Chansons de Geste in Africa and Brazil?
Adam's Notes for November 21, 2024
The plan was that I was going to write about the second half of Aye of Avignon this week, but I stumbled upon a fascinating paper minutes after I sent last week’s Notes, and I want to share it with you.
I found the paper through a tweet by Sam Ottewill-Soulsby (whose blog The Historian’s Sketchpad is a great resource for Carolingian stuff, btw).
The paper is called “The Saga of Lohodann: Making Sense of an Annobonese Folktale Rooted in Carolingian Drama”1 and it’s by Jeroen Dewulf, published earlier this year in the Journal of Early Modern Studies, in a volume titled “Subaltern Writing and Popular Memory in the Early Modern World.” It’s worth looking up.
First: Annobón is a very small island off the coast of Africa just south of São Tomé and Príncipe, currently a province of Equatorial Guinea. As of the last census, it has a population of about five thousand. It was discovered by the Portuguese on January 1, 1473, and I say discovered because the Portuguese report that it was uninhabited. Soon after it was colonized with enslaved Africans, and as there were very few Portuguese settlers, the mixed children of white settler men and African women soon became the top of the hierarchy on the island. By the eighteenth century there were no Portuguese left. Over the years, several attempts were made by the Dutch to land on the island to restock, but these were always driven off. In 1798 Annobón was sold to Spain, but the Portuguese failed to mention that they had long ago lost control of the island. Catholic missionaries who visited over the years reported that the island’s religion was a mix of late medieval Catholic and indigenous African beliefs. The island’s system of government consisted of a Governor, Head Sacristan, and Schoolmaster who formed the Grand Council.
It turns out that each year, the population gathers for three days during Holy Week to hear saga of Lohodann recited from memory. What makes this really interesting is that the saga’s story seems to come from the chansons de geste. Dewulf writes:
An intriguing characteristic of this tradition is that the initial storyline of Lohodann follows to a large extent the birth and youth of the Carolingian knight Roland, as it was first recorded in the fourteenth-century Geste Francor. This story reached the Iberian Peninsula in the early modern era via the Reali di Francia, from where it travelled to Africa. In fact, the hero’s name Lohodann (or Lodã) corresponds to the local pronunciation of the Iberian Roldán/Roldão. Even more intriguing is the story’s ending; rather than a heroic death on the battlefield of Roncesvalles, Lohodann’s life ends after a mission to hell in pursuit of a witch, and the subsequent stabbing of all unworthy Christians at a church service. This curious ending indicates the degree to which the saga of Roland was adapted to local culture, which allowed this key figure in the Matter of France to become an African hero.
This tradition could go all the way back to the 1400s, with a few elements added or subtracted over the years, but no one knows for sure. In fact, the first written record of the story only appeared after a visit from a Catalan scholar in 1989. Apparently the local tradition is that the story is always recited by a male member of the Cisneros family.
Here’s how Dewulf summarizes the story of the saga in his paper:
Once upon a time, a king called Hala Manyi lived in a palace in the village [of Palé]. He had a daughter, Beedji, whom he kept under close supervision. Several men asked the king for the hand of his daughter but they were all rejected with the argument that only a man with real soldiers would be allowed to marry her. He did not know that Beedji had fallen in love with an old, poor fisherman, who used to pass by the palace. She would give the guards so much alcohol to drink that they fell asleep and smuggle the fisherman into her room. This continued until she got pregnant. Concerned about Hala Manyi’s reaction, the couple fled and ended up living in a cave, where they survived by begging in the surrounding areas. One day, there was heavy rainfall that threatened to flood the cave. Beedji and the fisherman left and, when trying to cross a river, the latter fell and drowned. Beedji then returned to the cave, where she gave birth to a male child whom she called Lohodann. The boy did not cry but, instead, rolled about in the placenta on the ground. In this way, he was able to see everything that happened before he was born and what was going to happen in the future. Already at a young age, Lohodann revealed great strength. One day, he took his father’s cane and rosary and told his mother that he wanted to go to her original house. He passed the river where his father had died, followed the coastline along the beach, and then encountered a group of children. He established himself as their captain and formed a small army with the most courageous ones. Thereafter, he entered Hala Manyi’s palace and took a plate of food from under the king’s nose, which he brought back to the cave. When his mother heard the story, she became scared and refused to eat. Lohodann returned to the palace, where the same scene repeated itself. After his third visit, Hala Manyi’s soldiers followed him and discovered the cave. Lohodann and his mother were brought to the palace, where the former identified himself as the king’s grandson. This was followed by a celebration.
Meanwhile, a man witnessed the landing of foreign warriors on the island. Upon hearing this, Lohodann assembled his twelve boys, who, with their swords, approached the enemy and defeated them. They then saw something that looked like a whale. Upon coming closer, they realized that it was a giant, whom Lohodann defeated after a long battle. This giant happened to be the son of devils. When she heard about her son’s death, the giant’s mother came out of hell and, at midnight, entered the house where Lohodann resided and killed one of the boys. The next day, she killed a second one. When the devil approached the house for a third time, Lohodann stabbed her with his sword. She fled down a ladder back into hell but was pursued by Lohodann, who killed her and then took a tunnel to the beach of Pala Padjil. From there, he walked to the village [of Palé], only to discover that people didn’t remember who he was. Since it was a Sunday, most people were in church. Entering the church, Lohodann took his sword and stabbed everyone, except those who succeeded in proclaiming their faith in God, such as the women Fiip and Fililipie. When he reached the high altar, Lohodann put down his sword, knelt down, and sighed ‘Oh, my God!’. He then requested something to drink from his mother Beedji and she brought a mug of water. While he was drinking the water, Lohodann’s body began to fall backwards. As he drank the final sip, his head touched the ground and he died.
I really can’t get over how close this is to Roland’s origin story. In most versions, Roland is said to have been raised in a cave in Sutri, a town just outside of Rome. His mother, Charlemagne’s sister, had run off with her lover, Duke Milon (Sometimes given as Miles, which being the word for soldier makes me wonder if it’s explicit if she’s running off with someone poor). Miles dies while Roland is young, and so Roland grows up poor until Charlemagne makes one of his famous visits to Rome. A young Roland very boldly gatecrashes the feast and steals food to bring home to his sick mother. Impressed, Charlemagne demands the boy be tracked down, and when he is, the family is reunited. Roland enters the knighthood, while Roland’s mother marries Ganelon (whom she’d previously rejected), thus starting their bitter feud.
As for the church massacre, one of the theories the author suggests is that this might be a memory of the repelling of the Protestant Dutch! (Apparently the Protestant Dutch were frequent villains in a similar Brazilian tradition.) Otherwise, it might be a reflection of an internal debate, about the tension between the island’s Catholic and indigenous beliefs. Dewulf writes that:
when taking into consideration that the final scene alludes to the church that was destroyed by Claretian missionaries in 1887, one could also interpret the saga’s conclusion as a call for resistance against the Eurocentric form of Christianity that these Spanish missionaries attempted to impose. In contrast to what one might expect when interpreting the saga from such a postcolonial perspective, this resistance did not come as a call for a return to a pre-colonial form of African indigeneity that rejects all European/Christian elements as signs of oppression. Rather, it came in the shape of a different form of Christianity, a syncretic one that built on the pre-Tridentine Catholic traditions the Portuguese once introduced in the region and that, in the context of local brotherhoods, went through a process of Africanization. From that perspective, Lohodann could be classified as a syncretic tale of anti-colonial resistance that, in itself, builds on two colonial legacies, one embedded in Portuguese religiosity, the other in Carolingian literature. The latter is all the more remarkable considering that the population of Annobón was illiterate. In fact, the strategic reinterpretation of European literature in the saga of Lohodann occurred entirely on the basis of memorization and thereby followed a pattern that corresponds to the way the Annobonese appropriated the Catholic prayers originally introduced by missionaries.
Dewulf points out that the names the names Fiip and Fililipie, recall Floripas, Fierabras’ sister in the gestes. Apparently the island of Principe, just North of Annobón, has an annual reenactment of the Fierabras story with a two-hour long battle sequence! Likewise, São Tomé has a similar reenactment. Apparently the dialogue is passed down from father to son.
Apparently these sort of reenactments have also been a tradition in Brazil. Dewulf writes:
One could also make a connection to another former Portuguese colony, Brazil, where the performance of Carolingian drama has a long tradition and where, to this day, plays based on the tale of Floripas are staged on specific Catholic holidays. In some places, only the battle scenes between Moors and Christians are performed. These are known as cheganças or, if on horses, as cavalhadas. They are typically, though not exclusively, associated with the nation’s Black population and performed by congadas, Catholic lay confraternities that are led by an elected king and named after the region from which the majority of Brazil’s African-descendant population originated: Kongo.
I had no idea that the chansons de geste were still alive like that, even if they’ve changed so much that they aren’t really gestes anymore. As Dewulf writes: “in spite of its European roots, the saga has become an African tale.” I’ve already had someone try to say to me that this is a cargo cult like phenomenon, but I think that’s very reductive, and misses the nature of syncretic religious practices.
It’s a really fascinating paper, and goes on to look at how and why these traditions developed, with a look at the celebration of Lent in Annobón and mock-war Kongo dances, and how these traditions merge and blend. I highly recommend looking it up for yourself.
I wish I had a less depressing note to end this on, but after reading the paper, I looked up Annobón to see what the island is like today, and… it’s not in a good state. The island is overcrowded, lacking both in clean drinking water and reliable electricity. Worse still, Equatorial Guinea has signed contracts to allow foreign companies to dump toxic and nuclear waste around Annobón. Two years ago the people of the island formed a group called Ambô Legado and declared themselves independent of Equatorial Guinea. While their claims have mostly gone unrecognized (shout out to the Catalan National Assembly and the Legislature of Río Negro in Argentina), Ambô Legado has done good work in spreading awareness and protesting the government of Equatorial Guinea. Unfortunately, this has also led to government reprisals, with dozens of islanders being locked up this July in the notorious Black Beach prison simply for signing a petition, and the island’s access to the internet terminated. It’s a depressing state of affairs, and hard to imagine things getting better anytime soon.
In other news, my review of Gail Simone’s debut novel Red Sonja: Consumed is up now at the New Edge Sword and Sorcery blog.
I’ll leave you now with this often overlooked Ennio Morricone banger, Abolição (Portuguese for abolition), which is from the soundtrack of the film Burn!, in which Marlon Brando gets involved with a slave revolt in a fictional Portuguese colony.
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J. Dewulf (2024) The Saga of Lohodann. Making Sense of an Annobonese Folktale Rooted in Carolingian Drama. Link: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-jems/article/view/15262/14091