Page 47 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

32 Mattijs van de Port

wide, colorful pants, caftan like shirts, and a little hat in matching print. I
soon spotted some of the intellectuals and anthropologists who frequently
show up at these events (the latter probably commenting on my eternal
presence in their field notes). I also identified some of the girls from the
terreiro choir, who all boosted new, elaborately braided hairdos and wore
identical wine red dresses, the color of Xangô. The rest of the audience
must have been made up of a significant portion of the clients, members,
and affiliates of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá and—judging from their Bermudas
and plastic flip-flops—a great number of people from the local neighbor-
hood. As always, the place was full of gays, people like my hairdresser
Adilson (who had alerted me to the event) and his friends, who had come
here to have an evening out, to pay their respect to the terreiro, meet up
with friends and flirt a bit with strangers.
On a raised platform, behind a long table decorated with African fab-
rics, raffia, palm leaves, and dried pumpkins on a string, sat Mãe Stella de
Oxóssi, high priestess of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, with her honored guests. The
priestess was all dressed up for the occasion. Her white turban, many-
colored necklaces, and white crinoline dress sparkled in the spotlights—an
exotic, queen-like figure, which dulled the appearance of the elderly gen-
tlemen in tie-and-suit who sat to her right and left: Gilberto Gil, the min-
ister of culture in the recently elected leftist Lula government, Antonio
Imbassahy, the mayor of Salvador, and two well-known local anthropolo-
gists, Julio Braga and Vivaldo Costa da Lima.
The latter was droning up a text he had written for the occasion. It
was something about the obá’s of Xangô, a council of twelve
“ministers”—a honorary function this particular terreiro has introduced
in the internal terreiro hierarchy. Costa da Lima had made it his task to
highlight the authenticity of that move with detailed ethnographic
accounts from Africa, where similar institutions seem to exist. It went
on and on and on, a stream of words that no one really listened to, but
that, as a play of sounds—Portuguese sounds mingling with African
sounds—sufficed to convey that Bahia’s link with Yoruba culture was
being celebrated here.
When Gilberto Gil finally took over the microphone, the chatting and

muttering of the audience quieted down. The brand new minister in the
Lula government—flown in by helicopter just for the occasion, as I was
told—reminded the audience that he too was an obá, a minister of Xangô.
Accepting his new job in Brasília, he said, had been greatly facilitated by
the fact that he already was a minister “at this primary, that is, the spiritual
level” long before his current position as a minister of state. He praised
Xangô, that “great saint,” and expressed his deepest respect and the respect
of all the ministers and members of parliament in Brasília to Mãe Stella, to