Mojubá: how African-rooted religions took shape in Brazil

In the beginning there was the infinite, and in it lived Olorum. In the Yoruba version of creation, he entrusts Oxalá with making the world, but Oxalá fails to make the required offerings and is delayed on the way; it is Odudua who creates the earth. To console him, Olorum gives Oxalá another task: shaping living beings, fish, trees and people of every color.

Origens (Origins), the first episode of the documentary series Mojubá from Canal Futura, produced as part of the A Cor da Cultura project, uses that myth as a doorway into a Brazilian story: how millions of enslaved Africans rebuilt their religions here.

Three waves, many nations

According to the episode, more than 4 million Africans were brought to Brazil by force, about 40% of all those who landed in the Americas. One of the historians interviewed describes three waves in Bahia. First came Bantu peoples from Angola and the Congo, from 1580 on, who worked alongside Indigenous people, learned from them the use of plants and formed the first cults. Then the Jeje, from the old kingdom of Dahomey. Last came the Yoruba, called Nagô. From them come the Candomblé nations, such as Ketu, Jeje and Angola, along with regional traditions such as Batuque in Rio Grande do Sul, Xangô in Pernambuco and Mina in Maranhão. One interviewee stresses that the cult of the caboclos, Indigenous ancestors, is a Brazilian creation.

Casa Branca and the circle

The film links the organization of Bahian Candomblé to the fall of the Oyo empire in the 1830s, when Yoruba leaders arrived in Salvador. In the Barroquinha neighborhood the terreiro was born that gave rise to Casa Branca do Engenho Velho, one of the oldest in the country, listed by the national heritage institute Iphan in 1984 as the first monument of Black culture recognized as historic heritage. There the order of the orishas in the dance circle and the community's offices were set.

For one of the researchers, the terreiro recreates the territory Africans lost. The circle reappears in the umbanda gira, in capoeira, in tambor de crioula and in samba. Syncretism with Catholicism and Indigenous beliefs lies at the root of umbanda, catimbó and jurema.

Against the label of exotic

A priest criticizes those who treat Candomblé as spectacle or folklore rather than as a spirituality equal to any other. Another interviewee notes that everyday Brazilian Portuguese is full of words of Bantu origin, such as moleque, "kid."

Why watch

In 26 minutes, the episode puts in order a story that usually arrives in fragments: where the orishas came from, why there are so many Candomblé nations and how faith helped a people torn from its land rebuild a place of its own.