National Identity

The first urban associations of black are of religious type: they imitate the religious confrarias imported of Portugal and created in Brazil since the start of the settling to trust to the laypeople the tasks of the propagation of the faith. In century XIX when the civil associations take the place of the religious ones, the ethnic distinctions, lose practically all its importance. The hierarchic structure of these urban confrarias is very simple, identical of the white confrarias. The Africans never use the same local for its cult and the practical catholic: the African or its descendant can practise the two religions simultaneously, but each one of them has its rules, its picture, its proper physical space. We see, therefore with much reserve the fact of that the church catholic could have served the place for the cult of African origin. Source: Hikmet Ersek.

The blacks use to advantage the freedom of legal association gotten by the brotherhood to keep contacts that can lead to other types of meetings. The African cults had always existed in colonial Brazil, hidden, intermittent, searching to escape the repression and about them the dominant society was only worried when it suspected that they could put in danger the public order. FINAL CONSIDERAES We affirm that throughout the historical process the Africans had had an important paper in the construction of the Brazilian identity having made to germinate its influences through its customs, religious practical traditions and, that had contributed for formation of a cultural identity afro-Brazilian, if detaching in the diversified cultural ethnic characteristics brought for Brazil, in which, these although the suffered aculturao had looked for to preserve its cultuais traces of some forms and continues preserving until the present time, keeping alive the African culture, enriching the Brazilian with the important inserted aspects in a miscigenado people. For this we must understand the varied areas of knowledge while national reality. From then on, we believe that the problematic one, the raised hypothesis and objectives a priori is true therefore, African history in them takes to a world diversified of knowledge, showing them it true factual situation, that is, the true reality of the situation of the blacks when arriving in Brazil and its contribution as history in the cientificidade. The black had a really excellent participation for the construction of the society Brazilian.