Death, Catholicism and Africanity in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the 18th century

Abstract

In the same terms in which the Black people rebuilt their African traditions in the eighteenth century slavish society, they could certainly realize the rituals of the Catholicism as something that had its principles, made some sense to them, and also had its justification. In this way, it is relevant to consider that the appropriation of some of the Catholic dogmas by the Black Africans and their descendants must be regarded as the result of their effective faith in them. An example was the existence of significant Black leaderships from Saint Elesbão and Saint Efigênia brotherhood in Rio de Janeiro in the seventeenth century, which assumed firmly the catholic beliefs in such a way that they settled a devotion to the souls in the purgatory, in 1786, not only with the aim of saving the souls of their deceased brothers, according to the catholic doctrine, but also as a part of a project that disseminated the Christian death, which was led by the African Blacks themselves. Based on the analysis of this case, as well as, the study of a sample of parochial records concerning the death and the testaments of The Africans and their descendants relating to the eighteenth century, I propose to discuss theoretically the nature of the catechesis project appropriations aimed at the Black people, especially regarding the representations around death itself, of dying, and also the afterlife. To this end arguments will be analyzed, as for example the ones from John Thorton, James Sweet, Vincent Brown, João José Reis and Anderson Oliveira stated on the relations between Catholicism and Africanism, concerning the religious experiences among Africans and their descendants in Rio de Janeiro in the seventeenth century.