Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Black People

On Tuesdays, a Catholic Mass is celebrated at the main altar with drums, a bell, and a gourd rattle. Baskets of bread are brought to the altar, then distributed to those gathered after the service. This practice took shape only in the early nineteen eighties, while the old image of Our Lady of the Rosary, which once stood at a side altar in another cathedral, is now kept here.

The word “black” in the name referred to specific people. In colonial Salvador, this was the term used for Africans and their descendants; among the parishioners were enslaved and free people, men and women. Many came from Congo and Angola.

At first, they prayed at a side altar in the old cathedral. An image of Our Lady of the Rosary stood there—the Virgin Mary to whom the cycle of prayers using rosary beads is dedicated. In sixteen eighty-five, the parishioners established their own brotherhood. It was a Catholic community with its own fund and elected stewards. For an enslaved person, such an organization dealt with very practical matters: the brothers visited the sick, buried the dead in their own cemetery, and made loans from the shared fund to buy an alforria—a certificate freeing a person from slavery.

Nineteen years later, the brotherhood received a plot by Portas do Carmo—the old city gates from which the road led to the Carmelite monastery. Here the parishioners began building a church of their own. There was little money. Masons, carpenters, and blacksmiths among the brothers gave the construction hours free from work for an owner or from the work by which they earned their living. That is why the building took nearly a century to rise. People who controlled only what was left of their own time spent that remainder on walls within which they could govern the community themselves.

Obtaining a building did not yet mean obtaining the right to celebrate as they wished. In seventeen eighty-six, members of the brotherhood appealed to Portuguese Queen Maria I, seeking permission to restore masks, dances, songs in the language of Angola, and African instruments to the feast of Our Lady. They recalled that these had been allowed before and that similar celebrations took place in other Christian countries. Lisbon refused. The brotherhood already had its own church, but it was not officially permitted to combine a Catholic celebration with forms brought from Africa.

Today’s Tuesday Mass is not presented as an uninterrupted rite preserved from the eighteenth century: this tradition took shape in the early nineteen eighties. The service follows the Roman Catholic rite, while the chants are accompanied by atabaques, an agogô, and a shekere, a gourd rattle; baskets of bread are carried to the altar and distributed to those gathered after Mass.

The seventeenth-century image of Our Lady of the Rosary, before which the brotherhood began to pray at a side altar in someone else’s cathedral, now stands here on the main altar. During the Tuesday service, both the baskets of bread and the instruments for which Queen Maria I gave no permission are placed beneath it.