Where gods and men have mingled - Brazilian cultural evolution
UNESCO Courier, May-June, 1986 by Jorge Amado

Where gods and men have mingled

THE culture of Brazil was formed in the struggle against racism and was born of the mingling of whites, blacks and Amerindians. The black element in Brazilian society is inextricably mingled with the white, and Africa is a maternal presence in our midst.

Our outlook on life is fundamentally antiracist, based as it is on intermingling. The vigorous "negro' art of the scultor Agnaldo da Silva, without equal in Brazil today, is not exclusively black. It bears traces of white and Iberian influences in both form and subject: Agnaldo's Oxossi is also St. George.

It is all the more unfortunate, then, that a distorted image of our way of life is sometimes presented abroad. The African contribution, which is of fundamental importance to Brazilian culture, is glossed over or pushed into the background.

This is a totally false approach. Through a curious reversal of the colonial mentality, there is a tendency to put the spotlight on painters, writers and singers with the blackest possible skins. This attempt to prove the absence of racial-prejudice in Brazil actually indicates a preoccupation which is totally alien to the Brazilian philosophy of life.
 

The blackest girls are chosen to sing, but no attention is paid to the fact that they sing songs more strongly marked by Iberian than black influence, although Brazilian music derives primarily from the atabiques of Africa.

The paintings shown tend to be typical examples of the Paris School--the important thing is that the artists' skins are black. Brazilian painters like Tarsila and Di Cavalcanti are neglected, although their work displays the black African influences which, along with white, Amerindian and Japanese elements, have produced an art which is uniquely Brazilian.

We must proclaim to the world at large the tremendous importance of the African presence in Brazil, in our life, culture and in the faces of our people.

The black African has contributed to all the great achievements of Brazil. The presence of Africa with its sunlight and shadow can be felt in the prophets, saints and angels which the mestizo sculptor Aleijadinho (1730-1814) carved in the mining region of Minas Gerais.

Africa is present in the music of VillaLobos and Dorival Caymi, in the Orixas and Madonnas of Agnaldo, in the poetry of Gregorio de Matos, Castro Alves and Vinicius de Moraes. It is present in the dancing, and the singing, the gentleness, the friendliness and the expansive imagination of everything great in Brazil.

For here in Brazil gods and men have, happily, become inextricably mingled.

Photo: For four centuries, black Africa has exercised a strong influence in Brazil, alongside the Amerindians and the European colonizers. Black African cultures and peoples played a major part in the development of a new type of civilization, which is neither European nor African, but distinctively Brazilian. Left, an Afro-Brazilian family out for a stroll in Salvador de Bahia. On the wall in background, scenes from the conquest and colonization of Brazil.