“To Tame the Evil Hearts of the Whites”: Afro-Diasporic Healing Practices at the Crossroads of Race and Gender in 19th-Century Brazil

In 1882, Anna Luísa do Nascimento, an elderly freed black woman, was arrested in the province of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on charges of being a charlatan healer. Policemen ambushed Anna Luísa and other practitioners of quimbanda—an Afro-Brazilian religions of Central African origins—in the middle of a healing ritual ceremony. With Anna Luísa, police apprehended sacred objects and allegedly poisonous herbal concoctions which, the woman claimed, worked to “tame the evil hearts” of local slave masters. Police suspected Anna Luísa of providing enslaved women with herbs to interrupt unwanted pregnancies that resulted from seignorial sexual violence. Her case file suggests that the quimbandeira might have been the cornerstone of an African and Afro-Brazilian network of enslaved women who administered micro-doses of poison to slave masters in attempts to control white patriarchal violence.

This paper critically analyzes the 1882 case file relating to Anna Luísa, contextualizing her practice within South Atlantic intellectual and political traditions, in conversation with Saidiya Hartman’s call for “critical fabulations” of the histories of afro-diasporic subjects caught in the violence of state archives. I employ a methodology of “nominal record linkage” to draw the contours of her specifically Afro-diasporic social, political, and intellectual life. I argue that the cosmologies, political imaginations, and knowledge systems expressed in her healing practices propose a new way of writing histories of Black freedom in Brazil. Like other black healers and diviners of the Atlantic world, Anna Luísa and her assertion of social, political, and spiritual power inspired fear in white slave masters and authorities, granting her the ability (though limited) to negotiate the living conditions of her community. Her story is representative of the diasporic entanglements present in the daily dispute and negotiation that characterized the last decades of slavery in Southeastern Brazil.