ABSTRACT
This paper presents an interpretation of the process of Simão in the Portuguese Inquisition. Simão was an African freedman born in the Kingdom of Kongo who lived in Bahia in the last decades of the 17th century. Simão was denounced to the Inquisition in 1685 after having been accused by slave-owner André Gomes de Medina and by Medina’s slaves of performing witchcraft to kill other Medina’s captives. Before being sent to the Inquisition, Simão had already been informally judged and condemned in André de Medina’s lands by means of a judicial and religious ceremony conducted by an African priestess named Grácia, who was a practitioner of an African-American cult called “calundu”. The analysis of Simão’s trial by African slaves aims at shedding light on concepts of guilt, innocence, and freedom that existed in the Bahian African community at the time. I argue that many African slaves have engaged in a kind of ideological resistance to slavery which did not conform to a paradigm based on the demand for liberty, in modern terms, but which instead was built upon a characteristically African understanding of solidarity.
Keywords
calundu; slave resistance; Inquisition; African-American religion