Collecting Fears: Paper Amulets in Brazil's Malê Uprising

Throughout 1834, Muslim West African slaves and freedmen in Salvador, Brazil, spent their limited free time producing a vast array of precious paper amulets. These apotropaic objects were inscribed with Quranic verses, magic squares, and other images of power that were meant to protect the amulets’ owners from harm. In the case of the amulets in Salvador, the artisans had a specific harm in mind. On January 24, 1835, hundreds of West African-born men and women took to the city streets in an attempt to gain freedom. The massive Malê Uprising was a carefully orchestrated event that was primarily led by the very same Muslim West African men who commissioned those paper amulets. In this paper, I focus on the end of these amulets’ material lives. After the uprising was put down, Brazilian authorities found paper amulets and Islamic paraphernalia on the bodies of many revolutionaries and began a systematic hunt for the revolt’s purportedly Muslim leaders. In this process, the government confiscated a vast array of African-made religious objects, including more paper amulets. A handful of these amulets were preserved in a state archive and exist today. I focus on the amulets’ collection and preservation by city authorities in order to consider the government’s fears about the affective power of non-Catholic, African image-making. I argue that the collection and preservation of the amulets embody Salvador’s crackdown on African religious expression more broadly and demonstrate the revolutionary potential of African art-making in Brazil.