ABSTRACT
This chapter provides insights into modes of struggle, showing how Afro-Bahians have shaped new roles and carved out social spaces for themselves in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Salvadors black militia officers exemplified faith in the national ideal of meritocracy, a justifiable position given their pivotal role in the armed struggle to dislodge the Portuguese from Salvador immediately after Brazil's political independence. In Brazil, as in the colonies of English and Spanish America, independence from European control was little more than the seizure of power by the agricultural and commercial elites who had dominated colonial economies. The tenacity with which Afro-Bahians maintained Candombl and African culture even in the face of severe repression challenged the Bahian elite and hampered their project for a whitened Bahia. Afro-Bahian strategies of social transformation must therefore embody both past and present, adapting to the conditions of the times in which they occur, while building on the past.
