Kumbukumbu: African Culture

Africa is a continent that encompasses over 30 million square kilometers, distributed throughout 54 countries and nine territories, with more than a billion people speaking around a thousand different languages. The continent possesses incalculable wealth in diamonds, petroleum, and various minerals, which exploitation contributes to the largest economic and social contrasts in the world. Since in antiquity, Africa was part of the longest and most important commercial routes, and, through them, came in contact with distant peoples and cultures. In the 7th century, Arabian caravans brought Islam to the North of Africa; in the 15th Century, Christians arrived at the Atlantic coast, and, from the end of the 17th Century on, the growth of the Atlantic commerce of slaves led to the largest forced migration in modern history. The expansion of colonial Europe over Africa in the 19th-20th Centuries ruptured the dynamic African history and established new political and economic patterns that were sustained by military force, alliances with African elites, and the implementation of European standards of modern life. In mid-20th Century, the victorious independence movements began to change this panorama. CONTINUE ---►

This is one of the oldest collections of the National Museum. It arrived in Brazil in 1810, even before the Museum’s creation, which was in 1818. It is an outcome of diplomatic relations between the Kingdom of Dahomey, which is currently Benin, and Brazil. In the year of 1810, the king Adandozan of Dahomey sent many presents to D. João, Prince Regent of Portugal, who, in the occasion, lived with the royal family in Brazil. These were objects of his personal use, some of them having been for the restricted use of the King and the dignitaries of the kingdom. Knowing of the Treaty of Friendship and Alliance between Brazil and England, which in 1810 established the gradual end of the slave trade, the Dahomey embassy tried to negotiate with D. João privileges for the slave commerce in Brazil. At the time, the Kingdom of Dahomey was in war with neighboring peoples, and thus, had many prisoners, becoming one of the largest slave exporters to the Americas. CONTINUE --- ►

For over a thousand years, the equatorial forest - cutted by the Congo and the Lualaba rivers - was occupied by nomadic and gatherer peoples, ancestors of the current Bantu peoples. They began to migrate from the center of the continent to the West, until they arrived at the Atlantic coast. On the way they began to mix with local peoples, teaching agriculture and metallurgy and establishing new settlements. Those who remained nomads in the forest became pejoratively known as pygmies. This set of peoples occupy today the entire forest and its surroundings (Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, The Republic of Congo, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Angola). Despite a linguistic proximity, they have very distinct cultures and social organization. From this region came the slaves that are known in Brazil as congos, loangos, and angicos. CONTINUE ---►

The National Museum’s collection of African weapons offers us study possibilities that go beyond the functional idea of “attack and defense.” They invite us to think of them as carriers of power and stories. We cannot conceive of them only as instruments of war, hunting, or other activities related to everyday survival. Some of them are ritual objects and denote the social status of the individual who detains it. They all possess a cutting or perforating metal part. Metallurgy was a technology created by the Bantu linguistic root peoples, today represented by more than 500 ethnic groups distributed all over sub-Saharan Africa. The set of weapons displayed were collected in the 19th Century and almost all come from the Zambezi River Valley. The region, rich in minerals, permitted the abundant use of some metals, such as zinc and copper — and the binding formed by the two, which gives origin to brass. The work with brass wire is present in most of the weapons at display in the Kumbukumbu room. There are references that this technique was developed by the Shona, a Bantu root ethnolinguistic macrogroup. The Shona were the largest group to settle in the Zambezi Valley. Today, these weapons, adorned in brass wire, are greatly appreciated by the Western market of African art. CONTINUE ---►

The territory that today corresponds to Angola exported over three million enslaved people to Brazil between 1530 and 1850, when the Atlantic trade was officially abolished. In Angola, slavery endured until 1878, year in which it became prohibited by the Colonial Portuguese legislation. However, in practice, slavery extended there until 1910. Angola remained a colony of Portugal until 1975. During the colonial period, the local population was submitted to forced work, very similar to the times of slavery, and also to a compulsory process of “assimilation,” which intended to instill in the Africans European cultural standards. Besides colonial employees, Catholic and Protestant missionaries of many nationalities established themselves in several parts of the country to convert the peoples of Angola to the Christian faith, in collaboration to the process of assimilation. CONTINUE ---►

The presence of Africans and their descendants in Brazil is marked by the violence of slavery and post-abolition. We present here objects that show how the Africans established themselves and recreated their world from the end of the 19th Century on, in particular in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. We have objects from the old Candomblés of Rio de Janeiro, known as zungus or “fortune giving houses”. There they worshiped Inkices (bantu), orixás (yorubá) and yodels (jêje-mahi). Persecuted, these houses were invaded and had their objects confiscated by the police and used as material proof of the practice of rituals that were prohibited at the time. The frequenters of these houses were persecuted and arrested. Knowing of the existence of these objects at the Court Police, the director of the National Museum then, Ladislau Netto, throughout the decade of the 1880s, began to ask to have them sent to him for his studies. The National Museum, then, formed a collection that contains old techniques of metallurgy and of wood art, material examples of religious practices of this last generation of Africans and their direct descendants. CONTINUE ---►