Iansã/Saint Barbara

Although the African people brought into Brazil between the 16th and 19th centuries lived under slavery conditions, they left multiple deep marks in our social life: in music, food, language, and especially religion. Candomblé in the State of Bahia, Xangô in Pernambuco, Casa Mina in Maranhão, Batuque in Rio Grande do Sul, are some of the names used to designate the several religions formed in Brazil based on the African religious heritage. Their rituals and belief systems are based on the worship of the orishas, vodus, and inquices, former kings, queens, or divinized heroes, who represent nature’s elemental phenomena or forces: water, vegetation, fire, thunder. Or the activities vicissitudes of the human being: agriculture, hunting, diseases, trips. Part of the collection of the Muhne museum results from the donation of the private collection of the anthropologist Waldemar Valente, who carried out researches in the ’50s with Afro-Brazilian religions in Recife and Maceió, gathering important and valuable pieces of the material culture of the terreiros.