Bananas to the king, 2019 - 2021
01 steel triangle; 2 casks; 2 CUC coins; 02 imperial palm seeds; 2 wooden plate photo transfers; 01 Photograph 15x 23 cm digital pigment print on Hahnemühle pearl paper.

Bananas to the king

In the Brazilian collective imagination, the 19th century is a period of slowness, with quieter lives, without the rush of today's metropolises, even though Salvador, Brazil’s largest city at the time, already had a population of 70.000 inhabitants. In the city where I write today, I share the waves of wi-fi and bluetooth with 3.5 million other people. Today's devices give us a false sense of control over time, but in truth, they never let us rest. Previously, work was more mechanical, a body in the world, on the assembly line, less a flow of information through the air. At the same time there was also a dynamism that does not seem to fit our imagination. In the second half of the 19th century, Brazilians in Lagos, Nigeria, made up nearly ten percent of the city's population. The local people associated them with Catholicism, because they wore western clothes and reproduced Brazilian social customs, such as going to mass on Sundays. Many members of African diasporic religions also attended church, as is still the case today. I found out that the even the great Bahian artist and Candomblé priestess, Olga do Alaketu was also Catholic. You can say that it is the colonial weight on our shoulders and it must really be the colonial unconscious assimilating such an enduring survival tactic, but this does not exclude a space for beauty where they overlap.

The return from Brazil, especially from Bahia, to Africa accelerated after 1835. Part of the black middle class chose to return to the African continent, many out of fear of reprisals by the Brazilian government against freed Africans after the powerful Malê revolt (1835), the largest uprising of the time, which was organized by 600 enslaved African people. Killed or imprisoned by the police, the Malê revolt shook the social organization, occupied newspaper front pages and instigated other conflicts. It left a burden on collective subjectivity and life for Africans in Brazil who were subject to increasing surveillance, control and punishment. For most Brazilians, the existence of a black middle class in Brazil years before the official abolition of slavery (1888) seems inconceivable, but there were freed blacks, who could negotiate or buy—at great cost and with collective sacrifice—their freedom. There was great effort to free iyalorishas and babalorishas, who played an important role in serving their own people.

The Brazilian community of Lagos Island, where ships from Salvador landed, is still little known in Brazil. Many who arrived there intended to go to other parts of Africa, but ended up settling in the city. To this day, Lagos Island has a neighborhood called the Brazilian Quarter, with many “Brazilian houses”, that recall Brazil’s colonial architecture, because they were built by Brazilians who had recently migrated. It is moving to recognize a layer of Brazilianness in the Nigerian landscape. Many residents of the Brazilian Quarter still have surnames that speak of their ancestors’ history. When I went there, I met families with Portuguese surnames like “da Costa” ,“Salvador”, “Martins”.

The journey from Salvador to Lagos allows us to think about how the oriṣas reinforced the ties between one side of the Atlantic and the other. One of the founders of Barroquinha candomblé, the first in Brazil, was Bangbose Obitikô, who traveled many times between Bahia and Lagos, taking, for example, tobacco and sugar to Nigeria and bringing fabrics from the coast, shrines, four-headed obís (cola nuts), and many other items necessary for liturgical rituals which had not yet found a substitute or an adaptation in Brazil. These spiritual beliefs were responsible for maintaining Brazil's connection with Yoruba and Bantu cultures, to stay in the territories I have been able to reach so far. Voyages could last a month, depending on the sea. These were sailing ships, without a motor. Without favourable winds, a journey could sometimes last two months. Even so, people came and went. Bangobose was a son of Ṣango, who played an important part in Brazil’s history.

Once it found me, Yoruba philosophy has never left me. The process is like a child learning to read; she begins forming syllables in her head as she walks along streets, passes signs, repeating words out loud, making herself literate, until she can no longer unread anything, the world is inhabited by letters and syllables, forming sentences building up like glue. The more I read about each oriṣa and their characteristics, the more I understand the world and people in a different way, in this late literacy.

The Yoruba ties between Brazil and Nigeria became clearer when I went to Cuba, another Afro-diasporic country like Brazil, with a very similar colonial history, with its sugar mills, tobacco and coffee plantations prior to the socialist revolution of 1959. There, too, important events were relegated to the background of history, because they did not align with the expansionist colonial project. Events left out of official discourse include the cosmovisions of the indigenous nations and the African diaspora, who find heaven on earth, without dividing one plane from another. In Western cultures, the subject and nature are disconnected, while in Afro-Indigenous cosmologies, the living and their ancestors are intertwined.

Walking near the Escuela de Artes – a sumptuous and experimental aesthetic project of socialist architecture started in Fidel's era and never completed – I passed a street lined with royal palm trees, palmas reales. They are spindly immense trees, true queens that streak the skies. I was intrigued when I came across a bunch of bananas (plátanos, in Cuban Spanish), already overripe, hanging from a trunk of a royal palm and tied by a red bow, right by the entrance from the street. I asked a Cuban friend accompanying me about these bananas tied to the palm trees. She explained that the Palma Real was the tree of Chango, the king. And that, so, people deposited gifts on his tree in order to honor him, make a request or communicate with him. She also told me, in a low voice, as if it was a secret—and she was not the only one to whisper—that Fidel had been in power for so long because he was a son of Chango the king of justice, who protected him and guided his decisions towards human rights. Imagine what if the importance of Chango in international politics appeared in history books, if the invisible were considered.

The imperial palm tree is a powerful political symbol in Cuba, it is named as a symbol of the nation in the Cuban constitution, which therefore contains a presence of Chango. The king of justice fails nowhere. In Imperial Brazil, royal palms also served as an instrument of liberation. When Dom João VI moved from Portugal to Brazil in 1808, he brought seeds from this famous tree, which he planted in the garden that would become Rio de Janeiro’s Botanical Garden. The seeds came from the Antilles and he prohibited their sale to maintain the exclusivity of this imported landscape. But at night, enslaved people climbed the trees’ tall trunks, collected the seeds and sold them to collecting money to buy their freedom. Ṣango, once again, intervened for freedom.

Bananas to the king, 2019 - 2021
01 steel triangle; 2 casks; 2 CUC coins; 02 imperial palm seeds; 2 wooden plate photo transfers; 01 Photograph 15x 23 cm digital pigment print on Hahnemühle pearl paper.

Bananas to the king

In the Brazilian collective imagination, the 19th century is a period of slowness, with quieter lives, without the rush of today's metropolises, even though Salvador, Brazil’s largest city at the time, already had a population of 70.000 inhabitants. In the city where I write today, I share the waves of wi-fi and bluetooth with 3.5 million other people. Today's devices give us a false sense of control over time, but in truth, they never let us rest. Previously, work was more mechanical, a body in the world, on the assembly line, less a flow of information through the air. At the same time there was also a dynamism that does not seem to fit our imagination. In the second half of the 19th century, Brazilians in Lagos, Nigeria, made up nearly ten percent of the city's population. The local people associated them with Catholicism, because they wore western clothes and reproduced Brazilian social customs, such as going to mass on Sundays. Many members of African diasporic religions also attended church, as is still the case today. I found out that the even the great Bahian artist and Candomblé priestess, Olga do Alaketu was also Catholic. You can say that it is the colonial weight on our shoulders and it must really be the colonial unconscious assimilating such an enduring survival tactic, but this does not exclude a space for beauty where they overlap.

The return from Brazil, especially from Bahia, to Africa accelerated after 1835. Part of the black middle class chose to return to the African continent, many out of fear of reprisals by the Brazilian government against freed Africans after the powerful Malê revolt (1835), the largest uprising of the time, which was organized by 600 enslaved African people. Killed or imprisoned by the police, the Malê revolt shook the social organization, occupied newspaper front pages and instigated other conflicts. It left a burden on collective subjectivity and life for Africans in Brazil who were subject to increasing surveillance, control and punishment. For most Brazilians, the existence of a black middle class in Brazil years before the official abolition of slavery (1888) seems inconceivable, but there were freed blacks, who could negotiate or buy—at great cost and with collective sacrifice—their freedom. There was great effort to free iyalorishas and babalorishas, who played an important role in serving their own people.

The Brazilian community of Lagos Island, where ships from Salvador landed, is still little known in Brazil. Many who arrived there intended to go to other parts of Africa, but ended up settling in the city. To this day, Lagos Island has a neighborhood called the Brazilian Quarter, with many “Brazilian houses”, that recall Brazil’s colonial architecture, because they were built by Brazilians who had recently migrated. It is moving to recognize a layer of Brazilianness in the Nigerian landscape. Many residents of the Brazilian Quarter still have surnames that speak of their ancestors’ history. When I went there, I met families with Portuguese surnames like “da Costa” ,“Salvador”, “Martins”.

The journey from Salvador to Lagos allows us to think about how the oriṣas reinforced the ties between one side of the Atlantic and the other. One of the founders of Barroquinha candomblé, the first in Brazil, was Bangbose Obitikô, who traveled many times between Bahia and Lagos, taking, for example, tobacco and sugar to Nigeria and bringing fabrics from the coast, shrines, four-headed obís (cola nuts), and many other items necessary for liturgical rituals which had not yet found a substitute or an adaptation in Brazil. These spiritual beliefs were responsible for maintaining Brazil's connection with Yoruba and Bantu cultures, to stay in the territories I have been able to reach so far. Voyages could last a month, depending on the sea. These were sailing ships, without a motor. Without favourable winds, a journey could sometimes last two months. Even so, people came and went. Bangobose was a son of Ṣango, who played an important part in Brazil’s history.

Once it found me, Yoruba philosophy has never left me. The process is like a child learning to read; she begins forming syllables in her head as she walks along streets, passes signs, repeating words out loud, making herself literate, until she can no longer unread anything, the world is inhabited by letters and syllables, forming sentences building up like glue. The more I read about each oriṣa and their characteristics, the more I understand the world and people in a different way, in this late literacy.

The Yoruba ties between Brazil and Nigeria became clearer when I went to Cuba, another Afro-diasporic country like Brazil, with a very similar colonial history, with its sugar mills, tobacco and coffee plantations prior to the socialist revolution of 1959. There, too, important events were relegated to the background of history, because they did not align with the expansionist colonial project. Events left out of official discourse include the cosmovisions of the indigenous nations and the African diaspora, who find heaven on earth, without dividing one plane from another. In Western cultures, the subject and nature are disconnected, while in Afro-Indigenous cosmologies, the living and their ancestors are intertwined.

Walking near the Escuela de Artes – a sumptuous and experimental aesthetic project of socialist architecture started in Fidel's era and never completed – I passed a street lined with royal palm trees, palmas reales. They are spindly immense trees, true queens that streak the skies. I was intrigued when I came across a bunch of bananas (plátanos, in Cuban Spanish), already overripe, hanging from a trunk of a royal palm and tied by a red bow, right by the entrance from the street. I asked a Cuban friend accompanying me about these bananas tied to the palm trees. She explained that the Palma Real was the tree of Chango, the king. And that, so, people deposited gifts on his tree in order to honor him, make a request or communicate with him. She also told me, in a low voice, as if it was a secret—and she was not the only one to whisper—that Fidel had been in power for so long because he was a son of Chango the king of justice, who protected him and guided his decisions towards human rights. Imagine what if the importance of Chango in international politics appeared in history books, if the invisible were considered.

The imperial palm tree is a powerful political symbol in Cuba, it is named as a symbol of the nation in the Cuban constitution, which therefore contains a presence of Chango. The king of justice fails nowhere. In Imperial Brazil, royal palms also served as an instrument of liberation. When Dom João VI moved from Portugal to Brazil in 1808, he brought seeds from this famous tree, which he planted in the garden that would become Rio de Janeiro’s Botanical Garden. The seeds came from the Antilles and he prohibited their sale to maintain the exclusivity of this imported landscape. But at night, enslaved people climbed the trees’ tall trunks, collected the seeds and sold them to collecting money to buy their freedom. Ṣango, once again, intervened for freedom.