ABSTRACT
One has only to glance at the stately townhouses lining old Salvador’s winding narrow streets or purchase African bean fritters from the turbanned women vendors on a lazy afternoon to imagine the ever-present Bahian past. The history of Salvador da Bahia is as imposing as the city itself. For those who would know Salvador, the city is a constant dialogue between past and present, between change and continuity. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Salvador still walks with many eguns, the ancestral spirits that guide the living. At their most fundamental level, Afro-Bahians’ struggles today address the same issues that their African forebears faced when they first arrived in the sixteenth century. Countering the impositions of a slave society in which a small elite dictated the rights and prerogatives of others, Afro-Bahians have consistently fought for self-determination and equal access to sociopolitical power. Applying countervailing pressure against hegemony, people of African descent have used existing mechanisms, created new ones, and seized upon moments of sociopolitical transformation to find self-fulfillment and dignity in a society that once defined them as chattel. The chapters in this book provide insights into each of these modes of struggle, showing how Afro-Bahians have shaped new roles and carved out social spaces for themselves in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
