A evangelização primeira: cristianização e resistência na tradição Ovimbunbu

Abstract

The first evangelization: Christianization and resistance in the Ovimbundu tradition, is a contribution to the decolonial efforts that have been made with the intention of valuing and emancipating cultures and peoples that were previously marginalized and deprived of the privilege of living and narrating their history in the first person. It situates the Ovimbundu peoples in the Bantu universe and presents their distinctive cultural characteristics. It discusses the value and centrality of religion in Ovimbundu societies and the description of the Ocimbundu as a religious subject, who interprets and experiences the world and reality based on religious beliefs and practices. It demonstrates how colonization and the process of Christianization became instruments of violence, destruction and erasure of the culture and traditional religion of the Ovimbundu peoples. By undertaking a bibliographical research project through the lens of decolonial theory, it was possible to see the viability of an interpretative shift as an act of insurgency against universalizing tendencies that attempt to perpetuate historical actions of erasure of non-Western peoples and cultures and symbolic manifestations, such as the Ovimbundu people. And to demonstrate that despite the impacts of Christianization, the traditional religion of these peoples found ways to survive, resisting to the present day, where it shares social spaces with other religions. And it was also possible to demonstrate in this research the usefulness of the concept of pluriversity as a decolonial epistemological perspective that enables an interpretation of traditional religion in modern society, where symbolic borrowings between the most varied religious strands occur at all times