There are certain countries, the names of which fire the popular imagination. Brazil is one of them, an amalgam of primitive and sophisticated, jungle and elegance, complex rhythms and luscious jazz harmonics… there’s no other place like it on earth. And while Rio, or its fame anyway, tends toward the more urbane end of the spectrum, Salvador and Bahia tend toward the atavistic.
Modern Salvador da Bahia (often incorrectly written as “Salvador de Bahia”, “da” being a fusion of the preposition “de” and the definite article “a”) is many things, these depending to some degree upon who is doing the conceiving and considering. It’s the third largest city in the world’s sixth economy, with innumerous modern apartment buildings looking like gleaming upended harmonicas, these filled with occupants of the professional classes who shop in New York and take their kids to Disney World. Ships fill the bay, carrying away industrial plugs for blast furnaces, resins, chemicals…the stuff of large-scale manufacturing by multinational corporations.
Yet of Salvador’s 2,500,000 inhabitants, the vast majority are descendants of those who worked for the owners of the “big houses” on the plantations on the other side of the bay, and the big houses located in old Salvador, in what is now a neighborhood rather than the entire city, the area called Pelourinho (for the pillory which stood in various of its principal squares).
It’s possible to live an almost European existence in Salvador if one moves within carefully circumscribed limits. From tower to imported car, along expressways to modern office buildings and clinics…but even a glance from the balconies of those well-stocked towers belies first-world fantasies; red-clay barracos — simple houses, a step up (maybe) from shacks, crawl up hillsides and dip into valleys. The destination signs fronting Salvador city buses are emblazoned with places like Mussurunga, Massaranduba, Periperi, Alto do Cabrito…by way of areas called Ogunjá and Bonocó.
Private schools for the more fortunate economic classes offer capoeira, alongside football (soccer), volleyball and such. Baianas de acarajé (women dressed in flowing white, sitting before their tables selling the foodstuff called — more properly in Yorubá — akara, the addition of “jé” rendering “to eat akara”), may be found evenings selling to lawyers and businessmen on their way home, cans of beer washing down the African comestibles. There are thousands of houses of candomblé in Salvador, these vastly outnumbering the numerous Catholic churches and even the evangelical churches which have sprung up in the suburbs like toadstools, these latter attracting customers…worshippers that is…drawn to the harangues telling them that God desires their economic success too…
And the radio. There is Globo, owned by the family of now-departed Roberto Marinho, who parleyed his insider’s connections with Brazil’s dictatorship into the country’s largest media empire — playing its depressing mix of mostly American hits of the ’70s and ’80s.
But across the dial, on both AM and FM, the clave and rhythms are most definitely of African derivation (although for the most part cheapened and debased). Publicly-owned Rádio Educadora however continues to demonstrate that not all is (to repeat) cheapened and debased in government here, with the occasional program of top-flight Brazilian music, including choro on Sunday mornings.
And of course there are the people themselves, their melanin content ranging from darkest African through dusky Indigenous to lightest European, the preponderance weighted toward the darker end of the spectrum. Although there are exceptions, the prevailing wisdom is, as expressed by sambista Ederaldo Gentil, Todo branco tem negro na família (Every white person has a black person in the family). In contrast to the United States, where “one drop” defines who is considered “Black”, the distinction between persons of European-heritage ethnicity and those of African-heritage ethnicity is conceived differently here. Part of this is due to the fact that, unlike in the United States, where the children of owners-of-enslaved and enslaved women were themselves consigned to slavery, in Bahia this was often not the case, creating a class of mixed-“race” people (“Black” in the United States) who were here called “moreno” and who had property, rights, and freedom. And with churning intermarriage and a mathematician’s nightmare of racial combinations in people’s backgrounds, particularly amongst the “common” people, and the consequent commonality of cultural background, the feeling of I’m the Black or white dude and he or she is white or Black is rare here except amongst the top-most, old landed economic class, or would-be snobs who ascribe to that benighted class’s pretensions and prejudices (and there are more than a few of the latter around).
Salvador is not home to a racism-free society as is often touted…but day-to-day personal relations between most people are thankfully free of the back-of-the-mind fencing so common between people of different continental heritage in the United States.
Brazil’s First Colonial Capital… Salvador (the city was generally referred to as “Bahia” until well into the twentieth century*) sits on a spit of land sticking south south-west into the Atlantic Ocean. And although it sits well within the tropics at a southern latitude of thirteen degrees, it receives a refreshing sea-breeze which seldom falters until the wee hours of the morning when things have generally cooled off anyway.
The city sits on a huge bay, the Baía de Todos os Santos (the Bay of All Saints), and the topography is predominently hill and valley. * See an interesting article from the New York Times dated July 14, 1874, in which “our own correspondent” (the Times’, that is) refers to the “town” as “Bahia”…
It’s for this reason that people speak of a cidade alta (upper city) and cidade baixa (lower city). Both are connected on the bay side by the famous Elevador Lacerda, a “marvel” hailed mightily in most guide books. Forget the marvel (you’ll see what I mean when you’re on it), but the elevator does beat walking up down the steeply inclining streets which serve the same function of connection. There is a fifteen centavo charge for the ride. That’s less than three cents as I write, so who’s complaining.
There’s also the nearby Plano Inclinado, same price. It’s this rugged geography which is so disorienting to people new to the city. Neighborhoods (bairros) tend to be built on the heights, with thoroughfares twisting around and between. Streets zigzag and change names, and a lot of them are one-way, necessitating roundabout ways of arriving at any given destination. It can take a long time to catch on, but by the same token it can add even more of an element of mystery to the place.
One of Salvador’s principal characteristics is the outgoingness of its people. People talk to strangers here, are friendly to them. People are not divided by that initial suspicion of strangers that marks so many other places, at least as far as where sociability is concerned. It’s easy to meet. But there’s another characteristic which often takes first-time visitors to Salvador by surprise: I’m referring to the city’s urbanscape, its architecture, building and home styles. Colonial Pelourinho was built while Bahia was the economic powerhouse of South America, and many of the buildings are gorgeous. Most of the rest of Salvador was built on a shoestring, and the results range from the unpainted claybrick shacks of the poor to the reinforced concrete buildings one sees everywhere (usually in need of painting), to the more expensive modern and generally undistinguished apartment towers found in the middle and upper-middle class neighborhoods. People expecting leafy tropical bungalows may be disappointed. This is an urban, third-world city, with plenty of crowds and traffic jams. It does, however, retain its renowned Bahian soul, and tropical serenity (along with those leafy tropical bungalows) is very close at hand.
Lastly, perhaps the quality most fundamental, most elemental to Salvador and Bahia, most striking in the sense of setting this place apart and making it its own — is its zeitgeist. Bahia’s timeframe runs independently of the (developed) world’s decade-defined stages of development. Music here, for example, isn’t 70s, 80s, or 90s. It is, rather, measured in its distance from — or more precisely by its proximity to — the senzalas (slave compounds) of centuries past, to the quilombos (communities formed by runaway enslaved) of both past and present. Likewise for Bahia’s lovely and deadly Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira, continuing to grow and develop without abandoning the ethos of struggle that spurred its creation in the first place.
Oxalá, Oxóssi, Xangô — Yemanjá and Iansã — all virtually forgotten on their native ground across the Atlantic — are known to everybody here, determining to a large degree the makeup and timing of Salvador’s yearly social calendar.
These manifestations of popular culture are current, now, modern. They hearken back to the past but aren’t stuck in it. They are not continually re-enacted museum pieces but rather a part of a continuing flowering and evolution. Put simply, they are a part of life here.
Important Primordials: The peninsula upon which Salvador is situated is like the thumb of an open and grasping hand, what is normally thought of as the Recôncavo (a vastly important place which many if not most visitors to Salvador, amazingly, never hear of) then being defined by the curved index finger. This way of definition developed when agricultural products were brought to Salvador by boat, sometimes making their way first down the Paraguaçu river after having been carried overland from the sertão (backlands) to Cachoeira, the river debouching into the bay at Maragogipe. The city of Bahia (as it was usually called then) was crouched on the bay, comprised of a commercial district much smaller in area than today (landfill has increased it greatly), the area around the upper section of the elevator, and what is now called Pelourinho.
Much of the remainder of the peninsula was given to sugarcane plantations, and dotted within the Atlantic rainforest were countless quilombos; both are attested to today in commonly used city names. The neighborhood of Garcia was once Fazenda Garcia (fazenda being a farm or plantation), and this denomination is still used today to distinguish one end of Garcia (fim-de-linha) from the other (the Campo Grande end). Neighborhoods Engenho Velho de Federação and Engenho Velho de Brotas are so called for the old mills (engenhos velhos) which pressed the caldo (juice, so to speak) from the cane so laboriously hacked out of the fields. The neighborhood of Cabula is named for an nkisi (deity) of candomblé angola (the first candomblé to arrive in Bahia)…whose rhythms comprise the basis for samba, meaning that the rhythms to which so many in the world inexpertly swayed as Stan Getz’s saxophone soared and João and Astrud Gilberto sensuously intoned — this paragon of suave Brazilian sophistication — was born in the rough senzalas of Bahia. Ironically enough, the barefoot senzala version was/is far more sophisticated than the sophisticated version.
But times have changed, and Cabula is now a crowded, non-descript middle-to-working class Salvador city neighborhood (plenty of candomblé around though), and Engenhos Velhos de Federação and Brotas are swarming working class neighborhoods (ditto the candomblé); the senzala samba, the samba chula and samba-de-roda have disappeared. A simplified version — Bahian pagode — is heard everywhere in Salvador, but the real-deal stuff has died out here in the big city. It remains, however, a potent force on the remainder of its native ground, the Recôncavo proper, where it is danced to on pounded earth, under moonlight broken by banana, palm and mango leaves, lifting the souls of its participants almost like something religious, which it was, and gods aside, is.
Two Black Americas
The U.S. was scene of a world-shaking migration of African-Americans from the plantation country of the rural south to the cities of the north. These people carried with them various strands of a music which in evolution would come to completely dominate the music of the nation, and most of the planet. One part of the vast lore associated with this history is that of the intersection of highways 61 and 49. It was here that bluesman Robert Johnson is reputed to have sold his soul to the devil for the complete and holy mastery of his guitar and musical idiom.
Brazil also saw a mass migration of African-hyphenated people searching for employment, but here it was from the sugarcane plantations of Bahia south, to Rio de Janeiro, after the abolishment of slavery in 1888. These people likewise carried with them their music which in evolution would come to completely dominate the music of a nation…but in this case it was samba.
And as the original “delta” blues remained behind — for some decades anyway — in Mississippi and Alabama and Texas et al…primordial samba (samba chula / samba-de-roda) remains still in the land which was its cradle, the Recôncavo. There’s even a crossroads here, dominated not by the devil but by the African deity Exu (who was conflated — mistakenly of course — by Christians with Satan): This is the crossroads of BA (Bahia) 420 (running between the towns of Santo Amaro and Cachoeira, both vast redoubts of candomblé) and BA 878 (turning off from BA 420 and after a few kilometers following the interior coast of the bay south to the town of Bom Jesus dos Pobres).
If in passing this inconspicuous-enough but mightily-culturally-freighted junction one slows down or pulls over, there usually will be seen several despachos — offerings to Exu — clay bowls with cigars, cachaça (cane liquor), fowl… Exu is the opener of pathways, including between earth and higher realms; the guardian standing watch. How appropriate that he should preside over the head of the pathway between the primal African samba of Bahia and the national music of Brazil (although in the past the journey south to Rio was made by boat). And likewise (for we believe it was Exu metaphorically rather than the devil likewise at the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49, or 8 and 1 as some say) over the pathway between the primal musics of the Old South and the national musics of the United States.
Bahia’s primordial samba was born mere graceful steps away from laughing in the death-mask of presumed power. Both it and America’s primordial music are, in common, part of humanity’s arsenal of not only survival mechanisms, but of prevailing mechanisms. Beauty aside, therein lies their importance.