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Mar/Apr 2006

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A Call to a New Ecumenism
by June Ramage Rogers

For more than 400 years, the religions of the Africans who landed on the shores of Brazil were prohibited. Today, the daughters and granddaughters of those Africans—whose blood is thoroughly mixed with the blood of the colonizers and the indigenous people whose land and cultures were destroyed—are reclaiming elements of their ancestors’ faith and drawing strength from some of the ancient rituals as their grandmothers did.

Rachel Harding points out in her book, A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University, 2003), that this faith was the means of survival and resistance for African slaves who were often worked to death in four or five short years. Parents practiced infanticide because no one, male or female, wanted to bring children into such a life. Today’s black women of Brazil are empowered by a history (long withheld from them) abundant with heroines such as Zeferina, the woman warrior who fought the colonial government to the death. Zeferina now serves as a model to women of Bahia struggling with their identities.

Telling Faith Stories
In June 1992, the Women Black Pastoral Agents held a national conference in Salvador, Bahia, the entry point for millions of slaves who were brought to Brazil after enduring the unbelievable horrors of the Middle Passage (the forced voyage across the Atlantic Ocean). The conference theme was “Women, Religion and Politics” and the first day of this event included a procession of three groups of women: Protestants carrying their Bibles, the adherents of popular Catholicism holding high the black Madonna—Nossa Senhora da Aparacida—and believers of the traditional African religion, Candomblé.

How do women of three very different faiths create a conference that speaks to the diversity of religious experience and expression?

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June Ramage Rogers, 2002 and 2005 Global Exchange participant, is a former mission coworker, chair of the mission and social action committee of Ohio Valley Presbytery and moderator of the coordinating team of PW in that presbytery.

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