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The Right to an Identity to Call Your Own

July 22, 2008

By Suzanne Rumsey

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Reflections on a Visit to Brazil

How do you hold on to who you are?  

On a recent visit to Brazil I had the opportunity to explore that fundamental question of identity in two very different places and with two very different groups of people.
The first was the Tremembé indigenous community of Almofala in the northeastern state of Ceará. The second was the Afro-Brazilian barrio of Plataforma on the outskirts of Salvador de Bahia. In both places, PWRDF partners are accompanying and supporting processes that seek to defend and promote the rights of these communities, as well as to build their capacities to claim their rights for themselves, including the right to be who they are.

The Tremembé

It is evening in Almofala. I am there with staff from GTME, the Protestant Missionary Working Group, a PWRDF partner. Tremembé elders, youth and children gather in the circular courtyard of the community school under an almost full moon. The Atlantic Ocean can just barely be heard crashing on the shore a short distance over the sand dunes. Slowly a circle of people forms around João Venâncio, the community’s cacique (political, spiritual and cultural leader). He begins to shake out a rhythm on a maraca, and then to sing in a gentle, lilting voice. Other musicians inside the circle join him with maracas, a guitar, a triangle, and those of us in the circle around them, begin to move in an easy dance step. Soon everyone who knows the lyrics — old and young — join in.
And for the first time that day the Tremembé language is spoken in song. Indeed, it is only a few words in songs of adventure and struggle that remain of the language. And so we sing, and dance, an endless moving circle around João and the musicians, a closed circle that keeps the evil spirits out, but also opens to allow other members of the community to join in. This is who the Tremembé are in their place.

But it wasn’t always so. When the Portuguese first arrived in 1500, there were between two and six million indigenous peoples living in 1,000 tribes in Brazil. Today official census figures put their numbers at 350,000 in 200 tribes. Since the 1600s when conquest and colonization came to Tremembé territory, they have seen their land invaded, reduced and limited by the Catholic Church, settlers and more recently large coconut plantation owners.

In 1993 the Brazilian agency FUNAI (National Indigenous Foundation), officially recognized the existence of the remaining 3,500 Tremembé people and undertook a process of demarcating Tremembé territory. While the territory officially recognized is greatly reduced from what would have been their traditional territories — only about 7,000 hectares of beach and coastal forest and farmland — this demarcation was immediately challenged by local coconut plantation owners. To date these legal challenges remain unresolved in the Brazilian courts and Tremembé land continues to be invaded.  

In 2001, with the support of Methodist “indigenist missionaries” and faculty from the National University of Ceará, the Tremembé decided to take the education of their children into their own hands, and to train young adults chosen by the leaders of their aldeas (settlements) within the territory as teachers of “differentiated education”, that is, education designed and taught by and for the Tremembé themselves. (“Indigenist missionaries” understand their role as one of accompaniment of indigenous communities, rather than evangelization.) Today there are 39 young adults, chosen by their communities who teach three weeks of the month in their communities and the fourth week, gather in Almofala for ongoing teacher training and curriculum development.

Methodist indigenist missionary and GTME member, Marly Schiavini has accompanied this process since 2005, facilitating negotiations between various local and state government ministries, the university and the Tremembé, as well as seeking the resources to ensure that this unique education initiative continues into its next phase which is a proposed four-year degree program for the teachers in Intercultural Education. “That’s my role”, Marly who is herself an educator, stated, “I’m here to help build their capacity and autonomy so that I am no longer needed and can leave.”

Rural Almofala, Ceará is about as far away socially, culturally and politically from urban Salvador de Bahia as one can get in Brazil. But the question of who you are in the place where you stand and call home is, in may ways, as pressing for Afro-Brazilians as it is for the Tremembé.

The Candomblé

It is late afternoon at a community centre in Plataforma. I have come here with staff of KOINONIA — Ecumenical Presence and Service, another PWRDF partner whose Egbé Black Territories program seeks to defend and promote the rights of the Candomblé and Quilombo, traditional Afro-Brazilian communities that are at once political organizations, cultural expressions, geographic territories and religious faiths.  In a small dance rehearsal room, about 20 young people are moving to the pounding beat of African drums.  Unlike the gentle circle dance of the Tremembé, this dance is intense and athletic, by turns ballet and modern jazz dance. Their teacher is a professional dancer, who is also a member of the local Candomblé terreiro (territory), Xpé Axé Kafé Bokum, The Land Where Our Energy is Planted. Under her guidance, the young people are learning through dance, the stories of their cultural and religious heritage and later in the month, will present their dances to the terreiro, their families and the larger Plataforma community. The dance workshops are the final segment of a three-month course in leadership training supported and coordinated by KOINONIA together with the terreiro. This is who the people of Candomblé are in their place.

Until 1970, the practice of Candomblé was outlawed and heavily repressed. Today, in the state of Bahia there are believed to be approximately 3,000 Candomblé “terreiros” (territories) whose community life focuses around a “casa” (house), where members gather for religious celebration rooted in traditional Afro-Brazilian belief systems.

KOINONIA accompanies 170 of those terreiros, providing capacity building and leadership training on everything from civil rights to HIV-AIDS prevention to gender training.  KOINONIA also provides training and legal support in cases of religious intolerance that, despite the changes in law in 1970 is still prevalent and growing in Brazil.  In fact, KOINONIA has been key in supporting a paradigmatic legal case of religious intolerance that occurred in 1999, when a highly respected leader of Salvador’s Candomblé communities, Mãe Gilda (Mother Gilda), was threatened and defamed in the press by the neo-Pentecostal Universal Church of the Reign of God. In fragile health, it is believed the shock and stress she experienced resulted in her death. Today that case is before the Supreme Court, and has served to focus publicly the prejudice and racism that still pervades Brazilian society.  On the political front, KOINONIA has worked with the Candomblé communities to have January 21st the date of Mãe Gilda’s death, declared a National Day to Combat Religious Intolerance.

Rafael Soares, who heads KOINONIA describes what is taking place in Brazil today as “development-ism”, that is, service delivery without the realization of human rights, when what is needed is transformative development; development that empowers people to realize their own rights understood in their broadest sense: civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental. “In all that we do, be it with Afro-Brazilian communities, rural worker and youth organizations, or the Brazilian churches, that is what we are trying to be about, transformative development”, Rafael says.

Circles of life, of dance, of rhythm and song.  Holding onto, or discovering for the first time, who you are in the face of societies and a world that has sought and continues to seek to deny and destroy your people’s identity. And when the dance ends, standing strong in the place where you are, that is your place. This is the work that PWRDF supports through our partners in Brazil.
Suzanne Rumsey is the Latin America-Caribbean Program Coordinator for PWRDF.

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