Batuque: African Drumming and Dance between Repression and Concession, Bahia, 1808-18551

Abstract

In this essay I will discuss some of the meanings acquired by black revelry under slavery. Given the restrictions of the available sources, I discuss above all the attitudes and the views of masters, policemen, journalists and politicians towards the batuque. For this reason I have chosen those festive manifestations which are more African or seen as such by these individuals. I intend to point out particularly what changed and what did not during the first half of the nineteenth century in attitudes towards the batuque, which here generally means black percussion music usually accompanied by dance.Keywords: slave revelry, nineteenth-century Brazil, repression and tolerance.The four million Africans transported to Brazil as slaves brought with them not only the physical energy to produce wealth, but also brought the religious, aesthetic and moral values to create culture. It is commonplace to talk about the African contribution to different aspects of Brazilian culture, but little has been produced to document the tense and often conflictual history of the formation of Afro-Brazilian culture (Tinhorã o, 1988(Tinhorã o, , 1998. This is an essay about a small piece of that history, about African drumming and dance (or batuque). However, I do not intend to identify the African origins of instruments, rhythms and musical forms; rather, I take African revelry as a window onto power relations under slavery in Bahia.Blacks were involved in all kinds of celebrations in Brazil during slavery. At white men's private parties, they figured as servants and often as musicians. They also participated in public festivities, whether civic or religious, segregated or mixed. Beyond this, they produced their own celebrations, which were far from identical. Some had more, and others less, African density. Those produced by black Catholic brotherhoods, for instance, included processions and masses as well as African drumming, dancing and singing. But there were also those celebrations that tried to 1 This article was written with the help of a research grant from the Brazilian Research Council, CNPq.

Learning to be black : the Afrocentric "word" as anti-racism mobilization in Salvador, Brazil

“…This thesis is situated within the debates on Black identity that have been ongoing in Brazil and, more particularly, in Bahia for the last forty years. Furthermore, this research study is located in the discussions which argue that the performance of Africa in Brazil is a form of resistance (Dzidzienyo 1985;Reis 2005). Rather, by virtue of a history of slavery and racial determinism, which established that life be led on the "frontiers of the skin" in Brazil, and thus confers to the country a particular xenophobic "cultural baggage" (McCallum 2005:100), a performance of Africa is also an explicit challenge to the racist state apparatus in Brazil, and is a phenomenological contestation of the status quo.…”

“…Rather, by virtue of a history of slavery and racial determinism, which established that life be led on the "frontiers of the skin" in Brazil, and thus confers to the country a particular xenophobic "cultural baggage" (McCallum 2005:100), a performance of Africa is also an explicit challenge to the racist state apparatus in Brazil, and is a phenomenological contestation of the status quo. As a consequence, the somatic modes of attention employed in these performances of Blackness exist in permanent tension with the prevailing hegemonic narrative of a racism free state (McCallum 2005;Reis 2005;Crook 2006).…”

“…This can account for why "cultural" practices have been the key site for Afro-Brazilian mobilization (Hanchard 1994:21). The history of Capoeira, a Brazilian corporeal practice with African origins, also illustrates this resistance as its deft and powerful movements were often practiced under the guise of dance in order to disguise the potential challenge which this practice posed to the slave socio-economic system in Brazil (Reis 2005). Similarly Reis (2005) discusses the Batuque -African drumming and dance in Brazil -from 1808-1855 and argues that these events were "a window onto power relations under slavery in Bahia, but moreover as a means of 'liberation' through the assertion of an identity, which although confined corporally by slave chains, could never mentally be enslaved" (Reis 2005: 201 that were established to contest the myth of the racial democracy, and "for Afro-Brazilians who have developed racial consciousness, Africa and its Diaspora have been a crucial foundation for racial identification on a national, international and transnational scale, utilizing forms of protest and commonality exercised by "Black" peoples elsewhere in both the old and new world" (Hanchard 1993:24).…”