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How I became Sango worshipper from very strict Christian family
After Nigeria, Brazil is rated as the country with the largest population of black ancestry with more than 100 million people of African, mostly Nigerian, descent. For decades, the two countries have explored shared economic and cultural history. The Acting Consul General, Ronaldo Vieira, spoke with ADEWALE ADEOYE on trade, economy, Orisa worshipers and the renewed cultural and economic ties between the two countries.
GLAD to meet you. Since you came as the new Acting Consul General of Brazil to Nigeria, what has been your experience about the people?
It is my second time in Nigeria. Between 2021 and 2023, I was the Deputy Ambassador of Brazil in the Embassy in Abuja. During that time, I learned a lot and I got so interested in Nigeria that I decided to take a PhD course. My thesis was on Brazil-Nigeria relations, which I successfully completed last September, almost one year ago. And, I believe that after I presented my thesis, I was invited to take charge of the Consulate in Lagos. So, it’s been almost two months I have been here, but I’m not so new to Nigeria.
When I came, a crowd of people welcomed me here. And I’ve been working very much on the basis of this network that I have built along the years. Because you can consider that from 2021 up to now, I haven’t walked away from Nigeria. Because after my term in Abuja, I went through studies and now I’m back here at the Consulate of Brazil in Lagos. Your PhD thesis on Nigeria-Brazil relationship is interesting. What were the striking things you discovered?
Well, you know those theses, you need to select all academic work, you need to select your objective, so you cannot really study everything. So, I did a historical study of the Brazil and Nigeria relationship since 1961. But my research was more on the impact, the role and the presence of the second dimension of politics in Nigeria, which is the traditionalists, the traditional monarchies. I think this is something that most scholars haven’t studied when they do international relations, because officially, the countries are linked through their formal ties. We deal with the official government, and you know that the traditional governments of Nigeria are not part of that particular system. Despite that, I have realised that traditional monarchs have great impact in promoting the economy, cultural exchange and political ties, because they have access to the formal presidency. And this is a knowledge that I experienced in Abuja that is very important and most scholars were not aware of.
What about the cultural aspect in your findings?
Well, there are two points on the cultural aspect. This is part of what we are trying to implement here. Our cultural (in Brazil) ties are more linked to a small part of Nigeria, which is the Yoruba, but not the entire group of the Yoruba. Our links are with the Yoruba who are traditionalists. So, the link between Brazil and Nigeria is mostly the Orisa worshipers and Brazil for instance was not aware of that. In Brazil, It is common that people think that the entire country worships Orisa. So the cultural aspects that I found was very interesting to argue in my research to highlight how diverse Nigeria is with 371 ethnic groups, according to some official sources, because it’s not a number that you can say it is the final because there are lots of research that Nigerians need to consider.
Another thing I also noticed culturally is that most of the books that make reference to Nigeria are written by foreigners in developed countries. And most of the studies lack field studies. I checked with some researchers who have some knowledge about Nigeria and I realised that none of them have travelled to Nigeria. So, how come if you don’t do field research, you can just trust (all) the reports of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank or the United Nations (UN) agencies. We have to be more careful about that.
The greatest finding on cultural aspects is to highlight that Nigeria is a very important country in Africa, and it has one of the most diversified cultures. And those cultures are not new. They go back 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 or even 10,000 years.Maybe they changed their names, but they were there. What was striking for me was the cultural diversity and how strong the different cultures are preserved, their values and the knowledge. Talking about culture, which are the strongest Nigerian cultures in Brazil that remained immune from Western civilization? For instance, you have Sango, you have Iyemoja.
Thank you very much for asking me that question. And it is much more complex than we think. Recently, I read a report from a Brazilian institution that does statistics, and we discovered that among the Orisa worshippers, 60% are not black. And most black people in Brazil are, in fact, Christians. So, 60% of the Orisa worshipers in Brazil are actually not black. I will not say that they are white, because this discussion of black and white might work well between Nigeria-European countries, but with Brazil it is very complicated because we are mixed. I give you an example, we have two words in Brazil for black. We have black and nigger (negroid), and according to the official classification of the ethnicity of people, I don’t fall in the group of blacks but I fall in the groups of niggers (negroid).
I know nigger doesn’t sound a good word in English, so maybe the translation is not correct. But if it is black, the word in Portuguese is Preto and the other word nigger is negro. I fall into the category of negro but I don’t fall into the category of Preto. So I am an African descendant. I am of mixed race. All mixed-race people come in the same group of the negros. And Pretos are the ones, the Africans who moved to Brazil and didn’t mix with white people or indigenous people of Brazil. This is also something very interesting that Nigerians don’t know about. Maybe because most of our interactions come from the white business people coming to Nigeria and you don’t see many blacks (from Brazil) in Nigeria, and also probably you’ve never seen the indigenous people of Brazil.Can you tell us more about indigenous people of Brazil?
The history was very difficult. I don’t want to go into details now because of our focus. But on another occasion, we can talk about it. We have more or less 2 million original people of Brazil. Most of these people don’t speak Portuguese and they live in, I wouldn’t say secluded societies, but they have independence in their settlements. Obviously they interact with urban people, they can use the official documents of Brazil, but they are not obliged to use the documents.
So, like you have the NIN in Nigeria, the original people of Brazil don’t have to go and look for any kind of these documents. But if they want, they can. Most of them don’t speak Portuguese. Now, the University of Brasilia has done a great job for the past 30 years. The University of Brasilia did the research to describe the languages of the original people of Brazil. At the moment, they have in their database 191 languages. This is very new, because when I was at school, when I was little, I didn’t get any information on the original people of Brazil. And now this discussion is coming out. I believe it is like this for many.Thanks to the Black Movement of Brazil, because since 1989, with the constitution of democracy in Brazil, there has been a lot of work, researches on the empowerment and emancipation of the black people of Brazil. Before, we didn’t have much studies on the condition, the situation, the history of the black people of Brazil. These studies were carried out and I believe that the Black Movement of Brazil brought together the strength for the original people of Brazil to fight for the right of existence because writing and studying a culture is bringing it into existenc, because people don’t know if you don’t write or talk about it, isn’t it?
How will you describe the strength of, for instance, the traditional worshipers in Brazil, in terms of the population?
The biggest festival in Brazil is actually related to Orisa. It is related to Yemoja. It holds (yearly) on the February 2. More than 150 million people go to the seaside for the festival. We have more than 150 million people. Brazil has more than 8,000 square of coast line. All the coast lines are filled with people who come for the festival.
What is the future of Sango worshiping in Brazil and what inspired you as a person to be Sango faithful?
Well, it came as a personal development. I was brought up in a very strict Christian family. So, at the age of four, I was already reading the Bible. I started reading and writing very early in my life. My family saw me as a potential religious leader. I was moving along with them and I did many different studies of the Bible. I also researched the Qur’an and other religions. At some point, something clicked in my mind and this is very personal. I was brought up by my white family. Unfortunately, my father who was black was late when I was about four or five years old.
For some reasons, I was adopted by a white family. I lost my ties with my blackness. So, it was only when I entered the university that I got in contact with all these studies by the Black Movement of Brazil, Pan-Africanism and black literature. It clicked in my mind that I had no reference whatsoever about my blackness, about my Africanness. I thought I needed to look at this. Where I come from, the Sango worshipers, most of them, are black. I started connecting with them. I felt so great about it. Little by little, I started studying it more.