038840engo 2

Brazilian and African sources for the study
of cultural transferences from Brazil to Africa

325

researcher and as an individual, the transatlantic flow has much to recommend
in its favour.

Notes

1. Salvador, Bahia, is called popularly boa terra, in part because of its being Brazil's
   first capital, the alleged moral laxity of many of its inhabitants, a casual attitude
   towards life's problems, essentially a kind of living museum, where architecture,
   art and the populace represent a more ancient Brazil, one lost with the coming of
   the twentieth century.


2. Waldir Freitas Oliveira, 'Desenvolvimento dos Estudos Africanistas no Brazil',
   Cultura, No. 23, October-December 1976, p. 114.


3. The Rio Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos is planning through the series, Cadernos
   Candido Mendes, to begin publication of its own Journal of African Studies.


4. Primary study of Banian-African cultural relations was made by Pierre Verger, Flux
   et Reflux de la Traite des Nègres entre le Golfe de Bénin et Bahia de Todos os Santos
   du XVIIe siècle, Paris, 1968. Iexla Pessoa de Castro and husband Guilherme tended
   to focus their studies studies of Portuguese-Yoruba linguistics in Ife, Nigeria,
   results were published in several numbers of the CEAO African Studies Journal, Afro-
   Asia (1968-69). Julio Braga, CEAO anthropologist, Didi dos Santos, a pai de santo
   and ethnologue and his wife Juanita Elbein dos Santos, anthropologist, all focused
   their studies of the origins of Afro-Banian religious cults in western Nigeria and
   eastern Benin, period 1968-71.


5. One African researcher, Elbun Ogunsanya, a linguistics and romance languages
   student from Radcliffe College, Harvard, in 1970 encountered certain difficulties as
   she attempted to research in cults and with people not officially under the patronage
   of CEAO. By 1974 three or four foreign researchers began appearing at the more
   celebrated candomblé terreiros on the same evening (period June-August 1974),
   causing the present writer to think that the researchers would to better to research
   the influence of the researcher on the ritual process of candomblé.


6. Of importance is the work of the Swiss linguist Rolf Reichert, Os Documentos Arabes
   do Arquivo do Estado da Bahia, Salvador, 1970, who as the resident Islamicist of
   CEAO worked with all of the existant Arab documents from the 1836 jihad in
   Salvador, providing Portuguese translations. See Turner, review article 'Os Docu-
   mentos Arabes', International Journal of African Studies, Boston, 1975.


7. After the end of Brazilian slavery, it was decided by the new republic that the historical
   blot of having had slavery as a national institution could perhaps be erased by
   destroying all relevant documentation, which occurred in 1893 as mandated by the
   State.


8. O Commercio de llheus, June-October, 1931.


9. Nineteenth-century newspapers included in the collection of the IGHB are: Diario da
   Bahia (1830s), O Commercio (1840s), O Diario da Bahia (1850s), Journal da Bahia
   (1850s-1870s).


10. In 1973 a Ph.D. candidate frotn Harvard University, Jane McDivitt, was doing a study
    of Afro-Brazilian poetry and other literature which evoked at times hostile responses
    from the members of IGHB who refused to admit the existence of such a field of
    study. The Ghanaian researcher Anani Dzidzienyo also encountered incredulity
    at his insistence that political behaviour of Afro-Brazilians could serve as a subject
    for study and analysis in 1970-71.