Transatlantic Threads of meaning: West African textile entrepreneurship in Salvador da Bahia, 1770–1870

ABSTRACT

This article details the factors that enabled the creation and maintenance of a transatlantic trade in West African textiles (panos da costa). At the end of the eighteenth century, the transformation of slave and textile trading routes in the Bight of Benin, the granting of trading privileges as compensation for enslaved and freed African mariners who labored aboard slaving ships, and the emergence of a commercial infrastructure in Bahia based on a network of African and Afro-Brazilian shopkeepers and mobile vendors who provisioned Salvador’s residents collectively generated this uniquely African commodity exchange. Through the purposeful circulation and consumption of West African textiles, enslaved and freed Africans in the city forged communal and cultural ties and inscribed their bodies with new meanings and social identities through dress, making these imported material goods a crucial site of black intellectual production in the early modern diaspora.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Mary E. Hicks is an Assistant Professor of History and Black Studies, Amherst College, 26 Chapin Hall, Amherst, MA 01002 USA. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Victor W. Turner, Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 21.

2 Henry John Drewal, ‘Art or Ancient: Yorùbá Body Artists and their Deity Ògún’, in Africa’s Ogun 2nd Expanded Edition, ed. Sandra T. Barnes (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 235–62, 238.

3 The men apparently had traveled to the plantation to sell cloth for chickens. Benedito had also been tasked by his owner, Padre Pedro Ferreira dos Santos, a resident of Lisbon, with dispersing pay to workers in the rural parish every week. Rachel E. Harding, A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 173–4. Gege or jeje was an ethnic signifier in Brazil that indicated peoples from Gbè-speaking regions of West Africa that stretches from the Volta river east to Porto Novo, including Ewè, Gèn, Ajá and Fon. J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 76.

4 Cabra was a Brazilian designation used to identify individuals of mixed indigenous, European and African ancestry. Harding, A Refuge in Thunder, 173–5.

5 Harding, A Refuge in Thunder, 173–5.

6 A number of works detail the contours of the West African commodity trade to Salvador in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but do not address this earlier period or regional patterns of dispersion. See Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, Flávio Gonçalves dos Santos, Economia e cultura do Candomblé na Bahia: o comércio de objectos litúrgicos afro-brasileiros, 1850-1937 (Ilhéus, BA: Editus—Editora de UESC, 2013); Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Negros, estrangeiros: Os Escravos Libertos e sua Volta à África 2a Edição (São Paulo: Editora Schwarcz, 2012).

7 For more on these small-scale traders and their domination of local trade in food, clothing and household necessities see Richard Graham, Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780-1860 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

8 On the enslaved as commodities in the transatlantic slave trade see Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007).

9 For more on the circulation of Atlantic commodities see Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986); David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

10 Melville Herskovits found that in 1940 locally produced ‘hand-loomed’ cloth similar to the style imported from West Africa was available in Salvador; however, the African variety was ‘worth much more’. Melville J. Herskovits, ‘Some Economic Aspects of the Afrobahian Candomble’, Miscellanea Paul Rivet, octogenario dicata 2 (1958): 227–47, 228, and Santos, Economia e cultura do Candomblé na Bahia.

11 The slave trade to Bahia peaked in the years 1801 to 1825 when slavers disembarked an estimated 258,736 Africans in the port. During the period between 1811 and 1819 enslaved people from the Bight of Benin swelled the city’s population with Nagôs representing 15 percent of all enslaved people in the city, Hausas 17 percent, and Geges 20.4 percent. Maria José Andrade, A mão de obra escrava em Salvador, 1811-1860 (Salvador: Corrupio, 1988), 189. Slave trade estimates courtesy of Stephen Behrendt, David Eltis, Manolo Florentino, and David Richardson, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, www.slavevoyages.org (accessed September 20, 2018).

12 African ethnicities or ‘nations’ in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Brazil were creations, initially of slaving merchants who categorized enslaved people according to the coastal region or ports from which they departed on the African coast. Though such labels did not correspond to existing political entities or social groups in Africa, in Brazil enslaved peoples from similar linguistic communities constructed social new solidarities around these New World constructs. Joseph C. Miller, ‘Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering: Restoring Identities through Enslavement in Africa and under Slavery and Brazil’, in Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil During the Era of Slavery, eds. José Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004), 81–121; Robin Law, ‘Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: “Lucumi” and “Nago” as Ethnonyms in West Africa’, History in Africa 24 (1997): 205–19, 205–6.

13 Robert S. DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 141.

14 African commodities included palm oil (azeite de dendê), assorted shells, baskets, straw mats, soap, gourds, kola nuts, herbs and peppers. Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 92. Correio Mercantil, No. 34, 7 February 1847, 3.

15 Akinwumi Ogundiran and Paula Saunders, Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 14.

16 Like panos da costa, asen or ritual staff alters as acted as ‘social documents’ inflected with socially defined, dynamic representational meanings in Dahomey. Edna Bay, Asen, Ancestors and, Vodun: Tracing Change in African Art (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 10, Ogundiran and Saunders, Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic, 18.

17 For more on dress as a form of bodily agency and resistance for the enslaved see Steeve O. Buckridge, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press, 2004); Tamara J. Walker, Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 134–5.

18 On the culturally defined value of commodities see Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: commodities and the politics of value’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–64, 6. For a discussion of the possibilities of materials—particularly fetishes—to act as agents and remake human subjectivities, see J. Lorand Matory, The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 2–4.

19 Cloth also acts as the material embodiment of the link to one’s ancestors. Rowland O. Abiodun, Ulli Beier and John Pemberton, Cloth Only Wears to Shreds: Textiles and Photographs from the Ulli Beier Collection (Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2004), 7.

20 In Yoruba-speaking West Africa cloth inhabits the same ontological category as oriki or praise poems which celebrate orisa (deities) and ancestors. Like other sacred objects, cloth is imbued with ase or life force, aura, or potentiality to transform/act upon. Rowland O. Abiodun, Yourba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 163–4.

21 The conflation of cloth with social identity is communicated by the Yoruba proverb, ‘My people are my cloth’, Abiodun, Yourba Art and Language, 48; Rowland O. Abiodun, and John Pemberton III, ‘The Dreadful God and the Divine King’, in Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New Second, Expanded Edition, ed. Sandra T. Barnes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 105–46.

22 The communicative mode of West African cloth is perhaps best expressed by adire eleko or indigo died textiles, first fabricated in Abeokuta at the end of the nineteenth century. These hand-woven cotton textiles incorporate writing or abstract symbols which express ‘one’s identity (including status and lineage, beliefs or set of values).’ The dying of adire cloth through a complex, multi-stage process allows Nigerian female artisans and artists to communicate local histories and orisa mythologies through motifs that only other textile artists can decipher. Nina Sylvanus, Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa (University of Chicago: Chicago, 2016), 2, Lisa Aronson, ‘The Language of West African Textiles’, African Arts 25, no. 3 (1992): 36–41, 38, Nkiru Nzegwu, ‘Introduction: Contemporary Nigerian Arts: Euphonizing the Art Historical Voice’, in Contemporary Textures: Multidimensionality in Nigerian Art, ed. Nkiru Nzegwu (Binghamton: ISSA), 1–39.

23 Manuel Álvares observed in 1607 that Wolof producers made ‘very well-known cotton cloths by sowing from six to twelve strips together’ which could fetch as much as 6,000 réis when sold in Iberia. These strip-woven cloths later became models for textiles produced by enslaved weavers in Portuguese workshops on the islands of Cabo Verde. Malyn Newitt, The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 84, 152; Colleen E. Kriger, ‘Mapping the History of Cotton Textile Production in Pre-Colonial West Africa’, African Economic History 33 (2005): 87–116, 103.

24 The definition of the Mina Coast evolved over time as Portuguese commercial activity expanded eastward. Markets accessed by Portuguese traders included those at Allada, Keta, Jakin, Apa, Little Popo, Great Popo and later Ouidah, Badagry, Porto Novo and Lagos. In these communities, West African merchants insisted on the bundling of multiple kinds of merchandise for the purchase of slaves, making the acquisition of cloth more likely. Kriger, Cloth in West African History, 34–5, Philip Curtain, Economic Change in Pre-Colonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 247–53; Robin Law, ‘Trade and Politics on the Slave Coast: The Lagoon Traffic and the Rise of Lagos’, The Journal of African History 24, no. 3 (1983): 321–48.

25 Cotton cloth circulated among several regional trade circuits in the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. A trading network along the Senegal and Gambia rivers involved the Wolof, and Kano cloth which was exchanged north across the Sahel and Sahara to North Africa. In seventeenth-century Asante, the court in Kumasi sponsored a guild of weavers who produced royal regalia, but it does not appear to have been exported. Evidence suggests Benin exported cloth to its west and east to neighboring polities via networks on the Niger and Forçados rivers. During this period, textiles manufactured in Benin were the most prominent in Portugal’s coastal West African trade, Colleen E. Kriger, Cloth in West African History (Oxford: Altamira Press, 2006), 40; Pierre Verger, Trade Relations Between the Bight of Benin and Bahia from the 17th to the 19th Century (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1976), 134 f.1; Judith Perani ‘The Cloth Connection: Patrons and Producers of Hausa and Nupe Prestige Strip-Weave’, in History, Design and Craft in West African Strip-Woven Cloth (National Museum of Arican Art, 1988), 95–112, 95–6; Colleen E. Kriger, ‘“Guinea Cloth” Production and Consumption of Cotton Textiles in West Africa Before and During the Atlantic Slave Trade’, in The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200-1850, eds. Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 109–17; Colleen E. Kriger, Cloth in West African History, 39–41; Colleen E. Kriger, ‘Mapping the History of Cotton Textile Production in Pre-Colonial West Africa’, African Economic History 33 (2005): 87–116, 92–9; George E. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth Century to the Eighteenth Century (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), 19–20; Peggy Stolz Gilfoy, Patterns of Life: West African Strip-Weaving Traditions (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 33.

26 Olfert Dapper reported that the Dutch sold blue indigo cloths in Gabon and Angola, while striped cloth was trafficked to the Gold Coast. Dapper, who synthesized the first-hand accounts of slavers and missionaries, also provided a number of suggestive details about the social role of cloth in the Benin Kingdom, noting its role in defining royal authority, relationships of patronage and signifying maturity and insider status. He alleges that boys were required to enter the court of Benin naked, a ritual rite of passage into adulthood that included the Oba or ruler bestowing both a wife and clothing on a young man after he had come of age. Similarly, girls remained unclothed until marriage, when their husbands conferred upon them clothing and a home. The prestige of woven textiles in Benin society was also indicated by royal funerary rites, as the Oba was reputedly buried alongside his clothing, furniture and cowries shells, John Nutt, For Africa: Containing What is of Most Use in Bleau, Varenius,Cellarius, Cluverius, Baudrand, Brietius, Sanson &c. With the Discoveries and Improvements of the Best Modern Authors to this Time, (Nutt, John, 1714), 477–8; Henry Ling Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (Barnes & Noble, 1903), 24.

27 The lagoon system connected Allada, Ouidah, Ijebu and Benin, which by the seventeenth century permitted the emergence of a vibrant regional, canoe-based trade in textiles. The earliest descriptions of Ijebu cloth in Elmina date to 1519. By 1621 Portuguese ships were acquiring slaves and textiles directly from the King of Ijebu, though by the late seventeenth century it appears this trade had stalled. Kriger, ‘Mapping the History of Cotton Textile Production’, 102–3; Law, ‘Trade and Politics,’’321–6; A.F.C. Ryder, Materials for West African History in Portuguese Archives (London, 1965), 16, John Vogt, Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 1469–1882 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), 68.

28 Kriger, ‘“Guinea Cloth”’, 122–3.

29 John Adams, Remarks on the Country Extending from Cape Palmas to the River of the Congo, Including the Observations on the Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants., (London: G. and W.B. Whittaker, 1823), 79.

30 Philip Curtin, Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 232–3.

31 John Adams, Remarks, 94.

32 Colleen Kriger argues that weaving techniques likely circulated among Benin, Ijebu-Ode, and Ife in the fifteenth century. In addition to the extensive nature of markets for domestically produced cotton cloths, textiles comprised the ‘largest and most valuable category of commodities imported into Africa during the Atlantic slave trade era as a whole’. Kriger, Cloth in West African History, 32–4, 42–3; Colleen Kriger, ‘The Importance of Mande Textiles in the African Side of the Atlantic Trade, ca. 1680-1710’, Mande Studies 11 (2009): 1–21, 2.

33 Cloth woven on horizontal treadle looms mostly by male artisans was narrower, and the resulting strips could then be sewn together to make sizable pieces while female weavers produced wider cloth on vertical looms. Kriger, ‘“Guinea Cloth”’, 111, Carolyn Marion Keyes, ‘Adire: Cloth, Gender and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria, 1841-1991’, (Ph.D. Dissertation: The University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993), 68–9.

34 As Robin Law notes in Oyo Muslim men dominated cloth manufacture, while in Ijebu women comprised the majority of textile artisans. Robin Law, The Oyo Empire, C. 1600-1836: A West African Imperialism In the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Aldershot, England: Gregg Revivals, 1991), 204–5.

35 These indigo dyed textiles were used as currency in the region, particularly in Timbuktu’s salt trade. Travelers noted that Kano cloth made it south to the Atlantic coast, where it competed with Yoruba-made textiles. Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘Interregional Monetary Flows in the Precolonial Trade of Nigeria’, The Journal of African History 15, no. 4 (1974): 56–85; Philip J. Shea, ‘Big is Sometimes Best: The Sokoto Caliphate and the Economic Advantages of Size in the Textile Industry’, African Economic History, no. 34 (2006): 5–21; Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa: Being a Journal of an Expedition, Undertaken under the Auspices of H.B. M’s Government in the Years 1849-1855 (Cass, 1857), 510–2.

36 Women aided by children were also purported to be the primary textiles makers in Benin during this period, Kriger, Cloth in West African History, 43, and Curtin, Africa Remembered, 263.

37 Curtin, Africa Remembered, 253.

38 Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (hereafter AHU), Conselho Ultramarino (hereafter CU), Bahia-Avulsos, Caixa 105, Documentos 8246-8249, Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 34.

39 Merchants found they could complete voyages 30 percent more quickly at these eastern ports than in Ouidah. They could also complete cargoes more inexpensively. At Porto Novo one enslaved man was valued at eight to twelve rolls of tobacco, in contrast to thirteen to sixteen rolls in Ouidah. Verger, Trade Relations, 167; Law, ‘Trade and Politics behind the Slave Coast’, 328, Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 35.

40 By the 1780s Porto Novo had eclipsed Ouidah as the most active slave trading port in the Bight of Benin. Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City, 35.

41 Mixed race (pardo) slaving ship captain André Pinto de Silveira established his own feitoria (slave trading fort) in Porto Novo in 1820 where he was active in the transatlantic trade at least until 1824. Men like Silveira formed part of the interwoven ‘Atlantic community’ which connected the Slave Coast and Brazil. Arquivo Histórico do Itamaraty (hereafter AHI), Colleções Especiaes, Commissão Mista, Lata 9, Maço 2, Pasta 1, Crioula, 113, Voyages of the Slave Trade Database, Voyage 476, União (1824), Robin Law and Kristin Mann, ‘West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast’, The William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (Apr. 1999): 307–34.

42 Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City, 41–43, Lisa Aronson, ‘History of Cloth Trade in the Niger Delta’, Textile History 11, no. 1 (1980): 89–107, 93.

43 Oliveira also, according to royal officials, had acquired a ‘large cloth of three lengths called Mandy’ and four additional ‘painted’ cloths of the same kind. These may have been Mande cloths from ports further west such as Elmina. AHU, CU-Bahia Eduardo de Castro e Almeida, Caixa 44, Documento 8244.

44 Colleen Kriger asserts that Europeans exported Yoruba cloth to both Brazil and the West Indies. Kriger, ‘“Guinea Cloth”,, 104. Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia (hereafter APEB), Secção Colonial e Provincial no. 138, 278.

45 ‘Mapa geral de toda a qualidade de embarcações que ha na Capitania da Bahia e navegam para a Costa da Mina, Angola’, AHU, CU-Bahia, Caixa 47, Doc. 8812, July 3, 1775.

46 Slaving negotiations also involved trade for other goods, including textiles (silks, satins, taffetas, velvets, denim, calico printed cottons from Britain and Asia), tobacco, sugar cane liquor, household tools, beads and jewelry and cowrie shells. Arquivo Nacional Rio de Janeiro (hereafter ANRJ), Fundo Junta do Comércio, Fábricas e Navagações, Caixa 410, Pacote 1, Papers of the São Miguel de Triunfante, 7–14.

47 Despite their enslaved status these men could hold property or peculium with the approval of their owners in colonial Brazil. Mary E. Hicks, ‘Financing the Luso-Atlantic Slave Trade: Collective Investment Practices from Portugal to Brazil, 1500-1822’, Journal of Global Slavery 2 (2017): 273–309, 286–7.

48 Barbers were commonly the primary medical officer aboard slaving ships. This was not Gomes’ only voyage. The man, originally from the Mina Coast, travelled to West Africa in 1811 on the Urbano. APEB, Tribunal de Justiça. Escritura de Debito, Livro 157, p 190v.

49 APEB, Secção Colonial e Provincial, no. 568-1, ‘Termos dos Cativos Mortos 1810-1811’.

50 Forty-eight of these panos da costa had been purchased alongside 95 captives from notorious Portuguese slave trader residing on the African coast, Francisco Felix da Souza in Ouidah in April 1812, ANRJ, Fundo Junta do Comércio, Fábricas e Navagações, Caixa 410, Pacote 1, Papers of the São Miguel de Triunfante, 7, 15.

51 The crochet pattern here likely referred to an ‘openwork’ or lace style (Asọ oníhò in Yoruba) in which the weave was altered to create a row of holes. Kriger, Cloth in West African History, 20, Keyes, ‘Adire’, 71.

52 ANRJ, Fundo Junta do Comércio, Fábricas e Navagações, Caixa 410, Pacote 1, Papers of the São Miguel de Triunfante, 7–8.

53 ANRJ, Fundo Junta do Comércio, Fábricas e Navagações, Caixa 410, Pacote 1, Papers of the São Miguel de Triunfante, 8–9.

54 ANRJ, Junto do Comércio, Fábricas e Navegações, Caixa 410, Papers of the Divina Providencia, 31–33.

55 By the late seventeenth century Europeans had begun purchasing ‘Benin cloth’ at a standard 3-piece and 4-piece lengths, Kriger, ‘“Guinea Cloth”’, 113.

56 Kriger, Cloth in West African History, 19.

57 Ibid., 56.

58 William H. Clarke, Travels and Explorations in Yorubaland, 1854-1858 (Ibadan University Press: Ibadan, Nigeria, 1972), 273.

59 Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language, 168–9, Kriger, Cloth in West African History, 47.

60 Joaquim Marques Loureiro, a slaving ship owner who died on the West African coast in 1813, possessed one brocade pano da costa and four large panos da costa bedspreads along with many other textiles of European origins. APEB, Justiça, Inventário de Joaquim Marques Loureiro, 4/1511/1980/5, 11-12.

61 Luís dos Santos Vilhena, Recopliação de noticias soteropolitanas e brasilicas contidas em XX cartas, vol. 2 (Bahia: Imprensa Official do Estado, 1921), 59.

62 Luis dos Santos Vilhenia, ‘Bahia in the Late Colonial Period’, translated by Gerald G. Curtis, in I Saw a City Invincible: Urban Portraits of Latin America, eds. Gilbert M. Joseph and Mark D. Szuchman (Oxford: SR Books, 1992), 98.

63 Harding, A Refuge in the Thunder, 173–5.

64 Grito da Razão, Bahia, 2 March 1824.

65 Ganhadeiros were wage-earning bondspeople. Grito da Razão, Bahia, 25 February 1825.

66 APEB, Justiça, Testamento de Lino Ricardo, Livro 12, 34.

67 APEB, Justiça, Inventário de Lucinda e Raimundo, 05/2006/2477/09.

68 During the early nineteenth century, Britain and Portugal (and later Britain and independent Brazil) accepted a series of bi-lateral treaties which permitted the capture and adjudication of Bahian slaving vessels under varying conditions. An 1815 treaty limited Portuguese slaving to south of the equator and after 1817 the Royal Navy again began seizing Bahian slaving vessels found northern ports. After Brazilian Independence in 1822, a renegotiated agreement between Britain and Brazil in 1825 recommitted the nascent empire to abolition of the trade and the Equipment Act of 1839 made seizure of suspected vessels easier. Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question, 1807-1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 8, 16–7, 52.

69 House of Commons Papers, Vol. 42, 115–6.

70 APEB, Tribunal de Justiça. 05/1977/2449/10, Inventário de Ventura Ferreira Milles.

71 João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The African Muslim Uprising in Bahia, 1835, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 223.

72 Rocha died a single man, with one daughter named Florinda, whose mother, an enslaved Hausa woman named Silveira, had passed away. APEB, Tribunal de Justiça, Testamento de Francisco da Rocha, Livro 19, 276, APEB, Tribunal de Justiça, Testamento de Bernardino de Sena, Livro 28, 98V.

73 APEB, Tribunal de Justiça, Testamento de Francisco da Rocha, Livro 19, 277.

74 Luis Nicolau Parés, ‘Milicianos, barbeiros e traficantes numa irmandade cathólica de africanos minas e jejes (Bahia, 1770-1830)’, Revista Tempo 20 (2014): 1–32, 28.

75 João José Reis, ‘From Slave to Wealthy African Freedman: The Story of Manoel Joaquim Ricardo’, in Biography and the Black Atlantic, eds. Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 133–4.

76 These included Elias Domingos de Carvalho, Antônio Caetano Coelho, Seca Medair, Joaquim de Almeida, Agostinho de Freitas, and Antônio Vieira dos Santos. The National Archives-London (hereafter NA), Foreign Office 315/48/48, Papers of the Gratidão, Letter to Joaquim de Almeida, Bahia, September 5, 1840.

77 ‘Nagô’ was an ethnonym for Yoruba in Brazil. The reason for these merchants’ Portuguese names is unclear, they also perhaps had formerly been enslaved in Bahia. NA, Foreign Office, 315/48/48, Papers of the Gratidão, Letter to Antônio Caetano Coelho, Bahia, August 11, 1840.

78 For more on the aftermath of the Malê revolt and the resulting diaspora of African returnees see Cunha, Negros, estrangeiros. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the textile trade between Lagos and Bahia retained its vibrancy despite the abrupt termination of the illegal slave trade in 1850. This period coincided with growth of the textile trade from Lagos and by 1857 the port city was exporting 50,000 units annually. Cunha, Negros, estrangeiros, 148.

79 These newspapers include: Idade D’ Ouro do Brazil, Correiro Mercantil, Grito da Razão and Suplemento ao Bahiano.

80 Enslaved man Vicente, of the ‘Tapa nation’ escaped wearing pants made of a pano da costa. Idade D’ Ouro do Brazil, Bahia, 25 July1815. A ‘young boy’ from Quelimane escaped wearing pants made of ‘thick’ panos da costa. Idade D’Ouro do Brazil, Bahia, Numero 84, October 23, year unknown. In 1818 a “ladino’ Fulani boy named Domingos escaped wearing pants of panos da costa and a blue denim jacket, Idade D’Ouro do Brazil, Bahia, 21 May 21 1819. Benedita, from Calabar ‘still unacculturated’ ran away wearing a ‘used’ pano da costa, Supplemento ao Bahiano, Bahia, 1 September 1829. The youngest identified wearer of a pano da costa was Julieta, a ‘freed African girl’ between 11 and 12 years old, Correio Mercantil, Bahia, 17 May 1838. Luiza, a woman of 30–5, with filed teeth and from the ‘Nagô nation’ escaped while wearing a pano da costa, Correio Mercantil, Bahia, 13, August 1838. A 50-year-old ‘creole’ or American born enslaved woman named Joanna, escaped while wearing a skirt, cotton blouse, white head wrap, gold hoop earrings and a pano da costa, Correiro Mercantil, Bahia, 21 August 1838. Manoel, with the facial marks of a ‘Nagô or Tapa’ escaped wearing pants made of panos da costa, Correiro Mercantil, Bahia, 6 October 1838. David, of the ‘Hausa nation’ also ran away wearing blue and white stripped panos da costa pants, Correiro Mercantil, Bahia, 4 December 1838. Constança, an enslaved woman from Cabinda escaped with several panos da costa, Correiro Mercantil, Bahia, 9 February 1839. Felisarda, an Angolan woman ran away while wearing a ‘worn-out red and blue stripped’ pano da costa the same year. Correiro Mercantil, Bahia, 11 December 1839. A Nagô woman, Delfina meanwhile wore a solidly blue pano da costa. Correiro Mercantil, Bahia, 19 June 1840. Felicidade, from the “Mina nation’ adorned herself with a pano da costa ‘grosso meio alacar’ with fine red and blue stripes. Correiro Mercantil, Bahia, 22 October 1841. Maria Antonia, a Gege woman, ran away wearing a ‘fine and new’ blue pano da costa. Correiro Mercantil, Bahia, 28 November 1841. Carolina a Nagô woman escaped wearing one ‘English’ pano da costa, and red coral ‘figa’ earring in the shape of a fist. Correiro Mercantil, Bahia, 15 December 1847.

81 John Adams, Sketches, 25.

82 In the mid-nineteenth century, James Wetherell described the unique and elegant character of local dress for ‘black women’: ‘The upper part of the dress above the petticoat is made of fine muslin … The part round the bust is edged with broad lace; small armlets, richly worked, are joined with a double gold button; … The skirt of the dress is very voluminous forming a complete circle when placed upon the ground; the lower edge is bordered with lace or has a white arabesque pattern sewed upon it; the inner petticoat is likewise edged with lace … .The arms are covered with bracelets of coral and gold beads, &c. The neck loaded with chains and the hands with rings … A handsome coast cloth is thrown over the shoulder. These cloths are woven into small stripes of colored cotton from two to four inches wide in striped or checked patterns and the slips sewed together to form a shawl … .the favorite color now is bluish gray ground with dull crimson stripes. A large handkerchief of white net or lace or colored muslin with white lace border or black net is most gracefully made into a turban for the head, and curious earrings complete the costume’. Verger, Trade Relations, 464.

83 Enslaved man Osifekunde, explained that in early nineteenth century Ijebu, tailors fashioned strip-woven cloth into wrappers for women and vests and trousers for men. While African men in Bahia sometimes wore panos da costa tailored into a shirt. Curtin, Africa Remembered, 263; Verger, Trade Relations, 449.

84 Tapa was the Brazilian term for Africans from Nupe. Correiro Mercantil, Bahia, 3 Oct. 1839.

85 Correiro Mercantil, Bahia, 25 October 1839.

86 Ibid., 17 May 1838.

87 Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, Feitos Findos-Juizo da Índia e Mina, Maço 33, numero 16, Caixa 157, Acção civil de embargos a primeira em que a autora a Irmandade de Jesus Maria José, erecta no convent do Monte do Carmo, por Maria Luiza e seu filho Custódio, e reu Custódio José Ribeiro Guimares, 1824.

88 APEB, Tribunal de Justiça, Inventário de Francisco de Nazereth, 5/2011/2482/4, 14.

89 Verger, Trade Relations, 465.

90 As Parés explains a variety of West African influenced spiritual and healing practices evolved in Salvador during the course of the nineteenth century. Private homes housed ritual alters, and diviner-healer activities which tended to be small in scale and driven by individual ritual practitioners. Candomblé terreiros or dedicated ritual spaces with elaborate ritual leadership and extensive clientele only appear in documentation after 1864. Candomblé congregations included both enslaved and free, Brazilian-born and African-born, white and black, though the leadership was heavily African-born. Luis Nicolau Parés, The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 112-117 and João José Reis, Divining Slavery and Freedom: The Story of Domingos Sodré: An African Priest in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 88.

91 Lisa Earl Castillo and Luis Nicolau Parés, ‘Marcelina da Silva: A Nineteenth Century Candomblé Priestess in Bahia’, Slavery & Abolition 31 (2010): 1–27.

92 Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil, 143.

93 Reis, ‘From Slave to Wealthy African Freedman’,143.

94 Reis, ‘From Slave to Wealthy African Freedman’, 143.

95 Reis, Divining Freedom, 95.

96 Case Watkins, ‘An Afro-Brazilian Landscape: African Oil Palms and Socioecological Change in Bahia, Brazil’, (PhD. Diss., Louisiana State University, 2015), 257.

97 Watkins, ‘An Afro-Brazilian Landscape’, 258.

98 Sabina da Cruz had consigned a variety of panos to João do Prado Carvalho including 11 blue textiles, 22 ‘panos da costa sanhá’ or crocheted cloth, and 23 panos da costa Tepolás in 1872 as well as others such as Placido Felix do Nacimento, APEB, Tribunal de Justiça, Inventário 03/1100/1569/7, 22, 85. In a later period, 1896, Afro-Brazilian woman Felicidade Maria de Sant’Anna imported 24 panos da costa worth 216$000 réis from Lagos, alongside black soap, kola nuts, and gourds. Cunha, Negros, estrangeiros, 159.

99 Straw mats, palm oil and cowry shells acted as important ritual offerings to orixás during religious ceremonies such as divination and initiation. Parés, The Formation of Candomblé, 90, Robert A. Voeks, Sacred Leaves of Candomblé: African Magic, Medicine, and Religion in Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 90, Reis, Divining Freedom, 92–108.

100 After the slave trade ended, the number of voyages between Salvador and Africa slowed, eventually to a trickle. In 1867 23 ships left for Africa, in 1868 15, 21 in 1870, and in 1871 18. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Rodrigues estimates that three or four ships a year made the journey. Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, Os Africanos no Brasil, 113, Cunha, Negros, estrangeiros, 158.

101 Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 119, Santos, Economia e cultura do Candomblé, 18–21.

102 Mestre Abdias e o pano-da-costa, directed by Raul Lody, Instituto Nacional do Folclore e Cultura Popular (Brasil), 1982, Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 212–5.

103 Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 92, 119, Herskovits, ‘Some Economic Aspects of Afrobahian Candomble’, 227–30, Santos, Economia e cultura do Candomblé, 108–9.

104 Mestre Abdias e o pano-da-costa, Lody.

105 Raul Giovanni Lody, Panos da Costa (Fundação de Arte—Cadernos de Folclore; 1977), 3–7, Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara, Manipulating the Sacred: Yorùbá Art, Ritual and Resistance in Brazilian Candomblé (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 45–8.

106 Ibid.

107 Herskovits, ‘Some Economic Aspects of the Afrobahian Candomble’, 230.

108 Rodrigues, Os Africanos no Brasil, 127–8.

109 Lody, Panos da Costa, 3–6.

110 Ibid.

111 Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 118.

112 B.J. Barickman, ‘“A Bit of Land, Which They Call Roça,”: Slave Provision Grounds in the Bahian Reconçavo, 1780-1860’, Hispanic American Historical Review 74, no. 4 (1994): 649–87; Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 159.

113 Matory stresses the distinction between passive ‘memory’, ‘survival’, or ‘tradition’ and active ‘strategic re-creation’. Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 70.

114 James H. Sweet, ‘Reimagining the African-Atlantic Archive: Method, Concept, Epistemology, Ontology’, Journal of African History 55 (2014): 147–59,148.