“The great leaveners of power in the slave societies of the African-Portuguese world were not muscle and might, but rather, African forms of religion and spirituality” (p. 83). With this bold statement, James Sweet concludes the first section of Recreating Africa and announces the thesis of the rest of this provocative book. Rejecting the view that the slave trade so disoriented and dislocated Africans that they could only build creolized African-American cultures in the New World, Sweet argues that in the Portuguese world, “the beliefs and practices of Central African slaves were more than culturally detached or diluted ‘survivals.’” Rather, “an essential character or worldview . . . was transferred to the Americas and survived in large measure” (p. 227).
Focusing on the first three centuries of slavery in the Luso-Atlantic world—the period about which we know the least—Sweet offers a rich feast of vignettes of African religious practices culled...
