In July 1704, Jacques Viegas, an enslaved West African man, disclosed to Lisbon’s Holy Office a small pouch that he had been wearing on his body to protect himself against violence. The amulet became the topic of intense interrogations. For 4 months, the inquisitors questioned Viegas about the object’s origin, production, and uses. Their heightened interest exemplified the early-eighteenth-century trend of people across the Portuguese empire engaging with the diverse range of practices and objects they associated with mandinga, a label not only used for the amulets themselves—bolsa de mandinga—but also to indicate the esoteric expertise (feitiçaria) deployed to manipulate and control unseen forces. In this remarkable book, Matthew Rarey explores through the distinct discourses about mandinga that developed in Portugal’s vast imperial territory between the late 1600s and 1835 specific ways in which enslaved and other marginalized people grappled with the bodily violations that they faced in their everyday lives.
Existing scholarship on mandinga has long demonstrated the importance of these amulets in African-originating cultures across regions such as the upper Guinea Coast, the Bight of Benin, Angola, Brazil, and Portugal. However, few actual pouches have survived—Viegas’s being a rare exception. One of the reasons for their disappearance that Rarey proposes is the little value that these objects held for those who rejected beliefs about their powers. To them, the amulets and their contents were “insignificant,” as Rarey explains, citing the words of a Brazilian scribe who inspired the book’s title. This tension between these objects’ significance and insignificance is at the core of this book. Why, Rarey asks, did different people in distinct historical contexts—both people relying on mandinga and inquisitors or other authorities who persecuted them—look to “these ‘insignificant’ materials as manifestations of apotropaic powers and revolutionary potential” (14)?
To answer this question, Rarey analyzes various aspects of the pouches and their uses both thematically and chronologically. Chapter 1 explores how the ethnonym “Mandinka,” originally used to indicate a specific West African ethnic group, came to be commonly accepted as a label for the pouches and their powers, and what role European classifications of Africans played in this process. Chapter 2 investigates the pouches’ contents and considers how and why the images and objects collected in them challenged the value systems and political and religious powers that asserted control over their users’ lives. Chapter 3 concentrates on the written texts and drawings inside the amulets to argue that the promise of protecting the bearer against physical violence resulted from an understanding of the intimate connection between archival production and corporeal violence. Finally, Chapter 4 examines the importance of leather pouches and their talismanic texts to the 1835 attempt to overthrow Bahia’s slave society, known as the “Revolt of the Malês,” and the fears that this prompted about these elements’ use in spreading subversive knowledge.
Together, the four chapters present a rich and multi-layered story about mandinga discourses, which provides insight into the spiritual, economic, and political significance of the unassuming objects that came to play such an important role in popular responses to the interpersonal violence, cultural displacement, and institutional power produced by the slave trade and the Portuguese colonial state. Rarey engages deeply with the literature and uses a wide range of sources as he develops detailed arguments about the amulets, their uses in countering the colonial gaze, and their function as portable archives. This inspiring book demonstrates how the smallest objects can still open a window to past worlds that have been ignored for so long. As such, the book is of interest not merely to specialists and students of the African diaspora and Black art history but to everyone interested in early modern material cultures.
