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The history of the discovery of African literature in Brazil and Cuba has at least two protagonists: on the one hand, the self-taught anthropologists, and on the other hand, their African informants, who were becoming legal subjects at the beginning of both republics (Brazil, 1889; Cuba, 1902). From these descendants of the slaves writers transcribed, into Spanish and Portuguese, the African oral traditions. With the abolition of slavery, Cubans and Brazilians were faced with a new population within their own culture, that included a specific origin in the map of Africa, a specific language and its own system of beliefs. No discipline was in better position to interpret those cultures and their progressive creolization than vernacular anthropology, which we now consider the beginning of Afro-Romance literature.* If European ethography was still the model to follow in defining what Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian were, the methods and conclusions of Afro-Romance anthropology soon grew apart from the European dictionaries. And yet, it was looking at Brazil and Cuba from outside Ibero-America, namely from Europe, that these anthropologists developed a panoramic view of their own countries. The distance made possible the historic passage from orality to text. By interviewing the last Africans in Cuba and Brazil, in their double role as informants and the spiritual leaders of their communities, the writers discovered in the field one of the major dilemmas of literature in general: to write not only as the Africans spoke, but as they spoke no more.
The central thesis of this dissertation is that the transcription of the oral traditions in the pioneering work of Nina Rodrigues and Fernando Ortiz produced a wholly new way of writing in Brazil and Cuba. After them, two generations of anthropologist-writers explored the influences of Africa on these creole cultures and gave the history of anthropology and literature an unexpected twist: the oeuvre of these writers passed from hand to hand among the followers of the syncretic rituals as much as the oral performances of the Africans used to pass from mouth to mouth to their descendants. By becoming the agents of such a passage they completed a cycle of oral transmission in Cuba and Brazil.
This study has a comparative character not only because it takes into account the literature of African origin in both Brazil and Cuba, but also because it analyzes the counterpoint between them and contemporary Africa. By including at various times both sides of the Atlantic saga, the comparison is necessarily a historical rather than a functionalist or a structuralist one. The term post quem of the present dissertation is the year 1888, which marks the beginning of Afro-Romance anthropology in Spain and at the same time the partition of Africa into European colonies. The term ante quem is the year 1969, in which, coinciding with the euphoria of independence in Africa, the brief history of Afro-Romance literature concludes in Brazil as a parody of XIXth century anthropology.
*Neologism from Willy Bal (Afro-romanica studia. Albufeira: Poseidón, 1979). Later on, Spanish linguist Germán de Grande Gutiérrez used it in his Estudios de linguística afro-románica (Valladolid: 1985).