Divining slavery and freedom

Divining slavery and freedom

João José Reis · 2015

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1. The 1862 police raid on Sodré

   In 1862 Bahian police raided the house of Domingos Sodré, an African-born freedman, seizing divination objects and ritual paraphernalia on suspicion he used Candomblé to help enslaved people buy their freedom — allegedly by having them steal from masters to pay for manumission and spiritual protection. The episode left a documentary trace that allows reconstruction of a single freed African's religious practice, economic activity, and household from police and notarial records.

2. Divination as a freedom economy

   African diviners in nineteenth-century Bahia operated an economy in which enslaved clients paid for rituals believed to secure manumission, soften masters, and protect against recapture. Religious practice thus functioned as a practical instrument within the struggle over slavery, not merely as a spiritual or cultural survival.

3. The freed African as intermediary figure

   A manumitted African could occupy an ambiguous middle position — legally free yet still African and suspect, connected both to the enslaved community he served and to the freedman property-owning class he had entered. This intermediary status made him simultaneously a resource for the enslaved and a target for authorities policing the boundary between slavery and freedom.

4. Reading repression records against their intent

   Police seizures, trial documents, and persecution files, created to suppress African religion, become the primary evidence for reconstructing the very practices and lives they aimed to erase. Reading these hostile sources against their grain recovers the agency and inner world of people who left few records of their own.

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