The Boa Morte Festival
Ayzoh’s destination photography workshop in Cachoeira
The Boa Morte Festival takes place in the small town of Cachoeira, 120 km’s from Salvador de Bahia — in Brazil — at the end of the second week of August. For more information, details about the workshop, the entire travel program, and to register please write to workshop@ayzoh.com.
The Boa Morte Festival (the name, meaning “good death”, refers to a proper passage from the material to the spiritual world) is perhaps the most important festival in the African Heritage calendar in Bahia and is a living document of African culture and Diaspora to the New World.
Over time the festival has grown in popularity and today it is covered by national television channels. It is also a very popular tourist attraction for people from Brazil as well as from all the world.
Cachoeira
The festival takes place in the pretty Bahian town of Cachoeira, in an area called the Recôncavo Baiano, one of Brazil’s most fertile and productive land.
Five hundred years ago, the Portuguese colonists cleared the land to grow sugar cane and, later, tobacco on these rolling hills. After an unsuccessful attempt at enslaving the local Indians, they imported vast numbers of slaves from Africa to work their fields.
Cachoeira flourished as a river port, linking inland agriculture to the ships waiting for 70 miles southeast in the Salvador harbor. By 1878, the town’s population was 7,000 and 2,000 of them were slaves.
A decade later, Brazil’s monopoly of the world’s sugar production had ended and new roads were replacing river transport. The town stopped in its tracks and its colonial architecture was left to crumble.
The Festival
On the surface — being deeply syncretized with the Fest of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary — the festival is purely and ardently Catholic, but the reality is more complicated as there are other religious, social and political subtexts.
References are constantly made to the Candomble deities, part of an African religion that achieves its spirituality through religious fervor and trances.
The African slaves were able to practice their religion in secret gatherings disguising much of their practices as Catholicism.
That’s why the name of the festival refers not only to the good death of Mary — who, according to scripture, ascended into heaven — but to the slaves who managed to become free during their lifetimes.
The Irmandade da Boa Morte
Founded in the early 19th century, the Irmandade da Boa Morte (Sisterhood of the Good Death) is a religious confraternity devoted to the Assumption of the Virgin and made of African-Brazilian women, all descendants of African slaves.
Reminiscent of secret female societies in Africa, the Sisterhood of the Boa Morte worship the Iyá’s — the female spirits of the dead — and their history is part of the history of mass importation of blacks from the African coast to the cane-growing Recôncavo region of Bahia.
In fact, although it was created with purely religious intentions — to pray for the dead and to provide decent funerals for its members — the confraternity had also an important role to free slaves, either by helping them escape or by earning money to buy their freedom.
In a patriarchal society marked by racial and ethnic differences, the confraternity is made up exclusively of black women, which gives this Afro-Catholic manifestation — as some consider it — a significant role in the annals of African Diaspora history.
Besides the gender and race of the confraternity’s members, their status as former slaves and descendants of slaves is an important social characteristic without which it would be difficult to understand many aspects of the confraternity’s religious commitments.
The former slaves have demonstrated enormous adroitness in worshipping in the religion of those in power without letting go of their ancestral beliefs, as well as in the ways they defend the interests of their followers and represent them socially and politically.
Although the group was the female equivalent of Catholic lay brotherhoods, the Boa Morte’s relationship to the church was never formalized. In the 1980’s a priest in Cachoeira confiscated the sisterhood’s property, including precious jewelry, religious statues and a sandal bearing the image of the Virgin.
A young lawyer, Celina Maria Sala, came to their aid, pursuing the case through several appeals and finally finding 19th-century paperwork proving that the sisters, not the church, owned the items.
The case was resolved in 1998, but Ms. Celina Maria Sala continues to take a lively interest in the Boa Morte Sisterhood that now — as a society — intends to preserve African traditions and to celebrate the life and death of the Virgin Mary.
Attending the Festival
Organized by the Boa Morte Sisterhood, the festival is celebrated from Aug. 13–15. The dates for the Boa Morte Festival are always the weekend, the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin. If August 15 falls on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday, the celebration will be on the following weekend.
These dates are confirmed three months before the celebrations begin when the Sisters consult with the Orixás for their permission to proceed with the celebrations.
Day 1 (Friday)
5.00 pm — All activities begin at the Boa Morte headquarters, at Rua 13 de Maio, in the center of town. The ceremony begins at the premises of the Sisterhood of the Boa Morte with a torchlit procession through the streets of Cachoeira as the Sisters, dressed in white, carry the prone figure of Our Lady Boa Morte.
The first day of the festival the sisterhood dresses in their best frippery. The blouses are decorated with ruffles and they wear large skirts to their ankles. Over their head is a dainty white turban and a white shawl covers their shoulders. They sparkle with jewelry including gold chains, colored beads, and cowry shells. They carry a figure of the Virgin Mary through the streets and then attend Mass.
At the end of the procession, a ritual dinner of wine, rice, onions, potatoes, and fish is served to anyone who wishes to feast.
Day 2 (Saturday)
6.00 pm — Religious ceremony in the premises of the Sisterhood followed by another street procession, this time the Sisters in solemn black clothes, once again carrying the prone figure of Our Lady Boa Morte through the streets of Cachoeira.
The second day of the Festival is more somber as it marks the actual death of the Virgin Mary. The sisterhood wears long black skirts, with black shawls that have a red silk lining and no jewelry. They attend Mass and then a somber parade winds its way through the town.
Day 3 (Sunday)
10.00 — Religious ceremony in the Mass followed by a procession through the streets of the town with the upright figure of Our Lady Gloria (Assumption). The Sisters are dressed in their full gala clothes of black, white and red. This is the highlight of the celebrations. Five Catholic priests officiate at the Mass.
The sisters parade through town after the mass with bands trailing behind them The Sisters later have their traditional “Samba de Roda”, a spinning samba only found in the Cachoeira region. This begins late afternoon and continues until early evening.
Note: for more information, details about the workshop, the entire travel program, and to register please write to workshop@ayzoh.com.
