Relocating the Sacred: African Divinities and Brazilian Cultural Hybridities by Niyi Afolabi (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Relocating the Sacred: African Divinities and Brazilian Cultural Hybridities by Niyi Afolabi Cajetan Iheka Relocating the Sacred: African Divinities and Brazilian Cultural Hybridities BY NIYI AFOLABI SUNY Press, 2022. 366 pp. ISBN 9781438490717 cloth. Niyi Afolabi opens his fascinating study Relocating the Sacred: African Divinities and Brazilian Cultural Identities with the story of his first trip to Brazil and the shock at the Africanist presence and religious consciousness in Bahia. Afolabi recalls his befuddlement at the common use of Yoruba language and consecration of Yoruba deities as spiritual anchors in Bahia. Afolabi’s confusion results from the denigration of the same cultural practices—indigenous language and spiritual practices—in Nigeria in the face of colonial modernity, a development that continues today. In Brazil, however, these African divinities are vibrant cultural [End Page 177] expressions mobilized for survival in a New World context steeped in violence for African descendants since slavery. Relocating the Sacred is a captivating study of traveling theory and praxis, of how Afro-Brazilians relocated religious and cultural practices to cope with the dehumanizing impacts of slavery and ongoing marginalization within a Brazil wracked by continuous legacies of slavery, colonialism, and globalization. Afolabi’s emphasis on “relocating” is a particular strength of his book as the term locates intentional agency in the hands of the Africans whose cultural heritage was not tabula rasa, as the colonizers would love to claim. The relocative thrust of the book reclaims a culturally rich society that the Afro-Brazilians were displaced from even as it emphasizes the work of syncretism that attended the migration of sacred practices to the Brazilian space. In Brazil, these sacred practices not only allowed for grappling with the traumas of forced displacement; they also offered a technology for dealing with the hauntings of the slavery past in the Brazilian state’s treatment of its Black citizens. As he has done in previous studies, Afolabi takes Brazil’s myth of racial democracy to task for excluding Afro-Brazilians in an equitable conceptualization of the nation and citizenry. As Afolabi asks in Relocating the Sacred, “why do these African cultural practices persist amidst the onslaught of globalization? Within a context of ongoing racial discrimination and demonization of Blackness, what roles exist for identifiable religious-cum-sacred rituals?” (3). Afolabi’s study argues “that the tension between the theory of racial democracy and the practice of white supremacy in Brazil opens the space for syncretism of cultures, including African sacred practices” (3). Afolabi locates three specific locations of culture for this syncretism, namely ritual altar, literature, and carnival culture. Each of the three sections of the book investigates each site of cultural production, showing how the “syncretism of African sacred practices offers a technology for grappling with enduring racisms, provides a strategy of resistance against white hegemonic power, and serves as a tool in the ongoing efforts toward decolonization” (3). The book’s robust argument unfolds across ten meticulous, well-researched chapters. Chapter one offers a necessary historical context for appreciating the relocation of the sacred from Africa to Brazil. The chapter rightfully contextualizes Bahia as the crossroads of cultures—secular and sacred and the meeting point of Catholicism and African religions—resulting in a negotiated hybridization. The chapter showcases cultural organizations and religious practices rooted in Bahia, including Ile Aiye Afro-Carnival Group and Filhos de Gandhi, which functions as a Candomblé house. These organizations facilitate the relocation of the sacred by “consistently showcas[ing] African values and Afro-Catholic themes” (46). The erudite and balanced second chapter reappraises the life and career of the French anthropologist Pierre Verger, who Afolabi considers “an oracular enigma” and “an embodiment of divine contradiction” (56). While acknowledging Verger’s important contribution to the preservation of Yoruba culture in the diaspora and the brilliance of his photography, Afolabi draws attention to the equally important problem of colonial research practices. Afolabi scrutinizes the privileged access that foreigners such as Verger had to sacred spaces inaccessible to most Africans, the colonial expropriation of African knowledge by Verger and other researchers, and the demotion of Africans to “informants” in this colonial economy of knowledge production. [End Page 178] If Verger’s work in chapter...