal the wounds, and there can be no other physician than the dark hued son of the mother, and there can be no other nurse as tender and kind as the daughter of this afflicted mother” (Garvey 1919, cited in Hill 1983, 159-61).

The 1930s was also marked by a transnational movement that not only nurtured black peoples’ affiliation to Africa but also established an “African character” purportedly shared by all Afro-descendants. This movement became known as ngritude, and had followers in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Among its many assertions, ngritude reclaimed the values of the African civilization and the recovery of an African memory in order to bring pride to black peoples in the African continent and in the diaspora. Ngritude emerged first in the field of literature as a reaction to the dominance of European canons and as an attempt to return to what were deemed the “primordial tenets” of the “black race,” which were imagined as “African” (E. Nascimento 1981). Ngritude‘s values spread from literature to other cultural realms, adapting to local specificities and influencing black discourses to this day. The belief in an African character, for instance, is very much alive in the myth of Mama Africa circulated by Bahia’s black organizations.

In the 1960s, the bond between black diaspora cultures and Mama Africa was further strengthened. Soul music produced in the United States became the soundtrack for the civil rights movement, while Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X raised the racial consciousness of black people around the world. Among the many black organizations responding to that call was the Afro-Bahian group Il Aiy. As stated by one of the group’s directors, “Il Aiy was founded and heavily based on black Americans-Black Power, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Mandela, and many other Africans who fought for the freedom of their country. So we make it a point to remember these people, because they are a force, a way of showing that blacks have fought around the world to free their people.” In a similar vein, the publication of Alex Haley’s bestseller Roots in 1976 was a great driving force behind the movement for diasporic blacks’ search for Africa. Before this, although more restricted to intellectual circles, Richard Wright’s Black Power (1954) had already inspired black Americans in the 1950s to look again, and in a new manner, at Africa. Symbols harking back to Africa popped up all around the United States. African maps were printed on clothing and accessories, and African-inspired hairstyles became increasingly fashionable. Aesthetics, as well as music, became an important means of circulation of new and proud forms of black identity in the African diaspora.

Forgotten connections were once again established in a new and creative manner, producing identities based on the myth of a unifying Africanness that would coalesce dispersed blacks. In this transnational imaginary, Africa was conceived as a sign of coherence in the face of experiences of dispersion and fragmentation. As Stuart Hall explains, the triangle of the African diaspora is centered on Africa as the mother of many different civilizations: “Africa is the name of the missing term, the great aporia, which lies at the centre of our cultural identity and gives it a meaning which, until recently, it lacked” (1993, 394). Diaspora language is created by people who feel, live, and invent a connection with a primordial home. This sense of connection changes through processes of forgetting, assimilation, and oppression. For William Safran (1991, cited in Clifford 1994), diasporas are “expatriate minority communities” dispersed from an original center to at least two peripheries: they preserve a memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland; they believe they are not totally accepted in the country to which they were taken; they see their ancestral homeland as a possible place of return; they believe they are committed to maintaining and recovering their original land; and they believe that their consciousness and solidarity are chiefly defined through the continued relationship with their original mother country.

Diaspora is derived from a Greek word that means dispersion. For a long time it was used mainly to describe the dispersion of Jews or to refer to Jewish groups relocated beyond their original homeland. At the end of the nineteenth century, the expression began to be employed to refer to the Africans spread around the world as a result of slavery. Edward Wilmot Blyden, a Caribbean scholar considered to be one of the pioneers of pan-African thought, has been credited as the first to refer to an African diaspora. In 1880, Blyden asserted that there were many similarities between the dispersion of Jews and Africans, even though Jews had moved around as a free and economically independent people, while Africans were taken as “things,” comprising the largest model of a forced diaspora. The expression African diaspora or black diaspora only became widespread, however, in the mid-1960s, initially in the United States and the Caribbean, and then throughout the entire diaspora after it was amply endorsed by black scholars and black political movements (Salzman et al. 1996, 762).

Achille Mbembe states that African and Afro-descendant thinkers adopted elements of the Jewish model of reflection and construction of their own history, such as the notions of suffering, contingency, and finitude, and have used these as building blocks for the creation of images about African history and identity promoted in the greater public eye (2000). Through constant repetition, a set of dogmas and dreams were imposed on the modern discourse produced about Africa by insiders, generating two main currents of thought: an instrumentalist one, which by affirming itself as radical and progressive attempts to manipulate and determine the supposedly authentic African discourse; and a reductionist current, which emphasizes difference and the native condition to promote the idea of a single African identity founded on the concept of belonging to the same “black race.” For Mbembe, both currents are based on myths and perpetuate fantastical notions about Africa.

While carrying their own contradictions and underlying risks, myths can be significantly productive for groups who have been historically oppressed and socially excluded. This is even more important for communities that define themselves as being part of a diaspora. Diasporic groups cultivate myths about their original homeland, and for this reason they are committed to its symbolic restoration, feeding the imaginary constructed around the motherland. The concept of diaspora thus presupposes long distances, a separation similar to exile, and the taboo of return, connecting multiple communities of a population that is geographically dispersed. James Clifford (1994) points to the curious fact that many minority groups that did not previously identify themselves as diasporic are now claiming diaspora origins and affiliations. The transnational connections produced by diasporic discourses create, especially for underprivileged groups, a sensation of the expansion of the boundaries of the nation in which they are minorities. Membership in a diaspora strengthens concepts such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness,” developed in The Souls of Black Folk (1990 [1903]), because its discourse reflects the feeling of belonging to a transnational network that includes the motherland not as something left behind, but as a place through which one can connect with modernity. This concept expresses the hybrid culture of black Americans and the permanent tension of being simultaneously black and American. By signaling the multiple and diverse natures of black people, Du Bois demonstrates the interconnections between Africa, the Americas, and Europe that gave rise to the modern black person.

In the 1950s, Frantz Fanon (1991 [1952]) studied the nature of this in-depth quest for Africa by blacks in the diaspora and connected this passionate search to the need to overcome self-hatred and condemnation. He viewed the rediscovery of Africa as part of a rehabilitation process for blacks in the diaspora. According to Stuart Hall, this rediscovery is the production of Africa itself and of the many identities that reinvent it, “not an identity grounded in the archeology, but in the re-telling of the past” (Hall 1993, 393). In this invention of the past, traditions have played a central role, but have been understood mainly as “one-way transmission belts” (Hall 1995, 207) which can safely and solidly connect us to our origin. Recovering traditions has thus been predominantly understood as a goal, when it should be seen as a never-ending creative practice.

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