Bolsas de Mandinga and their Makers: An Interview with Professor Cécile Fromont

“We have in the Inquisition trials and elsewhere numerous testimonies of Africans and Europeans alike that describe how knives, swords, or even bullets from firearms have literally bounced off the skin of bolsa de mandinga wearers.”

-Professor Cécile Fromont

In 1730 an African slave and Vodun devotee named José Francisco Pereira was arrested in Lisbon and charged with witchcraft. Like others of his era who attracted the attention of the Inquisition, Pereira was a popular figure who offered his services to both poor and well-to-do clients. His magical specialty, however, was bolsas de mandinga, handcrafted pouches with mysterious contents that could bestow upon their wearers a variety of god-like abilities. According to Cécile Fromont, an award-winning professor of art history at Yale University, the bolsas “were objects of universally recognised and feared power”. In a recent lecture at the Courtauld Institute she said that they “threatened and engendered the wrath of Church and State alike”. 

Born in the Kingdom of Dahomey (modern-day Benin) Pereira spent years as a slave in Latin America and Portugal. Accordingly, his art (and that of his fellow African master magicians) was viscerally informed by harrowing transatlantic experiences. For this reason, bolsa magic was as unique as it was visceral, Odyssean both in its scope and in its influence. The bolsas, Fromont explained, “were the product of the sustained, if often abruptly asymmetrical dialogue that the Atlantic Slave trade sparked between people along the two continent coastlines–Africa and Europe–and beyond in the Americas.”

We caught up with Fromont to learn more about the bolsas de mandinga and their history.

The Custodian: Who were the primary masterminds and designers of the bolsas de mandinga? Did these individuals have to receive specific training in the magical arts? 

Professor Cécile Fromont: Africans who had recently gone from different locations on the African Atlantic coast through the Middle Passage to Madeira, Brazil, then Portugal were the primary makers of the bolsas. Some were already ritual specialists before their enslavement, but all trained along their journeys with practitioners they met during their travels, Indigenous as well as African. They learned from these masters of all horizons the art of finding and mixing ingredients into empowered packets capable of bringing security of mind and body to their wearers. 

C: What kind of materials, symbols, and colours could one usually find inside a bolsa de mandinga?

CF: Bolsas de mandinga, according the surviving examples and descriptions in the historical record, were primarily papers inscribed with esoteric formulae from the Catholic realm that the mandingueiros (the bolsa-makers) bundled with herbs, body fluids, cloth, Catholic sacramental material, and already existing amulets, such as medals and coins. In other words, they turned scraps from the Portuguese religious, visual, and material environment into singular objects of fierce and trustworthy Afro-Atlantic might. The process was both material transmutation–ingredients combined into a new, metamorphosed whole–and psychological transformation, ushering makers and users from powerlessness to empowerment.

C: How did mandinga pouches become, to use your words, “the objects par excellence of the eighteenth-century Afro-Portugese Atlantic?” Were they called differently in different communities and cultures? 

CF: They are “the objects par excellence of the eighteenth-century Afro-Portuguese Atlantic” because they encapsulate the spiritual, material, and human ebbs and flows that the Portuguese transoceanic political and economic endeavours created at the height of the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Similar objects existed in related contexts such as the gad-kò in the Caribbean island French occupants called Saint Domingue or other similar bundles in the Spanish colonial port of Cartagena de Indias. Each set of examples and the documentary record that allows us to approach them, hold a different inflection born from the confrontation between the African ritual specialists and the specific slave regime against which they used their knowledge and tools. 

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C: You’ve said that the bolsas appeared all over the world, in places like India, Portugal, Brazil and the Maghreb. How did they acquire this kind of cosmopolitan popularity?

CF: The bolsas fully integrated the spiritual fabric of Portugal, and Europeans as well as Africans and Afro-descendants used them and carried them along in their travels to the four corners of the Portuguese world. 

C: Could you tell us more about the variety of powers that bolsas provided to their wearers?

CF: As individualised objects, each bolsa served a purpose unique to its owner. At a broad level, they brought security and empowerment to those who face disenfranchisement and uncertainty in their lived circumstances. Users turned to them for reasons ranging from affairs of the heart–or lust– to attempts at gaining security of mind and body in the face of danger. Wearers trusted them to stop knives and bullets from penetrating their body, to allow them to escape violent masters, or to help them capture and maintain the affection of a lover.

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