Uprooted Africans brought as slaves to Brazil carried with them a collective memory, including elements of their religion and medicine. The Yoruba orisha and the Christian saints have been thoroughly assimilated; sculptures made in Brazil in the first half of the twentieth century still show clearly the survival of the Yoruba influence combined with Christian iconography. Examples of Shango wands, twin figures (ibeji) and representations of Eshu confirm this conclusion.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
383 p, Black Atlantic Religion illuminates the mutual transformation of African and African-American cultures, highlighting the example of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion. This book contests both the recent conviction that transnationalism is new and the long-held supposition that African culture endures in the Americas only among the poorest and most isolated of black populations. In fact, African culture in the Americas has most flourished among the urban and the prosperous, who, through travel, commerce, and literacy, were well exposed to other cultures.
Not rooted or identified as a Brazilian martial art, Capoiera Angola is the foundation of which African-Brazilians adapted the rhythmic form of self-defense and offense called Capoiera. The indigineous Capoiera Angola is the mother/father of Brazil's Capoeira, which was formed when Africans from Central Africa were brought to South America in bondage. Capoeira Angola goes further.
