Metz Maracatu

JERRY D. METZ

Cultural Geographies of Afro-Brazilian Symbolic Practice:Tradition and Change in Maracatu de Nação

(Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil)

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Maracatu de Nação, A Tradition Reinvigorated

The main carnival of Pernambuco, Brazil, which takes place in the largecoastal city of Recife and the nearby town of Olinda, has received little at-tention from non-Brazilian scholars—either as an annual event or as alocus of cultural activity year-round.1 One of Pernambucan carnival’s mostimpressive features is the maracatu de nação groups, which are processionsof predominately Afro-Brazilian percussionists and dancers dressed in re-splendent colonial-era Portuguese attire. The focal point of each processionis its “king” and “queen,” a man and woman—usually the spiritual lead-ers and directors of the group, regally dressed and crowned—who, accord-ing to oral tradition, represent the king of Kongo and his queen paradingwith their court. This practice, unique in its musical detail to the urbanarea of Recife-Olinda, is related to a host of other widespread Afro-Brazil-ian traditional festivals evoking the king of Kongo. These were all held inconjunction with ostensibly Catholic celebrations of Nossa Senhora doRosário, São Benedito, or Rei Baltazar (the “dark king” who, with two otherwise men, visited the newborn Jesus).2 Prevalent in nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Recife, maracatu de nação went into decline after around1960. In 1967, only three groups remained. A 1969 newspaper states, “theauthentic maracatus of pure African origin are disappearing with thedeaths of their monarchs” ( Jornal do Commercio [Recife] 1969). By 1988,one prominent observer of Pernambucan popular culture declared that thetradition appeared to be headed for extinction; another countered that, withnine groups then dedicated to performing maracatu de nação (many ofthem initiated recently by dissident members of older groups), there hadbeen a “miraculous” rejuvenation of the form.3

When I visited Olinda and Recife for carnival in 2004–5, I found a cul-tural practice showing clear signs of revitalization. Dozens of groups werepresent; Santos and Resende (2005, 29) suggests that while thirty-onemaracatus de nação are currently registered with Pernambuco’s CarnivalFederation, some sixty-five groups are active. There were many young peo-ple in their ranks, and the various races of participants in many new groupswere striking. Almost all the groups were arrayed in the characteristic

Latin American Music Review, Volume 29, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2008 © 2008 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

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choreographic formations César Guerra-Peixe observed in 1949–1952, anddescribed in his valuable Maracatus do Recife (1980). There are several so-cial forces behind the resurgence of maracatu de nação:

• The work of middle-class, lighter-skinned activists to “rescue” thetradition by adapting its sonic and visual aspects into stylized,nonracialized forms (the first and most influential of such groups is Maracatu Nação Pernambuco, founded by Bernardino José in1989);

• The globalized reimagining of maracatu de nação in the manguemovement (spearheaded in the early 1990s by Chico Science, nowdeceased, and the band Nação Zumbi);

• A state concern to articulate and project a unique identity, sinceexceptional cultural forms attract national status and tourismrevenue; and

• A heightened Afro-Brazilian consciousness, inspired by theinternationally renowned afoxés and blocos afro that transformedBahian carnival in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

Attitudes in Recife vis-à-vis Bahian influence are divergent. Culture offi-cials have watched in alarm (but tourism boosters in envy) as Salvador’sre-Africanized carnival, with its miscegenated soundtrack axé music, haselicited unprecedented controversy, prestige, and international interest. Ifthe “invasion” of Rio de Janeiro–style samba schools in Recife’s carnivalwas the bane of Pernambucan purists a generation ago,4 the specter of aBahian stranglehold on local creativity produced indignant debates and ledsome to call for a prohibition on Bahian trio elétricos in the 1980s and 1990s(Diário de Pernambuco [Recife] 1989; Jornal do Commercio [Recife] 1993). Forsegments of Recife’s black population, however, the impact of Bahia’s elec-trified frevos on local carnival bands was irrelevant. They hailed the racial-ized political discourse and neo-African aesthetic of Bahian afoxés and blocoafros. Internalizing the imperative to rethink history, they drew inspirationfrom the idea that the quilombo Palmares, and its leader Zumbi, reigned inthe captaincy of Pernambuco.

According to the Jornal do Commercio, between 1982 and 1991, at leasttwelve different afoxés were founded in Recife and Olinda, and all twelveparticipated in 1991’s carnival. Roberto Santos, founder of the Pernmabu-can afoxé Afro Axé, declared that the goals of the movement were to “dis-seminate African culture and dance more and more, while continuing topoint out the farce of the Golden Law of 1888.”5 The journalist explains thatafoxés do this “using atabaques, agogôs, and other instruments that charac-terize the expression of African culture” ( Jornal do Commercio [Recife]1993).

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The statement that atabaques and agogôs—the drums and double ironbells associated with Brazilian candomblé, and also featured in the paradesof afoxés such as Filhos de Gandhi—are expressing “African culture” inRecife’s carnival is suggestive. During recent carnivals, I noticed an occa-sional departure from what oral tradition maintains is the distinctive sym-bolic repertoire of the maracatu de nação. Specifically, the large single ironbell, called gonguê, was replaced here and there by the smaller, doubleagogô. And some groups had augmented their percussive battery with ad-ditional instruments: the timbau, a conical, djembe-like hand drum, andthe abê, or large gourd rattle, common in afoxé. But the calunga, a small,ornately dressed wooden doll that serves as a sort of fetish, protector, andportable xangô alter for traditional groups, was sometimes missing fromthe newer groups; occasionally it was replaced by a female, black plasticchild’s doll wearing a homemade African-style outfit. Both of the tradi-tional objects that I saw being replaced—the gonguê and the calunga—hintat links to a Central African cultural base in maracatu de nação that has notbeen adequately explored by scholars.

For many years, the “African contribution” to carnival in Recife was seento be the function of the maracatus de nação. In 1908, Pereira da Costapraised its “typical African features and customs” (1908). Decades later,Afro-Pernambucan journalist Paulo Viana declared that “The negro rhythmbrought from Africa with the slaves is present in Recife’s carnival, repre-sented by the maracatus” (1974). But the social context surrounding mara-catu has changed; the symbolic field that gives orientation and depth tostate, national, and racial identity is not the same in twenty-first-centuryBrazil as it was in nineteenth- or twentieth-century Brazil. Maracatu denação is transforming in several ways at once in a push and pull betweendiffering symbols of African-ness or Afro-Brazilian-ness within the popu-lation of black Pernambucanos that still constitute its highest base of par-ticipation. Differing notions of tradition, resistance, and “authenticity,”particularly in their modern political and global connotations, are verymuch at play.

This essay offers brief examination of two objects in maracatu de nação,the gonguê and calunga (largely ignored by the literature on both Brazil andAfrica), that seem able to offer a renewed sense of African-ness to modernparticipants. This is followed by a discussion of competing symbols andvalues arriving in the politicized Bahian model of a “re-Africanized” iden-tity, and how the traditional maracatu de nação groups are positioned withrespect to Afro-Brazilian versus Pernambucan identity. I follow Zairianethnomusicologist Kazadi wa Mukuna’s emphasis on “Conceptual andContextual Analysis” to understand so-called “Africanisms” in Latin Amer-ica (1999).12 Although it is important to try to identify the African originof cultural manifestations in the New World, an equal priority is placed in

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understanding how those African elements are transformed in their newlocal cultural contexts. In other words, the nature of change, recombina-tion, and reconfiguring of contemporary meaning in African-diasporic tra-ditional culture becomes a subject of inquiry in itself.

Origins: From the King of Kongo to the Maracatu de Nação

Maracatu de nação is doubly syncretic. It embodies African and Portugueseinfluences, but within the African heritage, aspects of both Central andWest African traits can be discerned. Nearly all the groups with a substan-tial history in Recife are affiliated with the West African–derived xangô re-ligion, although some (such as Maracatu Nação Cambinda Estrela) professties with jurema, sometimes called catimbó, a hybrid of xangô with indige-nous beliefs. The maintenance of ethnic “nations” as organizing units inmaracatu perhaps speaks to the significance accorded to the king of Kongoritual among local blacks during the colonial period. The practice may havebeen inspired by the visit of the king of Kongo’s ambassador to Dutch Recife in 1642; it was already occurring in Portugal among Central Africanblacks (Kiddy 2002, 159; Dantas Silva 1991a, xxxii). The first record of acoronation in Brazil of black ethnic “royalty”—in this case, a king andqueen of Angola, not Kongo—comes from Recife, at the Church of OurLady of the Rosary of Blacks, in 1666 (by which time the Portuguese hadretaken the area). Historian Elizabeth W. Kiddy argues that, because of theearly predominance of Central African slaves in Pernambuco, and the leg-endary reputation of the king of Kongo among both slaves and Europeans,kings from all the various African ethnic groups came to be called “kingsof Congo … the King of Congo became the term of the leader of African de-scent who represented and received the loyalty of blacks of many nationsand people of mixed descent” (Kiddy 2002, 172, 181, 182).

A controversial aspect of the maracatu is this historical relationship withwhite power structures. The election of black “kings” was carried out underthe supervision of state and religious officials, in the context of Christiancelebrations; the kings, mediators between white and black society, werecharged with keeping order among their “subjects” and could even becalled upon by white authorities to punish them. Against the interpretationthat this was a ritualized exercise in the conciliation, division, and controlof black populations, some scholars counter that the Kongo kings repre-sented powerful, mythic hero figures, “affirming an African identity to thecommunity that elected them and opening new spaces for black agency ina society based on slavery” (Souza 2002, 331). Still, the Kongo king ritualwas linked inextricably with slavery, and in Recife, it was perhaps part ofthe institution itself. Leonardo Dantas Silva concludes that, “with abolition,on the 13th of May, 1888, the coronation of Kongo Kings lost its sanction


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and reason for being, because there was no longer the necessity for thattype of ‘authority’ to maintain order and subordination among the blacksubjects” (1988, 1991b). Memories of the ritual were kept alive, particularlyin the Xangô terreiros and the Catholic brotherhoods. Something like thecontemporary procession of maracatu de nação had perhaps been enactedfor the old Kongo kings. Henceforth, the dance-music-theater of maracatude nação, lacking the political and symbolic depth it once had, would beperformed for Catholic festivals for the Santos Reis and Nossa Senhora doRosário, and during carnival and other secular celebrations.

Jan Vansina, anthropologist and historian of Central Africa, suggests thecontinued importance of the idea of a Kongo kingdom in Central Africa afterthe Kongo state itself collapsed in 1665: “The façade of the kingdom waseventually restored … Kings were sacralized rather more than in earlierdays; in the 18th century this turned them into mere figureheads, almostfigments of the collective imagination. Besides the ideal of kingship, someof its emblems and rituals survived” (Vansina 1990, 221). In contemporaryPernambuco, there was very likely a search among diverse Central Africanpeoples for new cultural common denominators, and objects with strongsymbolic significance might have been valued and locally reconfigured.

Kongo Concept: The Gonguê

The gonguê is a single, clapperless iron bell, one to three feet long, consid-ered fundamental to the performance of traditional maracatu music. In thehistorical record of Brazil, reference to the bell seems to appear only inPernambuco. Larry Crook, an ethnomusicologist specializing in Afro-Brazilian music, opined that the term gonguê “is possibly related to the Eweterm gakogui (iron bell)” (2002, 244), which would imply a derivation fromWest Africa, specifically in the region of Ghana. Crook offers no evidencefor this idea. A more promising observation came from Guerra-Peixe,some fifty years previous, who identified the term gonguê as a “corruptionof the Bantu ngonge for iron gong” (1980, 58).

Granted, Bantu is a complex family of languages which contains manydifferent words referring to bells: kengede, mulangu, kengelengele, njinjo,bembo, nyengede. But there is a vein of words based on the root –gong, re-ferring to bells, including gonga (“time,” “bell”) and gunga (“bell”). Ngongiis described as an iron bell or gong “producing two different sounds, usedin the past by headmen to assemble people for public works or war” (Com-parative Bantu Online Dictionary 2006). Portuguese anthropologist JoséRedinha, in a study of Angolan musical instruments (1988),6 noted that thelarge (often, but not always, double) bell was widespread in the northernhalf or two-thirds of the region, encompassing the majority of people inAngola, and called by a variety of names: gongo, ngongue, ngongu, xigongo,


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chingongo, longa. It was associated with aristocracy, kingship, and politicalfunctions, notably with the Jaga people. Traditions related to the Cabindaarea suggest that the bells were once made of copper. Redinha uneartheddocuments showing that such bells were played by native royal functionar-ies to mark the arrival of the Portuguese explorer Paulo Dias Novais at theisland of Luanda in 1575.

Combining linguistics and archeology, Jan Vansina produced a sugges-tive study of the histories, uses, and distribution of Central African bells(1969). Evidence exists that they were used for bridewealth and as “money”across the Ubangi River, possibly linking them with the river trade in gen-eral. However, Vansina described how large single or double iron bells wereemblems of authority and power across the Kongo kingdom (1990, 158–65).He writes that the single bells were sometimes used as purely “musical”instruments, for diversion and entertainment. But in times of war, theywere used “in the old Kingdom of Kongo to signal from one army unit toanother, and to lead the soldiers in battle.” Among some peoples, singlebells were deemed public property; among others, such as the Mbuun, suchbells were regarded as emblems of high state honor and could be ownedonly by soldiers who had shown extraordinary bravery (Vansina 1969, 190).In general, double bells were property of the chief and played only at eventsin which he took part. Wherever he went, runners with bells went ahead toannounce his arrival, playing his praise name. In societies where doublebells were absent, “the single bell was an insignium of political leadership,whether of chieftainship or of the leadership provided by the eldest of a


FIGURE 1. Clockwise from left: gonguê from Recife, Brazil; single bell and double bells from the Democratic Republic of Congo; double bell from Uganda.

PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR.

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lineage or of the village associations … In some cases, where importantchiefs had double bells, minor headmen or chiefs had single ones.”Among the Kuba, the single bell, rather than the double, was the preferredemblem of kingship. The association of large single or double bells withroyalty in Central Africa followed kings to their graves: the playing of suchbells in the funeral rituals of kings was common historically across the re-gion (Vansina 1969, 190).7

Unlike the double bells of Sudanese West Africa (including the Ewegakogui), which place the smaller bell above the larger bell, Central Africaninstruments characteristically place the two bells side by side; they areoften larger and heavier than West African bells. The pitch interval be-tween their two notes is generally smaller than that of West African bells.A double bell from West Africa, called akokô (“iron” or “time”) in Yoruba,agogô in Brazil, is central to many Afro-Brazilian musical-cultural prac-tices, most famously the samba as well as capoeira and the secularized pub-lic performance of candomblé music called afoxé. Guerra-Peixe (1980, 58)noted that in the public performance of xangô in Recife, a single bell sim-ilar to the gonguê was played; but it was always, without exception, called anagogô. (Today, the small single bell often used in both xangô and Bahiancandomblé tends to be called adjá.) He also observed that the gonguê was al-ways played with a wooden stick, whereas the agogô in candomblé or xangôwas struck with a metal rod: the sound of iron on iron is supposed to bepleasing to certain orixás.

In sum, if the “charter myth” of Kongo identity by the early eighteenthcentury drew from imagined connections with the fallen Kongo kingdom,it is plausible that one of the pervasive symbols of Kongo kingship—theiron bell—would continue to be associated with ritualized activity involv-ing political power and authority. Similarly, given the fairly widespreadmetalworking knowledge throughout the Kongo region, one could imaginethat people of Kongo origin might have carried to Brazil both the techno-logical knowledge of how to produce these bells, and a cultural meaningfor those bells related to the rituals of kingship. Certainly, more researchremains to be done into the gonguê, its possible Central African anteced-ents, and its history and meanings in Pernambucan maracatu perform-ance. It is unlikely that a specific “ethnic” or “tribal” origin of the gonguêcould be discovered, even through aligning slave-trade demographics withthe sort of work Vansina advanced. And even limiting the search for rootsin historical Central Africa to societies who associated single bells of thegonguê type, instead of double bells, with kings (an indefensible limitation,since this form in Pernambuco could have resulted from a negotiation ofcultural values, influenced by the greater costs of a double bell), Vansina’sresearch shows the distribution of single bells as a broad swath alongsouthern coastal Gabon deep into the Kongo. Still, the maintenance in


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Pernambucan maracatu de nação of this Bantu-derived word and its royalKongo associations is unique in Afro-Brazilian culture.

Kongo Concept: The Calunga

Guerra-Peixe summarized the principal themes of maracatu songs, calledtoadas, that he heard in Recife in the early 1950s: The most common waseach group’s referencing of its own name and importance. Other promi-nent references were to Luanda, kings, the imperial or royal court, xangô,the gonguê, the seashore, and the calunga. The calunga is a doll, typicallycarved of dark wood or painted black, considered by traditional maracatuparticipants to be essential to satisfactory performance and to maintainingthe identity of the particular nação. Indeed, the calunga is believed to be asacred protector of maracatu, holding the memories of all the ancestors ofa given maracatu nation. An informant in Nação Elefante told Guerra-Peixethat the calungas are from a remote epoch, dating back to the foundation ofthe group, in this case 1800 (Guerra-Peixe 1980, 37–39). Its particular pow-ers or ritualistic functions in the xangô terreiros are tenaciously guarded.The director of each maracatu nação, who should ideally be one of a famil-ial lineage of directors, is personally responsible for looking after the calun-gas during the year.

Each calunga is given a name, and several exemplars can exist at onetime of a certain name. Thus, Katarina Real observed among three mara-catus three different dolls called Dona Joventina: one made in 1835, cur-rently in the historical museum of Igarassu; one made in 1905, currentlyin Recife’s Museu do Homem do Nordeste; and the third presently in useby the Maracatu Nação Estrela Brilhante ( Jornal do Commercio [Recife]


FIGURE 2. Above: a small akokô bell from Nigeria, West Africa. Below, left and right: agogô bells from Brazil. PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR.

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2000). Other names of traditional female calungas are Dona Leopoldina,Dona Clara, Dona Emília, Dona Bela, and Dona Isabel. The doll is almostalways female, although at least two male calungas, named Dom Luís andDom Henrique, have been observed. The male dolls are said to be namedfor kings of Kongo; Dona Isabel refers to Princess Isabel, who signed theGolden Law of abolition in 1888. When a new maracatu de nação wasformed in 1967, partly through the guidance and patronage of anthropolo-gist Real, the group’s leader named one calunga Dona Júlia—this was thegiven first name of of Dona Santa, the matriarch of Nação Elefante and amajor figure in Pernambucan xangô. The second calunga was called DonaInês de Castro. Real “admired the intelligence and imagination” of Eudesfor choosing the name of a medieval Portuguese queen, but never askedhim why he chose it (2001, 45, 105).

Mário de Andrade studied the calunga in the early 1930s and presentedremarks on its various meanings for the first Congresso Afro-Brasileiro in1934 (Andrade 1967, 301–8). He suggested that, in Bantu-speaking CentralAfrica, the word was used as a greeting or nickname for people of highstatus (senhor, chefe, grande) or as a synonym for “ocean.” He cites the idea(of an unknown Englishman) that calunga came to refer to God in Angola:“Not their god, Zambi, well known and familiarly represented in sculp-ture, but the unknowable god of the missionaries that was impossible tocomprehend—whose latitude cannot be measured” (Andrade 1967, 302).Through the writings of a Portuguese soldier stationed in Luanda, Andradewas aware that leaders of small villages in the interior of that region used“crowns of vine” and a staff “with a doll at the end” to symbolize theirpower (Andrade 1967, 303). But, he maintained that the application ofthe word calunga to a doll, as in the world of maracatu, was a Brazilianinnovation—even perhaps a simple mispronunciation. For him, it was de-rived from calumba, which had various meanings in colloquial nineteenth-century Portuguese: little girl, and a doll; as well as sugar cane syrup (andthe trough it is kept in), a flowering shrub (Schneider 1991). That is,African people and their descendants in Brazil came to call the calumbadoll by a similar name that was more familiar to them, calunga. He doesrecord that the dolls were believed by some Afro-Brazilians to have magi-cal powers to move and communicate; he found evidence that the dollswere occasionally part of the ritual objects of xangô leaders.

The dolls were also sometimes called catita, or catitinha, in the maracatunations Andrade explored. Kalunga, the Bantu word, refers to the sea or alarge body of water that is the threshold dividing the living and the dead,this world and the spirit world. Andrade suggests this meaning with thisexcerpt from an old song: “Êh, cadê Dona Catitinha/Que no mundo nãoaparece?/Ela está debaixo d’água/Que não assobe nem desce.” Similarly, Edison Carneiro (1981) collected candomblé songs from Angola-Kongo


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rituals that mention the calunga. One states, “O calunga é um poço muitofundo.” Another piece includes the lines “Ora vamos ver/Duas conchinhas/Do Calunguinha/Na beira do rio/Uma subia/E a outra descia.”

Carneiro describes the syncretic relation between Bantu and Yoruba be-liefs regarding water as “Iemanjá [Yoruba orixá of the waters] lives in thedepths of the Calunga” (1981, 158). How should this statement be read?Carneiro would appear to grant a prior, foundational existence to calunga,and by extension the whole Kongo-derived belief system, over the WestAfrican candomblé, in Afro-Brazilian religious practice; or he just mightbe nodding to the earlier arrival of Bantu-speaking slaves in Brazil.Schneider’s dictionary of African words in Brazilian Portuguese lists four-teen definitions for calunga, including a Bantu divinity; the fetish doll ofthis divinity; anything of a very small size, possibly including dolls, chil-dren, or adults; a kind of fish. Calunga-grande is defined as the sea, calunga-pequeno as death, a cemetery, or the little realm of the dead.

The calunga in these maracatu texts does imply a connection with thespirit world. More precisely, here it carries a double connection, one spiri-tual and one geographic. The calunga or “sea,” metaphoric in one case (theBantu concept) and literal in the other (the Atlantic Ocean), is what medi-ates between the Kongo descendants in Brazil and their African ancestors.Guerra-Peixe collected these lines from Nação Elefante (“Dona Diamante”was one of their calungas):

“Princesa Dona Diamante/Pra onde vai?/Vou passear/Eu vou para Luanda/Eu vou, eu vou.” The names of individual calungas are often evoked inmaracatu songs as a sort of geographic and cultural reconciliation. An old song from Elefante says: “A bandeira é brasileira/Nosso rei veio deLuanda/Oi, viva Dona Emília/Princesa Pernambucana.”

A possible link between the maracatu/xangô calunga and public per-formance of candomblé religious practice is made in Raul Giovanni’s Lody’s1979 study of the Bahian afoxés. He records that it was common to see ayoung initiate from each organization in Salvador carrying a babalotim, orsmall wooden doll, painted black, wearing satin clothes. The dolls were hol-low, and charms or objects sacred to each particular candomblé house wereplaced inside. Animal sacrifices were occasionally made to the babalotim,which constituted a sort of mobile altar specific to each group and theorixás with which they were connected; the doll was believed to repel eviland emanate good. For the afoxés, a young boy was charged with carryingthe babalotim, while the maracatus de nação traditionally choose a womanto carry the calunga.

This raises a question about historical similarities between maracatuand the afoxés. In the early 1960s, Katarina Real’s centenarian informant


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told her that the original name of maracatu was nação, or, he elaborated,“Afoxé da África.” Each practice, maracatu de nação and afoxé, has a foun-dation in West African–derived religion; in public, each performs a sort ofprofane representation of their religious beliefs and activities, mixed withother Afro-Brazilian elements. The similarity may be a consequence of thegeneral need to mask African beliefs in more acceptable outward appear-ances in Brazilian history. More specifically, it could also be related to theperiod of repression suffered by Afro-Brazilian culture in general in thedecades following abolition. Many cultural practices (including capoeira)went underground, their followers often taking refuge in the terreiros ofcandomblé or xangô that could be relocated far from the city’s persecutions.A rich mixing of identities, ideas, and strategies would have occurred inthese terreiros. If maracatu and Bahian afoxés once enjoyed a sort of easy, fa-milial relationship, that has become an irony for Pernambuco that will beexplored in the next section.

For now, it is enough to note that the history and meanings of thecalunga in maracatu de nação are far from well understood. Ethnomusicol-ogist Philip Galinsky, in his insightful book on Recife’s modern musicscene, refers to the maracatu calunga as a “voodoo doll” (Galinsky 2002,108). Casual English translations do not give the calunga its due. Certainlyits Central African links need to be explored, both as a word and spiritualconcept, and also as a material form (based perhaps on dolls as insignia ofpower, or on the small portable altars common to villages after the collapseof the Kongo kingdom).8 Today in Recife, artists known for their worksculpting and restoring sacred religious art are commissioned to carve newcalungas for maracatu; how were the dolls made in the past? Capoeira, thedance-fight game with an oral tradition linking it to Angola, has been ana-lyzed as a ritualized “crossing of the kalunga” rooted completely in Kongohistory, culture, and cosmology (Obi 2002). The calunga needs to be re-considered in the context of maracatus. The babalotim has all but disap-peared from Salvador’s afoxés; the calunga appears to exist nowhere outsidePernambuco, where it retains great importance to the few traditional mara-catus. As with the gonguê, the persistence among traditional maracatus denação of a complex set of Central African perceptions pertaining to theword-object “calunga” is striking.

Afro-Brazilian Context: A Wider Symbolic Field of “Tradition” and “Resistance”

Maracatu Leão Coroado was founded in 1863. Although younger than Ele-fante (founded in 1800), it is Recife’s oldest continuously active maracatude nação, and is aware of its status and role as such. The liner notes to thegroup’s CD in commemoration of 140 years of existence describe its current


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leader, Afonso Aguiar Filho, as “guardião do segredo do Leão Coroado …Sua missão é manter e transmitir procedimentos técnicos e seus instrumentos,associá-los a sistemas simbólicos, mitos, mistérios e ritualizações” (Noqueira2003). The visual layout of the booklet depicts Afonso, on the right, look-ing stolidly at a separate picture on the left of Leão Coroado’s previous di-rector, Luiz da França, who appears to be offering a handful of seashellsoutwards and to the right towards the younger Afonso. The message isclear: the torch has been passed to a worthy successor. Afonso, a babalorixálike Luiz de França, has stated: “Tradition has to be maintained. I amagainst the changes and stylizations that they’re doing today in maracatu …For this I say to everyone that the evolution of Leão Coroado will be to ar-rive at its roots” (“Documento Nordeste” 2002).

The changes he criticizes are arriving from principally two sources.First, there are many new maracatu groups started by people outside theAfro-Pernambucan and xangô community. Some, notably Maracatu NaçãoPernambuco and Maracatudo Camaleão, present ornate, highly producedperformances mixing maracatu with other traditional styles; they will alsointroduce African percussion and electronic instruments, as well as horns,to their stage shows. Because of their greater networking skills and moreopen cultural discourse, these groups attain a level of success and interna-tional exposure that eludes the traditional groups. They typically expresstheir goal as “resgatando” (restoring, recuperating) the maracatu de naçãotradition; but ironically, many of their members are white, and no particularconnection with Afro-Brazilian belief systems is necessary to participate.9


FIGURE 3. Gonguê player, Maracatu Estrela Brilhante, Carnival 2004, Recife. Note the leg brace to help support the instrument. PHOTO BY THE AUTHOR.

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Their critics often refer to them as maracatus de universitário. Because oftheir different positioning with respect to the meanings and accessibility ofthese traditions, they release recordings containing original compositionsabout the beauty of maracatu de nação, its African roots, the unique gloryof Pernambucan culture, and so forth. The creator of Nação Pernambucosaid in 2005 that he wants to “reveal the connections between maracatumusic and other kinds of music around the world” (José 2005).42 (NaçãoPernambuco is credited with recording the first full-length maracatu album,but the record also contains elements of samba and other regional styles.)Conversely, Leão Coroado, Estrela Brilhante (founded in 1910) and othergroups that maintain a “traditional” posture generally limit their repertoireto material based on, or thematically and musically aligned with, maracatutoadas in the oral tradition and public dominion.

Because these “stylized” groups perform shows onstage throughout theyear, and because they have no Afro-Brazilian religious requirements tosatisfy, they may be seen with no calunga (or with a simple cloth doll tovisually represent a link with traditional groups); they do tend to express astrong commitment to the gonguê as a fundamental component of mara-catu. But another aspect of change in maracatu de nação that Mestre Afonsomay be referencing comes from a very different source, although it alsocenters on conflicting notions of “tradition.”

In a process starting in the mid-1970s, Bahian carnival was “re-Africanized” (Risério 1981): old connections with African culture were ex-plored; many new ones were imagined, along with links to the Africandiaspora in general; and a new sense of negritude, based on a globalizedidentity that reconciled traditional symbols of Afro-Brazilian culture withmodern cosmopolitan style, emerged in Salvador. Candomblé, capoeira,afoxés, batuques in general—many such cultural forms came increasinglyto be understood by both practitioners and the public as symbols of racialstrength and resistance. The success of this movement, in terms of com-mercial returns, international prestige, and racial emboldening (that is,both personal self-esteem and general social advances for Afro-Bahians)did not go unnoticed by young black Pernambucans. The image of a politi-cally militant, globally savvy Afro-Brazilian identity has inspired the growthof afoxés and blocos afro in Pernambuco. Both types of groups occasionallyface charges of importing a copy of Bahian culture into Pernambuco, butan unlikely defender of the afoxés was anthropologist Katarina Real: “Forme the entrance of Bahian afoxés in the carnival of Recife represents an-other example of the incredible powers of integration of Recife’s carnival”(Real 1990, 200–201).

Of course, for some of the black movement’s most militant members,the powerful traditions of “integration” in Brazilian society were part of theproblem they were trying to confront. It is a curious coincidence that,


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around the time of the “boom” in Pernambucan afoxés, black activists associated with Pernambuco’s small MNU (Movimento Negro Unificado)organization tried to help save Maracatu Nação Leão Coroado from disap-pearing, providing both financial support and the contribution of man-power to fill out its ranks of drummers. This is a chapter of the history ofmaracatu de nação that needs to be studied further. How long did this affil-iation last? How did the nature of the relationship between the MNU andblack cultural organizations in Pernambuco change over time? It seems thatonly Maracatu Nação Cambinda Estrela (founded in 1935 as another type ofcarnival group) publicly expresses admiration for the MNU: in their CDliner notes, they thank the MNU “for denouncing racism in our country.”

Yoshihiro Arai observed Recife’s carnival in 1988 to assess public repre-sentations of candomblé (1994). In terms of performance, the public “spec-tacular” of diverse ritualistic behavior in afoxé, including clothes, dances,and musical invocations of specific orixás, is all presented with a detailedopenness and directness that counters the maracatus’ secrecy and obliquerepresentations of xangô culture. Arai speculates that this could be relatedto the different histories of the two traditions: the practice of candomblé inBahia was long restricted to private spaces, whereas maracatu, through itshistory in the Kongo king rituals, inherits a tradition of ludic public per-formance in an ostensibly white, Christian sphere. By this analysis, themerging of maracatu with xangô resulted in the construction of a protec-tive public façade, an impenetrable envelope, around xangô’s sacred ele-ments. The strategy of such a façade to protect Afro-Brazilian culture wasundoubtedly one part of the Kongo king processions on Catholic holidaysthroughout the colonial period. But the cultural discourse and reception ofthe contemporary afoxé owes much to historical factors in Brazil, andspecifically in Bahia.

It is well known that the afoxé Filhos de Gandhi was headed towardsextinction when Gilberto Gil, a black Bahian musician of internationalprominence, intervened to support them (Gil was followed quickly by theBahian government and the state office of culture and tourism). This wasduring the early phase of Bahian carnival’s re-Africanization. The groupsubsequently has become regarded, by both locals and foreigners, as a sortof living monument to resistance and racial and social awareness. Manylater analyses draw from the characterization by Anamaria Morales, pub-lished in 1988, stating that the group originated “certainly as a form of eth-nic affirmation … The participation of pais-de-santo in the afoxé Filhos deGandhy leaves no doubts that this was an organization dedicated to cul-tural resistance” (264–74).

A different image of the afoxé group emerges from a lively 1971 in-terview with their procurador, Seu Honério. He recollects that in Febru-ary 1949, he and a gang of friends saw a movie called Filhos de Gandhi at


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Salvador’s Cine Jandaia. “We were all impressed with him [Gandhi], andVavá Madeira suggested that we create a group with this name [of themovie]. The syndicate said no, because Gandhi was a statesman’s nameand the Police wouldn’t allow it. But we worked everything out andfounded the group under a mango tree.” For an undisclosed period, thegroup sang marchas carnavalescas, until one of their members bought anatabaque (drum used in candomblé ) “from a boy on the Rua do Passo … westopped to sing in the house of Nonô, who was a filho-do-santo, and fromthen on we only sang candomblé songs” ( Jornal da Bahia [Salvador] 1971).

This puts a somewhat different slant on the group’s origins, and re-minds us of the context of the 1970s and 1980s in constructing an en-hanced aura of Afro-Brazilian meaning and identity around candomblé andgroups such as Filhos de Gandhi. As the black consciousness movementexpanded in Brazil, articulating unprecedented challenges to Brazil’s racialparadigm, scholars were rethinking the nature of hegemony and agency,and cultural politics as a subaltern strategy. The particular social history ofBrazil had facilitated a complex racial system in which, as Darién Davis ar-gued, blacks were “assimilated into the Brazilian mainstream throughouthistory”: physically through miscegenation, and psychologically throughthe myth of racial democracy, with the mulatto escape hatch to allowwell-behaved, successful, lighter-skinned blacks to advance into a special,more acceptable racial space (Davis 1999, 230). Given this, Larry Crook andRandal Johnson could declare in 1999 that any Afro-Brazilian behavior(recognized as such) is inherently political: “Cultural expressions involvingquestions of identity are inseparable from broader political processes, evenwhen the connections are not rendered explicit” (Crook and Johnson 1999,1, 5, 7).

It has become almost an orthodox view among scholars, practitioners,and large segments of the public that such Afro-Brazilian culture andsymbols represent resistance, as opposed to the mere (communal, festive,nonpolitical) carryover of traditional, “exotic” practices into the present. Yetsome practices and symbols have been especially influential in communi-cating this attitude in Brazil, and beyond; they all also tend to derive fromthe black cultural-politics movement that emerged in Bahian carnival. Asblacks were generally shut out of the normal routes to political power,carnival provided a space — albeit a complex one, due to the ambiguousrelationship between carnivalesque expression and quotidian reality—tomount a cultural challenge to the status quo. Now the focus of internationalattention, the movement was initially ignored or dismissed in Salvador untila critical mass of popular interest solidified its base.

If the blocos afro and afoxés of Salvador’s re-Africanized carnival have de-fined the parameters of this new, politicized Afro-Brazilian identity, thefirst bloco, 1974’s Ilê Aiyê, was both the vanguard of the movement and the


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standard against which later blocos are still (however implicitly) assessed.The other highly influential bloco afro, Olodum, is familiar to thousands offoreign visitors to their public rehearsals in Salvador’s Centro Histôrico orPelourinho, recently transformed to a tourism site. The musical style ofIlê Aiyê is conveyed through what they call batuque or samba duro, a trans-position of highly syncopated (and often minutely researched) Africanrhythmic sensibilities to a sort of escola de samba rhythm section, whereasOlodum revels in a globalized, African-diasporic sound focused on theCaribbean (samba-reggae being its most famous hybrid). Olodum, it shouldbe noted, began as a recreational carnival club in 1979, but was reorganizedas a black-consciousness organization by dissidents from Ilê Aiyê in 1983.These and other blocos repeatedly declare as their goals the restoration ofcultura negra in Brazil, the strengthening of black pride and self-esteem,and the fight against racism.

There were diverse reasons for the growth of this new Afro-Bahian iden-tity. Many of its early leaders were not performers themselves, but educatedworkers in Salvador’s expanding industrial economy, frustrated by theirown lack of socioeconomic mobility and the alarming rise of the black un-derclass. African liberation movements (particularly against Portugal’s lin-gering authority) were influential, as were the images and sounds of blackpride from the United States. Locally, there also developed an impulseamong activists in candomblé and capoeira to reject the state’s constructionof these practices as touristic folklore. Textually, candomblé references anda foundation of West African, specifically Yoruban, symbols are as integralto the blocos’ repertoire as to that of the afoxés. This is perhaps most thecase for Ilê Aiyê, since the mother of their director, Antônio Carlos dosSantos (Vovô), is a mãe de santo, or priestess of candomblé. She oversees thegroup’s initial procession at the outset of each year’s carnival, with a ritual-istic deployment of white doves, fireworks, and chants, and offerings to theorixás. Their name, a Yoruban phrase, is said to have emerged from a con-sultation of the buzios (seashells) during a candomblé ceremony. Olodum ismore eclectic, combining references to the orixás, Jamaica, Egypt, Cuba,South Africa, and Brazil’s parched northeastern sertão with constant evoca-tions of Pelourinho (as a stage of both somber black protest and beery bon-homie). Other blocos also use a range of local and global symbols of blackculture to create particular niches in Bahia’s crowded carnival market.10

The local press has come to endorse this re-Africanization—which, in 1993,helped Bahian carnival “beat” Rio’s for overall novelty and cachet—notingthat it is “irrestível para os turistas … Não há Estado brasileiro tão represen-tativo da herança africana como a Bahia … nem parece haver um oceanoseparando os baianos da África” (Veja 1993; A Tarde [Salvador] 2003).

The establishment strategy of praising the movement’s cultural efflo-rescence while downplaying its political potential replaces earlier, more


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confrontational approaches to defuse it. Ilê Aiyê took the brunt of the at-tacks, not only because of its pioneer status (debuting during the middle ofBrazil’s recent decades-long military dictatorship) but because of its policy,still maintained, of restricting membership to phenotypically black people.The bloco has long stated that it will change this policy when Brazil nolonger presents systematic, structural racism against blacks in everythingfrom education, employment, political representation, and wage equity tothe mass media and popular culture. In 1988, the group’s rhetoric and no-toriety provided a sharp counterpoint to official celebrations of the 100-yearanniversary of abolition: in response, a vitriolic critique of Ilê Aiyê in thenews magazine Veja bore the blunt title “They’re the Racists” (Belchior deSá 1988, 134). Indeed all the blocos afro have been targets of the charge that,by questioning Brazil’s racial democracy, they are hypocritically introduc-ing “race thinking” themselves—and even worse, it is often alleged, theyare doing this by importing foreign perspectives and symbols of raceconsciousness (such as the American black power movement) that arealien to Brazilian society and national identity. But the power of the sym-bolic return to Africa pursued by the blocos afro and afoxés has been to high-light a part of Brazilian social history that most Brazilians have beencontent to leave unmentioned—the overarching distaste for anything re-motely “African,” a prejudice that predated and outlived the freeing ofslaves in 1888.

Because the images, sounds, and tangible elements of black identity inBahia have been newly valorized, they are also scrutinized and selectedcarefully by participants in the Afro-Bahian scene. A 1987 article in Olodum’s newsletter chastised all the blocos for their shabby, improvisedaspect in the previous carnival. It acknowledged a lack of financial support,but argued: “[T]emos que perceber que quem produz essa viagem à Áfricaé a juventude negra baiana … precisamos estar atualizados, atentos ao queé novo, para criarmos uma nova estética dentro da cultura Africana con-temporânea” (Nelson Mendes, “Akomabu,” Jornal do Olodum 1987; in Rodrigues 1996, 48–49). There is a feedback process, that is, between pro-ducers and consumers of the symbols of Afro-Bahian identity. Beyond danceand candomblé references, musical instruments themselves have taken ona new eloquence in this period of heightened consciousness of symbols.When Ilê Aiyê uses typical instruments of the Brazilian bateria such asagogôs, surdos, and repiques to play a fusion of batucada with Senegalesesabar rhythms; or when Olodum’s former percussion director Neguinho doSamba used Cuban timbales to signal the percussionists instead of a tradi-tional apito or samba whistle (which he rejected as a coisa de guarda de trân-sito [Rodrigues 1996, 29]), their symbolic decisions are being guided by acritical view of Brazilian society as well as a creative impulse to recast thetexture of local experience in the wider African-Diaspora context.


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Consider, too, the berimbau, an Afro-Brazilian musical bow. As a com-pelling musical instrument and material object, the berimbau’s image hascome to connote the strength and cunning of slave resistance; the personalliberation metaphors of capoeira practice; and capoeira’s own struggles tosurvive repression in the years after abolition (the instrument itself wasperiodically outlawed). With its primitive, rustic appearance, the berimbauasserts the relevance of traditional African-derived culture in the high-techpresent. It gained more visibility through the participation of capoeira lead-ers in the recent campaign to create a “day of black consciousness” counter-ing the abolition anniversary; the date chosen, November 20, correspondsto the siege of the quilombo Palmares in 1694, during which Zumbi foughtto his death rather than surrender to Portuguese forces. It is often the onlyBrazilian musical instrument familiar to foreigners, many learning of itthrough capoeira academies or demonstrations in their home countries.Ironically, the berimbau appears not to have been part of capoeira before themid-nineteenth century, or later; still, international tourists’ avid interest inthe berimbau’s (and capoeira’s) contemporary overtones of Afro-Brazilianresistance and authenticity adds to the cosmopolitan prestige of the berim-bau as a visual-musical symbol.

The timbau, a Brazilian conical hand drum, emerged relatively late inBahia’s re-Africanized milieu but has had remarkable impact. It was theprincipal instrument in Carlinhos Brown’s Timbalada, a large percussivecarnival group founded in 1992 as a tribute to the blocos afro and their ex-tinct ancestor, the blocos de índio. With his many students and disciples,Brown, a Grammy-award winning percussionist and composer, elevatedthis anonymous drum from a casual beach-party instrument to an icon ofAfro-Brazilian musical power and technique. Associated with this transfor-mation is Brown’s philanthropic investment to improve living conditionsin his poor neighborhood of Candeal, a commitment to community upliftthat the blocos afro formally share but do not equal. With the commercialand aesthetic success of Timbalada, every bloco afro has added a timbauplayer to their ranks—even if one might expect Cuban congas or WestAfrican djembes in those contexts. But here, too, candomblé has informedthe instrument’s identity. Ari Lima argues that Timbalada conceived of thetimbau, rhythmically and symbolically, as “a representation or profane syn-thesis of the candomblé atabaques,” the sacred hand drums used in ritualpractice (Lima 1988).55 Musically, Timbalada draws from many sources, buthas often declared its allegiance to candomblé; combined with its ultramod-ern studio sound and RayBan-wearing chic, this allows it to occupy a realmbetween local Afro-Brazilian culture and the international music scene—a realm Brown calls Bahian afro-pop.11

In Pernambuco, meanwhile, attempts by local versions of Bahia’s blocosafro to participate in carnival have met with both formal and informal


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discouragement. Whatever the reasons, any mainstream discomfort withthe blocos’ Afro-Brazilian religious undertones can have little to do with it.Candomblé provides the spiritual and aesthetic foundation of the afoxés,and it is the very aesthetic model of the afoxé Filhos de Gandhi, their cos-tumes, dances, textual style, and instrumentation, that has dominated theafoxés in Recife since their inception. The first Pernambucan afoxé, Povo doOdé, paraded in homage both to Filhos de Gandhi and to Africa during thecarnival of 1991. They invited leaders of the Bahian afoxé to Pernambucofor the event, and to chair an afoxé strategy session; the objective was to“concretize the interchange between representatives of cultura negra” ( Jor-nal do Commercio [Recife] 1991). The maracatus de nação were not part ofthis conference. And the liner notes of a recent CD showcasing three Pernambucan afoxés drive home the idea that Recife’s modern, politicized“africanidade,” at a national level of significance, is the purview of theseafoxés.12

The conceptual association between afoxé, candomblé, the blocos, resist-ance, and the politicized Afro-Brazilian identity represented in Bahian car-nival may help throw the “African legitimacy” of maracatu de nação intoquestion for some Pernambucans. The agogô double bell is central to afoxéperformance, a staple of the blocos afro, and is also considered integral tothe musical dimension of capoeira. These are symbolic contexts chargedwith racial and cultural resistance. As an instrument linked with can-domblé, the agogô also is capable of opening a direct channel to African an-cestors and the orixás. Antonio Risério describes the group Filhos deGandhi as “beleza pura no toque do agogô … evoluíndo em coreografiasancestrais, entre cânticos litúrgicos do repertório jeje-nagô.”13 In many oftheir songs, Filhos de Gandhi reference the centrality of the agogô bells toAfro-Brazilian tradition; one, which Gilberto Gil has famously recorded, is“O Gandhi” by Antônio Caixão: “Ê o Gandhi saiu a rua/Abafou/O Gandhisaiu a rua/Tocando seu agogô/O quem falou assim/Foi nagô.” The afoxésof Recife also sing about the “African power” of their bells. All this puts asort of pressure on the gonguê, which, as an instrument unique to Pernam-buco and the maracatu de nação, does not carry the broad racial and cul-tural meanings that the agogô conveys across Afro-Brazil, from São Luís toRio de Janeiro.

Might there be a more straightforward explanation for selecting anagogô over a gonguê—a musical advantage, since the agogô is a double bell?In fact, although the gonguê offers only one playing surface, the instrumentproduces two distinct pitches (at an interval of anywhere from a third to afifth) by striking it varyingly on its narrow neck or wide mouth. In this itis reminiscent of the handheld cencerro, or “bongo bell,” of Afro-Cubanmusic, although the gonguê has a long handle and is held mouth outward;the cencerro typically has no handle and is held along its side edges, mouth


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down and inward toward the player. The two most common gonguêrhythms in maracatu de nação are reproduced below (pitches indefinite).

EXAMPLE 1.

For the sake of comparison, here is the standard agogô pattern of theafoxés, a rhythm called ijexá. Structurally, the rhythmic line resembles theslow maracatu pattern (beat 2 is displaced one-sixteenth note), although thetwo phrases are pitched differently.

EXAMPLE 2.

Guerra-Peixe refrained from in-depth comparisons of the foundationrhythms of maracatu and xangô. Still, in a paper he presented in 1982 onAfrican influences in Brazilian music, he mentioned a rhythm called“Congo” he heard in Pai João d’Angola’s xangô house in Belo Horizonte.Unfortunately, the paper’s appended notation does not reflect the pitch dif-ferences Guerra-Peixe suggested were there in performance.

EXAMPLE 3.

This single-bell “agogô” (today called adjá ) timeline is similar both to theslower gonguê rhythm of maracatu and the afoxé ijexá. If a “borrowing” wasinvolved here, who was the lender? For his part, Guerra-Peixe declared ofthe “Congo” rhythm: “Não tenho dúvidas sobre sua procedência angolanaou conguense, porque já o ouvi em gravações procedentes dessas areas deidioma banto” (1982). Only further studies will be able to shine light on thepossible musical connections between xangô, afoxé, and maracatu.

But behind the surface tension of agogôs cropping up in maracatu, itmay be that the position of the traditional maracatus de nação as relevantbearers of African or Afro-Brazilian identity is similarly uncertain. Do the


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maracatus not connote racial resistance? After all, they suffered publiccensure and repression in the nineteenth century. Impassioned newspapereditorials often requested police intervention: “The maracatu is an infa-mous, stupid and sad thing! … Is a society that tolerates the maracatu civi-lized? Of course not! It’s as though we live in Abyssinia” (A Província[Recife], February 16, 1877). But both oral tradition and historical evidenceimply that, as the king of Kongo ritual disappeared, its processional aspectwas unproblematically absorbed into carnival; maracatu has been “repre-senting Africa” in carnival since the early decades of the twentieth century,as Pereira da Costa and Mário de Andrade wrote. That is, perhaps “Africa,”by way of the maracatus, didn’t have to fight its way back into carnival andpublic awareness in Recife, as the story of Filhos de Gandhi and the blocosafro stresses that it did in Salvador. Such ambiguity is echoed in lingeringdoubts about the Kongo king institution’s link with Catholic brotherhoods:did kings who were crowned by priests and sheriffs have genuine politicalpower and agency, or were they merely pawns in an elaborate ritual of social control? This debate is far from resolved among Recife’s maracatucommunity, or in the academy. In the carnival of 1964, Leão Coroado pa-raded with a float depicting two kneeling slaves, with a banner reading“Nunca Mais.” One of the two slaves was white, and Master Luiz de Françatold Katarina Real “A senhora sabe que também havia muito escravobranco!” (Real 2001, 26). More research needs to be done on the questionof how maracatu entered the carnival celebration after abolition, with atten-tion to how the practice may have changed throughout the decades in re-sponse to local and national political developments, and to the evolvingconceptions of race and race relations in Brazil.

Afro-Brazilian religious practice founded on the orixás—i.e., xangô orcandomblé—has long represented in Brazilian society (for better or worsein different historical periods) the most authentic living legacy of Afri-can culture. By contrast, the outward musical, processional aspects ofmaracatu—in distinction from its traditional, internal xangô dimension—are generally considered by local practitioners and observers to be fullyPernambucan, dating from the late colonial or early imperial era. One Per-nambucan researcher has written with pride, “In Africa there doesn’t existanything like our maracatu.” (Claudia Lima Web site). This recalls a simi-lar controversy over the roots of capoeira, with competing camps arguingsince the 1930s for an African or a Brazilian, specifically Bahian, origin.14

(Both sides have approximated each other somewhat over the years, partak-ing in the best of what each vision of capoeira offers in terms of teachingstrategies and cultural capital.) The critical point here, though, is suggestedby Lewis’s observation (1992, 66) that once the state endorsed a capoeirathat would be taught through standard methodology, and practiced only infitness academies targeting the middle and upper classes, “the importance


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and prestige of street games steadily declined in the eyes of most players.”Moving capoeira inside was “a crucial step in the domestication of thesport” because, according to Roberto da Matta’s framework of the casa andrua in Brazilian culture (in which the house is organized, controlled, andprivate; the street risky, unpredictable, and deceiving), “the academy be-comes a kind of surrogate casa within which activities are supervised, safe,and healthy, as opposed to the dangerous and unruly street games.” Per-haps the opposite has occurred with maracatu de nação—perhaps the prac-tice has become de facto “domesticated” to the extent that it has become ayear-round public spectacle, a festive street parade or staged performance,with its already obscure connections to the (secretive, dangerous, mysteri-ous, deceptive) Afro-Brazilian xangô practice rendered invisible in theharsh illumination of camera-flash or electric spotlight.

The liner notes to a CD from Maracatu Nação Estrela Brilhante (foundedin 1910) boast that “The group’s instruments are still made the way theywere in the era of slavery.” This way of contextualizing the practice, merelyas a holdover from slavery, may have less cultural cachet for some youngblacks than the bold reinvention of African tradition occurring in Bahiancarnival among the afoxés and blocos afro. For Antonio Risério, the best wayto understand “re-Africanization” was to examine how Gilberto Gil’s song“Axé Babá” combined past, present, and future: “It’s an afoxé for Oxalá, butrecorded in a sophisticated 24-channel studio—with handclaps, agogôs, andatabaques combined with the sound of a Rhodes keyboard,” electric guitar,and synthesizer (Risério 1981, 13). The impulse to rethink maracatu’s placein contemporary culture may explain why some maracatus are incorporat-ing the timbau, the industrially manufactured Brazilian hand drum associ-ated directly with Timbalada and blocos afro such as Ilê Aiyê, Olodum, andMalê Debalê. In 2004 and 2005, the young maracatu groups Nação Guetoand Daruê Malungo were both led by musicians who, walking on stilts,played musical signals and fiery solos on the timbau. Agogô bells were alsoobserved in the ranks of these two maracatus. Gueto did not parade withany sort of calunga, but Daruê Malungo carried a black plastic doll.

Another musical symbol of African cultural heritage has been absorbed,not only by newer groups, but by the venerable Nação Estrela Brilhante(founded in 1910): the abê, or large gourd rattle. Traditional maracatu groupshave tended for years to use ganzá, a metal tube shaker common to sambaas well as regional styles, but Mestre Walter of Estrela Brilhante decidedthat the abê was more traditional than the ganzá—because older maraca-tus had probably used this African instrument instead of the industriallymanufactured Brazilian samba shaker. In the opinion of Pernambucanpercussionist Eder “O” Rocha, a member of the band Mestre Ambrósioand a fixture in Recife’s music scene, “The abê was introduced into EstrelaBrilhante through the direct influence of candomblé-de-rua [afoxé ].” He


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notes that groups deriving from the “cultos de candomblé de Recife” use atrio of differently sized gourds—large, medium, and small—to play syn-copated patterns, and that this practice also appears in Estrela Brilhante(Rocha 2001).

Maracatu Nação Porto Rico—founded in 1967 from a preexisting group,and so accorded traditional status—recently adopted the use of handdrums: from atabaques to timbaus to other African-inspired drums of sim-pler (carved-shell, rope-tuned) make. In their study of maracatu, Santosand Resende note that “the introduction of the abês and atabaques is muchcriticized by other [maracatu] masters and by folk experts.” But according toPorto Rico’s oral tradition, the group traces its heritage all the way back tothe quilombo of Palmares. Jailson Chacon Viana, their director, justifies theintroduction of hand drums by pointing to historical documents, suggest-ing that “funneled and single-membraned” drums were played in Palmares(Santos and Resende 2005, 45–46). There are obviously differing percep-tions among Recife’s leaders about the meanings and boundaries of mara-catu, and the groups monitor each other: Seu Toinho, director of MaracatuEncanto da Alegria, states flatly that “I’ll die first, but I won’t allow the abêin, nor will I let women play in this maracatu” (“Maracatu Nação Encantoda Alegria” liner notes). One school of traditional thought holds thatwomen should not touch the instruments. However, most groups nowallow women to participate as musicians, not just as dancers. Anothernewer group, Maracatu Nação Badia, is named for a famous mãe-de-santoin Recife who, the tale is told, led Recife’s first maracatu group—one thatwas itself, according to some popular versions of the tale, made up only ofwomen.

In the name of tradition, older maracatu groups may not sing or recordnew compositions; Porto Rico has composed a few new songs, but in gen-eral, the older groups stay rooted in traditional themes and structures. Theresult is ironic: Middle-class, whiter-skinned groups such as Nação Per-nambuco, Maracatudo or Maracatu Várzea do Capibaribe release CDs fullof inventive songs about Africa and African culture, and even write wholesongs in Bantu or Yoruba, thereby keeping themselves in contemporary“Afro” style; this, while Leão Coroado is still singing about Princess Isabel,who freed the slaves in 1888. The newer groups, which often start as socialprojects for Afro-Pernambucan (or otherwise underprivileged) young peo-ple, rarely get the chance to record. One exception has been Nação Erê, whoattracted some international support through collaboration with the famedBrazilian percussionist Airto Moreira. Many songs with a socially criticalperspective were composed for their debut album, with titles such as “MãePreta” (“Tantos meninos na rua/Sem teto, carinho e pão/Aguenta muitarojão/Quem fica na contra-mão”) and “Treze de Maio Não é Dia de Negro”(“Irmão, irmão/Assuma sua raça, assuma sua cor … Vem pra Nação Erê …/


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Pra denunciar racismo/E contra o apartheid brasileiro”). Coincidentally ornot, this group advertises its use of the agogô rather than the gonguê, andthey parade at carnival without a calunga.

Conclusions

This paper has attempted to show that the apparently unremarkable shiftfrom one bell to another in some maracatus de nação may tell us somethingabout the symbolic power of the different objects involved. These smallchanges may be an indication of a larger dispute over the symbols ofAfrican or Afro-Brazilian identity and “authenticity” in Pernambuco, par-ticularly as these symbols are contextualized in the twenty-first century.Kim Butler has suggested that the Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1937, whichfocused on Bahian candomblé, “promoted an emphasis on ‘authenticity’ asa means of legitimation among the houses … Another side effect was asubsequent bias toward Nagô traditions in the academic literature” (Butler1998, 207). But this event, influential as it was, probably was not the gen-esis of the often-invoked “Nagô bias” in Afro-Brazilian scholarship. A dis-tinct preference for Islamist West African, as opposed to Central African,origins of (Afro-)Brazilian culture was a guiding preoccupation of GilbertoFreyre, organizer of the first Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1934; and in this,as Anadelia Romo argues, Freyre was contributing to an earlier debateamong Brazilian intellectuals about the relative cultural and intellectualvirtues of slaves from different regions in Africa (Romo 2007).15 At thelevel of popular discourse in Pernambuco, discord over “authenticity” and“traditional validity” appears to have divided the maracatu de nação fordecades, although the conflicts are rarely cast in ethnic or “tribal” terms.A Pernambucan origin of the practice is regularly cited, although MestreWalter and his gourd rattle are stretching the bounds of “tradition” back toAfrica. Similarly, other elements of the traditional maracatu de nação mayhave an African heritage. The elucidation of specific Kongo elements,should they be verified, would be heralded by some maracatu leaders andresearchers.16 It might be welcome news to Mestre Moraes, leader of theGrupo Capoeira Angola Pelourinho, a renowned capoeira angola academy inSalvador, Bahia, which asserts a cultural link with the origins of capoeira inAngola. Moraes, decrying an alleged “Yoruba hegemony” pervading thewhole of contemporary Afro-Brazilian thought, has declared his goal to “re-store the history of Bantu people in Brazil, and publicize the values of thisimmense cultural legacy” (Revista Exu 1989). Such a focus on African eth-nic identity is not widespread among Brazil’s public, yet it reveals the pas-sion these topics can evoke among Afro-Brazilian culture activists.

The calunga’s traditional limitation to a narrow cultural phenomenonin one specific region means that young people are not seeing it in other


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Afro-Brazilian carnival processions, or through the media (e.g., MTV Brasil).A brief survey of state tourism literature suggests that the calunga has be-come part of the palette of official, patriotic Pernambucan identity thatsome black youths may wish to militate against—even as they choose toparticipate in maracatu, which, along with capoeira, is still the most tradi-tional local Afro-Brazilian expression available to them. In historical prac-tice, though, calungas are deeply associated with xangô, while the structureand function of newer groups do not rely on spiritual rituals or lineages.Some of these newer groups, such as Badia, do include a follower of xangôamong their directorate to satisfy a certain vague sense that the religionbrings validity to maracatu de nação. But there is no requirement to be adevotee of xangô to participate, which ironically makes the new “black”groups similar in their secular attitude to the “whiter,” stylized groups.

Finally, the calunga is suffused with highly specific uses and historicalsignifications that simply might not fit the sensibilities of some modernyoung Afro-Brazilians. To parade with a store-bought, black plastic “Barbie”-type doll, as some groups do, may be less the smothering of tradition bystylization than the interjection into maracatu de nação of a new perspec-tive on black culture and identity. Such toys, typically of the “Susi Olodum”brand family, are of recent vintage.17 After all, before the success of theBahian blocos afro, and the wide social, cultural, and economic changesengendered by that success, it would have been difficult to imagine suchan “ethnic” commodity manufactured for and advertised to young blackconsumers—or their parents. The product demonstrates in a very mod-ern, public sense that the black demographic market exists—even if cen-sus results regarding race in Brazil remain ambiguous.

In a study exploring the relations between new aesthetics of beauty andconsumption patterns among urban Afro-Brazilian women, Jocélio Telesdos Santos suggests that middle-class black mothers were often involved inthe drive to create such dolls (2001). He notes that AfroDay, a businessstarted by renowned Rio de Janeiro politician Benedita da Silva, has in-vested in the manufacture and marketing of black dolls. Silva told the Jor-nal de Brasília in 1992 that these dolls “valorize the black form, in a waythat the child can recognize herself in the toy—identifying herself fully,without rejecting her own traits and characteristics.” In a remark that isparticularly revealing, Silva adds: “My daughters didn’t like [black] clothdolls, because there exists wide prejudice against them.” Not only do clothdolls connote poverty in their simple, homemade composition, but they arealso seen as fetish objects, “peças de rituais umbandistas.” By contrast, theplastic, mass-produced, store-bought doll of a black female figure appar-ently carries no worrisome undertones of African or Afro-Brazilian spiri-tual practice.


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According to Livio Sansone, in Brazil today, “‘Africa’ has come to signifycivilization and tradition within black culture, somewhat in opposition to‘Afro,’ which has come to mean a lifestyle—adding an African tinge to theexperience of modernity” (1999, 39). For Gerhard Kubik, ethnicity “as acultural consciousness movement is by definition non-ethnic,” but it is anattempt at a large-scale grouping beyond the “relatively narrow variationmargin of what in ethnology is defined as an ethnic group” (1994). Mara-catu de nação presents, in the context of modern flows of symbols and com-modities that could represent black identity, a quite narrow variationmargin. This is not because of any “ethnic” boundaries (West African,Kongo, or otherwise) that repel nonmembers, but because of its relativeisolation and insularity as a cultural practice—including its longstandingaversion to publicize its connections with xangô. There are probably blackyouths in contemporary Recife (as in any city in the diaspora) whose inter-ests are more “Afro” than “African”: for whom the search for roots andidentity might involve shopping malls, Jamaican reggae, Lakers t-shirts,the Malcolm X movie, Salvador’s Ilê Aiyê, and American hip-hop as muchas local maracatu de nação. For them, perhaps, the agogô, timbau, berimbau,and other emblems of a cosmopolitan, globalized Brazilian negritude offermore symbolic currency than the gonguê and the calunga—with or withouta recuperated, specific Central African heritage for these two (now highlylocal) Afro-Brazilian cultural objects.

Of course, one must acknowledge the importance of maracatu denação—long associated with African cultural identity—in bringing pres-tige and new vitality to Recife’s carnival and popular music scene generallysince the late 1980s (see Galinsky 2002). But this is not to say there is con-sensus on the symbolic or traditional nature of maracatu practice: recallthat, as early as 1988, two prominent scholars of Recife’s popular culturedrew opposite conclusions about the viability of maracatu as an expressionof authentic local tradition, even as the number of participant groups wasgrowing. The explosion of new maracatu groups with diverse identities andemphases, the appearance of the stage as a year-round performance venueoutside carnival, the new black consciousness movements in Brazil, thetrendy aerobics-style classes in “maracatu e dança afro” offered in Recife’swealthy beachfront neighborhoods—all these have put new strains onmaracatu’s claims to traditional legitimacy. As arguably the most tradi-tional objects in maracatu (along with the alfaia bass drums), the gonguêand calunga are clearly capable of offering an affirmation of regional-ethnicpride to many Afro-Pernambucans. But to others, selecting the agogô maypresent a distinct option for framing local culture in larger symbolicprocesses. And if some groups also eschew the calunga, perhaps they see itas an example of the limited (discreet, ambiguous, non-confrontational)


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symbolic capital of xangô in maracatu, in contrast to how the candombléuniverse has informed a bold Bahian negritude.18

Sansone has analyzed the hierarchies operant in the exchange of com-modities related to modern black identity across the Black Atlantic (Sansone2003).19 He observes that commodification implies a selection among blackobjects, bestowing status and promoting those that are selected. Successfulnew black objects are often costly (i.e., hair care products, glossy “ethnic”magazines, or hip-hop fashions); imported objects generally have higherstatus than local ones. The agogô is a conveniently inexpensive instrumentthat, if we apply to it Sansone’s framework for categorizing Bahian exportsto the Black Atlantic, is simultaneously a “traditional” black object (drawnfrom venerable Afro-Bahian candomblé culture) and a so-called “new tradi-tional” one (derived from modern Bahian carnival, itself globalized andre-Africanized). Of course, the agogô is not a “Bahian” instrument per se, al-though its new sheen of Afro-Brazilian resistance owes more to the Bahianafoxés, capoeira and blocos afro than to Rio’s older samba schools. But whensome young Afro-Pernambucans “import” the agogô into their local cul-tural milieu of maracatu, they may be pursuing two related goals: First, thearticulation of a separate space in which to transcend, if not resist, the con-flicting claims to African-versus-local authenticity that hang over the sym-bolic expression of contemporary maracatu performance; and second, thecreation of a linkage between Afro-Pernambuco, re-Africanized Bahia, andthe Black Atlantic generally, where modern identity construction involvesthe selective, dynamic, even contradictory use of various local traditions,global trends, and African pasts.

Notes

The author would like to thank Julio Conde, Luis Orlando da Silva, Tom Farrell,Elizabeth Kuznesof, Barbara Weinstein, Saverio Giovacchini, and LAMR’s reviewers.

1. Relevant works in English include Pinto (1996); “The Pernambuco Carni-val and Its Formal Organizations” (1994); Galinsky (2002); and Crook (2002, 2005).

2. See Benjamin (n.d.); Fernandes (1977); Lucas (2002); and Reily (2001).3. See Dantas Silva (1988, 1991b) and Real (1990).4. Katarina Real, who sat on Recife’s Comissão Organizadora do Carnaval

from 1965– 1967, criticized the “samba schools, an import from Rio de Janeiro,every year more exaggerated, threatening to smother the carnival groups of Per-nambucan origin” (Real 2001, 19).

5. The Golden Law of May 13, 1888, signed by Princess Isabel, put an officialend to slavery in Brazil.

6. I thank Professor Carlos Sandroni, Federal University of Pernambuco, forbringing this work to my attention.


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7. Recent video footage available in the JVC Video Anthology of World Mu-sic and Dance (Middle East and Africa III, distributed by Rounder Records, Cam-bridge, MA) shows a memorial ceremony for a king among the Tikar people ofCameroon; mourners are playing very large double bells.

8. James H. Sweet (2003) describes the significance of kitekes, “wooden stat-ues that served as representations of the ancestors among the Kongolese.”

9. According to one news article, “There is no way to deny that all the currentinterest in maracatu is due to Nação Pernambuco … it was at their rehearsals that themiddle class learned to dance and play” the traditional instruments (Lima 2001).

10. Goli Guerreiro (1999) has explored how the blocos afro base their aestheticorientation on candomblé, as seen in their names and lyrical references as well astheir dance and costume styles; she also creatively analyzed the types of Africa con-structed in the discourses of many leading blocos afro.

11. “Toque de Timbaleiro” by Nem Cardoso, on their 1993 release Timbalada,declares “Toque de timbaleiro/Sacudindo o mundo inteiro/Foi criada na Bahia/Saúda os orixás/Com a força ijexá/Candomblé, reggae, magia/… Vem com trançasnegras lindas/Toque o timbau ê ô …”

12. Liner notes to the CD Afoxés de Pernambuco state, “The Afro-Pernambucanscene is one of the strongest in Brazil. In this context the afoxés fit in as powerfulcultural and religious entities, preserving a tradition of the Afro-Brazilian culture …The afoxés contribute generously to raise the self-confidence of the black people ofBrazil. The afoxés are also working politically and socially by informing peopleabout their rights and fighting against discrimination.”

13. Liner notes to the CD “Afoxé Filhos de Gandhi,” a restoration of their 1981long-play record.

14. The brand of capoeira that the state formally recognized in 1937 is associ-ated with Manoel dos Reis Machado (Mestre Bimba), who argued that capoeira wasborn in Bahia. Bimba proposed to take his so-called capoeira regional or luta regionalbaiana inside a physical-fitness academy, register students with the state, chargefees, and prohibit students from practicing capoeira publicly; he would teach itthrough clear methods, structures, and exercises (derived in part from boxing andkarate); and he would stress its virtues as a means of fitness and self-defense. To agovernment eager for healthful symbols of Brazilian national identity, this was ap-pealing. But other capoeiristas in Salvador, led by Vicente Ferreira Pastinha (MestrePastinha), disagreed with Bimba’s methods and outlook. They claimed capoeira wasAfrican, and asserted its mystical, naturalistic, and individual nuances againstBimba’s rigorous standardized approach.

15. Elite concern with the Yoruba’s literacy and strong religious-ethnic identitywas catalyzed by the 1835 Malê Rebellion in Bahia (Reis 1993).

16. For elucidations of Central African influence on Brazilian musical culture,see Mukuna (1979) and Kubik (1979).

17. The “Susi Olodum” doll, released in February 2000, boasted a period ofinitial sales ten times higher than its manufacturer anticipated (Wall Street Journal2000).

18. Recife’s press tends to refer to maracatu de nação as a folkloric manifesta-tion. Elefante and other longstanding maracatus have also been called “patrimôniosdo folclore pernambucano,” a characterization that would seem to condemn change.


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And whatever the maracatus’ historic value for representing African culture in Per-nambuco, a newsletter from the state Secretariat of Tourism, Culture and Sportstresses their innate racial democracy and power to unite “negros, pardos, brancose todas as demais combinações étnicas que pudermos arrolar” (Newsletter of FUN-DARPE 1984).

19. While focused on exchanges between nation-states, Sansone also notes thatmuch of the symbolic exchange and commodification of “Africana” across the BlackAtlantic has occurred “within, rather than across, different language areas, and colo-nial and ethnic traditions” (2003, 91)—suggesting, therefore, regional exchange.

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Documents

Metz Maracatu