PDF The Black Church in the African American Experience by C. Eric Lincoln; Lawrence H. Mamiya in History

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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 western coast of Africa; particularly from modern-day Benin. She describes a Catholic lay brotherhood formed by the enslaved Mina congregants of a Rio church; and she situates the brotherhood in a panoramic setting encompassing the historical development of the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa and the ethnic composition of Mina slaves in eighteenth-century Rio. Although Africans from the Mina Coast constituted no more than ten percent of the slave population of Rio; they were a strong presence in urban life at the time. Soares analyzes the role that Catholicism; and particularly lay brotherhoods; played in Africans’ construction of identities under slavery in colonial Brazil. As in the rest of the Portuguese empire; black lay brotherhoods in Rio 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 the value of church records for historical research.