Salvador da Bahia

Salvador was the capital of colonial Brazil for two centuries and one of the largest slaving ports in the Atlantic world, receiving people from the Bight of Benin and from Central Africa in numbers that made the city and its recncavo overwhelmingly African. Candomble is what those populations built out of what they carried.

The building blocks were the houses, terreiros, each an initiatory community under a mother or father of the saint, with a compound, drums, a calendar of festivals and a body of initiates. The oldest houses still functioning in Salvador were founded in the nineteenth century, and several were led by women whose authority extended far beyond religion into the social organisation of black Bahia. Practice is grouped by nation, Ketu drawing on Yoruba orixas, Jeje on Fon vodun, Angola on Central African traditions, and the groupings are about ritual language and repertoire rather than the ancestry of the members.

Catholic lay brotherhoods gave Africans a legally permitted place to gather, and the identification of orixas with saints allowed public devotion to continue under a Catholic surface. Whether that identification was disguise, genuine double belonging, or something that changed over time is argued about within the tradition as well as outside it, and a movement to remove the Catholic elements has gathered force since the twentieth century. Police permits were required for ceremonies in Bahia into the 1970s, so the persecution is recent history rather than colonial background.

The church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim sits on a hill above the bay and is the most popular devotional site in the city. Its room of miracles is hung with wax arms, legs and heads, photographs and hospital wristbands left by people whose prayers were answered, and the ribbons sold at the gate are tied round the wrist with three knots and three wishes and worn until they fall apart.

On the second Thursday of January the washing of the steps takes place. Women in the white lace and full skirts of Bahia carry water jars from a church in the lower city several kilometres to Bonfim and wash the steps and the forecourt with scented water while crowds follow. The church has objected to the rite repeatedly and at times locked its doors during it, because for many participants the washing honours Oxala, the orixa identified with the Christ of Bonfim, and the event is therefore Catholic and Candomble at once. Neither the crowds nor the practice have gone away.

Two weeks later, on the second of February, offerings are taken out to sea at Rio Vermelho for Iemanja, the orixa of the ocean: flowers, mirrors, combs and perfume placed in small boats and rowed beyond the breakers by fishermen, with the understanding that what sinks has been accepted. Salvador also holds more Catholic churches than almost any city in the Americas, and the two calendars run through the same streets on the same days.