Bolsas de Mandinga: Afro-Atlantic Amulets and the Inquisition

Bolsas de mandinga ("mandinga pouches") were small cloth or leather bags worn on the body for protection throughout the eighteenth-century Portuguese Atlantic world, from Lisbon and Cape Verde to Angola and Brazil. Made and sold above all by Africans and people of African descent, they typically held written Christian prayers together with stones, roots, powders and other substances, and were believed to "close the body" against knives, bullets and misfortune, a belief that brought many of their makers before the Portuguese Inquisition.

What a Bolsa de Mandinga Was§

A bolsa de mandinga was a small bag, often of cloth or leather and sometimes sewn shut, carried around the neck, under the arm or in clothing. It belongs to a family of protective pouches found across many cultures, from the written amulets of medieval Europe to the charm bags of West Africa, and it is one of the best-documented examples of such objects in the early modern Atlantic.

Most of what is known about the pouches comes from the records of the Portuguese Inquisition, which investigated their makers and users as suspected sorcerers. Those records preserve confessions, descriptions of the contents and, in some cases, the papers found inside. Historians including Laura de Mello e Souza, Daniela Buono Calainho and James Sweet have used them to reconstruct the trade, the people involved and the beliefs that sustained it. Because the records were produced by inquisitors seeking evidence of heresy and diabolical pacts, they must be read with care: they show what the accused said under questioning, framed by the categories of their judges.

The Name: Mandinka Amulets and Portuguese Usage§

"Mandinga" derives from the Mandinka (Mandingo) people of the Upper Guinea coast and the interior of West Africa. From the fifteenth century Portuguese traders there encountered Muslim clerics who made written amulets, small leather packets containing verses of the Qur'an, divine names and magic squares, worn by people of many faiths for protection in war and travel. These amulets, often called gris-gris in European sources, gave the Mandinka a reputation as masters of protective writing.

Over time the word mandinga in Portuguese came to mean a powerful charm and, more broadly, sorcery itself; a mandingueiro was a person who made or used such charms. By the eighteenth century, however, most bolsas de mandinga had little to do with Islam. Their makers were often Central Africans from Angola and the Kongo region or West Africans from the so-called Mina coast, and the texts inside were usually Catholic.

Contents: Prayers, Altar Stone and Earth§

Inquisition descriptions show a recurring set of contents. The most important was paper bearing handwritten prayers, invocations of saints, names of God, crosses or other signs. Since many makers could not read or write, they obtained these papers from literate people, sometimes clerics or students, and the copying of prayers created a network of collaboration across social boundaries.

Other contents included fragments of the consecrated stone set in Catholic altars, called pedra d'ara, which was considered especially powerful because Mass had been said upon it; consecrated hosts were alleged in some cases. Pouches might also hold roots and herbs, gunpowder, lead shot, bits of bone or hair, earth, coins or small stones. Some makers had the finished pouch placed beneath an altar cloth while Mass was said, so that the sacrament would empower it, a practice that particularly alarmed the inquisitors. This mixture of Christian sacred objects and African techniques of assembling medicines recalls the bundles of west-central Africa described in Minkisi: Kongo Sacred Medicines.

Closing the Body: Protection Against Weapons§

The most commonly reported purpose of the pouches was to make the wearer invulnerable. Witnesses and defendants claimed that a person wearing a mandinga could not be pierced by a knife or wounded by a bullet, and stories circulated of tests in which a pouch was tied to an animal and the animal survived a blow. This protection was described as fechar o corpo, "closing the body", an idea that remains part of Afro-Brazilian religion and Brazilian popular Catholicism today.

The demand for such protection reflects the dangers of the colonial world. The buyers included enslaved Africans exposed to violence, free Black and mixed-race men, sailors, soldiers and travellers, and also Portuguese and Brazilian whites. Pouches were also sought for success in love, for luck in gambling and commerce, and for protection against witchcraft and the evil eye. The general history of protective objects of this kind is traced in Amulets and Talismans.

The Portuguese Inquisition and the Mandingueiros§

The Portuguese Inquisition, whose tribunal at Lisbon also had jurisdiction over Brazil, opened dozens of cases involving mandinga pouches, with a concentration in the first half of the eighteenth century. Inquisitors treated the pouches as evidence of superstition and, in more serious cases, of a pact with the Devil. Under questioning some defendants described meetings with the Devil at crossroads or in the night, accounts that historians interpret in different ways: as confessions shaped by the inquisitors' expectations, as reflections of African ideas about spirits recast in Christian terms, or as both.

Punishments ranged from penance and religious instruction to flogging, banishment to other parts of the Portuguese empire and service in the galleys. The trials show that the trade in pouches was well organised in some places, with makers, suppliers of prayers and middlemen, and that it moved with people along the routes of the empire. James Sweet's study of the healer Domingos Álvares, tried in the 1740s, shows how one African ritual specialist moved between West Africa, Brazil and Portugal, illustrating the mobility of the world in which the pouches circulated.

An Atlantic Object: African, Islamic and Catholic Sources§

Historians describe the bolsa de mandinga as a characteristically Atlantic creation. Its name and the prestige of written protection came from Muslim West Africa; the practice of assembling powerful substances in a container drew on west-central African traditions; and its prayers, saints and altar stones came from Iberian Catholicism, which had its own long tradition of written amulets and small devotional pouches. None of these sources alone explains the object, and its makers adapted all three to the needs of people living between Africa, Europe and the Americas.

Sweet has argued that such practices show the persistence of African understandings of health, misfortune and spiritual power under slavery, while Mello e Souza placed them within the wider popular religion of colonial Brazil, in which Europeans, Africans and Indigenous people borrowed from one another. Both perspectives help explain why a protective pouch could be valued at once as a Christian sacramental, an African medicine and a commodity sold in the streets of Lisbon. The wider family of religions that developed from these encounters is introduced in African Diasporic Religions.

Legacy in Brazil: Patuá and Mandinga§

The pouches did not disappear with the end of the Inquisition in 1821. In Brazil, small protective bags called patuá remain common in Afro-Brazilian religions and in popular Catholicism, often containing herbs, prayers or sacred images, and are associated with the religions described in Candomblé and Umbanda. The expression corpo fechado is still used for a person believed to be ritually protected.

The word mandinga also survives in Brazilian Portuguese, where it can mean a spell, a hex or, more playfully, cunning and trickery. In capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art, a mandingueiro is a player admired for guile, deception and an almost magical unpredictability, a usage that keeps alive the memory of protective knowledge associated with Africans in the colonial world.

Frequently asked questions§

What was in a bolsa de mandinga?§

Contents varied, but most pouches held handwritten Christian prayers or signs on paper, often with fragments of altar stone, herbs, roots, powders, shot, hair or earth. Some were placed under an altar during Mass to give them additional power.

Why are they called mandinga pouches?§

The name comes from the Mandinka people of West Africa, whose Muslim clerics were famous for making written protective amulets. In Portuguese, mandinga came to mean a charm or sorcery in general, even when the pouches contained Catholic prayers.

What does corpo fechado mean?§

Corpo fechado means "closed body" in Portuguese. It describes a person believed to be protected by ritual means from wounds, weapons and other harm, an idea central to the use of mandinga pouches and still found in Brazil.

Sources and further reading§

• The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery, and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil — Laura de Mello e Souza, 2003
• Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 — James H. Sweet, 2003
• Metrópole das mandingas: religiosidade negra e inquisição portuguesa no antigo regime — Daniela Buono Calainho, 2008
• Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World — James H. Sweet, 2011
• Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages — Don C. Skemer, 2006