The majority of enslaved Africans entering Bahia in the first half of the nineteenth century came from the Yoruba-speaking world. ${ }^{7}$ It is, therefore, not surprising that Francisca da Silva's and José Pedro Autran's slaves, former slaves, and godchildren were predominantly Nagô. So were the co-workers at the heart of Francisco Gomes de Andrade's social network. The ethnolinguistic concentration of Nagôs in Salvador increased the demand for orisha worship of the sort practiced by Iyá Nassô, as it did for the African commodities, beyond enslaved people, that Africans who worked and travelled in the transatlantic trade purveyed. While Nagô slaves and freed people in Bahia inhabited a world in which the State, church, and most free citizens were committed to maintaining a social order based on slavery, and thus to tightly controlling the enslaved population, these Africans did not have to look far for companions who spoke their language, shared their culture, practised their religions (including Islam), and understood their signs and symbols, even when veiled (De Oliveira, 1995-1996). Freed Africans, many Nagô, became deeply threatening to the authorities in the aftermath of the 1835 Malê slave rebellion, leading to the severe punishment of those thought implicated in the uprising and to the introduction of new laws and regulations that repressed Africans more generally.