All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

Author of Review: B. J. Barickman

[You may view the article as PDF Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia II ]

Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. By Joäo José Reis
and translated by Arthur Brakel. [ Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History & Culture.] (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Pp. xv, 281.)

The late night hours of 24 January 1835 witnessed the outbreak of the Revolta dos Malês, one of the largest and best organized slave rebellions in Brazil’s long history of slavery. In Salvador, capital of the Northeastern province of Bahia, hundreds of African-born slaves and freed slaves, many of whom were Muslims, engaged in bloody street skirmishes with local police and militia forces. Although quickly crushed, the rebellion brought in its wake a wave of repressive measures against the rebels caught by Bahian authorities and more generally against all African-born slaves and former slaves. National authorities, fearing the possibility of other Af rican-led slave rebellions, took similar measures.

Slave Rebellion in Brazil by Joäo José Reis, a revised and translated version of a work published in Brazil in 1986, makes available in English the best study to date of the 1835 uprising and the only study to make full use of the extensive court records generated in the rebellion’s aftermath. Rejs skillfully combjnes those records and various other sources to reconstruct a detailed narrative of the revolt and to locate it within the context of social-political turmoil that overtook Bahia in the early-nineteenth century. Reis delves even deeper into the Muslim-led 1835 uprising by linking it with the life experiences of African-born slaves in Salvador. In this way, his study also goes far in mapping the social, cultural, and economic contours of urban slavery and urban slave life innineteenth-century Brazil.

Reis’ analysis of court records confirms the impression held by contemporary observers that, overwhelmingly, the slaves and freed slaves who joined the rebellion were West African by birth and mainly Yorubas and Hausas. Reis, however, goes beyond both contemporary observations and later scholarship by demonstrating how daily work experiences, residential patterns, and the demographically-limited opportunities to form families all combined within Salvador’s urban setting to create, among West Africans in Bahia, the overlapping networks of religious and ethnic solidarity on which the rebels would draw in plotting and organizing the revolt. The greater freedom of movement slaves enjoyed in the city also made it possible to bring into those networks freed slaves of West African origin, who, in turn, provided crucial resources in laying the groundwork for a rebellion. For example, freed slaves who earned their livelihood as peddlers or merchants could easily make contacts with other Africans, whether slaves or former slaves, throughout the city and in nearby plantation areas. Plans to expand the uprising into the countryside stand out among the many features that set the 1835 rebellion apart from earlier revolts by urban slaves in Bahia.

Salvador’s urban setting also allowed Muslim West Africans both to practice their faith more or less openly and even to convert non-Muslim West Africans to Islam. Some of the most fascinating sections of Reis’ work explore the spread of Islam in Bahia and the religious practices of the city’s Muslim community. In those sections, he argues that Islam reinforced ethnic solidarities and gained for Muslim West Africans considerable prestige among large segments of the African-born slave population; it also created the hierarchy of leadership used in plotting and then launching the rebellion.

Earlier studies of the 1835 uprising have repeatedly identified the Mal revolt as a strictly Muslim rebellion and have, in some cases, even gone so far as to describe it as a jihad. While by no means discounting Islam’s importance, Reis convincingly challenges these “jihadist” interpretations that stress religious intolerance. The networks of religious and ethnic solidarity on which the rebels relied did, it is true, almost entirely exclude mulattoes and Brazilian-born blacks, who, in turn, took virtually no part in the uprising. But the evidence presented by Reis indicates that the Mals had no plans to establish an exclusively Muslim society; they were fully aware of the strategic need to bring other Africans into the rebellion, which did indeed expand beyond Salvador’s Muslim community. The leadership was Muslim, but the rebellion itself was an “an African uprising” (emphasis in the original).

Joäo Reis’ Slave Rebellion in Brazil is, in sum, a superb example of the very best recent Braziljan scholarship on slavery. Uniting careful research with a sophisticated treatment of issues related to race, ethnicity, relgion, class, and collective action, it deserves attention not only among scholars interested in New World slavery, but also from an even wider audience. Moreover, despite a few questionable word choices, the translation is thoroughly readable and can therefore be recommended for classroom use.

Source: The Americas Vol. 51, No. 2 (Oct., 1994), pp. 275-276