The Roots of Catholic Samba

Samba is the iconic dance and musical style of Brazil. And in the Recôncavo region of the state of Bahia in the northeastern part of the country, it’s also a crucial part of religious celebration. Ethnomusicologist Michael Iyanaga writes that this is part of a long cultural evolution in that region that brought together musical and ritual tradition from different African cultures to reimagine Catholicism.

Iyanaga begins his story in colonial Brazil. Enslaved people trafficked into the Bahia region to labor in agriculture were almost all from Central Africa. Like white and mixed race (“pardo”) Brazilians, these men and women organized themselves into fraternal mutual-aid and philanthropic organizations centered on a Catholic patron saint.

The Black societies were made up of people from many Central African cultures and, starting in the eighteenth century, enslaved West Africans as well. These Afro-Brazilians sometimes performed songs and dances from their own regions and other times blended techniques together, creating the beginnings of a specifically Brazilian tradition.

For example, while West African rhythms tend to operate in twelve-pulse cycles, Central African ones more often use sixteen pulses. Putting the two systems together yielded a polyrhythm using triplets—with beats split into three parts—that’s common in samba.

Likewise, members of the fraternal societies blended Central African traditions focused on ancestor worship with Portuguese and African forms of Catholicism. So the emerging Brazilian music and dance form showed up both at Catholic festivals and also at calundú ceremonies, healing rituals with roots in Angola that involved channeling the voices of ancestors.

As early as the 1720s, calundú rituals used percussion instruments, including the tambourines, hand drums, and rattles that still show up in samba today. Although these ceremonies were based in Central African religious systems that predated the arrival of Christianity, in Brazil they often involved calling on Catholic saints. Iyanaga suggests that this may have been a way to unite Afro-Brazilians of all ethnicities. It’s also significant that the saints showed up in calundú, private events where Africans wouldn’t have needed to disguise ancestor-worship in Catholic garbs to fool enslavers, reflecting Black Brazilians’ intentional incorporation of them into their religious lives.

The religious translations also went in the other direction. For example, the brotherhoods sometimes recast their patron saints as relatives who naturally appreciated the African rhythms of their homelands.

By the early nineteenth century, Afro-Brazilians in Recôncavo were performing similar songs and dances outside of fraternity events in large public celebrations for Christian holidays including Christmas. Within fifty years, the practice spread across racial lines, and in the twentieth century, samba became a dominant part of religious celebrations in the region. In the process, Iyanaga writes, it allowed Black Brazilians to refashion both music and religion to suit their needs.

“This Catholic samba represents neither passive assimilation nor unbridled resistance—it fits somewhere in-between,” he writes. “And, I think, it is in fact this ‘in-between-ness’ that most accurately depicts the history of the black experience in the New World.”

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