When the streets speak Africa…

A review of Adewale Emosu’s Sacred Streets of Salvador: Living African Heritage in Bahia by AKINTAYO ABODUNRIN.

FROM little acorns mighty oaks grow. This captures the spirit of Adewale Emosu’s ‘Sacred Streets of Salvador: Living African Heritage in Bahia’. In 2014, his then-employers, African Newspapers of Nigeria, publishers of the Tribune titles, sent him to cover that year’s FIFA World Cup in Brazil. It was while covering the Mundial that he received another directive from his employers to do an extensive feature on remnants of Nigerian culture in Brazil.

That side story, ‘Bahia: Even in Brazil African heritage lives on’, later won Emosu the 2015 CNN/MultiChoice African Journalist of the Year Award in the culture category. Yet Bahia never slipped from his mind. A decade later, the former Tribune sports editor has returned with a rich and thoughtful exploration of the city widely celebrated as Brazil’s most African. In this 160-page volume, Emosu applies participant observation, a classic ethnographic tool, to animate Bahia for his readers.

Anyone interested in this city, where African delicacies, gods and culture were imported centuries ago along with enslaved people that served as its workforce, will find ‘Sacred Streets of Salvador: Living African Heritage in Bahia’ a compelling read. What began as a tourism series has matured into an intimate portrait of a society whose lifeblood pulses with African memory. It is a testament to how Africa continues to breathe, stir, and sway in Bahia.

Emosu writes that the book “is an invitation to see Salvador not just as a tourist destination or a historic city recognised by UNESCO, but as a living testimony to resilience and creativity. The streets themselves tell the story of survival, struggle, and renewal. To listen to them is to hear Africa speaking through Bahia.”

In this book of five parts and 12 chapters, the author discloses that Salvador is a city where the sacred does not stay behind closed doors, but walks the streets, dances in carnival parades, rises from the smoke of acarajé frying in clay pots, and echoes in the deep. Churches, mosques and temples are not the repositories of sacredness;  it is carried by people, foods, songs, and rhythms that move through the everyday life of the city.

The book begins with the history of Bahia, located on the Atlantic Coast. It looks at how its location by the sea made it one of the most significant points of entry for enslaved Africans in the Americas.  It examines the sugarcane plantations on which its wealth was built and the role of enslaved Africans in creating those riches.

Despite leaving their homelands in West and Central Africa (Nigeria, Benin Republic, and Cape Verde), among others and living under harsh conditions, the Africans never forgot their roots. They had with them their languages, stories, recipes, healing arts, and reverence for the sacred. In Bahia, they wove these threads into new patterns by disguising deities in the faces of Catholic saints, stirring West African spices into Brazilian stews and marking rhythms on drums that spoke to both memory and survival. These practices then survived and reshaped Salvador, turning it into a vibrant repository of African heritage in the Americas.

Emosu shares various aspects of African life and influence in Bahia, including religion, festivals, dress, and food, in this well-put-together book. We learn more about Candomblé and its Orixás. For the author, Candomblé is more than a religion. It is, for him, a way of remembering and organising life around ancestry, nature, and the sacred. He tells us about the orixás, divine forces of nature and human character at the heart of Candomblé. There is  Oxum, the goddess of rivers; Ogun, the warrior, represents iron and labour; Yemanjá, the queen of the sea, who offers protection and maternal care. There is also the food for these orixás, including acarajé, caruru and amalá. We learn through Emosu that the food appears on altars and street corners and is carried by women in white lace and flowing skirts, with colourful headgear and beads.

The author delves deeply into food, music and movement in the streets in the second part of this book.  He shares the Yoruba roots of acarajé (akara-bean cake) and how the Baianas, often wearing lace dresses, turbans or headwraps, and beaded necklaces, prepare, fry, and serve it on the streets. And if one wonders whether eko (agidi), akara’s familiar companion, exists here, it does, known as akasan. Moin-moin appears as abará, and palm oil is called dendê.

We learn from the author that the baianas are more than akara sellers. He explains that they also “act as cultural guardians, protectors of a living heritage that blends religion, memory, and identity. The acarajé they prepare is more than a popular street food—it is a sacred offering, a link to the orixáIansã (Oyá), the goddess of winds and transformation in Candomblé. Each step in its preparation carries symbolic meaning: the soaking and peeling of black-eyed peas, the rhythmic grinding, the careful heating of red dendê oil.”

Carnival, arguably Brazil’s most famous export to the world, is also examined in ‘Sacred Streets…’ We learn that it is not merely a festival of joy and excess but a powerful act of remembrance and resistance, a living celebration of African heritage.  We also learn about groups, includingIlêAiyê, Olodum, MalêDebalê, and Muzenza give form and rhythm to a new kind of street carnival rooted in ancestral pride, Pan-African consciousness, and artistic self-determination.

Emosu lets us know that the Salvador carnival is more than a party. “It is a stage where history, identity, and power collide in rhythm and colour. For six days each year, the city becomes a vast open-air theatre where every drumbeat, dance step, and costume tells a story of survival and self-affirmation. Beneath the laughter, music, and glitter lies something much deeper: the echo of ancestral memory and the ongoing struggle for recognition. On Salvador’s streets, Carnival is a celebration, but it is also a ceremony and resistance; a sacred drama where joy and protest are inseparable.”

Capoeira, part dance, part fight, part song, and entirely history in motion, does not escape the author’s attention. He also dwells on street education, that is, how the elders are passing the torch to the young ones.

He raises urgent questions about Salvador’s future: How will Afro-Brazilian culture withstand the pressures of tourism, commercialisation, and redevelopment? How can youth inherit living traditions without reducing them to spectacle? And how can communities protect sacred knowledge in a world eager to commodify it?

With a degree in English Language and Literature, Emosu steps confidently into the role of ethnographer and primarily excels. He offers a thoughtful, layered account of the endurance of African heritage in Brazil, now inseparable from Salvador’s identity. It is a laudable achievement and, aside from overlooking the second publication date of the original Tribune story, a near-flawless work.