Língua e raça no Brasil colonial

Appendix Language and race in colonial Brazil

1 Introduction

In this article, we analyze the process of racialization of African languages and subjects in the Brazilian colonial context. It is about exploring how the relationship between language and race was co-naturalized (Flores 2020; Rosa and Flores 2017) and mutually constituted as a social reality by processes of racialization of languages or languaging races, originating from the colonial context and capitalism (Alim et al. 2020). The analysis of the process of language racialisation is relevant because languages, as symbolic systems, integrate and constitute structures of thought, perception and behaviour (Mbembe 2019). Racializing processes, which marginalize and hierarchize people, are products of the construction of white subjects and white languages as normative elements (Alim et al. 2020; Flores 2020; Nascimento 2020). We consider that the relationship between language and race is constitutive of the historical process of emergence of the coloniality-modernity pair (Mignolo 1995). In this sense, we understand that the birth of the question of race and, therefore, of the Black, is linked to the history of capitalism (Mbembe 2017). And this history, evidently, has its bases in colonial systems of exploitation.

Thus, we seek to contribute to the analyses of the relationship between race and language by highlighting the material bases that were constitutive of racializing discursive processes in the Brazilian colonial context. The article in in line with critical African thought that problematizes the way in which the categories of race, ethnicity, and tribe were created and manipulated within a colonial project: “[…] the main phenomenon of colonization is the establishment of new territorial clippings […], that is, the fractionation of this “world-economy” constituted by pre-colonial Africa into a myriad of social spaces that will soon be elevated to the category of “races”, “tribes” and “ethnicities””^[1] (Amselle 2017: 62). Priority is thus given to a critically oriented discussion that allows us to identify the relationship between language, race and colonialism in the Brazilian context. To this end, the article does not present “new data” of research, but is largely structured around the literature review on the theme from a critical perspective of the racialization process in the colonial context, paying attention to the gestures of interpretation and analysis on the relationship between language and race. We believe that this discussion is relevant and necessary, since it contributes to an updated revision of the colonial framework that historically racialized languages in Brazil, contributing to re-signify what counts as African languages and heritages in the diasporan context. Moreover, the ‘data’ collected to a large extent by missionaries, travellers and explorers in the colonial context were racialized, which contributed to foster the emergence of nineteenth-century evolutionist racial theories (Schwarcz and Gomes 2018). We are cautious about the meaning of “data” with regard to racialized linguistic phenomena, avoiding reiterating the objectification of language and its speakers. We problematize the racializing linguistic ideologies that have shaped concepts and metalanguages concerning “linguistic data”. We focus on four elements in our analyses: the use of the terms boçal, ladino, crioulo and língua; the learning of Portuguese and the meanings of proficiency; the politics of naming and ethnicization; and the missionary linguistic ideologies that articulated theology and racialization. The aim is to explore the underlying ideological mechanisms that made possible the racialization of languages and their speakers in the colonial context. This context matters because it grounded the linguistic ideologies that shaped the idea of Brazil and of languages in Brazil.

In dialogue with this critical framework, the article takes a genealogical perspective (Flores 2020; Foucault 2009), which considers historical revision as a central element to highlight and problematize the way power relations have racialized languages and subjects. We understand that this historical perspective allows “to identify the traces of these racializing discourses within the discursive formations that lie at the core of the contemporary grid of intelligibility” (Flores 2020: 113). Furthermore, we explore the colonial discursive practices (Flores 2020) by contextualizing our analyses in the economic and political relations of the time, with a focus on the system of the mills and the Christianization of Africans in Brazil. Although this analysis is focused on Brazil, it cannot be decontextualized from the translantlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans (Schwarcz and Gomes 2018). By addressing the articulation between economic and religious contexts from the perspective of ratiolinguistics, the article brings an important theoretical and analytical contribution to the historiography of language practices in Brazil, considering its relationship with the African continent.

In light of the Portuguese colonial apparatus, which combined religious, political and economic interests, we analyze the role of languages – and of ideologies and representations about them – in the contexts of enslavement, evangelization and resistance. We problematize colonial linguistic ideologies insofar as “[…] representations of linguistic structure and colonial interests shaped and enabled each other” (Errington 2001: 20). From a critical perspective, we consider the way in which the colonial context, the sugar device (the engenho model) and Christianization contributed to shape linguistic practices and racializing linguistic ideologies (Flores 2020; Rosa and Flores 2017), which still reverberate today. More specifically, we point to the relationship between five interrelated elements: the ideological dimensions of language, racializing processes, economic domination, religious evangelization, and resistance practices.

The historical context of this text is primarily the Brazilian colonial period, more specifically between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, when the sugar industry, through the ingenio model, contributed immensely to shaping social and economic relations involving African peoples in the Brazilian context, in parallel with the process of Christianization of these peoples. In relation to terminology, we note that the term engenho (ingenio in Spanish) cannot be taken as synonymous with the plantation system: while the terms in Portuguese and Spanish refer to the context of Iberian domination in Latin America, the latter was used in English, expanding the colonial sense to more modern understandings involving the exploitation of sugar cane (Schwartz 2004). In statistical terms, Brazil contributed to the enslavement of around 5 million Africans over the course of four centuries, which represents 40 % of the African population that was destined for the American continent (Gomes 2019, 2021). The African peoples brought to Brazil were distributed in cycles that encompassed, initially, the so-called Sudanese Africans through the Guinea cycle in the 16th century; and, subsequently, the Bantu Africans, through the Angola and Congo cycles; in addition to these cycles, two others included the Mina Coast cycle and the Benin Bay cycle (Mattoso 2003).

In this paper, we consider that the economic domination is not separated from the process of Christianization and discursivization of languages. According to Hoonaert et al. (1983: 45–48), the economic cycles guided the missionary cycles: “the sugar mill […] also ‘evangelized’ […] The Jesuits could not escape the internal logic of the colonial system”.^[2] Thus, the models of appropriation, control and government of bodies were accompanied by practices of government of souls through religious pastoralism, which intensified in the context of the reform and counter-reform of the sixteenth century. According to Foucault (2008: 308), one observes in this period an “increase in devotional conducts, increase in spiritual controls, and intensification of the relationship between individuals and their guides”.^[3] Missionarization contributed to an increase and refinement of the techniques of pastoral power. We understand that the missionary discourse in the colonial context was characterized by three elements: refusal and contestation of primitive religions, demonstration of Christian thought for the purpose of convincing, and imposition of rules on the converts (Mudimbe 2004). To this end, languages played a central role.

As a constitutive practice of the missionary device, the construction of knowledge about the local languages played a relevant role, contributing to reinforce missionary and racializing linguistic ideologies (Irvine and Gal 2000). Unlike the Missionary Linguistics approach that reinforces representations of language guided by a structural model (Zwartjes 2011, 2002), we assume that missionary linguistic ideologies contributed to the constitution of Christianletos (Severo and Makoni 2015; Severo and Abdelhay 2023), a colonial and racializing theological device about languages (Severo 2019). We explore some examples of this device in the following sections: initially, we address the so-called African linguistic heritages in the colonial context, paying attention to the racialization of languages, in particular to the whitening role of Portuguese; next, we address the relationship between enslavement, Christianization and linguistic ideologies; finally, we register, from the perspectives of multilingualisms of the Global South (Pennycook and Makoni 2020) and colonial diasporic multilingualisms, the importance of re-signifying what counts as African languages in the diaspora.

2 African linguistic legacies in Brazil and the racialising role of Portuguese language

We propose that the history of Portuguese in its relationship with African languages in Brazil should be seen against the backdrop of specific economic and religious processes involving the African diaspora. We engage with questions raised by Pennycook and Makoni (2020) regarding the way colonial linguistic complexity was historically racialized, framed, shredded, and named, contributing to the subjugation of people, cultures and histories:

Language descriptions cannot be abstracted from the colonial imperatives to control, subdue, and order. The description of languages, therefore, has to be seen not so much as a scientific division of a language spectrum along natural lines but rather a colonial project in the defining and dividing of colonized people

(Pennycook and Makoni 2020: 48)

The African languages spoken in colonial Brazil have been represented by modern linguistics based on two major groupings – Sudanese and Bantu languages. According to Nina Rodrigues (1932) and Mendonça (1933), two general languages (línguas gerais) emerged in the Brazilian context, one of Sudanese origin and the other of Bantu origin: the Iroborba or Nago, in Bahia; and the Kimbunda or Congolese language, in the center and south of the country. Research reports the predominance of Bantu heritage in Afro-Brazilian formation or the existence of a general Kimbundu-umbundu-kikongo language in the context of the sugar mills and coffee plantations in the center-south of the country (Castro 1983, 2022; Slenes 1992). In the Central African context of the Angola and Benguela kingdoms of the 18th century, the Portuguese language would have become creolized, configuring a type of Atlantic Creole culture of Central-Western Africa, or an Afro-Portuguese culture that would have been taken to the Americas, especially Brazil (Almeida 2012; Heywood 2001). In addition, the languages Kimbundu and Umbundu would have been used as lingua franca in those African kingdoms (Heywood 2001). This information is relevant if we consider that between 1501 and 1800, 3,617,889 Africans were shipped from west-central Africa, among whom 2,802,748 enslaved Africans arrived in Brazil (slavevoyage.org).

The main criteria used to define African linguistic heritages in Brazil have been structural, descriptivist and/or ethnolinguistic. We problematize the classical creolistic tradition, because we understand that this tradition is the fruit of the colonial experience, following epistemological orientations based on genealogical families and ethnolinguistic categories that often treat African subjects, and their languages, as less human (Hollington 2021; Makoni et al. 2003). We avoid reproducing a structuralist perspective of language which shreds languages into pieces and attribute to pieces of language ethnic or geographical origins. The limitations of the creolist tradition refer to the very conception of language, disconnected from identities, social practices and discursive memories. We identify with the ideological orientation of Black Linguistics which proposes the following analysis concerning the conditions of production of knowledge about African languages in the colonial and missionary context:

The early work on African languages was, by and large, carried out by white missionaries and linguists with limited expertise in the languages they were describing and inventing as part of empire building. Because of the less than ideal conditions under which some of the work on Black languages began, it is logical to raise questions about the current nature of the conditions under which knowledge of these languages is being produced.

(Makoni et al. 2003: 9)

In regard to colonial linguistic ideologies, the ideologies of language families were reinforced in the nineteenth century by comparative philology in the Germanic tradition, contributing to establishing both linguistic genealogies – with effects on the way peoples, their cultures and histories were framed and labelled – and evolutionary hierarchies among peoples (Irvine 1995). The analysis of genealogical relations among African languages was largely based on the morphosyntactic system, for example gender and the designation of person as opposed to non-human objects. Such morphosyntactic categories served as linguistic indexes of an ideology based on Eurochristian representations of family and identity (Irvine 1995). The consequences of such a theoretical framework for the analysis of sub-Saharan African languages were that “Languages lacking sex-gender systems – such as most sub-Saharan African languages – revealed […] a mentality not yet able to recognize social hierarchy or assert Independence” (Irvine 1995: 147). We argue that the category Bantu language, framed from the theoretical prism of the language family, is part of the list of Western linguistic categories applied in the African context (Makoni and Pennycook 2006). Thus, what is understood as Bantu heritage should be investigated based not only on archaeological evidence of language, but, above all, on the social, communicative, political and cultural history of African peoples in diasporic processes. This matters because we understand that linguistics played a central role in colonial policies concerning language and identity invention, which demands a critical epistemological review:

If there is one criterion that has often been put forward to support the existence of the notion of ‘ethnicity’, it is certainly that of language […] But if there is one field in which there is great confusion in relation to Africanist linguistics, it is that of linguistics […] the focus of linguistic studies on morphology and syntax does not allow for a convenient approach to linguistic problems seen in a geographical and historical perspective.^[4]

(Amselle 2017: 53)

It is not our purpose to address African heritages in structural, lexical or ethnolinguistic terms, a theme explored in detail, for instance, by Castro (1983, 2016, 2022, in expanding the works of Raymundo (1933) and Mendonça (1933). Differently, we seek to analyze the relationship between language and racializing processes involving African peoples in Brazil, and other representations of African languages, which do not operate through the framework offered by models centred on the description of European languages. We assume that “the legacy of African languages as European scripts is still felt in the general tendency to regard the representations of languages as synonymous with the languages themselves” (Makoni and Pennycook 2006: 13).

In this section, we address some examples involving the relationship between language and race: we explore the relationship between language use and identity, based on the terms boçal, ladino, crioulo and língua; and we discuss the learning processes of Portuguese, the practice of baptism and the politics of naming/ethnicization. Finally, by revisiting the past, we advocate a contemporary perspective that considers diasporic multilingualisms as socially and historically situated practices.

3 Engenho, enslavement, Christianization and the role of languages

The social and economic model of the mills (engenhos) followed a disciplinary organization that grouped the subjects according to tasks and distributed times. It was a patriarchal model, in which control and privileges were centralized in the hands of the engenho lords, which did not prevent, logically, a network of solidarity relations between the enslaved. It is worth noting that in 1570 there were around 60 engenhos in operation in the states of Pernambuco and Bahia in Brazil; this number increased to 346 in 1629, and to 528 by the end of the seventeenth century, remaining stable until the mid-eighteenth century (Schwartz 2004). Such engenhos operated as economic and social systems oriented towards racializing, objectifying and dehumanising practices: It follows that “[…] the problem posed by the plantation regime and the colonial regime was that of the functionality of race as a principle for the exercise of power and as a rule of sociability” (Mbembe 2019: 97). From 1693 onwards, the discovery of gold in the state of Minas Gerais motivated the emergence of another economic and social model of exploitation, based on mining. In addition to the sugar mill and mining, there were also the models of urban centres, domestic services, cattle and coffee.

In terms of Christian discourse, the relationship between the daily life on the plantation and the enslaved condition of Africans was theologically naturalized. For example, Father Antônio Vieira, the most active Jesuit in Brazil in the seventeenth century, compares, in his sermon XIV do Rosário (1633, paragraph VII), the arduous life of the enslaved in the mills with the sacrifice of Christ:

In a mill you are imitators of the crucified Christ […] because you suffer in a very similar way what the same Lord suffered on his cross and in all his passion. His cross was made of two timbers, and yours in a mill is made of three. […] Christ without food, and you hungry; Christ mistreated in everything, and you mistreated in everything. The irons, the prisons, the floggings, the scourges, the affronting names, of all these your imitation is made up, which, if it is accompanied by patience, will also be worthy of martyrdom […] In all inventions and instruments of work it seems that the Lord has not found another that is more like his than yours.^[7]

Slavery, in the Christian imaginary described here, is seen from a theological perspective, being legitimized by the notion of sin. In the Christian conception, black Africans were associated with the descendants of Canaan, son of Ham who, upon seeing his father Noah naked and drunk, was cursed by him. The curse meant that the sons of Ham would become servants of serfs. In this perspective, while slavery/servitude was seen as punishment, baptism and Christianization were taken as the paths to salvation. In another sermon, Vieira (1686–1688, chapter V of the sermon XX of Rosário) resumes the biblical thesis of the dispersion of Noah’s lineages throughout the world, associating the punishment of Ham and his descendants with the colour of the Ethiopians’ skin: “For the space of two thousand years all men had the same colour, until when the descendants of Noah’s second son inhabited the two Ethiopias and many of them began to be black”.

The biblical interpretation for the lineages that spread across the world from Noah onwards was also ratified by a linguistic interpretation, following the example of the American William Jones who, in 1792, delivered a speech on the origin of nations and linguistic families at the meeting of the Asiatic Society in Bengal. William Jones’ linguistic-theological rationale was that the sons of Ham spread across India and Africa through their affiliations – Cuch, Mesraim and Rama. This perspective of linguistic lineage based on theological lineage would subject African languages to the ideas of condemnation and punishment, just like the sonship of Ham.

The presence of priests in the engenhos was not constant and continuous, unlike what occurred in the indigenous settlements (Severo 2019). This means that the Christianization of the enslaved did not follow a consistent model, even because many engenho lords avoided applying religious obligations to the enslaved, as they would consume work time on Sundays (Schwartz 2004). This example reveals how the spread of Portuguese through the Christianization of Africans was loose and irregular. Even so, in some contexts, the engenho lords allowed only catechesis, prohibiting the instruction of the black slaves (Franzen 2003). Regarding the use of African languages in the context of Christianization, from the eighteenth century onwards, Jesuits who knew some African language, especially Kimbundo, and were in charge of evangelizing the “pagan blacks”, became increasingly rare (Mattoso 2003: 112).

The Christianization of the enslaved followed a pragmatic and simplified ritual, often in charge of the chaplains of the mills, who taught a few elements, such as the sign of the cross, the creed and some prayers of the saints. According to the Constitutions of the Archbishop of Bahia of 1707, the Christianization would take place in Portuguese through the use of simplified linguistic structures that conveyed, in a summarized and mechanical way, the catechism, as the excerpt below suggests (p. 219–220):

BRIEF INSTRUCTION OF THE MYSTERIES OF FAITH, ADAPTED TO THE WAY OF SPEAKING OF THE SLAVES OF BRAZIL

Who made this world? God

Who made us? God

Where is God? In Heaven, on earth, and all over the world

Is there one God or many? We have only one God

How many people? Three

[ …]^[8]

In this document, Monteiro da Vide delegates to the lords of the engenho the power to Christianize the enslaved by following some basic aspects, such as: the teaching of general elements of Christian Doctrine, the performance of baptism, the teaching of Portuguese, the teaching of reading and writing, among others. A relation between religious discourse and a racializing perspective of language is evident, by iconizing meanings of rudeness and brutality to African languages.

In the missionary linguistic context, the translation of religious texts played a relevant role, either by inscribing a Christian imaginary in the non-Christian world, or by the process of systematization of the local languages. The colonial linguistic ideologies centred on the linguistic classification system and the role of translation operated as signs of conversion, understood as: “the process of making difference into similarity, of reducing the lower order diversities of the non-European world to the universalistic categories of the West” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 221). Regarding the practice of translation of religious texts in the Brazilian context, Father Antônio Vieira (sermon of Rosaryo XXII, 1686–1688, paragraph VII) exposes two reasons that led the Church – in the scriptures, mass and sacraments – not to use the so-called vulgar languages, prioritizing the role of Latin as sacred and unifying:

[F]irstly, because of the majesty of sacred things and divine worship, which in the ears and understandings of the rudiments could lose part of their reverence and esteem, and be exposed to many interpretations, not only unworthy but erroneous. Secondly, because the Catholic Church being one, it was also fitting that the language which it used in all parts of the world should be one, and that it should be the most common and universal, which is Latin.^[9]

In terms of language ideologies concerning the role of translation, it was not a matter of prioritizing perfect pronunciation, but the possibility of accessing the semantics of the Catholic text: “the flavor of prayer is not in what is pronounced with the tongue, but in the sense and meaning of what is pronounced; it is not in what the words sound, but in what is understood under them: sub lingua tua” (Vieira, Sermon of Rosay XXII, paragraph IV). The semantic dimension, the logos, is prioritized in detriment of pronunciation, the body.

Summing up, we argue that missionarization, by using language as an instrument of evangelization, inscribed specific language ideologies in the religious sphere, reinforcing a Christian – metaphysical, genealogical, mental and sacred – view of language. Such ideologies, which integrate the Christialects (Severo and Abdelhay 2023; Severo 2019; Severo and Makoni 2015), include:

1. a genealogical perspective of languages, which overlaps genealogy of races, genealogy of languages and religious genealogy;

2. the univocal relationship between language and thought, which fractalizes to civilized languages and minds versus savage languages and minds;

3. the binary and racialized construction of Latin languages – the Portuguese language – as the language of whites as opposed to the language of blacks;

4. the practice of translation as a project of language reduction (reducción) and invention;

5. the racialization of languages considered less sacred.

4 Conclusion

We explored the relation between language and race in the Brazilian colonial context, by focusing on the language ideologies that iconized and fractalized (Irvine and Gal 2000) racializing meanings in the languages spoken by Africans brought to Brazil during the colonial context of enslavement and missionarization. Examples included the terms boçal, ladino, crioulo and línguas in the configuration of a racializing and classifying linguistic imaginary; the ways Africans learned Portuguese in the contexts of the engenho and of Christianization; the role and meaning of proficiency in Portuguese language in the context of the abolition of slavery in Brazil; the politics of naming and ethnicization; and the way theology contributed to the racialization of Africans and their languages. We also mentioned the role of resistance in the resignification of meanings and roles attributed to the Portuguese language.

It is important to highlight that the colonial context cannot be seen in a binary and dichotomous way, as asserted by Cooper and Stoler (1997: 34) “colonial dichotomies of ruler and ruled, white and black, colonizer and colonized only reflect part of the reality in which people lived […] these dichotomies took hard work to sustain, were precariously secured, and were repeatedly subverted”. Rather than replicating dualist ideologies of analysis of the colonial experience, it is a matter of operating through the bias of a “critique of responsibility” (Mbembe 2019), in attention to the paradoxical and ambivalent situations involving colonialisms. Thus, the colonial context is characterized by plural practices of resistance, subversions, re-appropriations and alliances, currently configuring a network of significations that inscribes the voices of colonized subjects within the movement that has been called the Global South (Heugh et al. 2021; Pennycook and Makoni 2020; Severo and Makoni 2021a, 2021b; Makoni et al. 2022). In dialogue with contemporary debates, we understand that diasporic colonial multilingualisms, as examples of Southern multilingualisms (Pennycook and Makoni 2020), should both highlight and problematize the racializing linguistic mechanism, as well as recognize and highlight the voices that have been erased and silenced.

Paying attention to contemporary agendas towards the recognition of southern voices, we argue that diasporic colonial multilingualisms integrate communicative, aesthetic, religious and resistance practices of African peoples in the diaspora, as well as their underlying epistemologies (Faraclas and Delgado 2021; Hollington 2021; Severo and Makoni 2021a, 2021b), such as: the role of oral tradition, songs, performances, sacred and other practices in contexts of resistance, such as the quilombos in Brazil (Nascimento 1985; Severo and Makoni 2021b). We consider that these practices carry conceptions of language that trigger senses of solidarity, survival, communitarianism and plurality, so fundamental to the construction of critiques of the capitalist and neoliberal model that has operated by repeatedly kidnapping the humanity of subjects (Mbembe 2017; 2019).

We hope that the article contributes to expanding reflections on the decolonization of the meaning and roles of language, either by critiquing the ways in which languages have been historically racialized, or by recognizing and validating the multilingualisms of the Global South (Pennycook and Makoni 2020). Unlike a descriptivist and structural view, we engage with a perspective that denounces and dismantles linguistic racializations, as well as recognizes colonial diasporic multilingualisms in dialogue with the material conditions of language use. It thus seeks to problematize racializing ideologies, contributing to processes of decolonization that involve the co-construction of modes of belonging to the world, removing the fences (linguistic and identitarian) that have contributed to separating and enclosing people and histories (Mbembe 2019). Finally, the article aims at contributing to the denaturalization of racializing relations involving languages and subjects, contesting systems of power and knowledge that still validate white supremacy (Rosa and Flores 2017).