The entire world was captivated on the 8th of January as we all watched anarchy descend on the Brazilian capital city of Brasilia, in scenes reminiscent of the United States capital riots of January 2021, two years before. One of the strands and influences connecting these similar displays of chaos was/is a very populous right-wing, Christian Evangelist sentiment and movement that in many recent instances have displayed a willingness to resort to violence to achieve their objectives almost as a ‘sacrosanct right’. Not far removed, in form and function, from the Christian Crusades of yesteryear.
After all, it is also in Brazil where we have on record, possibly the youngest person murdered because of their faith and its associated practices. 11-year old Kailane Campos was murdered in 2015 by gangs of Christian vigilantes charged with the same religious imperative; intolerance of any other that did not align with their own. It is executions like his that reinforce the need for mobilising to secure necessary socio-political protections for adherents of African and African-derived spiritual systems across the globe as I covered in a seminar series produced for UK’s Black History Month 2023. Watch entire series here.
What makes it all sadder is that Brazil is also one of the few places where legislation has been enacted to recognise and make space for the various African spiritual derivatives like Macumba, Umbanda, Candomble and the like strewn across the cultural foundations of Brazilian society. So we wonder how such could even take place without adequate recourse to justice or the existing legal protections acting as deterrent?
The answers were made evident during the recent presidential elections when the socialist candidate, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as Lula, won against the hard right candidate Jair Bolsonaro and what consequently nearly ensued was a coup.
Be assured this isn’t a political article at all to raise support one way or other, but to highlight some important observations that came to light because of this election victory and the relevance and intersection of their guiding faiths or religious orientations. Our focus is and will always be the retention of the African Cosmological corpus, however, it would also be rather naïve if I didn’t highlight where and how politics influence faith and consequently, associated actions and if indeed, they can be divorced from each other.
After all, we can also surmise that one of the first recorded instances of seeing such a political interference in faith was when Akhenaten and his wife, Nefertiti tried to manipulate the ancient Kemet corpus into a monolithic ‘religion’ that would only elevate their status and none other. Or Emperor Constantine and his council having absolute power to decide what the composition of the first bible would be, as many know it today.
It is worth noting some striking differences between the 2 candidates and their track records. Under Lula, Brazil witnessed the highest rise in social and academic mobility of its ‘lower classes’, unsurprisingly made up disproportionately of those of African and Indigenous descent. In this way, he was and continues to be a proponent of the idea of collective benefit for a wider section of the populace, not just a few elites, a notion tied into a socialist concept called ‘Emulacion Socialista’ (socialist emulation), which I expounded deeper on in my other article on Cuba; read here.
There are core similarities and correlations Emulacion Socialista shares with the sacred concept of UBUNTU in the African framework, which is that the wellbeing and development of a community is dependent on how its members support and build each other up. Fundamentally, I am because we are; “It is not I, it is me and me is WE”, to quote scholar-activist Baba Dr Wade Nobles.
Bolsanaro, on the hand, had a proud history of being a military man who has openly spoken in favour of the genocide of the indigenous populations and erasure of liberated areas (quilombos) where former enslaved Africans settled, all in favour of big business, with no regard for cultural and historical considerations.
In his short term as president, he had revived reckless exploration rights in the Amazon without due recourse to consideration of the environmental damage it would cause or those it would harm. The difference in perspective and ideology between the two couldn’t be clearer with regard for human consideration and rights to being.
In the electoral campaigns something even more perplexing happened. Lula had gone to a terreiro (basically an African shrine house) to commune and engage with our Ancestral energies and the wife of Bolsanaro took to publicly denouncing him with long-standing colonial tropes, of being ‘a devil worshipper’, one who would bring ruin to the Nation specifically because of his professed faith; pure, ignorant, hateful bile with no factual justification.
Purporting the same negative rhetoric that’s been used for centuries in maligning and distorting African Spiritual Systems, but at state-level, in contradiction of the country’s own legislature for protection of faiths.
As a result, abuse, mistreatment, and violence against Brazil’s practitioners also increased, with social ostracisation and physical harm as the result. This religious hate speech was used continuously as part of Bolsanaro’s electoral campaign, in an attempt to dig into the widely held irrational fears many have been indoctrinated to have of African Spirituality. It was state-sanctioned hatred. Full stop. Yet, happened it did.
Least we also forget, one of the main reasons we don’t find African faiths legally recognised worldwide is also due to another state-sanctioned act, this time by the British Empire in Jamaica with The Obeah Act of 1898. Even before some Diasporan derivatives such as Haitian Vodou, Brazilian Candomblé, Suriname Winti, or Cuban Lukumi/Santeria was ever given legal consideration in the ‘Western world’, it had already been afforded a criminal status in Jamaica after the success of the Maroon wars and prohibited.
The reasons for this were clearly noted by English historians like Edward Young, who wrote of African Cosmology’s positive influence on the enslaved in rebelling against the inhumane act of trafficking human beings. As a result, attacking African spiritual expressions became an act of war and was used to subdue further rebellions by seeking out and killing the spiritual leaders of freedom fighters as a first and essential objective (Tacky’s Revolt, Vincent Brown, Harvard University Press, 2020).
The obtuse definitions and clauses in the Obeah Act were deliberate to cover and prohibit nearly all aspects of African cultural expressions and associating it with criminality was a perfect way to sow misinformation and mistrust of it over time.
As this law still remains on the legislature in Jamaica, it technically means any Jamaican practising any form of ‘recognised’ African faith, say IFA, is doing something illegal.
Can you imagine?
Essential practices like divination are misconstrued as ‘sorcery’ and prohibited, but isn’t it interesting that divination is also found in other religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, yet somehow that remains overlooked?
So its ok for a Jamaican of Chinese or Indian descent to seek answers via say the I-Ching, and that’s ok but somehow the African version is nothing but fraud?
These double-standards need addressing in this time!
What makes it worse is there are members in the Jamaican Parliament today fighting against this law being repealed, another reminder of the long shadow of Colonialism even when we’ve assumed to have moved ‘beyond’ this heinous epoch of history.
The role of the British in pressurising the Jamaican government to repeal this law cannot be understated, as they’re the progenitors and also bears the responsibility of addressing historical wrongs it committed across its colonies, especially as it now proudly touts its ‘5 core values’ of being British, as one of those being ‘the freedom to practise and express one’s faith’. Really?!
Yet not a single African Tradition receives any form of National recognition in the UK, a rather bizarre way of putting these values into practice?
Back to Brazil, even after all the dirty tactics, including lawfare used to imprison the Lula beforehand to make him ineligible to stand for future elections, he still won! Looks like the ‘African Gods’ are not so powerless after all are they? Of course not, after all, we can only look to the history of liberating spaces in places like Suriname, Jamaica, Haiti etc to know that fact.
After the unexpected defeat, Bolsanaro and his followers attempted a rather genius strategy to take over the country by stealth, cue the riots of 8 January 2023.
I was at a workshop in the Latin American conference earlier this year featuring a speaker from Lula’s party who explained how they managed to overcome this chaos. At the time Lula was in another part of the country and at first glance the most effective means of quelling that rebellion would have been to send in the provincial army who were charged with that duty in such emergencies.
What Lula is said to have instead done was extremely fascinating as a technique for channelling spiritual guidance, some of which is covered in the workshop Elemental Ritual and as Prof Bayyinah Bello also espouses in Healing with the Elements.
He gave his attendants his phone and went into a room by himself with no digital devices and alone, returning about 10 minutes later with the correct decision that led to the peaceful ending we all witnessed. The consequent investigations into the organisers of the riots would reveal that the head of the provincial army was found to be in cahoots with the outgoing Bolsanaro, basically he was complicit. Had that army been sent in as per expected procedure, then the city would effectively fall under his jurisdiction, not the elected Lula.
See how spirit guidance works when we make time for it in our lives?
We come to experience their direct hands in our existence. To paraphrase the words of eminent UK educationist and scholar-activist Prof Gus John ‘Orisha is about centring and finding balance and equilibrium within ourselves’
It would be flippant of me to claim, ‘the African Gods have won’, relishing the schadenfreude but how flippant would that be, energies don’t ‘fight’ each other, for what? Since when does summer try to take over Autumn’s period?
No, only human beings are dumb enough to fight over what they could easily share for each to get a fair share.
A casual glance at the Natural Forces show us how they work in complimentary fashion to maintain equilibrium and it’s their unique characteristics that is required for that balance. Difference, therefore, is to be appreciated and learnt from, not despised, caricaturised and demonised!
Least we forget the violence in Brazil against devotees hasn’t stopped, perhaps not as widespread and as frequent only because these intolerant religious bigots are no longer emboldened by the same far-right rhetoric they believe, coming from the highest office in the land and are now compelled to move with caution.
So yes, a victory in one battle, but the war is much wider, broader, nuanced and deeply embedded in the psyche of the world, fully indoctrinated via ‘white juju’; the psychological processes, institutionalised systems and processes that propagates Afriphobia in and at every level of society.
We all know what the aim of ‘white juju’ has been since time immemorial – to fully erase the African corpus and practices from the collective human experience.
Well it can try, but if the pope’s decree (AD 1493) that encouraged the early Portuguese mercenaries or missionaries to go out and ‘civilise’ the ‘Heathens’ with the ‘right’ culture didn’t manage to do so entirely, nor the British laws of 1898, or any of the undemocratic clauses we still find in the constitutional frameworks of countries today manage to, then it’s clear it will always be a pipe-dream racist or religious bigots; it will never happen!
But there’s much work to do in every space we find ourselves. Advocating for, defending, maintaining and seeking our sacred Traditions and practices to be afforded the due respect and courtesy provided to others.
One of the places to start is at the link below, to help us lobby the UK Government to officially add Oshun’s festival in August to the calendar of UK’s nationally recognised religious festivals.
This will be a significant start to pave the way for others still maligned. As a signatory to the UN charter of human rights and with ‘freedom to practice one’s faith’ as part of its ‘5 core National values’, not forgetting the first state to officially ban a faith, the UK government carries a great responsibility to redress. Let us help it do so. Thank you in advance!
https://www.change.org/p/list-osun-s-festival-as-part-of-uk-s-celebrated-religious-festivals
By Dalian Adofo, BA(Hons), PGCE, MA