An important addition to Atlantic World and African diaspora history in English, People of Faith explores identity formation, social organisation and cultural expression among African converts to Catholicism in eighteenth-century Brazil. Mariza de Carvalho Soares argues convincingly that through the creation and maintenance of lay brotherhoods in Rio de Janeiro, religious practice and performance allowed for a measure of self-determination among enslaved and freed peoples from West Africa's Mina Coast (modern-day Ghana to Nigeria). Soares begins with a comprehensive overview of Portuguese expansion in Africa to contextualise the origins of colonial terminology for the enslaved. In the second half of the book, she reveals the ways in which members of the brotherhoods in Rio de Janeiro identified and organised themselves.

Soares describes how the process of enslavement and Christianisation created colonial terms for places and peoples, both indigenous American and African, and how their meanings shifted over time as they were transferred across the Atlantic. She demonstrates that ‘creole’, usually denoting people born in the Americas, was also used in Africa, and thus can be better understood as meaning those born within Christian society, as opposed to gentio (heathen), a term also used for Brazilian natives still in need of conversion. The term nação (nation), used in baptismal records for Indians and Africans, and therefore assigned by the priest, is sometimes considered equivalent to ‘ethnicity’ by historians. But Soares shows that its meaning was broader, and referred to native peoples of a particular territory who shared language, political systems and customs. As an alternative to these signifiers, born of European expansion and imposed by colonial society, Soares proposes the use of ‘provenience groups’, which can indicate a place of origin or social group, recognises the changeable nature of identities and allows for the parallel identities created by enslaved peoples themselves.

Although Angolans made up the great majority of slaves in Brazil, Soares' subjects were enslaved in Cape Verde, São Tomé, the Mina Coast and Mozambique. By 1740, they formed the membership of a lay brotherhood in Rio de Janeiro at the Church of Santo Elesbão and Santa Efigênia, which specifically excluded Brazilian creoles and Angolans. As the Mina Congregation grew, ethnic factions broke away from the Dahomean majority leadership. The book, at its core, is a micro-history of one breakaway faction, the Mahi – Gbe-speakers enslaved in the interior of the Bight of Benin – and sub-groups (Savalu, Agonli and Iano), who elected their own ‘king’ within the brotherhood in 1762. Thus, people labelled ‘Mina’ by Europeans defined and managed their own provenience groups through the brotherhoods. Although literate in Portuguese, the Mahi leadership emphasised their ethnic identity – only Mahi could be elected to the governing board, for example. In the late eighteenth century, members of the Mahi Congregation at Elesbão and Efigênia established two sub-communities, the Devoção às Almas do Purgatório (Devotion to the Souls in Purgatory, dedicated to saving the souls of the brothers and of unconverted ancestors) and the Fraternidade Nossa Senhora dos Remédios (Fraternity of Our Lady of Remedies, dedicated to serving the needy and sick). In a postscript, Soares draws on new research to identify four core members of the Mahi Congregation involved in the establishment of Our Lady of Remedies. All barber-bleeders (barbers who were trained to let blood for medical purposes), the men shared ethnic and occupational identities, and they were interconnected by a web of financial and social favours and obligations.

Originally published in 2000 as Devotos da cor: identidade étnica, religiosidade e escravidão no Rio de Janeiro, século XVIII, and based on the author's 1997 doctoral dissertation, the study relies on a variety of archival documents, including the foundational statutes for the brotherhoods, ecclesiastical correspondence dating to 1740–67, baptismal records, obituaries and wills, in addition to solid secondary sources. Documents regarding the leadership conflict within the Mina Congregation reached the High Court in Rio, the viceroy and finally the queen in Portugal. The unusual Mahi Manuscript of 1786 promoted ethnic ties and, in Soares' view, showed the leader of the Mahi Congregation to be an ‘unusually energetic proponent of Catholic doctrine and ritual’ (p. 202).

Soares describes the governing structure, finances and everyday acts of devotion and charity within brotherhoods, which included attendance at members' funerals. Preoccupied with receiving a proper Christian burial at a time when slaves in Rio ‘typically had their cadavers tossed unceremoniously on the beaches or in the fields outside the city’ (p. 126), members of the brotherhood could count on an elaborate public ceremony, mourners in formal dress, flowers, and church Masses. Their deaths were recorded for posterity in the obituary registry. According to Soares, Catholic burial formed ‘the paramount objective of the brotherhoods and the most-direct way for individual slaves to demonstrate their human equality within the hierarchical confines of colonial society’ (p. 159). Both men and women expressed their desire for a Christian burial in their wills and some left funds to provide this charity to other members.

The lay brotherhoods provided a context for social prominence among slaves and freed people via the election of men and women officers, and via public performances which, in addition to funerals, included festivals and processions. In 1764, the Mina Congregation gained approval to establish a folia (a parade with dancing and song, led by elected kings, queens and courts) called the Imperial State of Santo Elesbão, which demonstrated the vitality of the brotherhood and provided an opportunity for fund-raising. Challenging a historiography that characterises the folias ‘as folkloric ensembles, pleasant and colorful but merely festive appendages’, Soares shows them to be central to ‘the brotherhoods' internal mechanisms of power, social differentiation, and identity constructions’ (pp. 178–9). Freed Mahi emphasised their African identity and reinterpreted their past in the folia, ‘recasting the indeterminate land of the Mahi as a powerful kingdom and its gentios as charitable Christians’ (p. 237).

The mid-eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro focus of People of Faith is an especially welcome addition to a rich and growing body of historical literature on slavery and the African diaspora in Brazil, which until recently has concentrated on colonial Bahia and Minas Gerais or nineteenth-century Rio.