Why Bahia Is Led by Women

The most conspicuous fact about the office in the diaspora is that the great Candomble houses of Bahia have been led, for most of their documented history, by women. Casa Branca, Gantois and Ile Axe Opo Afonja were all headed by ialorixas, and the succession of maes de santo in those houses is the backbone of any account of Brazilian Candomble. In Cuba the balance went the other way, with male officiants taking a larger share of the ritual work and the oriate emerging as a male specialism.

Anthropologists have argued about the reason at length and the argument is historical rather than doctrinal. Nothing in Yoruba religion says the office is a woman's. What differed were the conditions on either side of the Atlantic: how enslaved and freed people were able to organise, what urban trades women controlled in nineteenth century Bahia and Havana, which African arrivals dominated each port and when, and how each colonial state treated African religion. J. Lorand Matory has gone further and argued that the Bahian female lineage was consolidated in part by nineteenth century traffic between Lagos and Bahia, which makes the Brazilian pattern a product of exchange rather than of isolation.

What is not in dispute is the standing of the women who held it. The senior ialorixas of Bahia were public figures, and the defence of Candomble against a century of police suppression was substantially their work.