Domingos Álvares Extended Biography
Domingos ÁlvaresExtended BiographyYou may wish to share this biography with students, or just to read it for your own information.Domingos Álvares was born sometime around 1710 in a small village called Naogon1 in the interior of present-day Benin (West Africa). His parents were regarded as powerful healers and diviners, responsible for ensuring the stability and well-being of their broader community. They did so by dedicating themselves to the highest vodun deity, Sakpata,the “vodun of the earth,” and the “vodun of Smallpox.”2 Domingos lived in a region of West Africa that consisted mainly of decentralized societies, where spiritual authorities like Domingos’ parents also acted as political authorities. As the son of Sakpata priests, Domingos would have grown up in close proximity to the shrine his parents built for their vodun, located in the heart of this healing community, and witnessed the many rituals they carried out in order to maintain the social health and harmony of their followers and clients. Perhaps more importantly, Domingos would have inherited the spiritual power of his parents and spent his adolescent years as an apprentice learning to cure a variety of spiritual, bodily, and social ills. Domingos grew up in a time of relative peace and stability. However, life in Naogon changed dramatically when the young healer would have been about eighteen years old. The rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade not only reshaped global commerce, but also transformed regional economies, politics, and cultures in much of West Africa. On the “Slave Coast” of modern-day Benin and its hinterlands, these transformations ushered in a period of unprecedented violence, in which communities living in the interior became particularly vulnerable to warfare, raids, and enslavement. In 1727, the ruler of the Dahomey Kingdom to the south of Domingos’ village, King Agaja, ordered his soldiers to invade the port of Ouidah, a large slave trading hub on the coast, so he could negotiate directly with European slavers and increase his profits from selling prisoners of war as slaves. As Agaja’s power, wealth, and territorial control grew, so did tensions between the Dahomean kingdom and the Oyo kingdom to the north. Between 1728 and 1732, people like Domingos, living between the two kingdoms, got caught in the crosshairs of violence, and were often captured as prisoners of war and sold into slavery.To make matters worse, King Agaja and his soldiers specifically targeted individuals possessing spiritual and therapeutic power. In order to gain legitimate access to new land, Agaja believed that he also had to harness the power of the various vooduns associated with those territories. Because Sakpata was considered the “vodun of the earth,” he was the vodun that represented both the most important spiritual power a ruler could achieve as well as the biggest threat to a ruler’s authority and legitimacy. By identifying, capturing, and enslaving spiritual authorities, Agaja believed that he was removing individuals that posed the greatest threat to his political power. It was in this context that Domingo was captured and enslaved in 1730. Brazil (enslavement and manumission) There is little information in the historical record regarding Domingos’ experiences as he was marched the 60 or so miles from the interior of Benin to the coast, held as a prisoner while he waited to board a slave ship, or crammed in the overcrowded underbelly of the ship as he sailed to Brazil during the Middle Passage. However, we do know that he reached Tapirema, in northeastern Brazil, by 1731. His arrival coincided with an economic crisis in the region. Once one of the main manufacturers of sugar and one of the wealthiest sugar economies in the world, Tapirema fell into an economic depression after sugar prices dropped significantly as a result of a growing number of sugar plantations in 1 Naogon is located in the Agonli-Cové region in Benin, roughly 60 miles inland from the coast.2 James Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 20.
2Domingos Álvares - Extended Biographythe Caribbean. This meant that plantation owners could not buy as many slaves, and could not adequately feed, house, or provide any kind of proper care for the slaves they did have. Though there were fewer slaves, this small workforce was still expected to maintain the same level of production. Slaves like Domingos were forced to do backbreaking work, and “cut up to 4,200 cane stalks every day.”3 Consequently, many enslaved Africans fell ill and were in desperate need of therapeutic treatment. This created a unique opportunity for Domingos to use his therapeutic knowledge to escape the perils of chattel slavery, and work to re-create the kind of healing community he had in Naogon. Domingos’ time in Tapirema was shortlived. At the height of the economic crisis, his first owner, Sebastianna de Carvahlo, sold Domingos to her sister and brother-in-law in Recife in 1733. It was there that Domingos demonstrated his therapeutic knowledge and power first by curing his fellow slaves for his master, Jacinto de Freitas, and then with Jacinto’s permission, curing the enslaved and free alike in and around the broader province of Recife. Jacinto strictly controlled Domingos’ movements in spite of the healer’s demands for more freedom to roam the countryside in search of new medicines and new patients to begin building a new community for himself. The more Domingos continued to demand some level of autonomy, the more Jacinto punished and limited Domingos’ work as a healer. However, Jacinto soon began to experience inexplicable losses, including the death of his cattle, illnesses within his family, and a sharp decline in his finances. By harming a master that would not allow Domingos to freely practice as a healer and rebuild a community of followers, Domingos “cured” himself of a “social death” caused by Jacinto’s strict restrictions. In response, Jacinto ordered authorities to arrest and jail Domingos, where he would spend several months between 1736 and 1737. In 1737, Domingos was again sold to a new owner, Manuel de Costa Soares, and again boarded onto a slave ship. Upon arrival in Rio de Janeiro, rumors had already begun circulating about Domingos’ therapeutic and spiritual power.4Both because of his buzzing reputation and because of Rio’s urban setting, Domingos found more opportunities for healing in his new setting. In fact, within just a few short months, his owner had “receiv[ed] ‘letters from various people’ across the region soliciting Domingos to cure their slaves.”5 One such letter came from José Cardoso de Almeida who had recently lost many of his slaves to illness and disease. After Domingos successfully cured some of Almeida’s surviving slaves, he asked the Governor if Domingos could be permanently released to him. For the first time, Domingos was allowed to go off on his own into the countryside to collect herbs so he could keep up with his patient demand. Wanting to capitalize on Domingos’ talents, Almeida ultimately set up the healer in a “public house” in the city center. Though he had to share his profits with his master, Domingos used his skills to earn his own money, practice healing, and build a loyal community of patients and followers. Domingos even rekindled relationships with at least two former friends he had met on plantations elsewhere in Brazil—Caetana Maria do Espírito Santo and Thereza Arda. By 1739, he gained full legal freedom, began to cure as a free man at the “public house,” and served as the leader of the healing community he had worked so hard to build. However, not long after he gained his freedom Domingos became the target of the Catholic Church. His healing practice stood adjacent to a Catholic church, and religious officials grew increasingly suspicious of the activities they witnessed at the “public house.” First, they were disturbed by the diverse clientele, including African, mixed race, and white patients, that frequented Domingos’ practice. Second, they bore witness to many collective healing rituals that took place in the evenings, which went against Catholic teachings. Believing Domingos was carrying out the Devil’s work, they raided the building in 1740, but Domingos had already fled. Over the next few years, Domingos became an itinerant healer, setting up a number of urban clinics around the city. It was through this network of healing centers, 3 Sweet, Domingos Álvares, 46. 4 These rumors were circulated both by the ship’s crew, but perhaps more importantly, by two slaves that had at one time lived on the same plantation as Domingos—Caetana Maria do Espírito Santo (a mixed race, formerly enslaved woman) and Thereza Arda (who had been sold to a Rio businessman after her master in Recife died). The two women stirred up rumors that Domingos had incredible powers and even killed many cattle, slaves, and the wife and son of his master. 5 Sweet, Domingos Álvares, 103.
3Domingos Álvares - Extended Biographythat he was able to integrate new members into his community and recreate the healing structures and institutions of his West African homeland. New members were required to dedicate themselves to voduns, and Domingos took on some of these as initiates who would ultimately become healers themselves. In addition to the spiritual practices that took place, Domingos continued to build on his scientific knowledge by collecting new plants and medicinal herbs and determining their efficacy through repeated trial and error. Portugal (Jail, Exile, Death) 1742-1750His growing community made him an even larger target of the Church. It is unclear when exactly he was arrested, but records show that on September 22, 1742, Domingos set sail for Portugal after being detained and jailed by the Inquisition authorities in Rio for being a feticeiro. According to historian James H. Sweet, “Domingos posed a formidable challenge to the institutional authority of the Catholic Church, and just like in Dahomey and [elsewhere in Brazil], spiritual threats had profound political implications.”6 The ship reached Lisbon two months later in December 1742 where he would spend the next eighteen month in a jail cell. During this period, he was constantly interrogated by Inquisition authorities. Domingos was asked to give his life history and provide details of his healing practices. Though his interrogators tried repeatedly to get him to admit the supernatural, ritualistic dimensions of his healing, Domingos consistently maintained that all of his remedies were natural herbs that he learned could cure through trial and error rather than divine intervention. Because of his familiarity with the Catholic church, he knew admitting to the supernatural dimensions of his healing would immediately be deemed the work of the Devil. Perhaps because of his savvy, Domingos was sentenced to exile rather than death. In 1744, he was banished to Castro Marim. All people sentenced to banishment could not leave the district in which they were relocated and were forbidden to pursue particular occupations, including medicine. However, within just months after arriving to Castro Marim, a starving and destitute Domingos broke the terms of his exile and began healing once again. However, because of his social position he was never able to garner the same kind of reputation or healing community he had in Naogon or Rio de Janeiro. Rather than fostering the growth of a new community, his healing only attracted the attention of Inquisition authorities. He must have known he was a wanted man because after just one year in Castro Marim, Domingos fled. For the next three years, Domingos traveled hundreds of miles by foot and continued curing people everywhere he went. When he was finally arrested on the outskirts of Algarve in July of 1747, he was “embellished with bolsas, beads, and veronicas, carrying a cane tube full of medicines and a sack with various other healing implements.”7 When once again interrogated about his therapeutic knowledge roughly twenty years after leaving his West African homeland, Domingos asserted that “in his land, through experience and knowledge they teach one another the natural virtue of herbs , and they cure their infirmities, and it is in this way that he knows some countervenoms and virtues of herbs...which are used in this way in his land.”8 Nevertheless, the tribunal ruled that Domingos had not cured by “virtue.” Though they did not believe he cured by “divination” either. Rather, they deemed him a “liar and trickster of people, a vile man, and transgressor of the orders of the Holy Office.”9 With that, on October 20, 1749, they sentenced Domingos to a public whipping and exile. This time he was to banished in the isolated mountain region of northeast Portugal over 300 miles away. Domingos never reached his destination, and does not appear in the historical record after his judgement in 1749. There is no way to know what happened to Domingos, but as a nearly 40-year-old man, broken down by years of chattel slavery, imprisonment, and more recently extreme poverty and isolation, it is likely he died on his way to the mountains.6 Sweet, Domingos Álvares, 153.7 Sweet, Domingos Álvares, 212. It is also important to note that he was in very tattered clothing and clearly worn down and hungry at this time. 8 Sweet, Domingos Álvares, 215. 9 Sweet, Domingos Álvares, 217.