# Religion and social practices  
Religion, however, was also the space where Africans were able to reorganize the family, a new group, providing through the initially religious festivals, the necessary framework for maintaining their historical-cultural dynamics. The remarkable fact that the Mocambo neighbourhood in Lisbon or, where appropriate, other urban concentrations of Africans, should be created and the minimum forms of kinship should be upheld, contributed to the preservation of certain African social practices. The very fact that Africans had enough ingenuity to create Mocambo in Lisbon highlights an ability to define strategies of total non-dissolution in Portuguese space, thus creating a space of their own,  
probably from free or hard-won Africans. Mocambo, and other urban spaces concentrating Africans allowed communities, for example, to handle births, marriages and deaths, since African rules imposed rituals that diverged from Portuguese practices.  
It is noteworthy that African polygamy, which has remained in Mocambo, will have joined wives from various backgrounds and speaking different languages, as was common in Africa. Given the classificatory kinship, each woman of the patriarch was at the same time the mother of her own children and the other patriarch's children. Women, more than men, acted as guardians of cultural values, that is, their traditions were naturally contradicted by the conditions of the functioning of Portuguese society, but were preserved in part through African religious strategies.