Confraternities in the Portuguese Atlantic World

Confraternities, known in Portuguese as irmandades and confrarias, functioned as devotional and mutual aid societies, which connected African-born and African-descended people in networks of mutuality beyond kinship ties in early modern Portugal, West Central Africa, and Brazil. Lay Catholic brotherhoods constituted important religious, civic, and social associations in the Portuguese Atlantic world. Sodalites were organized by priests and lay persons to venerate one or more patron saints and associations prioritized the extension of charity as an act of piety directed toward members or non-members, depending on the class standing of participants. Lay Catholic brotherhoods emerged in the late Middle Ages on the Iberian Peninsula and became part of daily life in Portugal and in Portugal’s early modern colonial territories, including Brazil and Angola. Confraternities also appeared in politically autonomous West Central African territories with significant Portuguese influence, including the Kingdoms of Kongo and Matamba and adjacent areas.¹ Historically, confraternities principally consisted of lay Catholics or those who had not taken vows to enter religious life or monastic communities.

The earliest lay Catholic brotherhoods populated by people of African origin and their descendants were dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, an iteration of the Virgin Mary. Priests of the Dominican order and local residents founded sodalities together. The Dominican order committed to the dissemination of devotion and reverence of the Virgin Mary as a model of piety and members and devotees connected to the order worked to heighten her visibility among all laity in Catholic realms and territories in Europe.² The earliest sodalities devoted to Our Lady of the Rosary in Portugal included members from the kingdom. However, as enslavers brought West and West Central African forced laborers to the Iberian Peninsula and acculturation unfolded, people of African origin and descent became a segment of the populace participating in Catholic devotional practice. As the Black population grew, devotees participated in the same organizations across lines of race. However, by the 1490s in Portugal, whites and Blacks separated due to intensifying racial boundaries and participants came to organize themselves into predominantly racially separate sodalities.³ In colonial (1500–1822) and imperial Brazil (1822–1889), this pattern of racial stratification was preponderant but not absolute from the 16th through the late 19th centuries.

Boundaries Among the Faithful: From Ethnic to Racialized Collective Identities

Confraternities tended to be racially exclusive in the Portuguese empire. Elite white Portuguese groups prohibited membership for people designated as Moorish, Jewish, African, or of mixed-race heritage or lineage in Portugal and Portuguese America. In West Central Africa, Catholicism arrived with Portuguese explorers and missionaries, but political leaders of the Kingdom of Kongo took on the practice of Roman Catholicism in the 1490s after the conversion of Nzinga a Nkuwu (r. 1470–1509), who adopted the name João I to honor his new links to the king of Portugal and Christendom.⁴ Confraternities in West Central Africa before the 1600s involved members of the kingdom’s political elite and nobility, due to the connection between Catholicism, Portuguese trade, and prestige for West Central African rulers.⁵

In Portuguese America, brotherhoods composed of African migrants and descendants accepted Black and non-Black members. Black-identified associations generally had one African ethnic group that restricted leadership positions to individuals from that background. Brotherhoods dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary before the mid-19th century, for example, typically allowed only persons designated as “of the Congo nation” or “of Angola” (de nação Congo) or (de Angola) to serve as administrative officers or kings and queens of organizational festivities.⁶ The Brotherhood of Saint Ephigênia and Saint Elesbão (Saint Elesbaan) has been documented as limiting leadership and membership to people self-designating as “of the Mina nation” (de nação Mina) and Brazilian-born African descendants, also referenced as crioulos.⁷ Non-Black priests and individuals holding strong affinities for a given saint might join sodalities even if they were not part of the predominant ethnic or racial group populating the association. While in the early colonial period, ethnicity routinely constituted a critical factor determining eligibility for belonging among African forced arrivals and their descendants, by the 19th century brotherhoods morphed into associative spaces where ethnic designations became less critical and a pan-ethnic Black identification emerged.⁸

In colonial Brazil, the first brotherhoods were dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary and this confraternity had the largest number of autonomously organized groups. Scholars date the earliest Black confraternity in Portuguese America to the year 1552. Jesuit missionaries and laypeople constituted the members and adherents in the province of Pernambuco.⁹ Initial Black brotherhoods were founded in the northeastern captaincies of Pernambuco and Bahia as early sites of population density, sugar cultivation, and economic prosperity. Salvador da Bahia, the first capital of Brazil until 1763, when Rio de Janeiro became the center of the colony, as of 1686 housed the Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary of Conceição da Praia.¹⁰ Minas Gerais constituted another area in which Black confraternities emerged in large numbers, likely due to the ability of residents in gold-mining areas to devote portions of their discretionary incomes to associational life, but also due to the prohibition of religious orders, which made confraternities a critical mode of Catholic education and institutional edification.¹¹ By the 1750s, Black confraternities had been established across prosperous cities and capitals in the captaincies or provinces of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Rio Grande do Sul among others. As urban institutions, Black lay Catholic brotherhoods dotted city centers and functioned as physical sites of assembly for African-origin and African-descended populations who gathered to celebrate the saints devoted to Black populations.

Churches founded by Black confraternities functioned as assembly points for African- and Brazilian-born African descendants from all walks of life.¹² Sodalities and the churches and altars which housed them functioned as physical and symbolic spaces where African immigrants and their Brazilian-born descendants blended African esthetics and baroque Catholicism as they did the work of utilizing and mixing extant Catholic practices with the emergent expressions of faith they would employ.¹³ Black-identified people also utilized the participatory space of confraternities to publicly demonstrate their presence in the cities where they lived and in the congregation of God. Black confreres used devotion as a way to build bonds with each other and to incorporate themselves into an important sphere of civic performance. Sodalities represented one of the few sites of independent Afro-Brazilian assembly that white Brazilian society encouraged, since the instruction of captives in issues of faith constituted a church and state objective.¹⁴ As historian Julita Scarano noted, during the colonial period “Religious brotherhoods of the kingdom looked to integrate all of the population including representatives of exotic races such as Moors, Blacks, and even Indians.”¹⁵

Membership

Scholars have had difficulty locating first-person sources indicating the factors motivating individuals to join lay Catholic brotherhoods among non-elites. Despite an absence of first-person accounts, existing historiography suggests that the disruption and trauma of the transatlantic slave trade and enslavement led to confraternities serving as sites of identification and integration in early modern Portugal and colonial Portuguese America. Entrants to the associations worked to establish a sense of belonging organized around ethnicity and, by the 19th century, racialized Black identities in Brazil.¹⁶ Associational members also utilized devotion as a way to participate in Catholic civic space. The juridical personality each association held made the groups sites of limited autonomy in the context of racial slavery.

Black brotherhoods generally admitted men and women as members, but organizational meeting minutes (atas) indicate that male leaders carried out administrative and general meetings with negligible female participation. Black confraternities, like other mixed-gender Catholic institutions, severely restricted female participation patterns, even though women made up approximately forty percent of total members of the Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary of Black Men of São Paulo during the last sixty years of the 19th century.¹⁷ This high level of female participation mirrored estimated female participation rates in other locales in 19th-century Brazil. Historian Elizabeth Kiddy noted that women represented approximately one-third of the overall membership in two confraternities in Mariana and Barbacena, Minas Gerais, in the 19th century, and historian João José Reis reported that women represented 48.6 percent of the members of the Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Mulattos at Boqueirão in Bahia.¹⁸ Women participated in sodalities in significant numbers, which helped finance associative life through dues and officer donations.

Afro-Brazilian confraternities had gender-specific offices to which they annually elected women. Female administrative board members in 18th and 19th-century Brazil held offices that paralleled those of men, but the responsibilities of female officers were distinct from those of male leaders.¹⁹ Every year each Black brotherhood in the city of São Paulo, for example, selected twelve women to serve as female board members (irmãs mesárias) according to their organizational charters.²⁰ Though the title of the position irmãs mesárias appeared to be the equivalent of their male counterparts’, irmãos mesários, the responsibilities of female officers were not the same.²¹ In 1871, the Rosary Brotherhood in the city of São Paulo made it clear in its organizational statute that gender represented an impediment for its female board members. The statute of their newly reformed compromisso indicated that “The sisters of the board due to their sex, which impedes the rendering of other services, have the responsibility of paying dues of 10,000 mil-réis and dressing as an angel in order to accompany the procession on the day of the festival of the Organ through the streets of the city.”²² Male board members, in contrast, were required to “Attend all the meetings convened, to vote on all questions in which the board deliberates, and to pay dues of 10,000 mil-réis at the act of possession of the office.”²³

The female board members of the Rosary Brotherhood were not unique in terms of their lack of access to participation in decision-making meetings, while being asked to provide financial contributions at the same level as men. In 1899, the Brotherhood of Saint Benedict of the City of São Paulo endowed its honored female board members with quite domestic responsibilities. While the associational charter required female board members to be “married women of renowned faith” their duties included “cleaning the cloth items used to ornament altars for the liturgy, to adorn the church with flowers and other decorations and to give a donation never less than 5,000 mil-réis for the expenditure of the Brotherhood.”²⁴ The formal roles and responsibilities of male and female board-member officers could not have been configured in terms that more expressly connected men with authority and power and women with secondary support responsibilities. The only offices in which male and female members had roughly equivalent duties and responsibilities were those presiding over the organizational festival.

Devotion

Afro-Brazilian confraternity participants assembled with each other and engaged Baroque Catholicism, which emphasized collective action, including celebration of the saints through music, movement, and festivities as outward demonstrations of internal piety. African-origin and African-descended confraternity members collectively celebrated patron saints and mourned deceased brethren with enslaved and free people of color in cities across the Atlantic world. The saints that inspired devotion and collective veneration represented a compelling set of intercessors and patrons. The saints who served as associational patrons varied from town to town and city to city across Latin America, but in Brazil devotions to Our Lady of the Rosary and Saint Benedict were most popular.²⁵ A host of other saints inspired African-origin and African-descent devotees in colonial and post-colonial Brazil, and the most commonly known included Saint Ephigênia, Saint Elesbão, Saint Anthony, and King Balthazar, one of the magi from the east who offered gifts to the newborn Christ.²⁶

Mutual Aid and Charity among Brethren

The tradition of mutual aid, the assurance of a proper ritualized burial, and the desire to have a space of socialization spurred confraternity participation.²⁷ Confraternities helped members navigate and negotiate the problem of civil status as slaves and social discrimination against Africans and their descendants. Elite white confraternities often displayed their devotion to God by serving the poor.²⁸ Elite brotherhoods such as the Santa Casa de Misericórdia established the first hospitals and orphanages in colonial Brazil. For elite white brotherhoods charity was directed outwardly and worked to confirm the status and patron roles held by priests, merchants, and colonial officials.²⁹

Black brotherhoods used organizational resources to extend charity, but they directed those resources to the less fortunate among their own members. In most cases, slave status locked bondspeople into a life of impoverishment. Even slaves who were hired out and retained a portion of their earnings struggled to house, clothe, and feed themselves, never mind the costs of trying to buy one’s freedom. Therefore, members of brotherhoods pledged to help members finance the administrative process required to secure liberty for slaves who had positioned themselves to purchase their own freedom or to be granted freedom by owners.³⁰ Mutual aid extended to the process of securing freedom for those able to underwrite the bulk of the costs associated with the process.

Illness represented another serious issue for enslaved people and the less fortunate among free people of color. The financial inability of bonds people and the free poor to seek medical assistance due to disease or ailment represented a significant problem. Slaves who became ill were often freed and abandoned so that slave masters would not have to bear the financial burden of acquiring medical attention for the captive.³¹ Without family or kin, long-term or even temporary illness could lead to destitution, and Black brotherhoods provided a modicum of a social safety net for indigent members. Among the offices created by the association’s leadership in the organizational statutes of the Rosary Brotherhood of the city of São Paulo in 1778 was a nurse to aid the sick.³² Confraternity members intended to extend care and assistance to each other in sickness, in health, in life, and at death.

Organizational statutes left no doubt that a critical function of the brotherhood was to provide appropriate rituals for the defunct at the hour of death. Poor brotherhood participants would have the cost of funerals covered by Black confraternities. The Brotherhood of Saint Benedict of the City of São Paulo covered funeral expenses for the children of members up until the age of twelve, while the Brotherhood of Saint Ephigênia and Saint Elesbão of the same city extended burial services and commemorations to all legitimate children of male and female members up to age seven.³³ In the 19th century, the Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary in São Paulo also covered burial expenses for wives of married male members in addition to children.³⁴ Brotherhoods would say masses for the soul of the departed and future generations would remember the brethren and their kin forever by continuing to pray for their souls.³⁵ Securing a proper burial in a context where an individual could easily have no relatives to be responsible for internment contributed to the significance of Black brotherhoods for African and African-descended populations.³⁶ The idea that members would also be remembered and honored in a way at least symbolically similar to their forbearers undoubtedly had great appeal.

Finally, the desire to participate in ritual space with people from shared language groups and common experiences increased the desirability of confraternity involvement and engagement. The sights and sounds of confraternity festivities and their general activities must have conjured an air of familiarity for participants and observers. The use of polyrhythmic, percussion-centered drumming and dance known as batuque during funerals and festivals, and the leadership of male and female patrons on special occasions in Black brotherhoods could only feel familiar to those from cultures which held special reverence for authorities linking the worlds of the living and the ancestors through collective ritual action.³⁷ While elements of cultural specificity were likely to be missing or incomplete for every provenance group of free and enslaved people, most African bondspeople and their progeny likely would have found some feature of their cultures of origin present in festivities sponsored and administered by Black brotherhoods, particularly in the churches they built and owned.

Baroque Catholicism marked the religious world that bondspeople entered from the 1550s to 1890s in Brazil. Black brotherhoods retained ceremonial and liturgical patterns, esthetics, and organizing principles based on baroque theological precepts and principles and on West and West Central African cosmologies and worldviews well past the mid-19th century. Brotherhoods were sites that Africanized Brazil and made African arrivals to Portuguese America part of the fabric of religious, civic, and social life across parishes and municipalities.

Discussion of the Literature

Scholars studying Brazilian lay Catholic brotherhoods have taken three distinct approaches to the institutions. These approaches are best described as cultural history, studies of class, and studies of ethnicity and race. A critical and compelling example of a cultural history approach is exemplified by Death is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil by João José Reis.³⁸ This text recounts the shifting sites and rites of burial through analysis of a revolt instigated by changes in locales of burial in Salvador, Bahia. In his research, Reis consulted irmandade statutes, member wills, and a plethora of other sources in order to ably describe shifting patterns of devotion and piety in the period analyzed. He also recounted how secularization and the post-Enlightenment thinking of reformers who banned burial in the city and under altars in the church conflicted with the forces of tradition embodied by lay brotherhoods and the wider populace across lines of race.³⁹ Reis’ work is a magnificent example of the depth and detail such a cultural history approach can generate. One drawback of a cultural history approach, however, is that perspectives on death or others issues can be successfully explored without full exploration of internal organizational dynamics and analysis of internal institutional structures.

Scholars have also utilized brotherhood documentation to conduct case studies of class which focus on the ways members use the organizations to exert social and political influence on fellow upper-echelon members, as well as noting how elite participants use these organizations as an affirmation of their class status.⁴⁰ Typically, these class studies focus on the exclusively white Santa Casa de Misericórdia. This vein of research emphasizes the role of elites in local, social, and economic development.⁴¹ Organizational documentation, especially executive administrative committee position records combined with analysis of wills and testaments, provide a way to understand social networks among the white elite who often used brotherhoods as a space to demonstrate their class standing through donations and executive committee service.

Scholars also approach lay brotherhoods as a way to explore ethnic and racial identities among Africans and African descendants in Brazil.⁴² These studies focus on Black brotherhoods as ethnic enclaves by the 18th century, which later transition to race-based organizations.⁴³ The strength of this literature is that by triangulating irmandade member registries and baptismal records, scholars are able to highlight and interrogate self-reported identity markers and designations demonstrating the prevalence and pertinence of ethnic identities or provenance zones for individuals and groups.⁴⁴

One limitation of this historiography is that most studies focus exclusively on the 18th century. Scholars of colonial Latin America who write about irmandades as ethnically specific groups generally do not venture beyond the mid-19th century.⁴⁵ While studies of patterns of popular religiosity during the 18th century have proliferated, fewer scholars have chronicled the religious lives of the increasingly diverse population of African arrivals and Brazilian-born slaves in the mid to late 19th century. What we know about Black brotherhoods suffers from significant gaps of chronology.

The historiography also has particular regional imbalances. Most studies of lay Catholic brotherhoods focus on the southeastern state of Minas Gerais or the northeastern states of Bahia and Pernambuco.⁴⁶ Minas Gerais represents a major location for studies due to the historic and contemporary visibility of the congada tradition prevalent in large cities and small towns throughout the state.⁴⁷ Scholarly production has significant depth in that province, but not in others. Even Rio de Janeiro has seen scant analysis; only two book-length studies of Black brotherhoods of the city exist.⁴⁸ Source fragmentation and the decentralized nature of associations means that further research and publications can continue to add fuller, more comprehensive renderings of Black confraternal life and member experience.