Filhos de Gandhy is the largest afoxé of the Salvador carnival: around ten thousand men, each wrapped in a cotton bedsheet sewn down the sides and a towel wound into a turban, moving at the pace of the ijexá drum rather than the pace of a parade.

The palette is not decoration. White is Oxalá. Blue is Ogum. The alternating white-and-blue strand is the fio-de-contas of Oxaguiã — white for his father Oxalufã, blue for Ogum, from whom he is inseparable. This system keeps that reading: cotton ground, bead blue, brass and straw at the edges, nothing shiny.