[No Title Available]

Abstract

Among the coastal peoples of Upper Guinea, when someone falls ill or dies, the presence of a jambacous is required-a Creole word to designate diviners, healer, mediums and other social figures who participate in the world of the sacred-capable of curing the sick person or at least restoring the social equilibrium lost as a consequence of the evil action of sorcerers, causers of evil. Using potions, amulets, or grisgris, blowing, reciting sacred words, and carrying out other performances, the jambacous, many of them Mandinkas, assume an important role in the restoration of the social equilibrium of families, lineages, and communities. In the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was of great importance for these coastal communities to detect the evil sorcerers to remove them from society through the death penalty or the sale of the individual to the Transatlantic salve trade. In Pará in the 1760s, the Mandinka slave José was summoned to cure the Bijagó slave, Maria, who was seriously ill. José prepared a mixture of plants and administered them uttering some incomprehensible words, part of a complex ritual which included both his herbalist knowledge and contact with the invisible. We know nothing of José's personal history. However, the fact that the slave trade between Upper Guinea and the Amazon Region-as shown by the book From Africa to Brazil-transported a large number of sorcerers can shed some light on still unknown and unsuspected aspects of the rich Atlantic history which intertwined the coastal societies and the highlands of Upper Guinea and the colonial Amazon, most particularly Maranhão, in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. Summarized in a lean 254 pages, the book written by one of the greatest specialists in the history of Guinea, Walter Hawthorne, sheds some light on different aspects which conditioned the history of the formation of an Atlantic slave economy in the state of Grão-Pará and Maranhão.