Photo-Diaspora

In this photographic series, Foto-diáspora (2025), Amanda Tropicana documents the matriarchs of Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion with approximately 1.85 million followers in Brazil.

It is essential to note that Brazil received more enslaved people than any other country in the Americas: approximately five million Africans disembarked at its ports between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, accounting for more than one-third of the entire transatlantic slave trade.1 Most of those trafficked came from West Africa, particularly the Costa da Mina region (present-day Benin, Togo, and Nigeria) and from Angola, with large numbers of Yoruba (Nagô/Ketu), Jeje, and Bantu peoples.

Bahia was one of the main points of arrival and home to Brazil’s largest concentration of West Africans. It was amid this profound colonial violence and the resistance to it that Candomblé took shape in the nineteenth century as a religion with African roots and a Brazilian identity. Candomblé encompasses several ‘nations’, or religious traditions, including Jeje and Angola. It is important to emphasise that I speak from within the Ketu nation, also known as Nagô.

In Nagô Candomblé, worship centres on the orixás, deities who embody natural phenomena and aspects of animal and plant life. Male orixás, including Exu, the messenger and the first to be greeted, Ogum, Oxóssi, and others, are known as Oborós. Female orixás, including Iemanjá, the great mother, Iansã, Ewá, and others, are known as Iyabás. Each has an archetypal identity and a corresponding presence in divinatory consultations.

This religion was built primarily through the hands and words of the iyalorixás, also known as mães de santo, or ‘mothers of the sacred’. Successive generations of iyalorixás have sustained a matrilineal tradition that honours the words and knowledge of elder women, the guardians of ancestral wisdom. These women pass down narratives about the lives of the orixás, known as itans, carrying forward a body of knowledge spanning thousands of years. 

The iyalorixás are leaders among the elder women. They are responsible for the terreiro, the sacred space where the orixás are worshipped. Since these communities first took shape, Black women have led them. Their members include both the matriarchs’ blood relatives and their ‘family of the sacred’. Among their daily responsibilities, the mães de santo manage the community’s finances and oversee the kitchen, which prepares both everyday communal meals and sacred foods. Among the duties reserved for them, they receive people seeking guidance through Ifá, an oracle system popularly known as jogo de búzios, or cowrie-shell divination. They are guardians of axé, the vital force that lives within us, and exercise a spiritual and political authority that challenges the patriarchal and racist logic of slave-holding society.

Within this tradition, ‘matriarch’ carries a particular meaning, referring to women who lead their communities. Throughout the history of Brazilian Candomblé, iyalorixás have left an enduring mark. To name just a few, we can look back to Mãe Pulquéria in the nineteenth century and, in the twentieth century, to Mãe Menininha do Gantois, Mãe Stella de Oxóssi, Mãe Simplícia, Mãe Olga do Alaketu, Mãe Nitinha de Oxum, and Mãe Ana de Ogum, among many others who have become ancestors in Orum, the spiritual realm. There are also Black women who continue to produce knowledge and care for their communities in Aiyê, the earthly realm, including Mãe Neuza de Xangô and Mãe Márcia de Obaluaiyê, my oracle and mãe de santo, among many others.2

Fortunately, despite the colonial persecution historically inflicted on the povo de santo, the people of Candomblé, Brazil is home to thousands of mães and pais de santo, as well as ogãs, ekedys, ebomis, and iyaôs, who carry Candomblé forward.3

Through Amanda’s lens, we come a little closer to these women.

– Djamila Ribeiro