African oil palms, colonial socioecological transformation and the making of an Afro-Brazilian landscape in Bahia, Brazil

Environment and History

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2015, Pages 13-42

  Watkins, Case ^a  

^a LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

African diaspora; African oil palm; Afro Brazilian; Columbian exchange; Resistance

Indexed keywords

AGROECOLOGY; ANTECEDENT CONDITIONS; BIOTRANSFORMATION; CROP YIELD; CULTURAL LANDSCAPE; MONOCOTYLEDON;

BAHIA; BRAZIL;

ELAEIS GUINEENSIS;

EID: 84920897024     PISSN: 09673407     EISSN: 17527023     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3197/096734015X14183179969700     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. Luís da Câmara Cascudo, História da Alimentação no Brasil, 4th ed. (São Paulo: Global Editora, 2011) pp. 150, 555–7, 841–5; Robert A. Voeks, Sacred Leaves of Candomblé (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997) pp. 82–4, 213. Elaeis guineensis does not appear in Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood, 1972).
2. CEPLAC, Diagnóstico Socio-econômico da Região Cacaueira, vol. 13 (Ilhéus: IICA, 1975) pp. 45–6; B.J. Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780–1860 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). The Dendê Coast includes the counties (municipios) of Cairu, Camamú, Igrapiuna, Ituberá, Nilo Peçanha, Maraú, Taperoá and Valença; see Case Watkins, ‘Dendezeiro: African Oil Palm Agroecologies in Bahia, Brazil, and Implications for Development’, Journal of Latin American Geography 10/1 (2011): 9–33.
3. John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Judith A. Carney and Richard N. Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); João José Reis and Eduardo da Silva, Negociação e Confito: A Resistência Negra no Brasil Escravista (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989); Stuart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992) pp. x-xi; William C. Van Norman, Shade Grown Slavery: The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013) ch. 6. Haripriya Rangan, Judith Carney and Tim Denham, ‘Environmental History of Botanical Exchanges in the Indian Ocean World’, Environment and History 18/3 (2012): 311–42; David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (eds) More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
4. Africans in diaspora and their descendants.
5. Cascudo, História da Alimentação, pp. 205–6; Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (eds) Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993); Voeks, Sacred Leaves; Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery; Andrew Sluyter, Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
6. The transformation of such cultural landscapes has long been a prominent theme among cultural geographers, but the discipline had until recently largely neglected African agency. Recent geographical scholarship is, however, working to uncover the socioecological legacies of the African diaspora: see works in n. 5 and Judith A. Carney, ‘Landscapes and Places of Memory: African Diaspora Research and Geography’, in Tejumola Olaniyan and James H. Sweet (eds) The African Diaspora and the Disciplines, pp. 101–18 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). For a sweeping treatment of ‘landscape’ within geography, see John Wylie, Landscape (London: Routledge, 2007). For a geographical theorisation of colonial landscapes, see Andrew Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and Applications (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) pp. 48–85. 7. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); James H. Sweet ‘Reimagining the African-Atlantic Archive: Method, Concept, Epistemology, Ontology’, The Journal of African History 55/2 (2014): 147–59. For examples of inclusive methodologies, see n. 5 and Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape. LaDona Knigge and Meghan Cope, ‘Grounded Visualization: Integrating the Analysis of Qualitative and Quantitative Data through Grounded Theory and Visualization’, Environment and Planning A 38/11 (2006): 2021–2037.
7. Jack R. Harlan et al., ‘Plant Domestication and Indigenous African Agriculture’, in Jack R. Harlan et al. (eds) Origins of African Plant Domestication, pp. 3–22 (The Hague: Mouton, 1976); C.W.S. Hartley, The Oil Palm, 3rd ed., (Essex: Longman, 1988) p. 4.
8. Harlan, ‘Plant Domestication’, p. 4; Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery, pp. 15–18, 44; Hartley, Oil Palm, pp. 5–8.
9. Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis (London: Hakluyt Society, [1505–1508] 1937) p. 121.
10. For palm oil as a provision on slave ships, see Carolus Clusius, Exoticorvm Libri Decem (Leiden: Plantianâ Raphelengii, 1605) pp. 57, 194 and Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery, pp. 52, 69. For its use in African slaving operations, see Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997) pp. 398, 414.
11. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2008) p. 350; Leif Svalesen, The Slave Ship Fredensborg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000) pp. 70–1, 94, 108–12, 117–8, 190.
12. Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007) p. 133; Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery, pp. 74–6; Rediker, Slave Ship, p. 214; Svalesen, Slave Ship, p. 70; H.W. Macaulay and Walter W. Lewis, ‘Her Majesty’s Commissioners to Viscount Palmerston, No. 17’, in ‘Correspondence with the British Commissioners Relating to the Slave Trade: Sierra Leone, The Havana, Rio de Janeiro, and Surinam’, in Accounts and Papers: 1837–8, vol. 15, 17 vols. (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1838) p. 25.
13. Europeans commonly referred to much or all of Western Africa as Guinea or Guiné during the transatlantic slave trade – see Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery, pp. 102–3.
14. For an exceptional record of palm kernels as seventeenth-century commodities, see Adam Jones (ed.) West Africa in the Mid-seventeenth Century: An Anonymous Dutch Manuscript (Atlanta: Emory University, 1995) pp. 73–128. Early accounts of Elaeis guineensis in the Caribbean are recorded in Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (Indianapolis: Hackett, [1657] 2011) pp. 102, 123–4, Hans Sloane, Catalogus Plantarum Quae in Insula Jamaica (London: Impensis D. Brown, 1688) p. 176, David R Harris, ‘Plants, Animals, and Man in the Outer Leeward Islands, West Indies: An Ecological Study of Antigua, Barbuda, and Anguilla’, (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1965) p. 115, Nicolaus Joseph von Jacquin, Selectarum Stirpium Americanarum Historia (Vindobonae: Krausiana, 1763) pp. 280–2, and Philip Miller, The Gardeners Dictionary, 8th ed., (London: Printed for the author, 1768), n.p., entry at PAL. See the international linguistic compilation in James A. Duke et al., Duke’s Handbook of Medicinal Plants of Latin America (Boca Raton: Taylor & Francis, 2009) pp. 289–91.
15. Orlando Ribeiro, Aspectos e Problemas da Expansão Portuguesa (Lisboa: Centro de Estudos Políticos e Sociais, 1962) pp. 107–9, 153–4; Gabriel Soares de Sousa, Tratado Descriptivo do Brasil em 1587 (São Paulo: da Silva, 1879) pp. 143–50, 169. Other accounts of 16th century Bahia include Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, História da Província Santa Cruz: A que Vulgarmente Chamamos Brasil (Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional, [1576] 1984) and Fernão Cardim, Tratados da Terra e Gente do Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, [1583–1589?] 1939).
16. Anonymous, ‘Navegação de Lisboa á Ilha de S. Thomé’, in Academia Real das Sciencias (ed.) Collecçao de Noticias para a História e Geografa das Nações Ultramarinas (Lisbon: Typographia da Academia Real das Sciencias, 1812), vol. 2, no. 2, p. 88; Clusius, Exoticorvm, p. 57; Jones, West Africa, pp. 73–128; Willem Piso, ‘Medicina Brasiliensi’, in Historia Naturalis Brasiliae, ed. Joannes de Laet, 4 vols. (Lugdun. Batavorum: Apud Franciscum Hackium, 1648) vol. 1, p. 5. For French incursions in colonial Brazil, see H.B. Johnson, ‘Portuguese Settlement, 1500–1580’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.) Colonial Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) pp. 17–20, 27–30.
17. Soares de Sousa, Tratado, pp. 177–8. Pindoba can also refer to the oleaginous catolé (A. humilis) but, describing the palms as ‘very tall and thick’, Soares de Sousa almost certainly indicated A. oleifera. Simão Estacio da Silveira, Relação Sumária das Cousas do Maranhão, 8th ed., (São Luís: Editora Siciliano, [1624] 2001) p. 63; Claude d’Abbeville, Histoire de la Mission des Peres Capucins en l’Isle de Maragnan et Terres Circonuoisines, (Paris: François Huby, 1614) p. 221. In that original French version, d’Abbeville lists the palm as ‘Pindo’, but the temperate Butia capitata does not extend to the Amazon. An 1874 Portuguese translation by P.A. Marques lists the palm, in my opinion correctly, as ‘Pindoba’. Frei Vicente do Salvador, História do Brazil (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, [1627] 1889) p. 13. Hoehne interprets Vicente as describing Elaeis guineensis, but that claim is unverifable: see F.C. Hoehne, Botanica e Agricultura no Brasil no Seculo XVI (São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1937) p. 327.
18. Georg Marggraf, ‘Historiae Plantarum’, in Historia Naturalis Brasiliae, ed. Joannes de Laet, 8 vols. (Lugdun. Batavorum: Apud Franciscum Hackium, 1648) vol. 3, p. 134.
19. First quote in Ivan Alves Filho, Memorial dos Palmares (Rio de Janeiro: Xenon, 1988) p. 15. Second quote in Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels, p. 122; discussion of disputed population figures on p. 123. Flávio Gomes, Palmares: Escravidão e Liberdade no Atlantico Sul (São Paulo: Editora Contexto, 2005). Both reports are published in Edison Carneiro, O Quilombo dos Palmares, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1958) pp. 201–222, 251–260. Palmares was located at altitudes of approximately 500 metres in and around the Serra da Barriga, a rugged forest in the agreste region of contemporary Alagoas. Elaeis guineensis does not usually thrive in such conditions.
20. William Dampier, Dampier’s Voyages (London: E. Grant Richards, 1906), vol. 2, pp. 386, 393.
21. John T. Schneider, Dictionary of African Borrowings in Brazilian Portuguese (Hamburg: Verlag, 1991) pp. 129, 131, 220, 253, 261–2. For the four ‘cycles’ of Bahian slavery, see Pierre Verger, Trade Relations Between the Bight of Benin and Bahia from the 17th to 19th Centuries, trans. Evelyn Crawford (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1976) p. 1. For Kimbundu as lingua franca, see James H. Sweet, ‘The Evolution of Ritual in the African Diaspora: Central African Kilundu in Brazil, St. Domingue, and the United States, Seventeenth-Nineteenth Centuries’, in Michael Angelo Gomez (ed.) Diasporic Africa: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2006) p. 71. For a compilation of African common names for Elaeis guineensis, see H.M. Burkill, The Useful Plants of West Tropical Africa, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (Kew: Royal Botanic Gardens, 1985–2004), vol. 4, pp. 354–5.
22. For more on etymology, see Watkins, ‘Dendezeiro’: 19. For 16th century Luso-African trade in ‘azeite de palma’, see Pereira, Esmeraldo, p. 121. For 20th century imports of ‘azeite de palma’ to Bahia, see ‘Mercado de Importação’, Boletim da Secretaria de Agricultura, Viação, Industria e Obras Públicas do Estado da Bahia Anno 2, 1/1–2 (January-February, 1904): 89. Adhering to the distinction between ‘dendê’ and ‘azeite de palma’, I use the term ‘Dendê Coast’ throughout this paper and elsewhere.
23. On germination, see R. Corley and P. Tinker, The Oil Palm, 4th ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003) p. 217.
24. AHU, Conselho Ultramarino, Caixa 2, Docs. 167–8; also available in Projeto Resgate, Universidade de Brasília, http://www.cmd.unb.br/resgate_ahu.php (Accessed 10 Aug. 2012).
25. Cascudo, História da Alimentação, p. 224.
26. Johann von Spix and Karl von Martius, Através da Bahia, 3rd ed., trans. Manoel Augusto Pirajá da Silva and Paulo Wolf (São Paulo: Companhia editora nacional, 1938) p. 85.
27. For uses of palm oil in Afro-Brazilian religious rituals in the mid-nineteenth century, see Luis Nicolau Parés, The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013) pp.116–17. Voeks, Sacred Leaves, pp. 82–4, 213; Raul Lody, Tem Dendê, Tem Axé: Etnografa do Dendezeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas, 1992) pp. 13, 61–80.
28. Edison Carneiro, Ladinos e Crioulos: Estudos sôbre o Negro no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1964) p.73.
29. Municipal reports solicited by Brazil’s national library in the 1880s record African oil palms in the states of Alagoas, Ceará, and Pernambuco – see Anais da Biblioteca Nacional, (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, 1991–1992), vol. 111, pp. 158, 239, 255; vol. 112, 258. A monograph from the mid-twentieth century found African oil palms in the states of Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Espirito Santo, Piauí, and Maranhão – see Gregorio Bondar, O Dendêzeiro (São Paulo: Ediçoes Melhoramentos, 1954) p. 9.
30. On salt-tolerance, see Corley and Tinker, Oil Palm, p. 77. Rice is one of few crops that flourish in the intertidal zone. Its commercial production in Bahia, however, remained secondary through the colonial period and beyond, accounting for only 5.05% of the foodstuffs handled by Bahia’s public granary from 1785–1849. Manioc four averaged 87.44% in the same period – see Richard Graham, Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780–1860 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), app. b. Rice was, however, common as a subsistence crop in coastal Bahia, including Cairu, Camamú, Ilhéus and Boipeba in the eighteenth century, where lowland fields likely integrated with the oil palm-mangal, as they do in Senegambia: see Luís dos Santos Vilhena, A Bahia no Século XVIII, 3 vols. (Salvador: Editora Itapuã, 1969), vol. 2, pp. 492, 496–7; see also Judith Carney, ‘“With Grains in Her Hair”: Rice in Colonial Brazil’, Slavery and Abolition 25/1 (2004): 1–27. For mangrove rice cultivation in Senegal, see Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), ch. 2, African oil palms in fg. 2.15.
31. Spix and Martius, Através da Bahia, p. 224; Mauro Cirano and Guilherme Camargo Lessa, ‘Oceanographic Characteristics of Baía de Todos os Santos, Brazil’, Revista Brasileira de Geofísica 25/4 (2007): 365. A GIS analysis of Landsat 7 imagery (2012) revealed mangal on 62.7% of the southern coast from the Jaguaripe inlet to the base of the Maraú peninsula.
32. Interview 2 Nov. 2012.
33. Interviews from 2009–2012 are replete with references to oil palm fields ‘plantado pelo urubú’. CEPLAC, Diagnóstico, p. 45; see also Bondar, Dendezeiro, pp. 5, 9, 19.
34. Here I consider the period of ‘colonial agroecologies’ to extend past Brazil’s formal independence from Portugal in 1822 (i.e. the Empire of Brazil) until emancipation in 1888. During that period, major agricultural changes occurred throughout Brazil but, in Bahia, slavery-based agriculture remained stubbornly entrenched, see Emília Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) ch. 6.
35. Barickman, Bahian Counterpoint, pp. 12–15; Graham, Feeding the City, p. 86; Stuart Schwartz, ‘Plantations and Peripheries, c. 1580–c. 1750’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.) Colonial Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) p. 108.
36. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) p. 87; Barickman, Bahian Counterpoint, pp. 144, 150–1; Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels, pp. 46, 69–72, 90–1. The region remains predominantly Afro-Brazilian. The 2010 Brazilian Census lists 83.29% of the population of the eight municipios of the Dendê Coast as ‘preta’ or ‘parda’, the two offcial racial designations corresponding with African descent, see http://www.ibge.gov.br/(Accessed 30 Sept. 2013).
37. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, pp. 26–7, 245–51, 296, 334; Gentil Martins Dias, Depois do Latifúndio: Continuidade e Mudança na Sociedade Rural Nordestina (Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 1978) pp. 68–70.
38. Ribeiro, Aspectos e Problemas, p. 7; David R. Harris, ‘Traditional Systems of Plant Food Production and the Origins of Agriculture in West Africa’, in Jack R. Harlan et al. (eds) Origins of African Plant Domestication (The Hague: Mouton, 1976) pp. 311–56.
39. Interview 23 Feb. 2012.
40. William O. Jones, Manioc in Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959) p. 32.
41. Carney, Black Rice, chs. 2–3; Nina Friedemann and Jaime Arocha, De Sol a Sol: Génesis, Transformación y Presencia de los Negros en Colombia (Planeta, 1986) pp. 301–78; Felix G. Coe and Gregory J. Anderson, ‘Ethnobotany of the Garífuna of Eastern Nicaragua’, Economic Botany 50/1 (1996): 71–107; Arturo Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008) pp. 39–40, 85–110; Ivor Miller, Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2009) pp. 70, 75.
42. Shawn William Miller, ‘Stilt-Root Subsistence: Colonial Mangroves and Brazil’s Landless Poor’, Hispanic American Historical Review 83/2 (2003): 223–53; Soares de Sousa, Tratado, pp. 169, 293–4. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels, pp. 45–7; Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery, pp. 123–38; Barickman, Bahian Counterpoint, pp. 54–65.
43. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels, pp. 105–9. The Brazilian constitution of 1988 codified federal support for quilombos, granting public services and communal land titles. As of 2013, Bahia had recognised 584 quilombo communities, with another 90 in various stages of processing, together more than any other state. For ongoing quilombo certification, see http://www.palmares.gov.br/quilombola (accessed 8 Dec. 2013). Besides federal certifcation, many states also recognise quilombos. For a comprehensive list of Bahian quilombos including an additional 30 recognised only by the state, see Universidade Federal da Bahia, Projeto GeografAR, http://www.geografar.ufba.br (accessed 7 Nov. 2013).
44. Interviews and observations of 14 Aug. and 9 Nov. 2012.
45. Inv. of Felix Alves de Andrade, Cachoeira, 1791, APB, Seção Judiciária (SJ), 2/706/1168/3. I am indebted to B.J. Barickman for this reference. The ‘real’ (plural ‘réis’) was the standard unit of currency in colonial Brazil. One thousand units became a ‘milréis’, written as Rs.1$000. In 1791, Rs.4$000 was enough to purchase 11 kilograms of beans in Salvador – see Barickman, Bahian Counterpoint, p. 62.
46. Vilhena, Bahia, vol. 3, p. 188; see also Spix and Martius, Através da Bahia, p. 85.
47. ‘Mappa especulativo dos efeitos entrado pelas estradas de Nazaré Termo de Jaguaripe na semana e feira de 12 de Janr° de 1823’, BNRJ, Seção de Manuscritos, II-34, 8, 29 lists ‘dendê in bunches’ for Rs.1$280 each and bottles of ‘azeite de dendê’ for Rs.2$560 each. For comparison, 1 unit of manioc four cost Rs.$320.
48. José Honório Rodrigues, Brazil and Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965) pp. 178–84. Vilhena, Bahia, vol. 3, p. 714. For applications by slave traffickers to simultaneously import humans and palm oil from Africa, see ‘Correspondência Recebida do Comandante das Forças Navais’, APB, Seção Colonial-Provincial (SACP), maço 3176. For general references to imports of African palm oil arriving in Bahia from 1718–1889, see Ignacio Accioli de Cerqueira e Silva, Memorias Históricas, e Politicas de Província da Bahia (Salvador: Typografa do Correio Mercantil, 1835), vol. 1, p. 158, Carneiro, Ladinos e Crioulos, p. 73; and the series of ship manifests in Série Manifesto, APB, Seção Alfândega (SA).
49. Vilhena, Bahia, vol. 3, pp. 130–1, 188.
50. Prinz von Maximilian Wied, Viagem ao Brasil do Príncipe Maximiliano de Wied-Neuwied, trans. Edgar Sussekind de Mendonça and Flavio Poppe de Figueiredo (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1940) pp. 443–4; ‘Correspondência recebida da Câmara de Nazaré’, APB, SACP, maço 1370; ‘Importação’, O Monitor, 22 June 1878: 2. Santarém is a former name of contemporary Ituberá.
51. Inv. of Tomás Pedreira Geremoabo, Salvador, 1875, APB, SJ, 5/2183/2652/1; ‘Declaraçoes’, O Monitor, 19 Sep. 1878: 2.
52. Inv. of Manoel Martins de Andrade, Jaguaripe, 1871, APB, SJ, 3/1292/1761/07. One of those ten people was a two-year old boy named Silvano.
53. Inv. of Maria da Piedade Melo e Sa, Ilhéus, 1876, APB, SJ, 03/1406/1875/22; Inv. of José Fernandes Panam, Taperoá, 1880, 1/123/190/01. Salvador residents also cultivated African oil palms during this period, notably in Candomblé compounds: see Lisa Earl Castillo, ‘O Terreiro do Alaketu e seus Fundadores: Historia e Genealogia Familiar, 1807–1867’, AfroÁsia 43 (2011): 213–59 and Parés, Formation of Candomblé, p. 173. For cultivation in late-nineteenth century Ilhéus, see Mary Ann Mahony, ‘The World Cacao Made: Society, Politics, and History in Southern Bahia, Brazil, 1822–1919’ (Ph.D., Yale University, 1996) pp. 185, 274 n. 12, 285–6.
54. Inv. of Gaudencia Martins (Africana), Camamú, 1897, APB, SJ, 1/412/800/10. Weekly commodities prices listed in ‘Pauta e oficio semanal, 1896’, APB, SA, Diretoria das Rendas, 060.05. Preferred for processing palm oil in bulk, the mortar and pestle were unnecessary for preparing small amounts; contemporary Bahians sometimes press preheated palm fruit by hand to produce enough oil for family meals. The above moringa was likely a large ceramic jug made from clay with intrinsic monetary value independent of the palm oil it contained.
55. CEPLAC, Diagnóstico, p. 41.