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Abstract: Popular culture in Brazil owes a great deal to African cultural elements that have been reorganized and reassembled through various and multiple historical processes. One particular festivity that takes place in many regions and has occurred since the beginning of Portuguese colonization consists of the coronation and celebration of black kings. This happened under the veil of Catholic brotherhoods that congregated groups of Africans and their descendants, who were slaves, freed or free born individuals. In the eighteenth century these were known as "black king celebrations." The celebrated individuals were identified as "kings of nations" and represented specific ethnic or multi-ethnic groups. The designation congada appeared for the first time at the beginning of the nineteenth century to refer to such celebrations, and as time went by the ethnic black kings gradually turned into "kings of Kongo." In the course of the nineteenth century, the king of Kongo festivals became, as a result of historical processes that had begun in the sixteenth century, the place of an affirmation of a black Catholic identity and a reinforcement of communitarian links, mainly among groups of Central African ancestry. Today the congadas are still performed by black and racially mixed groups, mainly in the southeast of Brazil.
Introduction
As early as the seventeenth century the choosing and celebration of a king among African communities and their descendants in Brazil was a widespread practice throughout all areas of the region into which Africans had been introduced. King celebrations took place within Catholic brotherhoods dedicated to the devotion to a patron saint. The process that led to the establishment of these celebrations, directed both to the spiritual entities and to affirming the authority of leaders before the communities they represented, must be understood in the context of social relations within Brazilian slave society.1
Throughout the period of the slave trade the majority of enslaved people in Brazil were from the region of present day Angola, or West Central Africa, although other regions of the continent were surely represented as well. The celebration of the black kings was seen mostly (although not exclusively) within communities of Bantu-speaking origin. Such kings represented ethnic identities or "nations" based on the slave trade context, referring to such identities as Mina, Angola, and...