Three continents, one people; American Indians, Europeans and Africans have shaped the destiny of Brazil

Three continents, one people

IN the main square of Goiania, capital ofthe State of Goias in the Centre West of Brazil, stands a monument which commemorates the founding of the town less than fifty years ago. Three great male figures cast in bronze support a massive stone monolith. Since they are not wearing distinctive clothing, only at close quarters can they be seen to represent an Indian, a Black and a White.

Similar monuments, on a smaller scale,probably exist throughout the country. They all reflect the widespread belief that for many years was championed by landed proprietors, fed by the popular imagination and propagated by Brazilian history books--that the country's history and culture were, and continue to be, the work of "three races": Indians, the original inhabitants of Brazil; Blacks brought from Africa; and Whites, the first of whom arrived from Portugal in 1500.

In the 1960s, the National Council for theProtection of Indians, as it was then called, estimated their number at 250,000. As in all the countries of the continent, the indigenous population of Brazil dwindled considerably during the colonization period, a trend which persists today. In 1900 there were some 230 indigenous tribes; by 1957 only 143 were left, a number which has not decreased since then. Thus in fifty-seven years, eighty-seven tribal groups disappeared--individuals, tribes, villages, ways of life, languages, dialects and cultures.

Brought from Africa on slave ships, men,women and children entered Brazil mainly through the ports of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, whence they were dispatched either to the great sugar plantations or, later, the coffee plantations, or else to the gold and gemstone mines in the regions which now correspond approximately to the States of Mato Grosso, Goias and Minas Gerais.

Through ignorance of perversity, the colonizingWhites labelled as "Indian" a varied range of indigenous cultures and peoples, just as they used the blanket-term "Black" for those who had been uprooted from widely differing peoples, tribes and cultures in Africa. The Africans who came to Brazil included Muslim Blacks from Mali as well as members of tribal groups from widely-separated regions with completely different forms of social organization, language, culture and religion--Yoruba, Dahomey, Fanti and Ashanti, Hausa, Mandingo and Bantu. From the earliest days of slavery in Brazil, the White masters set out to convert the imported slaves to Christianity and to intermingle them in such a way that only Blacks totally unknown to one another would be living on the same plantation or in the same inland city.

Slave labour was not evenly spreadthroughout Brazil. Blacks from Africa played a greater part in the settlement of the coast than in that of the interior, and established themselves more in the Northeast and East than in the Amazonian regions of the North. They were concentrated in wide areas of Bahia and Minas Gerais and were never numerous in the north of Parana or in Santa Catarina. These two regions were among those initially settled by poor white farmers, the caipiras (peasants) and Sertao-dwellers, then later by European immigrants (Italians, Germans, Poles and others), who to a large extent came to replace the Black slave labour force when the economic interests of the land-owners no longer dictated the production of wealth based exclusively on the slave system.

To what extent did each of these differentethnic groups contribute to the development of Brazilian culture? The social contribution made by Indians, Blacks and Whites was first and foremost natural rather than cultural, for before becoming a nation whose culture is to a great extent the outcome of combinations and exchanges among different national and ethnic groups, Brazil was and still is a country whose population is largely the result of miscegenation between these three main human elements.

As in some other South American countries,unlike the situation in, for example, the United States, from the earliest days of Portuguese colonization there was intensive sexual intermingling between the "three races", resulting in the emergence of a large mestizo population. Brazil is thus not a nation in which ethnic groups and cultures have remained strictly separate from one another. Nor is it a country where racial interbreeding took place in one direction only, for example between Indians and Whites or between Whites and Blacks. Here, mainly among the poor and powerless, there have always been liaisons and marriages between Blacks and Whites, between Indians and Whites, and between Blacks and Indians. In each region there are specific names for the ethnic types resulting from such interbreeding. But, as a general rule, the word mulatto is used to designate someone with one Black and one White parent, caboclo for a person born to an Indian and a White, and mameluco (a less common term, corresponding to a rarer type of union) for the son or daughter of a Black and an Indian. It is no exaggeration to say that the Brazilian nation is the product of ethnic intermixture, even if there is supposed to be a majority of Whites (although this is considered to be debatable by some observers), especially in the cities of the South.

Those who lay stress on the importantmodernizing influence of the wave of European immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--which mainly affected the prosperous and industrialized regions of the South--obscure the fact that the pushing back of national frontiers to the North and West was largely due to the slow and indefatigable work of the poor mestizo people. History has forgotten that it was they who conquered, in their fashion, the most remote and hostile regions of Brazil.

While nearly all the Amazon Basin (anarea the size of Europe, excluding Russia) is a "product" of the colonizing work of poor and landless caboclos, most of "Brazilian baroque" culture is the creation of generations of mulatto artists. The sculptors (such as o Aleijadinho), painters, poets and musicians who produced the first authentically Brazilian high culture in Minas Gerais were children of Whites and Blacks, some of them slaves. In the colonial period, as later, nearly all the artists and craftsmen were Black slaves or mestizos, as educated and wealthy Portuguese or Brazilian Whites conspicuously dissociated themselves from productive work.

It is very difficult to attribute a specificcultural contribution to Indians or to Blacks in this vast country which has always been dominated by Whites. We have attempted to show that in Brazil there has never been an abstract category of "Indians" or another, equally abstract, category of "Blacks", but different nations, peoples, groups and individuals who represent in concrete terms what it means to "be Indian" or to "be Black" in Brazil.

Their contributions took a variety offorms, according to the pattern of events in each region and the way in which economic, political and cultural relations were built up among the different ethnic groups. Thus the Indian influence is much stronger throughout the Amazon region than in the Centre West, whereas Black influence is especially strong and active all along the coast, but chiefly in the States of Rio de Janeiro, Bahia and Minas Gerais.

With a few rare and localized exceptions,the achievements of the indigenous peoples did not leave an impression on Brazilian culture that could nowadays be recognized as a genuine "cultural system", in technology or religion, for example. However, certain rudimentary agricultural techniques--such as the widespread practice of coivara or slash-and-burn cultivation--hunting or fishing methods and very widespread folk remedies, are recognized as being of indigenous origin.

Although there have been no transfers ofcomplete systems of symbolic or religious thought from indigenous to regional cultures, it is certain that in nearly all areas of Brazilian life, and in people's representation of their lives, there are ways of feeling and thinking which have sometimes close, sometimes remote, connections with the typically Indian. Traces of indigenous cultures are found in the names used to designate geographical features and many towns all over Brazil, and in important aspects of systems of interpreting reality.

The situation was completely differentfor the Black populations brought from Africa: if they exerted only a fragmentary influence on Brazilian ways of life, they brought to Brazilian culture elements of material culture and symbolic representation which today form part of everyday life.

For example, besides the powerful tracesof Black culture discernible in Brazilian Catholicism, there are today a great many religious systems, beliefs and cults whose ancestry is clearly African. The candomble is certainly the most important religion of Afro-Brazilian origin, with many initiates throughout the country. But this is only one strand in a rich and varied tapestry of Black forms of worship to which Whites are increasingly drawn. From the Casa das Minas cult, confined to the northern regions, to the umbanda (a later Brazilian derivation from rituals of "Afro" origin, now more widespread than the candomble itself throughout the national territory), a rich and intense religious and ceremonial activity is emerging in Brazil.

A type of athletic wrestling known ascapoeira, initially practised with razors or knives, was repressed for many years. It used to be associated with Blacks in the lowest social groups, but it has spread so extensively that today there are very few large or medium-sized towns which do not boast one or more "capoeira schools". This rapid dissemination is also a social phenomenon, in that young people of all social classes are eager to learn and practise it. A cross between dancing and a martial art, in which lively footwork and skill in dodging are essential, capoeira is only one of many Black contributions to Brazilian culture which hav eachieved nationwide status.

Most current studies on the contributionsof different ethnic groups to Brazilian culture take the view that such fragments are not really of central importance. To claim to measure the extent to which Indians and Blacks participate in a predominantly White culture with distant European roots, in terms of their contribution to Brazilian cuisine, farming techniques, handicrafts or folk ritual, is to conceal the fundamental and essential behind a picturesque veil.

Admittedly, any nation which, like Brazil,is the product of encounters, conflicts and alliances between national and ethnic groups, conclusively demonstrates that people must learn how to live together in everyday circumstances, respecting the right to be different and the rights of minorities. It is impossible to forget that Blacks and Indians always took part in Brazilian life as serfs and slaves, as subjects or dispossessed peoples, and that in spite of everything they were brave enough to struggle and resist. Sepe-Tiaraju, an indigenous warrior chief, and Zumbi, a warrior taken as a slave who chose to die rather than submit to slavery, are perhaps more striking examples of the contribution of minority populations to Brazilian culture than all the minor products and skills with which Blacks and Indians have enriched it in other respects.

Similarly, the Black consciousness movementsthat are being organized throughout the country, as well as attempts by indigenous groups to resist expropriation of their land and to defend their rights--foreshadowing a future Union of Indigenous Peoples--are the strongest evidence of the free and creative participation of Blacks and Indians in Brazilian life and culture.

There is a racial problem in Brazil. Aracial democracy has theoretically been achieved, but both the employment statistics and the life led by the vast majority of Brazilian Blacks and mestizos reveal that a wide gap still exists between the desire for full democracy and the assertion of social equality among ethnic groups. However, there is evidence of a strong national awareness of the rights of Indians.

A new, fully democratic assertion of"Negritude" and "Indianity" is once again finding vigorous expression in the arts, in scientific research and in politics, and this is undoubtedly the most important historical development that today binds together growing numbers of Whites, Blacks and Indians.

COPYRIGHT 1986 UNESCO
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group