Sisterhood Symbol
*The Sisterhood of the Good Death is celebrated on this date in 1823. The Sisterhood of Our Lady of the Good Death is a small but renowned Afro-Catholic religious group in Bahia, Brazil. The history of the "Sisterhood of the Good Death" is part of the history of the Middle Passage of blacks from the African coast to the cane-growing catchment area around the port of Salvador, Bahia, known as the Recôncavo Baiano. Iberian adventurers built several towns in this area for three centuries, including Cachoeira, the second most important economic center in Bahia.
Confraternities (a brotherhood, especially with a charitable or religious purpose) flourished during the 19th century when the country was independent but still lived under the regime of slavery. For each profession, race, and nation, the African slaves and their descendants came from different places with different cultures. There were confraternities for the rich, poor, musicians, blacks, whites, etc. There were almost none for women, and in the male confraternities’ women entered as dependents to ensure they would receive benefits from the corporation after the death of their husbands. A church had to welcome it, and its statutes had to be approved by ecclesiastical authority. In a male-controlled society marked by racial and ethnic differences, this confraternity is made up exclusively of Black women, which gives this Afro-Catholic manifestation as some consider it a certain reputation. It is known both as an expression of Brazilian baroque Catholicism, with its distinctive street processions, and for its tendency to include profane rituals punctuated by a lot of samba and banqueting in religious festivals.
Besides the gender and race of the confraternity's members, their status as former slaves and descendants of slaves is an important social characteristic. Without this quality, it would not be easy to understand many aspects of the confraternity's religious commitments. The former slaves have demonstrated enormous ability in worshiping the religion of those in power without letting go of their ancestral beliefs and in how they defend their followers' interests and represent them socially and politically.
No one knows in what year the Sisterhood of the Good Death was founded. Odorico speculates that the organized devotion began in the Church of Rosário in Barroquinha, Salvador and that Gêges (blacks of the Ewe and Fon ethnicities) moved from there to Cachoeira were responsible for organizing it. Others speak of that period, too, but cite the Yoruba. Since early in the nineteenth century, progress and new agricultural and industrial techniques were introduced there. While the sugar economy was experiencing difficulties, tobacco gained new strength when it attracted the German capital's interest following Brazil's political independence. The opening of motorized shipping lines strengthened the breeze of economic renewal, stimulating the integration of the Recôncavo with the provincial capital and increasing trade. This, in turn, encouraged the formation of strong links between Black slaves in many cities, especially Salvador and Cachoeira.
Jefferson Bacelar notes that the 1820s, especially the first three years of the decade, were marked by a process of agitation and excitement among the people of Bahia, many of whom - regardless of social class - were involved in a struggle for independence that was marked by a strong anti-Portuguese spirit and armed skirmishes. The easing of tension between masters and slaves elicited by this momentary “unity” contributed to the permanent removal of blacks to the cities of the Recôncavo, where slave owners were very interested in solving the conflict and, to defend their interests, armed the slaves and used them against the Portuguese. This exceptional state of affairs resulted in many religious and civil initiatives by the slaves, perhaps the Irmandade da Boa Morte. An emergence from the slave quarters with the abolitionist atmosphere after the brutally crushed revolt of Muslim slaves in Bahia in 1835. Perhaps that is the origin of the Islamic touch to the confraternity's very beautiful traditional clothes.
Luiz Cláudio Nascimento, a historian from Cachoeira, says that the first liturgies of the Black Sisterhood were held in the Church of the Third Order of Carmo, traditionally used by the local elites. Later the sisters moved to the Church of Santa Bárbara in the Santa Casa de Misericórdia hospital, where there are images of Our Lady of Glory and Our Lady of the Good Death. From there, they moved to the Church of Amparo. They left that church for the Parish Church (Igreja Matriz) and then went to the Church of Ajuda.
Many confraternities built their churches. This was the case with the Church of Rosário in Barroquinha. The Sisterhood of Good Death maintained close contact with this church and its confraternity.
The religious confraternities of the 19th century, like the secular ones such as the Society for the Protection of the Handicapped, did more than revere Catholic saints and the orixás, or Afro-Brazilian divinities, of their members. While they outwardly met ecclesiastical and legal requirements, they become exclusive guilds that worked behind the scenes for the interests of their members. As respected solidarity organizations, they were simultaneously living expressions of inter-ethnic exchange and an ambiguous instrument of social control whose participants were creative "managers."
The confraternity members contribute. One-off membership and annual fees, alms collected, and other forms of income were used for various purposes: purchases of freedom from slavery, festivals, religious obligations, payments for masses, charity, clothing, and more. The funds raised during members' lifetimes were always meant to pay for a decent funeral, whose preparations, given the dual religious activities of its members, required both rigor and understanding, besides being a nest egg for the burial.
Over time the Sisterhood has lessened its connection to the Catholic Church and has become a landmark of Candomblé, the main African-based religion of Brazil. Candomblé is a spiritist religion that worships a complex pantheon of deities or guardian spirits, the Orixás, part of Yoruba culture. At Candomblé rituals, the Orixás are invoked and "incorporate" by the officiating priests.
Due to their secret nature, the inner rites of the Sisterhood, linked to the worship of the Orixás, have still not been the object of an ethnographic interpretation. What has been studied is the exterior part of the worship, which uses almost entirely Catholic symbols appropriated by the Afro Brazilian religion. The high point of the Sisterhood's activities is the Festival of Our Lady of the Good Death, held yearly in Cachoeira.
The Sisterhood's Festival combines Candomblé worship elements with an ancient Christian festival, the Assumption of the Virgin, whose origins are in the Orient. The festival reached Rome in the 7th century, spread through the Catholic world over the next two centuries, and was eventually brought from Portugal to Brazil, known as the festival of Our Lady of August.
Devotion to the Good Death was just as common in colonial and imperial Brazil as the confraternities. It has always been a popular cult.
The Sisterhood's version of the Festival became a popular devotion with racial features as the Sisterhood gathered mainly black and mixed-race women and acquired a unique interpretation with its characteristics. For that reason, the group has always caused conflict with church authorities.
Candomblé lent elements of its belief system to a practice that was originally Catholic, as well as socio-historical components of the hard reality of slavery of captivity that made martyrs of those in the diaspora.
Veneration of Our Lady of the Good Death came to have social significance. It allowed slaves to gather, maintain their religiosity in a hostile environment, and shape a corporate instrument for defending and valuing individuals. For all of these reasons, it became an unrivaled means of celebrating life.
At the beginning of August, a long schedule of public events brings people from everywhere to Cachoeira, to what Moraes Ribeiro considers the most representative living document of Brazilian, baroque, Ibero-African religiosity. Suppers, parades, masses, processions, and samba-de-Roda (a traditional form of playing and dancing the samba in a circle) put the confraternity in the center of events in this provincial city ultimately, in the main newspapers and news networks of the capital.
The festival's calendar includes the confession of members in the parish church; a cortege representing the death of Our Lady; a vigil followed by a supper of bread, wines, and seafood in obedience to religious customs forbidding the consumption of palm oil and meat on the day of Oxalá, the creator of the universe; and the burial procession of Our Lady of the Good Death, during which the sisters wear their ceremonial clothing.
The celebration of the Assumption of Our Lady of Glory by a mass in the mother church, followed by a procession, gives way to the contagious fun of the people of Cachoeira, which breaks out in full color, food, music, and dancing over as many days as the donations and annual reserves allow.
Like all confraternities of Bahia, the Boa Morte has an internal hierarchy that administers the everyday devotions of its members. The leadership comprises four sisters responsible for organizing the public festival in August. They are replaced each year. At the top, in the most prominent position of the Irmandade da Boa Morte, is the Perpetual Judge, the eldest member. There follow the posts of Attorney General, Provider, Treasurer, and Scribe; the first is at the head of religious and profane activities.
Novices must be attached to a candomblé center in the area. They go through initiation with a three-year preparatory phase, during which they are known as "sisters of the purse," and their vocation is tested. Once accepted, they can take leadership positions and rise in the confraternity's hierarchy every three years.
They all share the tasks of cooking, collecting funds, and organizing ceremonial suppers, processions, and the funerals of members according to religious precepts and unwritten statutory regulations. Elections are held each year. Africans and their descendants in Brazil broadened the concept of kinship to include all those of the same nation.
African ancestry was reworked within Bahian religious institutions, and the lay confraternities end up serving this process of cultural intercourse. The belief system has absorbed the dominant culture's values functionally and creatively so that complex processes of syncretism and cultural appropriation take place in the name of life. Other examples are found in the symbols of clothing and food, where there is constant reference to the links between this world (Aiyê) and the other (Orun).
In the 21st century, the Sisterhood of the Good Death remains vital. They showcase the intersectionality of African women and Catholicism. Their resilience to strengthen themselves in the western hemisphere. In the rural Bahian town of São Sebastião do Passé, a daring young rider gets a tenuous grip before flipping a steer with his bare hands at a vaquejada, Brazil’s version of a rodeo. The town lies in a cattle country that stretches away from the hot and humid coastal region of sugar and coffee plantations. Bahia’s semiarid outback is studded with shrubs and cactuses. Cattle producers boost productivity with center-pivot irrigation, greening up huge circular pastures to satisfy Brazilians’ hunger for grass-fed beef.
