Books, based on archival or ethnographic research or both, are mainly conceived as the solitary result of individual accumulation. Knowledge, instead, is more easily understood as the result of circulation, sharing and even imitation or mimesis. I have always been more prone to share and exchange than accumulate individually. Since I settled in Brazil in 1992, my professional life has been intertwined with the history of most of the documents I used in the research for this book. I have been very much involved with their digital repatriation to make them accessible to the growing numbers of young and, increasingly, black scholars. Some might be interested in reading and reinterpreting them. As a result of my emphasis on sharing, individual books written by me have been relatively wanting in my career, even during my prime. Instead, I have indulged in collective oeuvres, compilations and seminars or intensive courses that result in meta-texts. So much social engineering takes its toll: I shared documents with colleagues, inspired by historian Paul Lovejoy’s admonishment, “do not sit on the archive”, and immediately made available online most of the papers I repatriated from the US and France. I insisted on collective curatorship of documents when, perhaps, I should have been more focused and produced my book about these documents first. I could have shared documents and findings afterwards, as the canon commends. I would have published more individual books but contributed less to what I assume has been the improvement of the conditions for the production of knowledge in Brazil, more especially in Bahia.
This book has a history – and stories – interlinked with those of my two main projects in that kind of social engineering: The Factory of Ideas and the Afrodigital Museum. This book is also part of a larger project on the international circulation of ideas about race and antiracism.
For several personal reasons, at the age of sixty I decided to embark on a long-term project that would take a decade or more to be completed. The project focused on the transnational construction of the notion of race and antiracism, as seen in Latin America and especially Bahia, and was conceived in three stages, each of which shows a specific form of transnationalism. It relates to emancipation in diverse forms, equal to the notion of globalization, even though transnationalism has a more innocent image than globalization and lacks the revolutionary and pacifist connotation of internationalism. Transnationalism, or transnational concepts such as Black Atlantic or African Diaspora, suggests the inherent limitation of the nation and its boundaries – which can be more acute in certain moments of history – and the polarity of global icons versus local meanings.
The second stage of the project was to study materials related to the transnational construction of the academic field of Afro-Brazilian studies in the 1930s and 1940s. It also focused on documents that concerned the way Brazil, and particularly the State of Bahia, held a central place in the development of the notion of Africanism, as articulated by Melville Herskovits, his associates, and the many scholars he influenced, as well as Frances Herskovits. Lorenzo Dow Turner and E. Franklin Frazier, whose work and time in Bahia are described in this book, would engage critically with Herskovits’ notion. It would prove essential in the subsequent creation of African studies in the US. It would reverberate in the development of new varieties of Négritude as part of the process that led to the independence of most African countries in the 1960s (except for the Portuguese colonies and white-dominated Rhodesia, South-West Africa and South Africa). Africanism also impacted on the redefinition of African-American identity on the eve of the Civil Rights Movement in the US (Sansone 2019 and 2022a). This book is the result of this second stage.
The third and last part of the project – my current research – emphasizes the impact of the making of Afro-American studies and African studies in North and South America and its effect on the life and trajectories of the independence leaders of African countries from the 1950s. It focuses mainly on the path of the Mozambican, Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane, who was trained as a sociologist in the US by, among others, Melville Herskovits. The Mondlane and Herskovits families stayed in touch for decades.
Researching and writing should be always also a matter of learning. I have learned a lot in writing this book, which I did during the Covid-19 pandemic.1
Second, “doing research from the South” has often been a rhetorical and confrontational expression, suggesting that there is a general South and that being there bestows on the researcher a specific authority to speak somehow “on behalf of the South”. Without denying the power relations that the expression “South” conveys, I am here stressing several practical aspects of a scholar’s daily life in the South (of the South). I am based in Salvador, Bahia – a place with exciting fieldwork opportunities and interesting documentation for the historian of slavery, but with very poor libraries and archives, especially of works on the period after abolition (1888). It has meant that research for this book had to be carried out in the North – where the best archives are – in short but very intensive periods, whenever I had the opportunity and the funds. An insufficiency of funds resulted chiefly in brief visits to a particular archive or library and a long time to elaborate on the findings. It also meant (too) long intervals between research in one or another archive that I filled in by attempting to systematize the documents gathered in the North and reading anything published on the field. Most of the time, the publications concerned were in the US, which meant having to purchase them or read them online (if only in parts) because Brazilian libraries have never been able to hold all or even most of the books dedicated to Afro-Brazilian studies, especially if these have been published abroad. And try as I might I could not purchase them.2
1
Apart from the few severe limitations to the concrete conditions for knowledge production in Bahia discussed above,3 the global politics of the archive (which includes the politics of storage, of what and how to store and where and for whom) have severely affected the production of knowledge in Bahia. But at long last the past two decades have been a period of opening up of our universities to a large and new generation of black or underprivileged students who, thanks to affirmative action, for the first time have access to higher education.
The lack of archives in Bahia, and more generally in Brazil, has been a source of great frustration and the galvanising force of many of my projects over the last thirty years.4 Moving from the University of Amsterdam, where I obtained my doctorate, to the Federal University of Bahia in 1992, I soon concluded that we needed a politics and practice of (digital) repatriation as a form of reparation for the traditional politics of the archive (by which the “proper” archive was meant to be kept in the North while the field and “bad archives” stayed in the South) (Sansone 2011). I spent my last few weeks in Amsterdam making photocopies for colleagues in the Department of Anthropology at UFBA and for the courses I had been invited to teach in Bahia. In the end I had a suitcase full of photocopies, and among them was the exchange between Frazier and Herskovits on the origin of the black family. These articles were not available in the FFCH/UFBA library, only about one kilometre from the Gantois and right beside the São Lazaro Church, two of the main sites in Landes’ and Herskovits’ photos. My colleagues and friends, Michel Agier and Jeferson Bacelar, asked me for a copy, which I was able to give them right away. The fact that these articles resulting from research in Bahia in the 1940s, which I had read in Amsterdam as part of my graduate education in Caribbean and ethnic studies, had been
Certain themes or documents that were important for African-American studies or/and Caribbean studies did not receive much attention in Brazil. Other more recent ideas and publications produced mainly in the US, regarding antiracism and affirmative action as well as comparative race relations studies, started arriving in Brazil in much more significant numbers especially after the celebration of 100 years of Abolition, in 1988, which was also the year of the first democratic Constitution in Brazil.
My main attempt to revert the politics of the archive mentioned above has been the creation of an experimental digital museum of Afro-Brazilian and African Heritage https://afrodigitalmuseu.uni-bayreuth.de/. It started in 2010 as an archive and now includes five Brazilian universities. It hinges on three key notions: digital donation, digital repatriation and digital generosity (Sansone 2019a). The idea of this digital museum came to mind in 2006 when, at the Schomburg Center, I came across the photos of the first official meeting of the Council of Faculty of the Institute of Philosophy in 1942, which had honoured Melville Herskovits in person. The Institute happens to be where I work at the Federal University of Bahia, and its archive had no such photos.5
An extra autobiographical touch, which makes me part of the field, is that I am a neighbour of the Gantois house, even if my relationship with the cult-house is primarily professional. At least once a year, at the end of the semester, I teach my last class of Classical Anthropological Thought in Brazil in Gantois, with the assistance of Mãe Marcia, who is not just any ekedi, but has worked at the CEAO for decades and is familiar with the social sciences and the working style of anthropologists. Moreover, I visit the Gantois for an occasional festa, on average once every six months. Living on the corner less than 100 metres from the shrine, I can hear the nightly drumming and fireworks from my bedroom. Besides, the older people in my family, one way or another, have been connected to the cult-house since their youth. They were all very familiar then with Mãe Menininha as they are now with Mãe Carmen.6 I have become
Livio Sansone with his students at the entrance of the Gantois cult-house, April 4, 2017
2 To Repatriate or Not?
In the meantime, I have discovered that the process of digital repatriation presents a complexity very close to that of physical repatriation. A quick look at the Gantois house and its Candomblé community today, and their dialogue with various sections of society, including social scientists about eighty years after the four scholars first came to Bahia, and fifty-three after Frances’s comeback, points to the conundrum of repatriation. The Gantois house, of course, has altered a lot over this long time. In a community that has experienced dramatic social changes, the cult-house has become more open to the outside and less interactive with its neighbourhood, which has become both larger and more complex, even in terms of religious life. If Frances was surprised by the changes in the community twenty-five years after her first visit, she would
Over time, I have also realised that it is not clear what it is meant by repatriation. In many ways, the Herskovitses were convinced that they were doing some sort of repatriation, by bringing knowledge, artefacts, sounds and images from Africa and the Caribbean to Bahia as part of their fieldwork. Anthropologists often transfer knowledge, objects, craftwork, pictures and sounds from one location of their fieldwork to another, as I did between Suriname and Bahia and from Bahia to Guinea Bissau. A few years after the Herkovitses, Pierre Verger’s photographic gaze was the lens through which the memory of Africa or descendants of Africa in the New World was awakened, and the process of repatriation took place. With his very personal style, Verger was as central to this repatriation as the images portrayed in his (excellent) pictures. Being able to commute memories and heritage across the Atlantic must have yielded for him and the Herskovitses an immeasurable sense of excitement, and even power.
More recently, two colleagues tried some kind of repatriation of the photos taken by Lorenzo Dow Turner. Olivia Gomes da Cunha (2020) and Xavier Vatin (2017) showed some of the photos and even played a selection of the recordings to the priest or priestess of a few cult-houses where those photos and recordings had been taken originally. They did not leave the material with the cult-house, because they felt they were not in a position to do so. Instead, they produced individual books and, in one case, a 72-minute documentary (Barreto 2019) which contains some of these photos and, to an extent, sounds. In my case, the digital project is a different matter because it is an institutional project, based at the CEAO/UFBA and supported with public funds, aimed at creating a digital archive – and then a digital museum – where images, sounds and documents may be accessed, commented on and even curated by individuals or groups. The project is based on local digital donation, international digital repatriation and digital generosity among scholars and other categories of people involved (black activists, people from the Candomblé community, high-school students, teachers, and so forth). Inspired by the principle of creative museology, and sharing information and documents based on the ideas of Creative Commons for the Afrodigital Museum, repatriation in this instance
However, as an experiment, I did repatriate some documents and many photos and recordings. Soon after I returned from the US in 2006, I was delighted to be able to give copies of the images and the recordings to Luis Nicolau Parés, Felix Omidire and Mãe Carmen of the Gantois house; my colleague and friend Fabio Lima gave them to Mãe Stella of the Ile Axe Apo Afonja house. I also left digital copies on CD s and pen drives with them, with special authorization by the SI to do so – and I thought that was the best thing to do. I was repatriating images and sounds and leaving them to the house to use as they pleased – and if and when it pleased them. Furthermore, having received authorization from the SI, MS and ATM, pictures and recordings had already been posted online in the first version of the Afrodigital website. While Mãe Stella reacted enthusiastically and thanked us for the gesture in a generous letter, Mãe Carmen’s reaction was not the one I expected. When I presented my project in the main hall of the cult-house, she told the two ekedi who were there: “Close all the windows. I want to be the first person in the house to see the pictures.” Something very similar had happened three years before to Olivia Gomes da Cunha (Da Cunha 2020:636).
Not all memory of the past is good or valuable for the present. When I presented the photos, locations and certain objects were recognized immediately. Although there are very many photos in cult-houses, there is a plethora of objects in them which are almost worshipped or treated as relics, such as the Memorial of Mãe Menininha, which is part of the Gantois cult-house (which contains very few photos).7 The people in the photos were often not recognized and in fact attracted less attention altogether. There was much less interest in people than I had imagined. It was much easier to recall places than people. Some people were not to be remembered anyway because, often, they had left the house after a quarrel. Repatriation is attractive to the Candomblé leadership when it suits the present arrangements. In the process of remembering, through observing the photos, what was remembered by the observers was almost always not what I would have liked them to remember. Sometimes memory failed. With others, there was just silence. It must be stressed that a certain elision in the process of answering questions from outsiders is typical of Candomblé leadership. A copy of a picture taken by Ruth Landes is now in the Memorial of Mãe Menininha, with no credit to the source. It is as if the cult-house is the valid owner of the photo. After all, what
One of the Afrodigital Museum tenets, digital donation, has also faced obstacles. Only a few scholars, mostly younger, are willing to show and share their archives. There is no tradition of donating personal archives to the Municipal and State Public Archives in Salvador, Bahia. This is the result of a tense history in the relationship between Bahia scholars and the local archives, which are poor, non-existent or scarcely available (for lack of maintenance, resources, personnel and goodwill). In the not-so-distant past, large chunks of public archives (and, to a lesser extent, libraries) were de facto privatized, becoming part of the social and symbolic private archives and libraries of local scholars.8 The present situation of the archive in Bahia is reminiscent of the coloniality condition, the basis of which is the establishment of sets of episodes in which the colonizer distinguishes himself by grandeur and generosity and the colonized by mediocrity and provincialism.
Let us consider the different attitudes of the SI and the MAE/UFBA regarding images and copyrights. The Smithsonian (let us call it here the colonizer) has been much more agile and willing to repatriate large numbers of digital copies of Melville Herskovits’ and Ruth Landes’ photographs than one of the small museums of my university (let us call it the colonized). The latter had become the repository of the library and documents of late professor Valentin Calderon, which had two pictures of Melville Herskovits participating in a faculty meeting of our institute, the FFCH/UFBA. Calderon had de facto privatized these two public documents, among many others, and made it difficult through his testament for the museum to concede to my request to put them onto the digital archive, even though I eventually managed.
Is repatriation always a practical solution? How politically relevant might it be? At times, physical repatriation can lead to disappointment. As the former curator of the IFAN Museum in Dakar, Ibrahima Thiaw, told me in an interview in March 2010, objects repatriated from Paris to Dakar originally “belonged” somewhere else, for instance in Mali. Another example concerns the physical repatriation of the part of Donald Pierson’s papers that relate to Brazil to the AEL/UNICAMP, the best archive of social movements in Brazil. When I consulted them there in 2010, they were still in disarray, which meant that they were not yet available online, as the rest of his papers were, at the University of Florida at Gainesville. Digital repatriation, although not free from limitation, has ended up functioning much better than the local donation of copies
In many ways, this book has been a way to make sense of that terrible pandemic that bereaved us of so many loved ones, including my father Agostino. During the many, long months of quarantine and social isolation in Brazil, my review from the South counted on a broad number of generous colleagues in the global North who assisted my research in a variety of ways. Without them, my incursion into the archives of the North would have been almost fruitless. Also, Sci-Hub, LibGen and other digital libraries have been essential to my project.
This difficulty of access is changing, thanks to the development of free knowledge in the digital community. Alexandra Elbakyan (creator of the Sci-Hub digital library) is one of the people who contributed most to the research for the present book.
These difficulties would have been insurmountable were it not for a set of outstanding specialists based in the United States and France who generously shared with me their data, insights and, often, PDF s of otherwise hard-to-get papers.
The feeling that in the field of Afro-Brazilian studies a more proactive attitude towards internationalization – and foreign scholarship in general – was needed was the main source of inspiration for the creation of the Factory of Ideas: Advanced Doctoral School of Ethnic and African studies, which was initiated in 1998. I have been the general coordinator of this project ever since. From 2010, the issues of heritage, heritage preservation, intangible heritage and (digital) repatriation became the top priorities of the Factory of Ideas. In 2005, at the CEAO, the first graduate programme with an MA and PhD course in ethnic and African studies (Posafro) was founded – thanks to an initial grant from the Ford Foundation. In 2010 Posafro created the Museu Afrodigital, which still survives as an outstanding example of its kind, despite a chronic lack of funding and a relative lack of experience in Brazil in the field of digital humanities.
In 2019 I discovered that some of these photos were to be found in the personal archive of one of our professors at UFBA, the late Ott. Until not many years ago, “privatizing” public documents was a common practice among Brazilian academics, as in many other countries in the global South with equally poor archives.
I showed the picture to two old ladies, Tia Edinha and Dona Railda (my mother-in-law), neighbours of the Gantois house, who were quite close to Menininha and knew Mãe Carmen well. They had interesting – and nostalgic – recollections about the Gantois and the community. The images and the recordings were also shown in a PowerPoint presentation at several conferences in Brazil, like RBA, ANPOCS and Congresso Lusoafrobrasileiro.
A small collection of her personal objects is open to the public.
I was told that there is a similar “tradition” regarding the patrimonialization of public documents among historians in Bahia.