People of Faith

In People of Faith, Mariza de Carvalho Soares reconstructs the everyday lives of Mina slaves transported in the eighteenth century to Rio de Janeiro from the African West Coast, in particular from modern-day Benin. She describes a Catholic lay brotherhood formed by enslaved Mina-Mahi congregants of a Rio church in a panoramic setting encompassing the historical development of the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa and the ethnic composition of the West African ;born slaves in eighteenth-century Rio called Mina slaves. Although Africans from the Mina Coast, including the Mahi, constituted no more than ten percent of the slave population in Rio, they were a strong presence in urban life at the time. Soares analyzes the role of Catholicism, and particularly lay brotherhoods, in Africans' construction of identities under slavery in colonial Brazil. As in the rest of the Portuguese empire, in Rio, black lay brotherhoods engaged in expressions of imperial pomp through elaborate festivals, processions, and funerals; the election of kings and queens; and the organization of royal courts. Drawing mainly on ecclesiastical documents, Soares reveals church records as extraordinarily rich archival sources.