(Blacks in The Diaspora) George Brandon - Santeria From Africa To The New World - The Dead Sell Memories-Indiana University Press (1997) (Z-Lib - Io)
(Blacks in The Diaspora) George Brandon - Santeria From Africa To The New World - The Dead Sell Memories-Indiana University Press (1997) (Z-Lib - Io)
(Blacks in The Diaspora) George Brandon - Santeria From Africa To The New World - The Dead Sell Memories-Indiana University Press (1997) (Z-Lib - Io)
from Africa
to the New World
THE DEAD
SELL MEMORIES
George Brandon
Santeria from Africa to the New World
Santeria from Africa
George Brandon
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
ween ANSI Z39.48-1984.
©
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
3 4 5 6 7 01 00 99 98 97
For
Iyalosha Oshunfunke,
Iyalosha Olurde,
Mwedogi, Ewe Babalawo of the village of
Kissema, Ghana—be he living or dead,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1X
I. Introduction 1
THE PROCESSUAL FRAMEWORK 3
PHASES OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT 3
CONTINUITY AND CHANGE 7
II. Africa 9
THE OLD RELIGION 11
THREE BROTHERS QUARREL, AND THEIR HOMES ARE INVADED
BY STRANGERS 18
BIBLIOGRAPHY 187
INDEX 203
Illustrations follow page 31 and page 120.
Acknowledgments
This book has had a long and tortuous history. Much of the material was
gathered in the course of writing my Ph.D. dissertation on Santeria for the
Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. That was in 1983. The
dissertation itself proved to be so massive that it was certainly unpublish-
able as it was. It became clear that what I had was two books rather than
one. One of the books, this one, was an historical study, albeit with heavily
anthropological overtones; the other book was an ethnography, which re-
mains to be put into a new and publishable form.
The first year of the research on which this book is based was conducted
with the assistance of an award from the National Fellowships Fund of the
Ford Foundation in 1980. The bulk of the dissertation research, however,
was carried on during my tenure with the Inner-City Support Systems
(ICSS) Project of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey
from 1980 to 1982. I cannot adequately express the debts that I owe this
remarkable group of people. Even. though I pursued my dissertation re-
search independent of ICSS, the end result would have been very different
had I not worked there. Dr. Vivian Garrison was instrumental in securing
me entry into what proved to be my most valuable network of informants.
Her long acquaintance with Espiritismo was also invaluable, as were our
long hours of conversation, which, gratefully, continue up through the
present. Other members of the [CSS team who were helpful along the way
were Ana Hernandez, Carol Weiss, and Judy Podell.
Some of the things I uncovered through the historical study and field
research I had done threw much of what I had learned to accept as an-
thropological theory into question. Following out the implications of this in
general terms and putting together the beginnings of an appropriate
framework for understanding and presenting what I had found consumed
many hours of meditating on and reworking of this material during the
succeeding years and continues to this day. Much of this work took place at
the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where I was employed as as-
sistant professor of African American studies from 1982 to 1989. I could
not have asked for a more supportive and collegial environment than the
one provided during those years by Daphne Harrison, Robert Hall,
Jonathan Peters, Chezia Thompson-Cager, and Willie Lamouse-Smith. A
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship allowed me to attend
the 1985 Princeton University Summer Institute on African American Re-
ligious Studies and to rethink some of my materials and ideas within the
broader context provided the other fellows under the direction of Albert
Raboteau and David Wills. It also allowed me to reconnect with the inspi-
ration of Charles Long, who was my first mentor in African religious stud-
ies nearly thirteen years before at the University of Chicago.
x / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
My library and archival research benefited from the services of the Cen-
ter for Cuban Studies, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cul-
ture, the Northwestern University Archives, the staffs of Rutgers
University’s Dana and Alexander Libraries, the Library of Congress Africa
Section, the Alvin O. Kuhn Library of the University of Maryland, the Mil-
ton Eisenhower Library of the Johns Hopkins University, and the National
Museum of Lagos, Nigeria.
Many individuals deserve mention because of their assistance, but there
is scarcely space to name them all or to tell of the variety and graciousness
of their help: Andres Perez y Mena, Verna Gillis, Joe Falcone, Lenny Lo-
pate, Clarence Robbins, John Mason, Kwabena Perry, Kelly Royal, Tufani
Rafua, Edward Tivnam, Eric Plasa, Dele Fan, Samy Gardner, Jose Alicea,
Maria Rivera, Mikelle Smith-Omari, Margie Baynes Quiniones, Angela
Fleming, Rosa Levya, Petra Lomar, Nana Yao Opare Dinizulu, Oba Osej1-
man Adefunmi I and the residents of Oyotunji Village in South Carolina,
David Brown, Elio Torres, Babatunde Olatunji, Chief Olu Akaraogun, Jo-
seph Holloway, Lionel Tiger, William Powers, Patricia Womack, and the
anonymous manuscript reviewer at Indiana University Press whose com-
ments were so helpful.
Santerta from Africa to the New World
Introduction
gion with a clear dual heritage. Its component traditions include Euro-
pean Christianity (in the form of Spanish folk Catholicism), traditional
African religion (in the form of orisha worship as practiced by the Yoruba
of Nigeria), and Kardecan spiritism, which originated in France in the
nineteenth century and became fashionable in both the Caribbean and
South America.
In having this kind of a dual heritage, Santeria is not unique. It is but
one of the series of related Yoruba-based religious forms that exist in the
Caribbean, in Central and South America, and now in the United States as
well. Santeria is the Cuban variant of this tradition. Shango in Trinidad
and on Grenada, Xango and Candomble in Brazil, and Kele on St. Lucia
are other examples. Yoruba religion also entered Haiti to compose there,
along with Kongo-Angolan and Dahomeyan practices, the kaleidoscope
that is the religion of Vodun. Santeria should also be viewed, then, in re-
lation to 1ts kindred New World forms.
In regard to the local—national context, I must point out that San-
teria was not the only African-based religious group I found during my
fieldwork in New York. Far from being an isolated instance, Santeria is
in fact only one—though possibly the largest—part of an extensive Af-
rican occult underground in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los
Angeles, Washington, Miami, and probably other cities across the United
States. When placed within this context Santeria looks far less exotic
and atypical.
In relation to the United States, Yoruba religion and Santeria—and re-
ally the greater part of this whole African occult underground—involve
not the retention of African tradition but rather the convergence of the
reintroduction of African tradition by immigrants from areas where Afri-
can religions have been retained with greater influence and greater fidel-
ity, with the purposeful revitalization of that tradition by U.S. blacks and
Puerto Ricans. In this context the issue of Africanisms in the United States
becomes not only an historical one but contemporary as well and concerns
processes of culture change that can be observed in the present and over
the very recent past.
What I would like to do in these chapters is to take the reader along one
path of what this transatlantic tradition of Yoruba religion has come to
be—the path from Africa to Cuba to New York City. Other paths could
have been, and ultimately must be, chosen and researched by scholars in
the future. So this book talks about one line, one path among the many,
and its focus is mainly on the structures and rhythms of Santeria’s history
and on problems of collective memory and syncretism. As a result, this
work draws on the literature of African, Spanish, and Cuban history;
African religious studies; primary and secondary sources on Santeria;
and my own fieldwork undertaken in Ghana (1974), Cuba (1978), the
New York metropolitan area (1979-81), and Oyotunji Village, South Caro-
lina (1981).
Introduction / 3
Santeria under Cuban socialism, the focus shifts from Cuba to the United
States and to developments in New York City and the surrounding area
(chapter V).
The final two phases, 1.e., all the variants of Phase IV and Phase V,
should be thought of as occurring as a form of multilinear evolution rather
than in a strictly unilinear fashion or as entirely separate. Despite the ev-
ident changes which have occurred and are occurring, all these variants ex-
ist in differing degrees of tension, relationship, conflict, or dominance with
each other, but they also all now exist simultaneously in differing contexts
in New York or elsewhere.
Phase IV involves the importation of Santeria in New York and its re-
birth and persistence here since 1959. Two new religious forms have arisen
here which bear important relationships to Santeria. Both can be seen as
offshoots of it to some degree, even though their relationships to Santeria
are quite different.
Phase IV Branch 1, Persistting Santeria and Santerismo. This branch rep-
resents the formative stage of Santerismo in which some preexisting forms
of Puerto Rican Espiritismo encounter and absorb some aspects of Sante-
ria. I believe that Santerismo has not yet passed through this stage to a per-
sisting form. Santerismo began to appear in New York in the middle 1960s
as a variant of Puerto Rican Espiritismo which exhibits the influence of
Santeria. This variant continues to exist there presently, especially in the
South Bronx.
Phase IV Branch 2, Persisting Santeria and Early Orisha-Voodoo. Orisha-
Voodoo represents a fusion of Santeria with black nationalism in New
York. In this early period the people who eventually became Orisha-
Voodooists were highly dependent on the Puerto Rican and Cuban Sante-
ria priesthood. Their efforts at African revitalization, including the
expunging of Christian influences, brought them into increasing disso-
nance with the Santeria establishment. For a variety of reasons, the lead-
ership of the movement left New York and the movement itself went on an
independent trajectory. The time was roughly 1959 to 1969.
Phase V, Orisha-Voodoo. ‘This phase sees the consolidation of Orisha-
Voodoo as a movement through the founding of Oyotunji Village, a com-
mune devoted to the practice of African religion. It also sees increasing
reliance on Nigerian priests, the initiations of the movement’s founder in
Nigeria, and a conscious broadening of the group’s ritual and ideological
bases to include elements of Fon religion, Haitian Voodoo, Bini religious
motifs, and elements of the Egyptian mystery system. The fundamental
base of the movement, however, remains Yoruba religion, which most of
the leadership and followers initially contacted in the form of Santeria.
Phase V is roughly 1970—71, the period of the founding of Oyotunji Vil-
lage, to the present. Phase IV encompasses the formative phase of Orisha-
Voodoo, while Phase V encapsulates its persisting form at present. Since we
are primarily concerned here with developments which took place in New
Introductlon 1 7
(1980). In the second part of chapter VI I attempt to extend its use and
apply it to the development of an Afro-Cuban religion.
In a society such as Cuba’s in which the cultural traditions of Africans
could neither be continued entirely intact nor be smoothly integrated into
a harmonious national culture, what evolved was an intersystem or cultural
continuum (ibid.:353). In a cultural continuum the recognition of socially
and culturally significant differences in thought and behavior derives from
a shared pool of common ideology, history, myth, and contemporary ex-
periences. Into this shared pool fall racial and ethnic concepts, stereotypes
and images, and the relationships between symbols and economic and po-
litical power on one hand, and group traditions and self-identity on the
other. Nevertheless people relate differently to this shared pool because of
their place in society and on the cultural continuum. It is because of this
that social and cultural differences that are seen as meaningful can be used
as a way for people to represent themselves to others and as emblems of
group and personal identity. In such a situation the systematic nature of
culture resides in the relationships which, through a series of gradations,
transformations, bridges, and situational adjustments, link one end of the
cultural continuum with the other or one intersystem with another (353,
370).
While Drummond's 1980 paper provided the inspiration for the model
I present in this chapter, I go beyond seeing the cultural continuum as one
way that groups within a multiethnic, multiracial society organize its cul-
tural diversity at a particular time to presenting the cultural continuum as
a temporal and historical process as well. This shifts the orientation from
the fusion of formerly separate religious traditions toward the analysis of
cultural variation and the fate of Yoruba religion in a multiethnic, multi-
racial Cuban society in which the ideological, ethnic, racial, and economic
conflicts were all expressed through a small shared set of religious symbols,
concepts and categories.
My approach here, while making use of anthropological concepts and
data, is still primarily historical. A second complementary volume in prep-
aration is an ethnographic study of Santeria in New York. It will describe
Santeria belief, ritual, and social organization and will contain detailed
comparisons with traditional African beliefs and practices. While I expect
that the second volume will be of interest primarily to scholars, believers,
and specialists in African and African-American religious studies, I hope
that both volumes will find a wider readership as well.
II.
a
Africa
I cannot but admire the incuriousness of so
many travellers who have visited Dahomey
and have described its Customs without an
attempt to master, or at least explain, the
faith that underlies them. Their excuses must
be the difficulty presented by the incorpora-
tion of manifold elements, and the various
obstacles to exploring a religion which every
man, to a certain extent, makes up for him-
self. “Perhaps,” said a Dahomean officer to
Captain Snelgrave, the first European who
visited his country (1727), “that God may be
yours who has communicated so many ex-
traordinary things to white men; but as that
God has not been pleased to make himself
known to us, we must be satisfied with this
we worship.”
Captain Sir Richard Burton,
Misston to Glele, King of Dahomey
Dudukpeme
Wo, /4 “oy
Kpandue~- --->
Hoe~
Accra
Aja, migration
Yoruba migration
0 100 Miles
oe
and Dahomey claim descent from a single prince. The king sitting on the
throne of the original ancestor was regarded as the “father” of all the other
kings and all the other kings regarded themselves as “brothers.” This
father-son relationship between the king occupying the throne of the orig-
inal ancestor and the other kings formed the basis of the constitution of the
Yoruba-Aja territories, including both Dahomey and Benin. All this was
based on a claim of kinship rather than force. It derived from descent, not
conquest, and was a social bond founded on blood relationship, not secu-
rity or economic interest.
Each temple was dedicated to one of the large number of deities wor-
shiped. Several temples to the same deity might exist in the same city or
town, but each temple had a separate priesthood with its own separate al-
tar dedicated to that deity. Sometimes temple exteriors were colorfully and
elaborately decorated with tall carved doorposts, geometric patterns, and
paintings of humans and animals enacting scenes from mythology. Inside,
symbolic objects (emblems, statuary, and ritual paraphernalia) functioned
as altar images and indicated the presence of the deity. Although some of
the altar images were in the form of human icons, most of them were not.
Instead they were usually common ordinary objects, such as pots, cowrie
shells, pieces of iron, gourd bowls, stones, tree limbs, and branches. These
things would be selected because of their symbolic association with the de-
ity or function they were to serve. After ritual treatment and placement
within a sacred context, they would become religious icons and represen-
tations of the deity. Beyond being a place for the gathering of the priest-
hood and for performing secret rites, the temple served the main function
of housing these objects.
It was the empowered objects that were important, not the physical
structure of the building or even the existence of one. Neither temples nor
shrines had to be permanent structures. Wherever a collection of the em-
powered objects of a deity could be brought together and a place could be
found that expressed the attributes of that deity, a shrine or temple came
into existence. So there were shrines in the marketplaces, at the boundaries
of towns, along roads, at the riverside, and in fields. Most worship took
place in homes rather than at the temples, and among the laity one found
shrines in the rooms and yards of compounds, tiny shrines for deities in
front of houses, and objects hung up as charms and protective devices
over doorways.
THE ORGANIZATION OF WORSHIP
Worship was organized on several levels. These levels can best be described
in terms of the four levels of priests and priestesses. At the bottom of the
hierarchy was the household level with the household or compound head
as priest. Above this were the temple priesthoods, each with its internal hi-
erarchy or system of rank. Hierarchy and ranking were characteristic of
Yoruba social life at every level. Within the temple groups, members were
ranked according to their order of initiation into a particular grade. Elders
were deeply respected, and their relative rank was shown by addressing
them with special titles and honorific pronouns and by obeisance and pros-
trations (Bascom 1942, 1951; Morton-Williams 1967:51; Eades 1980:54).
The temple priesthoods all came under the responsibility of a village or
town priest, who was in turn responsible to the priesthoods of the national
or royal cults.
Worship took place in a daily, weekly, and annual round, with daily wor-
ship centered for the laity in their compounds. Weekly worship gathered
Africa / 13
Olodumare/Olorun
Orisha
A
S Egungun
h
e
Humans
“Nonliving” things
together those who worshiped the same deity. The annual celebrations,
commemorating each major deity worshiped in the area, were communi-
tywide festivals.
COSMOLOGY AND PANTHEON
an orisha is a person who lived on earth when it was first created, and from
whom present-day folk are descended. When these orishas disappeared or
“turned to stone,” their children began to sacrifice to them and to continue
whatever ceremonies they themselves had performed when they were on earth.
This worship was passed on from one generation to the next, and today an in-
dividual considers the orisha whom he worships to be an ancestor from whom
he is descended. The tradition is accepted by all groups of the Yoruba tribe, and
apparently in a modified form in Benin and Dahomey. (1944:21)
While some orisha are widely worshiped throughout the Yoruba terri-
tories and even into areas west and east such as Dahomey and Benin, oth-
ers have a purely local following, and there is much variation in the rituals
and mythology of the deities in the different regions. As a result some or-
isha are associated with specific places or regions. In some places the wor-
ship of an orisha can be traced back to a stranger who brought it there from
another place. Myth names the city of Ife as the birthplace of most of the
orisha, which means that for Ife residents most of the orisha are of local
origin. For residents in other places, the orisha worshiped there originated
elsewhere. The wide spread of the worship of deities closely associated with
Oyo—such as Shango, Oya, Oba, Yemoja, Oshosi, Orisha Oko, and
Erinle—is undoubtedly the result of both the centralizing influence Oyo
wielded as the dominant Yoruba city-state over several hundred years and
the dispersal of Oyo’s population after the city fell to conquest.
Although the orisha may be regarded as ancestral by its worshipers, it is
not in the same category as a person’s immediate ancestors or the founder
of the compound in which one lives. These latter are the egungun, who
receive separate veneration at shrines within the household and com-
pound. At the village level there was a secret society of male maskers, the
Egungun Society, which impersonated the ancestors of the community as a
whole at major festivals. Ancestor veneration also existed at the national
level in terms of the cult of the royal ancestors. While the orisha are con-
cerned with the minutiae of individual destinies, the ancestors are con-
cerned with the moral and social order of society and with adherence to
public norms. Within Yoruba, Bini, and Dahomeyan society, social rules
and injunctions were continuously phrased in the idiom of kinship (as we
have already seen in relationship to the ties among the kingdoms and the
theory undergirding it and in relationship ties between the orisha as
sources of power and their devotees). The role of the ancestors was not to
ensure individual achievement and satisfaction, although they remained
interested in the fates of their descendants; it was to undergird the contin-
ued existence of society and of a just social order at all levels. This was true
at the level of the household and compound in which the bodies of the
dead were frequently buried, and the ancestors therefore were close at
hand, and it was true at the level of the royal dynasties whose ancestors
were central for the national identity of the kingdom and whose guardian-
ship of fundamental moral and social values undergirded kingship. The
king was at once a link in a long chain of powerful ancestors, a living an-
cestor himself, and a deputy of the orishas on earth.
As manifestations of the communal ancestors, the Egungun maskers
embody a moral force still resounding from the time when all human in-
stitutions first came into existence. Since their word is law, they can medi-
ate and judge disputes and cleanse the community of illness and witchcraft
(Lawal 1977:59). More than anything else they embody the conquest of
16 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
death by the techniques and rituals of immortality and the return of the
dead from their world to renew their strong bonds with those they still
love. For this reason they are welcomed at their annual festivals with
great joy.
Humans. This category includes those living people who are visible and
those about to be born. Among them are kings, witches, priests, and twins,
all of whom are believed to have special powers for both good and evil.
Plants and animals. These constitute the environment in which humans
exist and their means of survival and nourishment. In turn they depend
on humans as well. Plants in particular are sources of both healing and
food, while knowledge of the individual characteristics of animals, birds,
and insects is important to hunter and farmer alike. Plants, animals, in-
sects, and humans all ultimately depend on the bounty of the earth, which
is deified as Onile and has an important secret society, the Ogboni, con-
nected with it.
“Nonltumng” things. Things such as stones, clouds, rivers, and pieces of
iron, which we might regard as not having biological life, are seen as being
alive, as having will, power, and intention, just like persons. The sky with its
stars, sun, thunder, lightning, meteors, and moon was the residence of Ol-
orun and the deities. Much of what goes on there is a counterpart of what
goes on on earth. It is simply the land of the dead and the orisha with a vast
population which usually sees everything from its own vantage point on
the other side of the visible sky.
Encircling this whole hierarchy of beings is an encompassing energy,
ashe, which permeates the entire universe. All of the powers (the orisha,
the ancestors, the forces and actions of nature, perhaps even the supreme
being itself) are manifestations of this absolute and indefinable power. It 1s
ashe which ties together all of the entire ontology and embraces the inter-
penetration of all beings. Pierre Verger, a longtime student of Yoruba and
Dahomeyan religion, has described it best.
The ashe of the forces of nature are part of the orisha, because the cult of the
orisha 1s directed to the forces of nature—though not to their unbridled and
uncontrolled aspect. The orisha is only a part of such forces, the part that is
disciplined, calmed, controlled, the part that forms a link in the relations of
mankind with the indefinable. Another link is made up of the human being
who lived on earth in olden times, and who was later deified. The latter was
able to establish control over a natural force, and to make a bond of interde-
pendence with it by which he attracted toward himself and his people the be-
neficent action of the ashe, and sent its destructive force upon his enemies. To
achieve this he made offerings and sacrifices to the tamed aspect of the force as
were necessary to maintain the potential of the ashe.
The orisha cult is addressed jointly to the tamed natural force and to the
deified ancestor, both of these links being considered as a unity. This alliance is
represented but not materialized by a witnessing object, which is the support of
the ashe. (Verger: 1966:37)
Africa 1 17
Human beings exist at the center of the universe. Their ability to carry out
ritual gives them an awesome responsibility because it is unique. Only hu-
mans can carry out rituals on behalf of all other beings; only humans can
sacrifice and empower objects with ashe. It is only humans, then, who have
the ability to create and sustain the harmony, freshness, and balance that
ought to exist in the universe.
To some extent humans were seen as being like priests for the other be-
ings of the earth. But their religion was not concerned primarily with Olo-
dumare or with the orisha or other beings or nature; it was concerned
primarily with humans and how the forces and beings and things present
in the universe could be used for the good of human beings and their lives.
The religion, therefore, contained a strong instrumental strain and was
concerned with using religion in the context of the practical exigencies of
everyday life, especially medicine and healing.
Although humans are at the center of the world, this does not make
them its master. A mystical bond links living and nonliving things in an in-
tricate web of influence and interdependence. To attain his or her ends,
the human being had to depend on the orisha and the ancestors. The hu-
man had to depend on the environment for subsistence and had to live in
harmony with the natural world. Humans also had to depend on each
other and ensure the harmony of their communities by conforming to the
moral and religious order of government, kinship values, taboos, and in-
teraction with the dead. As a result divinity and the sacred were closely as-
sociated with ecology and with human relationships.
18 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
OPENNESS TO CHANGE
some groups of Egba, Egbado, Nago, Aja, Ewe, Adangbe, and Ga (Fage
1969:42.)
The founding of the Yoruba city-states initiated a chain reaction that
propelled a general westward migration of peoples. Yoruba subgroups now
extend from southwestern Nigeria through the modern Republic of Benin
(formerly Dahomey) and Togo and on into some areas of Ghana (Fage
1969:42; Parrinder 1949). Eades (1980) estimates the total present-day
Yoruba population at about fifteen million.
While the Yoruba did evolve a common language and culture, they
never constructed a common political state. Instead various cities and king-
doms developed separately, interacting with each other over the centuries
but each with its own dialect, history, and variations in religion, political
structure, and general culture. By the beginning of the nineteenth century
the largest of these Yoruba city-states, the most populous and most cen-
tralized, was Oyo. Oyo, a true empire, came closest to integrating all of the
Yoruba peoples under a single influence—that of the Alafin, Oyo’s king.
Egba, Dahomey, Borgu, Porto Novo, and parts of Nupe all paid tribute to
Oyo.
The political system of Oyo was complex. The Alafin, theoretically an
absolute ruler and divine king, lived secluded in a palace. Surrounded by
ritual restrictions, he administered through a corps of eunuchs and titled
slaves. Seven principal nonroyal chiefs formed the Alafin’s council, the Oyo
Mesi. The Oyo Mesi also administered the nonroyal wards and descent
groups of the capital city.
Religion played an important role in both social and political life. Each
cult group was organized around a hierarchy of priests, some of whom
were also significant political officials. Though the Alafin was said to “own”
all the cult groups, he did not have unrestricted power over them. Each cult
group, however, did communicate with the Alafin before performing any
ritual affecting the interests of the community as a whole (Morton-Williams
1967:58). The most important of these cult groups, in political terms, were
the Ogboni cult and the cult of Ifa. The Ogboni cult of the earth, restricted
to powerful old men, mediated between the Alafin and the Oyo Mesi. ‘The
Ogboni also had important judicial functions (Morton-Williams 1960a,
1967:59). Divination played an important part in government, and the Ala-
fin had constant recourse to a diviner, a chief priest of Ifa, to interpret
events and the will of the gods and to advise him in decision making.
Benin. Descriptions by Portuguese who visited Benin City in the six-
teenth century register it as an impressive metropolis with great streets and
neat houses, palace courtyards and galleries, brass figures and elaborate
carvings (Barros 1552; Cadamosto 1937; Fernandes 1951). The later ob-
servations of Dutch and British explorers paint a similar picture (Bosman
1967). Benin and the Yoruba states were clearly the results of long devel-
opment and were well differentiated from each other from the times to
which Bini oral traditions refer. In Benin a person became rich by holding
99 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
remarkably well. The wars, however, were ruinous (Anene 1972:270; Brad-
bury 1957:94).
Dahomey. In many ways it is remarkable that a major state ever arose in
the region of old Dahomey. It has one of the poorest coastal areas in West
Africa. The poor savannah with its frequent droughts and famines seems an
unlikely place for a powerful and wealthy kingdom, yet in the seventeenth
century several Aja states existed in the region under the dominance of Al-
lada, which in turn was subject to the Yoruba state of Oyo. In fact it was
Oyo that upset the delicate balance that kept this network of states to-
gether. When Oyo invaded the coastal Aja states and introduced the slave
trade there, the preexisting social, economic, and political organization be-
gan to weaken (Akinjobin 1972:256). By the middle of the seventeenth cen-
tury the coastal Aja states were rebelling against Allada’s control.
Into these shifting currents leapt Agadja, king of Abomey from 1708 to
1732. Agadja took advantage of the power vacuum created by the coastal
rebellions and subordinated all the other Aja states to his rule. In 1724 he
invaded Allada and destroyed and conquered his neighbors; by 1730 he
had completed his revolution. Agadja and his successors eventually drew so
much power into the kingship that Dahomey truly became an absolute
monarchy. An extensive governmental bureaucracy uncoiled throughout
the kingdom from Abomey. The king appointed and dismissed all state of-
ficials, ministers, and chiefs; military officers received their appointments
from him; and the king monopolized all the forces of a standing army, a
civilian militia, and a legendary corps of female warriors. History, too, be-
came a royal monopoly as the traditions concerning royal clans and lin-
eages were confided only to certain royal relatives. Within the city of
Abomey the king even selected the heads of lineages (Lombard 1967:79).
The entire governmental apparatus was designed to exact obedience di-
rectly from individual subjects to their king. It is not surprising, then, that
it should have been riddled with royal spies, part of a permanent system of
espionage directed from the capital city (Lombard 1967:79-80; Webster
and Boahen 1967:112; Fage 1969:103).
If the Dahomeyan king’s power in the judicial, political, and military
spheres was absolute, it was only slightly less so in the field of religion. The
chief priests of all religious societies came to the king for licensing. As high
priest of the state religion, the king confirmed the election of the priests of
the national cults and supervised their activities. Throughout the neigh-
boring regions of West Africa the secret society remained, and remains, an
important socioreligious institution. In Dahomey the king forbade secret
societies as a possible threat to royal power (Lombard 1967:75—80; Webster
and Boahen 1967:112). Furthermore, all cults and worship, whether na-
tional or local, communal or domestic, indigenous or incorporated from
conquered peoples, were subordinated to the cult of the mystic leopard
Agassu, the cult of the royal ancestors. In these ways Dahomey was as dif-
ferent from the previous Aja states as it was from Oyo and Benin.
24 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEW WORLD
100 Miles
ce |
IGBOMINA
IJESHA
EKITIor
EFON
ONDO (IJAMO)
e Benin
BENIN
The expansion of the slave trade in Benin seems to have taken place with-
out the use of firearms—one of the prizes of the trade in slaves on the Af-
rican end—and there is no evidence that in Benin proper the trade in
slaves was ever extensive in absolute numbers (Graham 1965:319-20, 331).
This is not to deny that sizable numbers of slaves were exported from the
Bight of Benin; rather it is to point to the laxness of state control and the
lack of intervention by the Oba in the slave-trading activities of the outlying
provinces. The European slave trade may well have increased the auton-
omy of the Benin kingdom’s outlying provinces. “It is probable, in connec-
tion with the state’s role in the slave trade, that the European factors, from
the very beginning, dealt more directly with the individual communities
than with the Oba” (ibid.:320).
In the fifteenth century Benin had been a well-established state. Over
the next four hundred years the tranquillity and cohesiveness of the Benin
empire were shaken by the rise of Oyo, the Atlantic slave trade, the Nige-
rian civil wars, and disputes within the royal house of Benin itself. Its large
Africa | 25
and far-flung army had, by the sixteenth century, pushed the borders of
the Bini kingdom out into the territories of the eastern Yoruba and the
western Ibo, enfolding these peoples in its influence. The seventeenth cen-
tury was the period of expansion for Benin. During this period the king-
dom expanded to Bonny and engulfed the Yoruba city of Lagos. Benin was
a major source of slaves. By the end of the century, though, the slavers had
shifted their focus further west, and the economic benefits of the slave
trade from Benin declined.
The next two hundred years also saw the amount of land under Benin’s
power shrink. The area from which Benin could conscript troops dwin-
dled, vassal territories broke off and no longer paid tribute, and eventually
the Oba was unable to guarantee security in all the areas supposedly under
his control. Whatever vitality there was left within the system was strangled
by state control and by the fruitless search for a security that was never to
be found.
Even more ominous were the incursions of the British, Europeans who
were no longer looking to Benin for slaves but rather for possession of the
people and the land itself. “Their presence and inland penetration repre-
sented a creeping and irreversible threat as the Oba lost control of the out-
lying territories and former vassals became enemies.
The Oba was undoubtedly suspicious of the actions of the white men on the
coast. He was also vaguely aware that somehow the presence of the white men
in his kingdom would upset religious practices cherished in Benin for centuries.
The white men who now condemned slavery could not countenance the mass
slaughter of slaves for religious observances and funeral rites. In the meantime,
the British agents who were operating in the neighborhood of the Benin River
were fed with the stories of dark happenings in Benin by the Itsekiri middle-
men who were anxious to exploit the economic resources of Benin. (Anene
1972:274)
The latter half of the nineteenth century spelled the tragic end to this
anxiety. Out of the north came Nupe-Fulani raiders to bite away at the
northern border of the Benin kingdom. The Bini, who had once exacted
tribute, now had to watch as northern Bini were forced to pay tribute to the
Muslim Emir at Bida. Both on the east and on the west the Oba was losing
control of his subjects. European traders made their way farther inland
through Lagos and up the Niger River into the regions that had formerly
been trading preserves.
In 1897 the Oba of Benin seems to have known what was coming, but
he made no attempt to pull together a military defense at the capital or
throughout his remaining territories. Indeed the Oba seems to have lost
control of his own palace. The immediate cause of Benin’s fall was the at-
tack of the British Punitive Expedition which was dispatched to revenge
the ambush of an earlier exploratory party. The Oba, in fact, had wanted
to receive this pioneer mission but had been overruled by his titleholding
96 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
councillors. The mission was snuffed out instead. On the advice of his
priests the Oba had many slaves sacrificed in a futile attempt to ward off
the impending British attack. Ralph Moor’s lurid account of Benin after
the Punitive Expedition is typical of the shocked reactions of the invaders
to the slaughter they had provoked.
The city presented the most appalling sight, particularly around the king’s
quarters. . . . Sacrificial trees in the open spaces still held the corpses of the lat-
est victims. . . . One large space, two hundred to three hundred yards in length,
was strewn with human bones and bodies in all stages of decomposition.
(Quoted in Anene 1972:275)
Crucifixions, human sacrifices and every horror the eye could get accustomed
to, to a large extent, but the smells no white man’s internal economy could
stand. ... Blood was everywhere; smeared over bronzes, ivory, and even the
walls. (Quoted in Graham 1965:317)
It was this image which was carried into the West after Benin’s conquest as
the image of what Benin had always been, when in fact the opposite was the
case. Benin was in a desperate condition and its fortunes at a low ebb when
the British conquered it in 1897.
The impression which the members of the expedition carried away from Benin
town, as the City of Blood, was no doubt largely due to the number of corpses
seen by them in the Arho Ogiuwu ... which they thought were the bodies of
slaughtered victims, whereas they were really those of executed criminals and of
persons who had died from infectious disease, etc., to whom decent burial was
denied. If also, as stated, all the human sacrifices consisted of criminals, these
would probably have preferred death as an offering to the gods or ancestors
than in any other form. ... The most abhorrent to modern ideas were the sun
and rain sacrifices in which the victims were tied to trees, but 1t must be remem-
bered that these were always wizards and witches, and so guilty, in native eyes,
of the worst possible crime. The idea of Benin rule, therefore, as one of blood-
stained despotism appears at variance with the truth. (Talbot 1926:90)
jobin 1972:258). On the other side, toward the northeast, was an Oyo
reluctant to relinquish possession of the region to an upstart. Oyo invaded
Dahomey four times in order to contain and control the revolt and the new
kingdom. In this threatened position, Dahomey was forced to became trib-
utary to Oyo. The rulers of Abomey and Oyo City exchanged daughters as
brides, Dahomey paid an annual tribute, and the court at Dahomey in-
creasingly absorbed Yoruba religious and cultural influences from 1730
onward.
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century King Kpengla of Dahomey
set up slave-worked plantations, and the centralization of power became
even more pronounced than before. At the same time, however, Dahomey
became more and more dependent on the Atlantic slave trade and owed its
rise and splendor to its profits. As a result its status depended a great deal
on the effects of external forces. The head tax levied on slaves transported
from or through the territory was a major financial support of the Abomey
kingdom (Webster and Boahen 1967:115). Oyo exported slaves out of
Porto Novo rather than through Abomey so that Oyo paid no taxes on the
slaves as did England. When England abolished its slave trade in 1808, the
court at Abomey was greatly affected.
Historians are divided on their views of the eighteenth-century political
conflicts that led to the collapse of the kingdom of Oyo. Akinjobin (1966)
believes it resulted from a factional struggle between the Alafin and his
council over expansion of the kingdom, with the Alafin wanting to develop
trade and increasingly exploit the areas they already held, while the Oyo
Mesi held a more expansionist position. R. C. Law (1971), on the other
hand, sees the conflict as centering, on one hand, on raw power for the
control of resources garnered by Oyo's growth and, on the other, on Oyo's
increased involvement in the Atlantic slave trade through the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.
When Alafin Abiodun died in 1789, the Oyo empire began to fall apart.
It disintegrated with astonishing rapidity into a plethora of autonomous
war leaders beholden only to their followers and the expediency of their
slippery, rapidly shifting alliances. By 1840 Oyo had completely collapsed.
While it lasted, old Oyo’s power and prestige had prevented major wars in
its territories and on its frontiers; its collapse precipitated the civil wars and
jihads that made the nineteenth century for Nigeria a century of warfare.
Civil wars broke out in the southern Yoruba territories. New states founded
in the 1820s and 1830s tried to fill the vacuum left by Oyo s process of de-
cline. Oyo’s own population shifted south to the fringes of the forests after
the empire’s death. Attacks on travelers and kidnapping became common-
place, and such events led up to the Owu and Egba wars (1820), the first of
the Nigeria civil wars stretching out through the nineteenth century.
The period between about 1820 and 1878 saw the final fall of Oyo, the
outbreak of the Owu War, the overthrow of old Oyo city by the Muslim Fu-
lani, m:gration southward out of the war zones, and the building of new
98 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
towns, including a new Oyo city. It also saw resumption of warfare and slave
raids into Yoruba territories launched from Dahomey (Akinjobin 1972).
The leopard had not changed its spots.
FROM SLAVES TO PALM OIL
In 1818 Gezo of Dahomey seized the throne and declared Dahomey’s in-
dependence from Oyo. Gezo took advantage of Oyo’s collapse and frag-
mentation and annexed some territories and towns formerly under Oyo's
control. While Oyo was involved in a civil war with Ilorin, Dahomey ceased
paying tribute and began aiming slave raids at Yoruba towns.
Independence from Oyo did not solve Dahomey’s economic problems.
Dahomey had continued to sell slaves to the Portuguese and Brazilian trad-
ers who persisted in coming after Britain had abandoned and then banned
the trade. But eventually the slave raiders exhausted their slave raiding
grounds. The court split over a debate about the direction of the economy:
to continue in the dwindling and embattled Atlantic slave trade or go into
large-scale palm oil production. By the 1850s the direction became clear as
Dahomey increasingly became a slave society—not a society based on the
trade in slaves but a society based on large-scale production by slaves. More
and more the catch from slave raids was diverted from export into labor on
palm oil plantations in the service of the African elite. Raids shifted farther
north, up into the Yoruba palm oil belt, but they were not particularly suc-
cessful. In the 1850s the slave trade from Dahomey to the Americas sank
into insignificance (Webster and Boahen 1967:116). By the 1870s Daho-
mey had completed the transition from an economy centered on slave
trade to one centered on slave production of palm oil (from slave trade to
protoindustrial slavery).
Though a considerable number of slaves had passed through Oyo in
the eighteenth century, the Yoruba themselves were not enslaved in large
numbers before the Owu and Egba wars (Eades 1980:28). These wars were
a turning point in Yoruba history for three reasons. First, they began the
chain of civil wars and thus a century of fratricide. Second, they were dis-
tinctive among Yoruba wars for their use of firearms manufactured by Eu-
ropeans. Finally, they were particularly brutal in that they employed, for
the first time in Yoruba history, the tactic of total war in which whole towns
would be razed and their populations enslaved en masse. As it became
more dangerous and less profitable to obtain slaves from farther north in
Nigeria, slaves of Yoruba origin appeared on the market in increasing
numbers.
It was the trade in slaves that helped bring about British intervention
and later British control of the Yoruba territories. In 1808 the British pro-
hibited English ships from engaging in the slave trade and patrolled the
Guinea coast as an international policeman trying to suppress the trade of
other countries in black cargo. They also tried to make treaties with Afri-
can kings. While these were ostensibly to be pacts for the suppression of the
Africa / 29
slave trade in their territories, the treaties were also meant to serve as a
prelude to developing trade in other goods between England and West Af-
rica. The English were not always successful in doing this, nor always wel-
comed with open arms.
When, in 1851, negotiations between the British consul and the king of
Lagos proved fruitless, the British were fired upon as a reward for their
persistence. On the third attempt to complete their mission, one of the
British ships set off a rocket after being fired upon by Africans on the
shore. The rocket exploded a munitions magazine on shore and started a
fire that burned the Yoruba city of Lagos to the ground. The British consul
eventually got his treaty anyway, but it was a treaty signed by a king he had
installed himself in 1852. In 1861, though, the slave trade was still going on
in Yoruba territories and the British forced the king of Lagos to sign a
treaty ceding the city to England. This was the beginning of the end. From
then on there was more and more British intervention into the interior of
Nigeria. The year 1865 saw the first intervention by Britain into the civil
wars when the West India Regiment was sent in to battle the Egba to free
toll roads so the British could use them as trade routes into the interior.
The remainder of the century saw the expansion of British colonialism un-
til Nigeria assumed its present national boundaries in 1914. England re-
mained in control, ruling indirectly through indigenous authorities, until
Nigeria became an independent nation in October 1960.
Certainly West Africa was not moribund or asleep, waiting for Europe-
ans to arrive. The region of the Yoruba, Benin, Dahomey, and its neighbors
in the western Sudan, was complex and dynamic. I have sketched the na-
ture of the states in the region, and we have seen that the differences
among them existed within a similar overall pattern. Societies and religions
were evolving and in contact. Interaction in politics, trade, warfare, and re-
ligion contributed to the internal variation in each society. Fluid, shifting
ambitions and alliances pitted the great kingdoms of the area against each
other at the same time as they were being penetrated by powerful external
groups: by Christian missionaries; Muslim armies, traders, and clerics;
Dutch, Portuguese, English, and French explorers; and the explorers’
progeny, the traders in guns, slaves, oils, and cloth. They were the products
of long development, development which was continuing at the time of
their conquest. This development was not only social, political, and eco-
nomic but religious as well.
A basic religious idiom, which I have tried to sketch, existed throughout
the region. While it was built up and practiced in local areas, it had spread
and been absorbed to varying extent in the different states. ‘There was vary-
ing worship of some of the same or similar deities throughout, while others
were limited to specific states, towns, temples, even specific households.
The African religions of the area are human centered but possess an
idiom embracing all of life. The happy, prosperous passage of humans
30 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
through this world and the spectacle of curing and immortality are their
major concerns, not salvation. They sanctify nature, cultural production,
and human relations as modes and means of divinity. Integral and diffuse,
they penetrate everyday life with a distinctive attitude toward existence.
Kinship played a key role in religion and in social life as a whole. It was
through kinship that the Africans articulated their personal relationships
and organized the relationships between the living and the dead, humans
and their deities, commoners and kings, and king and king.
The tendency in all of the kingdoms was for conquerors to absorb the
deities of their newly acquired territories while they set up and established
temples, priesthoods, and cults of their own. So the relatively long stability
and centralizing influence of the Yoruba kingdom of Oyo allowed the
spread of Oyo’s own deities to other areas. Oyo’s stability also permitted
free and safe migration through the areas under its control, so other cults
or forms of rite also spread from one area to another. The West African
religions were open to change, incorporating deities and borrowing myths
and rites without losing the integrity of their world view. The religions had
evolved and were evolving. Their history, which uses rites, myths, masks,
Statues, dances, poems, and migrations as the engines of memory, is only
beginning to be mined.
The contradictions that exist between what people believe and what
they do give the historian many opportunities to moralize, for the oppor-
tunities increase with distance, hindsight, and the passage of time. One is
tempted to moralize on the fact that the kingdoms broke Ebi, the ancient
family ideology and constitution governing the relations between states
and kings. True, none killed their father and Ile Ife remained inviolate, but
the brothers quarreled and warred on each other. While they were dis-
tracted by duplicity and power, the stranger with whom they traded people
entered from behind and became their conqueror. It would be easy enough
to see this as a kind of moral retribution for their part in the iniquity of the
Atlantic slave trade, but it would also be mistaken and short-sighted. Slav-
ery was not the only reason for the warfare between the kingdoms and
their neighbors. Yoruba slaves were being exported from the Dahomeyan
port of Whydah as early as 1698, and the warfare that fed the supply dates
from that period (Bascom 1969b:12). But the cessation of Dahomey’s in-
volvement in the Atlantic slave trade did not end the warfare. It continued
up to the 1890s, when the French army finally conquered Dahomey. The
kingdoms had other interests than the slave trade, political and economic
interests of their own unrelated to Europe. Although the trade in slaves was
an entryway for the Europeans, it was not the only one. Nonetheless the
outcome was tragic. The Yoruba civil wars and the Dahomeyan invasions of
Yoruba territories caused great destruction and loss of life, and for a time
they fed the slave traders’ markets well.
From the fifteenth century on through the latter part of the nine-
teenth, an enormous black wave swept out of Africa. The effect was like
Africa / 31
dropping a pebble into a still lake, then following it with another and an-
other and another. But this wave rippled out into the sea, faster and faster
and more turbulent, until it became a seamless rush, a powerful black tide,
that mounted and curled and finally broke up against the farther shore of
the Atlantic with a silent but incredible force.
I can visualize the anger of the ancestors as their descendants were sev-
ered from them. For the descendants, death lay ahead, not behind. It
would not be a gradual slipping into another world, a change of position
welcomed with rejoicing, but a sudden wrenching into voidness, into na-
kedness, into emptiness. It was not the ancestors but the descendants of the
enslaved who would really be dead. In the future, when the long genealo-
gies that invoked the living and the dead through their names were spo-
ken, the lost ones, the enslaved ones, were as if vanished beyond the
horizon of life and death, and their descendants, if they had any, had
names that were not known.
The farther shore, however, only received those that still breathed. All
along the way, strewn in the wake of that black wave, were the bodies of the
dead. They lay on the battlefields and sacrificial grounds. They lay scat-
tered along the slave routes to the African coast and in the cemeteries of
the coastal forts. They expired in chains in the holds of the ships and they
lie, even now, at the bottom of the sea where they have long ceased being
food for the fishes.
PLATE 1. Decorations on the front of a Vodun shrine. Dahomey,
1930s. Photograph by Melville Herskovits. Herskovits papers cour-
tesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
with two edicts issued in 1492 and 1502. In essence what these edicts de-
clared was that in the matter of religion, Moors and Jews, as the major non-
Christian groups in Spain, had two alternatives: they could convert to
Catholicism or face exile from Spain. Under no circumstances would the
Crown compromise with Islam or Judaism. The Spanish monarchs ex-
pected to use the Catholic religion as an integrating ideology in the New
World just as they were already using it in Spain, and no Moslem or He-
braic influence was to be allowed to spoil the future Catholic purity of
the Indies. Moors and Jews who converted to Catholicism publicly but
persisted in practicing clandestine non-Christian rites were simply ask-
ing for their turn under the knife of the Inquisition. By 1505 most Moors
and Jews still residing in Spain had at least gone through the motions of
conversion, yet their orthodoxy and the sincerity of their beliefs remained
highly suspect.
sence of any civil register, baptism functioned as the real birth certificate of
new citizens (Ortiz 1971:207, 209).
The promotion of a conquest culture, however, requires a cadre of
agents for transmitting it, for practicing it, and for controlling it in the col-
ony, a colonial elite. In the case of Cuba it 1s possible to know who these
people were and how their influence waxed and waned under the pressure
of changes within and beyond the colonial society. Franklin Knight, draw-
ing on a sample of 450 of Cuba’s most influential, wealthiest, and most
prestigious families, was able to trace their origins and their time of arrival
(see table 1).
The vast majority of these families could be traced back to Spain,
France, Portugal, Ireland, and the Low Countries (428, or 95.1 percent)
and had attained social importance before arriving in the New World.
They belonged to exclusive military orders and sided with the right people
in monarchical disputes, or had been raised to nobility from service as 1m-
perial bureaucrats. They fulfilled the criterion of limpieza de sangre (“clean-
liness of blood,” 1.e., no Jewish or Moorish blood on either side for four
generations back), and they were staunch, unfailing Roman Catholics for
as many generations (Knight 1977a:235). The high rate of intrafamily
marriages in this group reinforced their already evident tendencies toward
aristocracy, and genetic conservation went hand in hand with the accumu-
lation of wealth and property (Martinez-Alier 1974). Through selectivity in
arranging marriages and control of property this group of “old” families
marked themselves off from the future generations of “new rich” as well as
the subsequent waves of new arrivals. From this pool of privileged aspir-
ants the Crown might select the royal governor, the treasurer and accoun-
tants, and the customs and military officials of the island. These were all
royal appointees. Colonials were excluded from these offices, and creoles,
those born on the island, were to have some control of the local economy
but no political or social power (Klein 1967:17-21).
Other groups besides the hegemonic white elite and the few free white
Catholic settlers and adventurers the state was able to attract contributed to
the labor force of early Cuba. A mixed labor force came into being during
40 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
this first phase of the island’s history as Spain drew on the diverse popu-
lations under its control. These included Amerindians, the full range of
Spanish slaves, free Africans, and ladinos residing in Spain and slaves direct
from the African continent.
When the system under which Spain gave land grants to the conquis-
tadors was abolished in 1550, there were nearly three times as many
Arawaks and Ciboney on the island as Spaniards, but the Arawak and Ci-
boney populations had dropped to between one or two thousand from the
sixty thousand estimated to have been there when Columbus landed
(Guerra y Sanchez 1952:138; Rouse 1963a:519; Wright 1916:194). That
same year the Spanish freed the remaining Indian slaves and settled them
in autonomous communities just outside the principal Cuban towns. De-
spite their initial social isolation the Indians prospered, and during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they spread out into the eastern and
central regions of Cuba. They were, therefore, in constant contact with the
Spanish, intermarrying with them, adopting their language, and assimilat-
ing into the version of Spanish culture prevalent on the island.
If we set aside the small number of sub-Saharan Africans that the
Moors brought with them when they invaded the Iberian peninsula in A.D.
711 and the small cargoes of black African slaves that the Spanish Chris-
tians imported from Tunis and the Barbary Coast after the eleventh cen-
tury, we can date the appearance of sizable numbers of Africans in Europe
from about 1440. By 1462 the Portuguese were supplying Africans as
slaves to Spain on a regular basis (Rout 1976:15). Africans were not the
only slaves in metropolitan Spain. Jews, Moors, Egyptians, Syrians and
Lebanese, Greeks, Russians, and some Spanish Christians all participated
in fifteenth-century Spain’s multiracial system of slave labor. The decrees
regulating slavery applied equally to all these groups regardless of race or
ethnicity. Besides the enslaved Africans present in Spain, a class of free Af-
ricans was there also whose condition was not that much different from Af-
ricans in bondage. Like their enslaved brothers and sisters, they were
domestics, stevedores, miners, and agricultural laborers for the most
part. They too were harassed by police and forbidden to bury their dead
where other people buried theirs. But free Africans in Spain also found
their social and economic advancement blocked by the racism of the craft
guilds, which refused to admit people of African descent. The majority
of the few Africans to attain any prominence in Spain were mulattoes
of mixed Spanish-African descent. The ladinos—Christianized, Spanish-
speaking blacks and mulattoes, slave or free—would seem to have been an
appropriate population for peopling the overseas colonies. ‘There were at-
tempts to do this, but there were problems.
Slave or free, the ladinos were expensive to attract and expensive to buy,
and they did not adjust well to their new circumstances in the Indies—at
least not well enough for Spanish tastes. Many ladinos were urbanites un-
used to working as farm hands and miners. In many locales, even in the
Cuba: Pre-Santeria and Early Santeria (1492-1870) / 41
early history of Cuba, the ladinos outnumbered whites. They could easily
escape into the uninhabited interior, where they would establish small com-
munities of their own or team up with the Indians with often calamitous
results for the Spanish settlers. The Christianized Africans were not above
establishing a common cause against the whites with the Muslim jelofes, Af-
rican slaves imported to Spain from ports between Sierra Leone and the
Senegal River. They even joined with pagan Africans imported directly
from the continent and could incite them all to insurrection. When such a
rebellion actually occurred in Santo Domingo in 1522, the shock waves felt
on the opposite side of the Atlantic were so strong that Spain altered its
policy on who should go to labor in the New World. Ladinos and jelofes
were the prime suspects in the Santo Domingo rebellion, and the Crown
decided that they would never have a second opportunity to hurl such a
frightening blow at white supremacy in the Spanish West Indies. In 1532
and 1540 royal decrees came down prohibiting the export of any white,
Moorish, Jewish, or ladino slaves to the Caribbean colonies. This process of
elimination left only bozales—“raw”, un-Christianized slaves direct from the
African continent—as an additional labor force to be bought and caught
and shipped to a new life in the New World.
This mixed labor force of whites, Indians, and Africans—all interacting
and influencing each other—formed the basis of the racially mixed pop-
ulation which evolved out of Cuba’s early days and from which the elite
strove to isolate itself. Parallel to the mixed work force, then, was intermix-
ture at the level of sex, marriage, and biological reproduction. Along with
this a creole culture soon evolved which formed the substratum on and
over and through which many subsequent developments in the island’s cul-
ture took place. To clarify what I mean by creole culture, and because some
aspects of 1t seem to have varied over time while others did not, it will be
necessary here not only to describe it as a type of situation but also to an-
ticipate the developments of later periods. This is necessary because a cre-
ole culture’s real nature is processual and is only truly revealed by the way
in which it unfolds in time.
The creole culture which began to emerge in Cuba was cultural inter-
system combining elements from several sources. In the early stages of set-
tlement, when the population was very small, it was also very diverse and
atomized. There were people from a wide range of ethnic and racial
groups, but each group was present in such small numbers that its contin-
ued existence as a distinct group was unstable, and culturally the result
must have been chaotic, undifferentiated, and mercurial. Eventually a set
of distinctions arose classifying the main cultural groups and trends in the
society into two: Spanish and African. The roots of this process are in the
period 1492-1790.
The intersystem evolved, however, combining elements from Spanish
and other European, Islamic, West and Central African, and Amerindian
sources. It later came to include input from populations originating in
49 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
Haiti, Jamaica, China, and the Yucatan Peninsula. Nonetheless the creole
culture was seen as poised between the poles of Africa and Spain. The
emergence of these poles out of the previous entropic situation was the re-
sult of the hegemonic strategies of the Spanish state and church and the
increase in the numbers of Africans as well as their persisting physical and
cultural distinctiveness. On the other hand the Ciboney, the Arawak, and
the products of their intermixture with the Spanish were regarded as In-
dians by the general public in some contexts, but in official terms and in
relationship to Cuban marriage law, they were regarded as white. The cen-
sus takers of 1770 treated the Indians as whites for their purposes, and ever
since then they have never been reckoned, officially, as a separate racial
category (Martinez-Alier 1974:81; Thomas 1971:21). This was true even
when there were visible physical differences between them and Spanish
folk. (In some instances, though, the Ciboney and Arawak were even
lighter in color than the Spanish.) What they contributed as Ciboney and
Arawak to the cultural intersystem, and particularly in terms of religion
(ritual use of tobacco, fumigation with tobacco smoke as a healing tech-
nique, herbalistic knowledge) was absorbed into the cultural intersystem in
various ways but ceased to be regarded as Indian. Racially Indians were
classified as whites; in relation to the Spanish—African cultural polarity,
then, they were most likely to be Spanish.
Nonetheless the creole culture represented by the continuum that
evolved out of the social relations among the groups in the population be-
came the first and native culture for those born on the island in the suc-
ceeding generations regardless of their ethnic or racial origins and to
varying degrees at all class levels. This was not the case for people who
were imported to Cuba as adults from other places, including those
places considered the source systems of the continuum. The repositories
and exemplars of the source systems were the Spanish-born elite (the pen-
insulares) and particularly the female aristocracy, on one hand, and the im-
ported African elder (the old bozale), on the other. But it was the creole
culture, the continuum, which became the native, the popular, and the
most widespread type of culture. The area between the two poles—the
complex of intermediate forms that was the intersystem and expressed
the heterogeneity of the diverse backgrounds of the populations of the
colony in its variations and mixtures—was where most people were. While
the creole culture became popularly dominant, it did not become socially
dominant. It was not linked to the colonial cultural institutions or to polit-
ical power deriving from Spain and was without formal social legitimiza-
tion or prestige.
Even in the earlier undifferentiated pioneer phase of European con-
trolled settlement it was clear that Spanish culture was to dominate every-
thing else, bridge all the fragmentary groups, and be linked to the sources
of political and economic power. Still, this did not obliterate the differences
Cuba: Pre-Santeria and Early Santeria (1492-1870) / 43
within the population as a whole or keep new ones from evolving. The cre-
ole continuum was Spanish dominated but was also mixed and hence in-
ternally syncretic. The nature and process of the creole culture itself had
varied over time from being undifferentiated and atomized at one point
to assuming a coherent form as a graded cultural and socioracial contin-
uum later on. But at this formative point Spanish, African, and Amer-
indian cultures interwove freely and chaotically while Spanish culture,
especially Spanish language and religion, dominated everywhere and tried
to penetrate everywhere so as to unify and possess everyone, as it were,
from the inside.
The creole culture itself continued to be shaped by the social relations
between the various groupings defined by the society. The ways in which
that inherent heterogeneity was expressed and thus regularized was
through social classifications formulated on the basis of inherited physi-
cal differences (such as skin color), ancestry, ethnicity, nativity, slave versus
free status, and religion. This was a process of mutual definition in which
the variation within the continuum was maintained by the ongoing cul-
tural, genetic, and social mixture among the groups. It was not so much a
thing as a process of continuous and continuing definition and redefini-
tion through encounters. This situation continued to condition what hap-
pened in later periods and in the history of the African religions in Cuba.
The processes through which the creole cultural continuum was defined
continued; the structure of the social, cultural, and racial classifications
evolved during this period remained essentially unchanged in later times,
but the content of the cultural categories and their meanings did change
and frequently became a point of conflict, contest, coercion, and manipu-
lation later on.
The creole culture, then, was a syncretic cultural continuum partici-
pated in by most of the population regardless of ethnic or racial origin.
Comprised of Spanish, Amerindian, African, and Islamic influences, it
remained nevertheless oriented toward Spain and, as a result, was domi-
nated proximally by the vision of Spanish culture current among the
island’s hegemonic elite. This elite in its turn saw the “ideal,” the con-
quest culture promoted by the union of the Crown and the church, as its
model and promoted it actively, selectively, and by example to the rest of
the population.
Before 1774 Cuba was a settler colony of artisans, frontiersmen, petty
bureaucrats, and small-scale farmers. Over the course of the entire Atlantic
slave trade Cuba received between 702,000 and one million black slaves,
with the greatest number coming in during the last thirty years (Curtin
1969:46, table 11; Thomas 1971:170, 183; Moreno Fraginals 1977:188—
89). Cuba was a relative backwater of the Atlantic slave trade through the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and most of the eighteenth centuries. Between 1511
and 1788 about 100,000 blacks found their way to Cuba (Aimes 1967:2609;
44 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
Mauro 1960:113-14; Wright 1920:358). The island did not have many
settlers of any kind through most of this period, and the slave popula-
tion was, in the beginning, but a small part of the total number of people
in Cuba.
The most lucrative and extensive exports were tobacco (a royal monop-
oly) and beeswax. The production of tobacco and beeswax required neither
extensive land holdings nor much labor but were commercially rewarding
and could be run as family businesses. Only a few families could engage in
large-scale farming, and the dominant form was grazing. Seen as a rather
aristocratic pursuit, cattle breeding was an occupation appropriate to a
gentleman, and hides were also an important export (Knight 1977a:232;
Thomas 1971:24).
Cuban economic life was relatively undifferentiated by modern stan-
dards. Farmers and merchants were indistinguishable. Agriculture and
manufacturing did not become separated until after the abolition of slav-
ery (Klein 1967:245; Atkins 1926:39). Trade was simply an appendage to
agriculture, not a specialty. Trade, agriculture, and positions of importance
in the royal bureaucracy, the military, and the town councils were so inter-
woven that a strong correlation between office holding, military service,
and wealth before 1792 1s evident among the 450 elite families reviewed by
Knight. Trade produced quick wealth, and these people were favorably
placed to exploit it. Minor official positions were bought and sold, and
the buyers thought of such purchases as investments, speculation against
the future economic gains of being the right person in the right place, all
the more as Cuba’s agricultural production slowly began to diversify.
Coffee soon became a new commodity, but it was sugar that dominated
all. The area given over to sugar cultivation increased dramatically, the
prototype of the Cuban sugar mill and the sugar plantation formed, and
the demand for labor to work them became ever more insistent. The de-
velopment of plantations to produce commodities for European consump-
tion was a vital first step in the history of overseas capitalism (Mintz
1974:9). When sugar became the most economically rewarding tropical
product to market internationally, it made the trade in enslaved Africans
the single biggest moneymaker of the time. It is surely no misstatement to
say that the majority of Cuban colonists came seeking wealth. But this does
not mean that there were not forces preventing everyone from acquiring it.
These forces were both internal and external.
In many respects the Cuban economy was barely on the fringes of cap-
italism. One aspect of Cuban social life in this period that clearly illustrates
this point is the lack of a developed cash economy. Actual money was
scarce, and in lieu of cash the colonists employed a complex system of bar-
ter. In feudal systems, with their localized, self-sufficient productive units,
money had limited value. “Barter and direct reciprocation of services was
the means of exchange” (Cox 1970:144). The Cuban case was different, a
peculiar hybrid. Commodity exchanges were assigned values in terms of
Cuba: Pre-Santeria and Early Santeria (1492-1870) / 45
ances that included a common ideology and cultural basis in Spanish Ro-
man Catholicism.
Spanish Catholic religious manifestations can be grouped under two
headings. One is the basic cult, which consists of the seven sacraments of
baptism, confirmation, matrimony, extreme unction, the eucharist, pen-
ance, and holy orders. The other is a cult of personages. These are the spe-
cialized cults of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. From the cult
of personages arises a vast array of religious phenomena: legends and mir-
acle stories elaborated into folk dramas, the yearly cycle of feast days, the
festivals of patron saints. Attached to these personages is a great variety of
beliefs, some of which encapsulate pre-Christian ideas and practices within
the context of Spanish popular Catholicism. While the basic cult and its
sacraments were definitely the domain of the priests and official Catholi-
cism, the cult of personages (especially Mary and the saints) were open to
folk interpretations. The consciousness of folk Catholics remained ambiv-
alent. There were some experiences and meanings in their lives which
could not be expressed in terms of the official teachings. Nonetheless, they
were lived out and practiced on the basis of a residual form of culture. The
residual nature of this folk religion put it at a distance from the ecclesias-
tical one, but under certain conditions this distance lessened to the point
where the dominant form absorbed some of the residual ones. The church
struggled against these folk interpretations but also sometimes accommo-
dated them. At times it seems even to have embraced them. What was em-
bodied as a uniform image in the ideology of the ruling classes at the apex
of society was splintered and reflected back on itself at the various lower
levels according to class, rural versus urban residence, and the availability
of churches and clergymen.
The Catholicism imported to Cuba was Counter Reformation Catholi-
cism. The Spanish missionary movement and the reaction against Protes-
tantism had changed the character of the religion and, according to Ortiz,
other factors also led to the “sinking of the Church to the level of masses”
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:
wax shaped into limbs, arms, female breasts, eyes, legs, and heads were
common sights on or near saint’s images in Spain. The offerings were at
once symbols and but one step in the acts of devotion and plea.
A sufferer hangs the figure appropriately symbolic of his ailment on the image
of his special devotion, at the same time lights a candle and offering a prayer,
hopeful that his token of faith will bring relief. (Foster 1960: 160)
their own daily lives. For them the saints were human beings who had mi-
raculous powers (Gudeman 1976:710).
This tension between the two Catholicisms was particularly important
in the context of Spanish hegemony in the New World. Since the popular
religious concept of miraculous sainthood was a major area of experience
and consciousness from the past of both the white and black Spanish set-
tlers, some version of it had to be incorporated if the ecclesiastical form was
to make sense. Furthermore it was dangerous to allow too much of this
popular religious practice and experience in the colonies if it resided out-
side the church and was not articulated to the ecclesiastical system in some
way (see Williams 1980:40—41). The priests, bishops, and cardinals viewed
this folk understanding of sainthood as misguided, but they could not put
an end to it. Nor would they have done so even if they could have, for
this understanding, misguided as it might be, still bound the folk to the
church in a very powerful way. As much as they wanted to impose on the
New World an official and purified dogma as opposed to the folk religion,
they found they could not import one without the other. In the New World
this folk religion was doubly residual. Although adapted somewhat by Cu-
ban ecological conditions and the Spanish-dominated but syncretic Afro-
Indian-Spanish culture of its environment, it was really emergent from a
form of society which no longer existed. What were essentially feudal and
medieval values were to suffer erosion under the effects of the industrial
age, Slavery, capitalism, and foreign contacts.
THE MARCH OF THE SAINTS
Richard Davey, traveling through Cuba in the 1890s, made a tour of Ha-
vana’s churches. In the Church of the Merced he found a painting of a
Cuba: Pre-Santeria and Early Santeria (1492-1870) / 49
The Admiral, Don Christopher Columbus, and the Spanish Army, being pos-
sessed of the “Cerro de la Vega,” a place in the Spanish island, erected on it a
cross, on whose right arm, the 2nd of May, 1492, 1n the night there appeared
with her most precious Son, the Virgin, Our Lady of Mercy. The Indians, who
occupied the island, as soon as they saw Her, drew their arrows and fired at Her,
but as arrows could not pierce the sacred wood, the Spaniards took courage,
and, falling upon said Indians, killed a great number of them. And the person
who saw this wonderful prodigy was the V. R. F. Juan. (1898:135)
It was common in the Cuba of this period for plantation owners to have
their sugar estates “christened” with Catholic rites (see Abbot 1971:36—37).
In effect, the sugar estate acquired a kind of personality and many of the
estates were named after saints. Through this ritual the plantation ob-
tained a heavenly patron who could come to its aid; and slavery and profit,
if not actually sanctified, were certainly legitimized through being linked to
the major sources of power and tradition in the society.
When the new sugar estate had been planted, the buildings necessary
to house the slaves, overseers, machinery, draft animals, and so forth all
completed, and the process of sugar production advanced to the point
where the sugar cane was ready to be ground, the master of the estate ar-
ranged for the christening. He engaged a priest to officiate over the pro-
cess. Like a newborn child the new estate had to have godparents, and
these had to be selected for maximum benefit and help in the future. While
visitors, overseers, and slaves looked on, the priest, the estate’s master and
mistress, and the godparents gathered before the grinding machine. After
praying and sprinkling holy water on the machinery, the priest uttered the
benediction most appropriate to the occasion: “In the name of God, go on
and prosper.” The team of oxen started up the grinder and the godfather
put in the first stalk of cane to be ground. After this the African slaves con-
tinued the grinding. The planter and his family, friends, and relatives went
away to rejoice and feed themselves. Meanwhile the slaves continued what
the godfather had begun, grinding and grinding.
BO / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
The christening of the sugar estates was a curious and potent example
of the power of symbolism as well as the symbolism of power. It compressed
into a few dense acts of religious ritual the whole complex of European
capital, American land, and African labor under the hegemony of Spain
and all that it depended upon.
THE UNION OF THE CROSS AND THE SWORD
Sunday was always a fete day in Havana, Santiago, and Matanzas, but the
churches were mainly attended by women—women and soldiers. The sol-
diers put in their appearance at military masses. These took place Sunday
mornings at eight in Matanzas, but the spectacle actually began earlier with
the clamor of the church bells summoning the people and the arrival of the
female aristocracy. They arrived in groups of twos or threes, some bringing
along children and adolescents. The images of the various madonnas in the
churches were frequently attired in the court dress of sixteenth-century
Spain, complete with ruff and farthingale, and the elaborate dress of these
women seemed to be modeled upon if not in competition with them: ele-
gant brocade, silk, lace, a black lace mantilla partially veiling the powdered
face, hoops, and flounces. A middle aisle served as the passageway to the
center of the church, their reserved space. Here they looked around, chose
their position and signaled the black or mulatto servant who had trailed in
behind them like a scarcely visible shadow. The servants, too, might be
finely attired, the females with bandanaed and turbaned heads and fine
skirts, the men with waistcoats and boots. Having placed down prayer car-
pets and low chairs for the mistress and her party, the servant watched her
drop to her knees and open her missal. The servant drew out and straight-
ened the folds of the mistress's skirt so that no beauty or effect would be
lost and knelt modestly behind her on a handkerchief. ‘The mistress prayed
the rosary interspersed with elaborate genuflections.
The entrance of the regiment was signaled with trumpet calls from out-
side. An entire regimental band marched in along with the soldiers and
played a processional for them while they took their positions around the
inside of the cathedral, officers in the chancel and in special pews set aside
for high government functionaries and foreign consuls, an honor guard of
eight soldiers on either side of the priest, the rest standing around the sides
of the church. The regimental band accompanied the communal prayer
recitations and songs. At the elevation of the host the field drummers
sounded out a tattoo, the honor guard presented arms and all the soldiers
unsheathed their swords. Further drumbeats announced the retiring of the
swords and rifles. With the end of the band’s music and the end of mass,
the regiment marched out just as they had entered, with martial music and
trumpet calls. They were the first to leave and stood around outside the
cathedral waiting for the exit of the women. Inside, the servants took up
the low chairs and folded the prayer carpets. The swishing of the flounces,
fans, and mantillas hid the sounds of their steps as they solemnly exited the
Cuba: Pre-Santeria and Early Santeria (1492-1870) / 51
church a few feet behind their mistresses (Abbot 1971:67; Howe 1969:143,
191-92; Wallace 1898:25-26).
THE SAINT AS MIRACULOUS HEALER
The Spanish folk Catholic theme of the miraculously found image which
thereafter becomes connected with a specific site and manifests wonder-
working powers is replicated in the story of Cuba's patron saint, La Caridad
del Cobre (the Virgin of Charity of Copper, later syncretized in Santeria
with the Yoruba goddess Oshun). An image of this miraculous virgin was
found floating in the water near the coast of El Cobre, a mining area rich
in copper. The finders brought it ashore and housed it in a church, where
they placed it upon the altar (Wright 1922). La Caridad, however, chose
not to stay there and disappeared. The spot where they later found her was
where they built the church that has sheltered the image ever since.
El Cobre was honeycombed with vivid contrasts. In El Cobre men who
were lowered a thousand feet underground in rope drawn cages had been
emerging grimy day in and blackened day out from mining copper ever
since the sixteenth century. Yet high above the mines, upon a hill, above
brick-paved terraces and wide flights of stairs, was a shrine where a dimin-
utive wooden image was said to work miracles, to heal those who simply
asked and believed. Pilgrims came on horseback and carriage, on foot from
the countryside and other towns, even from overseas to this hill. Some as-
cended the whole length of the terraces and stairs on their knees, begin-
ning their plea with an extra gesture of piety before they were even in sight
of the saint’s image (Wallace 1898:32).
The pilgrim’s rite was a simple one. He or she knelt before the Virgin’s
image and prayed and invoked her blessing. Many pilgrims, armed with a
large spoon, ladled out some of the consecrated oil from the lamps into a
vial and carried it home with them; others, after a brief prayer, swallowed
the oil right there, taking its virtue into their bodies.
The saint was such a little thing, maybe twelve or fifteen inches tall and
made of wood. The statue was enclosed in glass and flanked the altar on its
right. At its feet were jewels left by those the saint had helped. Above, sus-
pended from the ceiling by massive chains of wrought silver imported from
Spain, large pans filled with oil served as lamps. Wax tapers floated in the
oil and were kept constantly aflame to illuminate the saint. Behind the sac-
risty, the padre tending the shrine would show visitors the concrete testi-
monials left to the saint’s healing powers: the crutches thrown away by
those who no longer needed them after encountering La Caridad, the
costly jewels and stiff garments embroidered with gold left in gratitude
(Wallace 1898:31).
The many women who came to the shrine of the Virgin of Charity of
Cobre and left such treasures there as offerings of thanks for loved ones
healed brought their African servants with them, for once again it was the
slave's task to set down a prayer carpet for them to kneel on so their knees
52 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
would not hurt nor their dresses be sullied. The servant then knelt behind
the lady during mass and during her petitions to the priest and the saint.
One can only wonder how these slaves understood what they saw, what
they made of it. Surely they must have wondered about this small, dark
wooden image which had floated in from the sea and then disappeared
only to reappear on this very hill. What unknown power resided in the
carved figure that allowed it to fulfill the hopes and sustain the faith of
believers? Was there not in it, somewhere perhaps, the secret of the power
of the whites?
ferentiated. New cities were established. ‘Through trade the colony became
involved in a wider world of political, economic, and social contacts. Trade
was the great dynamo generating wealth. By 1850 almost all wealth that
went into the sugar plantations came from trade, much of it directly from
the trade in African slaves (Knight 1970:105). In the nineteenth century the
old families began to fall behind the new individuals and corporations in
spite of their initial advantages. The new transformations in technology and
capital ate away at the old oligarchy’s influence and control. The sugar rev-
olution, brought about by the skills of the oldest Cuban families, brought to
the island new men, new economies, new money, and the beginnings of the
industrial age—all connected to the different facets of the production of
sugar by African slave labor. The island’s international political and eco-
nomic dependency was obscured by the drama of the pursuit of wealth. So
was the polarization of ethnic groups and their antagonisms. And so was
the process of social disintegration. Every segment of economy and society
sought material goods and possessions. Slaves sought their freedom. Free
people sought wealth and status. Those without wealth and status sold
their labor or their intellectual skills to acquire wealth and status. Those
already possessing these things used them to acquire more titles, more
land, more machinery, and more slaves.
When the plantation sector of the Cuban society began to rapidly de-
velop, leaving behind centuries of stagnation in response to the growing
European and North American demand for sugar, tobacco, and coffee, the
need for plantation and farm labor was serious and pressing. This raven-
ous hunger for labor power was satisfied by the importation of African
slave labor. Importing large numbers of slaves dramatically shifted the de-
mographic balance and initiated a process common to most of the Latin
American colonies—one that was to have profound social and cultural con-
sequences. Between 1790 and 1822, 240,000 Africans entered Cuba. The
Cuban-born creole population was swamped in an avalanche of Africans.
There were now ninety-six Africans on the island for every four creoles
(Moreno Fraginals 1977:193). By 1861 the population of slaves replaced
the nonwhite free population as the island’s second-largest demographic
component (Knight 1977a:234).
The process began with a high ratio of slave imports relative to the total
island population, but the plantation economy's swing into full produc-
tion led to the decimation of the imported slaves. The birth rate decreased
and mortality leveled them. Only the number of slaves sufficient to fill
the deficit was imported, and as the number of Cuban-born slaves in-
creased, the demand for imports lessened correspondingly. If we exclude
the loss to slavery of those who obtained their freedom, we can see that the
slave population was naturally decreasing. The causes were many. Over-
work; accidents involving machinery and boiling sugar on the sugar es-
tates; epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and smallpox; brutal punishments
at the stocks, whippings, and outright murder; the high infant mortality
54 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
to have children to replenish the slave masters’ stocks of slaves, but some
would use any of the number of native abortives that still constitute a part
of the herbal pharmacology of Santeria. Others would have children, and
the children of these slave mothers would live to know freedom. Old peo-
ple who lived long enough to be unfit for the strenuous plantation work
and children below age nine came to account for almost 20 percent of the
slave population (195). Hence family relations could solidify more and,
with the family, the transmission of religious traditions.
African slavery was doomed when it became clear that there was no
longer any real and economical way to replace losses. As a result most black
Cubans descend from slaves brought to Cuba in the nineteenth century,
especially the last thirty years of the trade when some 250,000 were im-
ported (Murray 1971). The last African slaves to reach Cuba came in 1865,
though rumors persist that a few were shipped over and smuggled in as
late as 1870. At that time about 75 percent of Cuba’s black population had
been born in Africa (Thomas 1971:170). By 1907 there were just under
8,000 blacks in Cuba who had been born in Africa (517). By this time they
were elders, old former bozales whose memories of Africa were perhaps
dim and perhaps hazy or inaccurate but nonetheless still real.
Lucumi Ethnicity
Originally there was no comprehensive term of reference for all of the
heterogeneous Yoruba subgroups in Nigeria, and people designated
themselves by the names of their subgroups (Bascom 1969b:5). The name
Yoruba itself was imposed originally by the Hausa or Fulani and referred
only to the people of Oyo. Later it was expanded to include all speakers of
the Yoruba language. In Cuba people from all the Yoruba subdivisions
were mixed together with people from all over West and Central Africa.
These were classified into groups called naciones (nations), and each bore a
distinctive name. Descendants of the Yorubas and some of their neighbors
became the Lucumi nation. In the same way that nationalities qua ethnic
labels in the United States were a secondary phenomenon precipitated by
the experience of European-American immigrants, Lucumi is a secondary
phenomenon in Cuba, a result of the inclusion of heterogeneous Yoruba
subgroups within an exploitative system of urban and rural slavery along-
side Africans from other areas. (For tribes as secondary phenomena, see
Fried 1975; for nationality as ethnic identity also considered as secondary
phenomena, see Hannerz 1974, Herberg 1956, Feminelli and Quadagno
1978, and Mullings 1978.) Just as Apulians, Sicilians, and Calabians all be-
came Italians in the United States, Oyos, Egbas, Ijebus, and Ijeshas all be-
came Lucumis in Cuba. Whether the ethnic label was borrowed from the
slaves by the slave traders and then imposed on the Africans or whether the
slave traders learned to use it to designate the African Yoruba in the same
56 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
way the Yoruba gradually came to designate themselves is unclear, but the
building up of Lucumi as a distinct cultural identity probably did not occur
immediately. It must have taken several generations.
Without doubt Lucumi ethnic identity was closely linked with Yoruba
culture and descent and forms one basis of Santeria. Some people refer to
Santeria as “Lucumi religion” or “Lucumi” to this day. Lucumi religion
is dominated by Yoruba traits, and Lucumi, the ritual language used in
Santeria’s prayers, chants, and songs, is dominated by Yoruba vocabulary
and Yoruba phonetic and syntactic structures. Many of the Lucumi claim to
be Yoruba descendants (Bascom 1950, 1952; Olmstead 1953). Nevertheless
Lucumi religion has traits derived probably from Dahomey and Benin, and
from the Hausa and Nupe as well. Some of this borrowing may have oc-
curred in Africa as part of the ongoing evolution of the religions of differ-
ent Yoruba subgroups in contact with other groups. It may well have
occurred in Cuba also. The name Lucumi may have come to include people
sold by the Yoruba, as some neighboring groups not included in the cluster
of Yoruba subdivisions were also called Lucumi. The Arara (people of Al-
lada) and the Ibo were frequently included within the Lucum1 nation and
must have contributed to the composition of Lucumi religion (Ortiz
1916:26, 38; Castellanos 1987:97). Still the core of Lucumi subculture and
its ethos and organizing principles in Cuba retained a Yoruba focus.
While one may be willing to admit that the ethnic nation names slave
traders and owners used to classify their slaves were often arbitrarily cho-
sen and corresponded very uncertainly with the geographical realities of
Africa at times, this does not erase the fact that there is another aspect to
this issue, one which is internal to Cuban society and does say something
about that society. Regardless of the geographical or ethnic relevance (or
lack of it) of the names of the African nations, the classifications based on
these names had a social reality within Cuba. These national designations
became descriptors for groups of African peoples having distinct lan-
guages, cultural attributes, physical characteristics, and ways of behaving.
Slave owners developed stereotypes concerning each of these categories
which were important in their selection and purchasing of slaves. Hence,
according. to these stereotypes as recorded by various authors, Carabali
were proud, Mandingas excellent workers, Gangars thieves and runaways,
Fanti also runaways but revengeful as well, Ebros “less black than the oth-
ers and of lighter wool,” Congos short in stature, and Lucumi industrious
workmen (Abbot 1971:14; Ortiz 1916:38; Rout 1976:32). Slaves, too, used
these designations to classify themselves and to regulate relationships be-
tween subgroups of slaves within the same plantation. If this were not true,
statements such as this one from Montejo, who was born a slave in 1860,
would have been impossible:
there was no love between the Congolese magic-men and the Congolese Chris-
tians, each of whom thought they were good and the others wicked. This still
Cuba: Pre-Santeria and Early Santeria (1492-1870) 1 57
goes on in Cuba. The Lucumi and the Congolese did not get on either. . . . The
Lucumis didn’t like cutting cane, and many of them ran away. They were the
most rebellious and courageous slaves. Not so the Congolese; they were cow-
ardly as a rule, but strong workers who worked hard without complaining. In
the plantations there were Negroes from different countries, all different phys-
ically. The Congolese were black-skinned, though there were many of mixed
blood with yellow skins and light hair. They were usually small. The Mandingas
were reddish-skinned, tall and very strong. I swear by my mother they were a
bunch of crooks, too! They kept apart from the rest. The Gangas were nice people,
rather short and freckled. Many of them became runaways. The Carabalis were
like the Musungo Congolese, uncivilized brutes. They only killed pigs on Sun-
days and at Easter and, being good businessmen, they killed them to sell, not to eat
themselves. From this comes a saying “Clever Carabali, kills pig on Sunday.” I got
to know all these people better after slavery was abolished. (Montejo 1968:37-38;
emphasis mine)
people and had to be treated differently because they knew all religious matters”
(1968:37; emphasis mine).
In seeking the social contexts of nineteenth-century Cuban society in
which Santeria might have arisen, the most obvious place to look would
seem to be the rural sugar plantations and the tobacco and cattle estates.
The majority of African slaves spent their lives on these estates, and as the
slave trade and the sugar frenzy wore on, increasing numbers of Africans
found their way there. Moreover, it is a common expectation to find that
folkloric and archaic traditions are better preserved in the countryside
than in urban areas. In this we would be misled. The cities and towns of
Havana and Matanzas provinces, rather than the countryside, are the
strongholds of Santeria, and they have been so for some time (Sandoval
1979:142; Lachatanere 1938:xxx-xxxI). In much of Cuba where there
were sizable numbers of both plantations and Africans, Santeria is un-
known or little practiced.
Far from maintaining that there were no fragments or reminiscences of
African religion in the countryside, I do just the opposite. I admit this, for
the evidence is clear that this was so, and we have already seen how the ebb
and flow of African immigration must have affected the preservation of
these traditions. But what we seek is not only the framework in which Af-
rican religious practices and ideas survived; we seek those contexts in
which they became syncretized and assumed a definite form. These two
things are not the same.
The Catholic Church was not able to implement on the plantations the
kind of guided culture change, eventuating in syncretism, which it was able
to produce elsewhere. Moreover there is little to indicate that the masses of
African plantation slaves had any great craving for Christianity such that
they would have created this syncretism themselves before emancipation.
In rural Cuba there were frequently no schools, no formal associations be-
yond the family or neighborhood. There were frequently no churches el-
ther (Lowry 1950:175; Crahan 1979:158). Cuba’s churches were located
mainly in urban areas, and persons living in the countryside often had to
trudge long distances to attend mass, with the result that many Cubans who
declared themselves Catholics might not have seen a priest since baptism.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the church at-
tempted to gain and then to keep a foothold in the countryside and es-
pecially on the sugar estates. The churchmen attempted to insinuate
themselves into the grinding machinery of sugar production by suggesting
that by Christianizing the African slaves the padres might be able to keep
more of them alive and working and less prone to commit the transgres-
sions that so often eventuated in their harsh and brutal punishment (Hall
1971:44). This was necessary because the number of slaves rendered use-
less for work following harsh punishments for disobedience, murder, and
pilfering increased year by year. If the clerics could instill in the slaves
greater humility, more conscience, and less ire against their overseers, they
62 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
thought the planters would view religion as more in line with their own
economic interests. Still, 11 was precisely these economic interests that lim-
ited time for religious instruction. Ortiz describes the leisure time activities
of slaves as consisting of dances, of diversions coincident with holidays; and
on Saturday nights drumming was prohibited only if 1t continued too long
or too loudly (1916:228, 230—35). But his description surely belongs to an
earlier period than the one we are considering, a period when there were
few slaves, the sugar mills were small, and the work schedules more lei-
surely. With the sugar boom this pattern was largely shattered.
The change seems to have been rather abrupt. In 1789 the Cuban Fu-
gitive Slave Law dictated that slaves should not work on the church’s hol-
idays; by 1817 the diocesan bishop had granted permission for slaves to
work on Sundays and saints’ days (Klein 1967:93; Moreno Fraginals
1976:52, 57). While the earlier small-scale planters may have viewed the
slave diversions as harmless, the later large-scale planters who had conti-
nents to feed and sweeten with sugar viewed such diversions as quaint but
unproductive. The picture of the nineteenth-century sugar mill and its
work regimen presented by Moreno Fraginals seems almost the opposite of
Ortiz’s description of this earlier era. He describes a brutal and incessant
regime of work without any respite except sleep, no days of rest, whether
Sundays or saints’ days, no hours of free time as such, and all available
hours used for sugar production except for a fifteen-hour period during
which a reduced work force cleaned machinery (Moreno Fraginals
1976:56, 1977:199-200). Workdays during harvest time were the longest,
sixteen to eighteen hours. At nonpeak periods fourteen-hour to sixteen-
hour workdays were normal on the plantations Moreno Fraginals studied
(1977:200). Such regime left little time which clergymen might use to teach
most slaves anything but the most rudimentary Catholicism, if that. Clerics
who managed to squeeze themselves in between the cracks in this schedule
found themselves with the unenviable task of trying, in the evening, to
teach these workers, who had worked sixteen hours in the fields or in front
of burning ovens and who desired not so much spiritual comfort as sleep,
an alien religion in a language which many of them did not understand
(Spanish) only to teach them prayers in another language they did not un-
derstand (Latin). It is no small wonder that for most slaves their contact
with Catholicism consisted only of prayer instruction and that what was
considered necessary was simply a pronunciation of the words and not an
understanding of them (Moreno Fraginals 1976:53).
Even when the church was able to get a foothold, the opportunity was
diverted or submerged in other interests. For example, the church might
have gained ground in the countryside through its role in christening and
burying slaves, since Cuban laws ordered that slaves be christened in
church and buried in consecrated ground (Hall 1971:43; Moreno Fraginals
1976:52). In time the christening came to have little or no religious signif-
icance and became essentially a form of taxation by the church against slave
Cuba: Pre-Santeria and Early Santeria (1492-1870) / 63
owners (Hall 1971:43). Sugar plantation owners used the Real Cedula of
1795, which authorized the construction of cemeteries in Havana, as a
screen behind which they could construct cemeteries of their own adja-
cent to their mills. The church protested but, in the end, lost (Moreno
Fraginals 1976:55).
Before the 1830s it had been customary for each estate to retain a chap-
lain (Hall 1971:44). In this way the church hoped to spread itself more
forcefully into the countryside, at least among the planters. Poor priests
from Spain and the United States chaplained these estates and mills. In-
evitably conflict arose between the church and these chaplains as they
slipped further and further into the employ of the estates where they
worked as opposed to the church organization itself (Moreno Fraginals
1976:52). By the late eighteenth century both the planters and the church
had lost interest in these sugar chaplains; by the end of the century sugar
mill owners had put an end to all religious services on the plantations be-
yond the yearly minimum required to save face; and by the 1830s the cus-
tom of sugar estate chapels and chaplains had faded into oblivion (Hall
1971:44).
The influence of the church in the countryside declined even from this
weak level through the middle and late nineteenth century. The Good
Government Laws of 1842 took responsibility for the religious instruction
of slaves away from the clerics and gave it to the slave masters, thus assur-
ing that slaves received little religious instruction and at the same time
keeping the priests out of the planters’ hair (Hall 1971:46). In 1847 Fiscal
Oliveras responded to the 1842 laws by proposing that the clerics could im-
prove the religious instruction of the slaves by improving the religious in-
struction of their masters. This only demonstrated how desperate church
officials had become in trying to retain their rural mission and how tenuous
was their relationship with the Cuban secular authorities. It also demon-
strated their utter powerlessness before a government thoroughly satu-
rated with corruption, slavery, and sugar estate interests (Hall 1971:46—47;
Martinez-Alier 1974:47). The church’s efforts to bring religion to the
whites in the countryside were scarcely more effective than their efforts to
bring it to the African slaves. In this same period the slave and free black
populations had the same percentage of baptisms as the island’s white pop-
ulation (Klein 1967:96—97). Most likely the opinions of the urban padres
would have echoed those of the always perceptive Philalethes, who visited
Cuba in 1856: “The country people of Cuba as well as the other inhabitants
are not very religious. Most of then learn a few prayers by heart, which they
repeat without understanding their import. This does not prevent, how-
ever, images of the Virgin and of saints being in every house” (1856:52).
The relative fruitlessness of the church’s efforts at Christianizing the Afri-
can slaves was commented upon in the testimony of Regino Martin before
an 1846 Havana committee charged with investigating the causes of the
high rate of suicide among them. His testimony was curt and damning: “It
64 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
is not necessary to have lived very long in the countryside to know that with
few, but very honorable exceptions, the slaves have hardly more religion
than the stupid idolatry which they brought from their country of birth”
(quoted in Hall 1971:45).
Who were these “few but honorable exceptions”? They were probably
domestic slaves, Christianized house servants with relatives in the fields
who, under continuous exposure to the Hispano-Cubans, had come to dif-
ferentiate themselves from the masses of slaves by adopting the religion of
their masters and mistresses. The position of this group of slaves is complex
and ambiguous. Most probably they were creole Africans rather than fresh
imports, and they could speak Spanish. On one hand they served as mes-
sengers of the Catholic priests to the field slaves, trying to do some of the
instruction the clerics disdained. This most often took place in sugar mill
towns rather than on the plantations (Montejo 1968:36). On the other
hand, while they still visited their relatives in the barracoons, it was clear
that they lived in a world apart. They “made out they were Christian” not
only to their masters but also to their fellow slaves (36).
It is evident that in a piecemeal and possibly unreflecting fashion, fe-
male slaves passed African religious and cultural lore on to some of the
white children they cared for. Since 1t was the custom of aristocratic Cuban
families and those who used them as a model to leave all domestic and
child-rearing responsibilities to servants or slaves, members of the creole
upper class were frequently reared by African or Afro-Cuban nursemaids
who enculturated them with beliefs and attitudes derived from African re-
ligion and magic (Lowry 1950:175-80; Sandoval 1979:141).
There may well have been another equally important avenue of cultural
interchange between the female domestic slave and her white mistress. It IS
easy enough to imagine the exchanges of information and instruction that
must have taken place around food preparation, housekeeping tips, re-
quirements, and advice. Furthermore both the black female servant and
her rural plantation mistress were women pushed into constricted roles on
the margins of a hierarchical and claustrophobic world dominated by white
men. In some cases it is possible that an ambiguous and ambivalent kind of
female solidarity developed between them in the twilight zone of intimate
contact and yawning status differences that both joins and separates mis-
tresses and servants. Might not the exchanges around food and housekeep-
ing, which at once obeyed and crossed race, culture, and class lines, have
been followed by exchanges of magical and religious lore, a process of ex-
change that went from servant to mistress as well as from mistress to ser-
vant and which both would keep secret from the master?
Just as house slaves served as messengers from the European priests to
the field slaves, most probably they were the people who brought the Af-
rican and Afro-Cuban healer to the “big house” when its inhabitants took
sick. The lack of medical facilities of any kind in the rural areas left Spanish
curanderos and African healers the only medical practitioners available for
Cuba: Pre-Santeria and Early Santeria (1492-1870) / 65
blacks and whites alike. Under the pressure of suffering or stress, the
upper-class creoles made use of everything that was available, the Catholic
priest, the Spanish curandero, and also the African healer (Sandoval
1979:141). All the elements of the potential syncretism of Santeria seem to
be present: Christian influence, perhaps shallow but still consistent, and
the African influence as well.
Still it is unlikely that there was a syncretic cult. It seems unlikely that
Santeria evolved within the unstable crack in the system of rural slavery
represented by house slaves. The house slaves were a small population and
most likely were kept ethnically diverse for the same security reasons that
the mass of field slaves were kept diverse. It is doubtful then that they
would have evolved a cult so dominated by Yoruba traits as 1s Santeria. Nor
is it likely that they evolved such a complex system of ritual and a hierarchy
of priests directly under the eyes of their masters, who almost always
equated African religions with witchcraft even, or perhaps especially, when
it cured them. Perhaps these Christianized house slaves maintained some
magical practices which they continued to perform alongside the Catholi-
cism of their owners (as we have seen, the Catholicism of their owners was
none too rigorous or pure), but these elements alone do not make a cult.
Moreover, in order to assume a more definite form this same mixture of
heterogeneous traits would require some other social framework in the
postslavery era. It seems unlikely, then, that Santeria’s ideological and rit-
ual systems or its distinctive social organization evolved at this time among
rural domestic slaves or field slaves.
But not all the Africans in the Cuban countryside were slaves. Many
were former slaves, Africans who had escaped estates and plantations
and taken refuge in the forests and mountains. As early as 1526 there
were wandering bands of escaped slaves, comarrones as the Cubans called
them, secluded and hidden in their own communities (Klein 1967:69;
Franco 1973:41). They gave aid to pirates, helped the French attack Ha-
vana in 1539, and for many years were the only emblem of resistance to
the colonial system. Cimarron communities, palenques, existed well into the
nineteenth century, and suppressing them was the major concern of the
colonial government. Palenques were dangerous because they offered ha-
vens for runaways and served as bases from which revolts could be staged,
and the cimarrones themselves frequently raided plantations, stealing, kill-
ing whites, and freeing slaves. Between 1795 and 1846 the Cuban Office
for the Capture of Maroons reported the existence of thousands of run-
away Slaves and the capture of thousands of them, whom it placed in special
prisons (Franco 1973:47).
The palenques were made up of scattered cabins with attached plots of
cultivated land. Hidden in the surrounding wilderness, they depended for
defense on pits full of forked hardwood poles sharpened to knife point and
sunk in the ground. Though hidden and hunted, they were not isolated.
Cimarrones from different palenques communicated with each other, with
66 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
plantation slaves, and with whites (De La Riva 1973:53). Palenques were so
well hidden that many expeditions went right past them, even though they
were often located near enough to plantations for the cimarrones to carry
on regular communication with enslaved Africans who helped them gain
what they needed to defend themselves. The cimarrones supplemented the
pistols and rifles they stole from plantations or raiding parties with those
they received in trade with disreputable whites in the countryside (53, 57).
The majority of cimarrones were probably fresh imports from Africa,
but creole Africans also took to the woods. They escaped alone, in small
groups, and in large breakouts. It is possible that some of the groups were
ethnically homogeneous, but it is difficult to tell. Cimarrones probably con-
stituted a very mixed group.
Free blacks or mulattos living in the country were often the leasers of
farms, and despite harassment by district judges and night patrols, they
doggedly worked their farms with their wives and children (Philalethes
1856:33). Yet the cimarrones, though perhaps in contact with them, did
not reside with them. Perhaps these free blacks could not offer them
enough protection. It is possible that skilled rural slaves could have found
freedom and anonymity in the Cuban cities among urban slaves and free-
men. But the cimarrones did not do this either. They were people whose
experiences, however diverse and complex, had driven them to reject not
only the slavery system in the countryside but the option of attempting to
make their way to the cities and fade into urban anonymity as well.
There would have been varying degrees of acculturation among the ci-
marrones, for house slaves as well as field slaves escaped; imported Afri-
cans and Cuban born slaves populated the palenques. What kind of
religion the cimarrones practiced in the palenques remains mostly a mys-
tery. De La Riva suggests an African base but uses a confusing and biased
terminology to describe it:
Men and women lived in absolute promiscuity and were dominated by their
leaders (whom they called Captains) and by the sorcerer or santero who would at
times function as witch doctor. (1973:52)
De La Riva does not say that the cimarrones themselves called these
African-style priests or doctors santeros, and his use of the term may well
be an anachronism. Even in some Cuban anthropological writings one
finds Santeria used as a rubric under which all Afro-Cuban religious forms
are confused. In particular it seems that for De La Riva santero denotes any
African-styled Cuban priest, doctor, or sorcerer rather than one specifically
practicing a form of Yoruba religion. The information on palenques is sim-
ply too fragmentary to demonstrate any substantial Yoruba influence.
Captures of cimarrones often netted religious or magical items of ap-
parent African origin. Abbot describes the effects found in the hideout of
a runaway slave: “a pouch manufactured in Guinea style with a lappet and
Cuba: Pre-Santeria and Early Santeria (1492-1870) / 67
a separate cap to shut over it for the more perfect security of the treasure
therein .. . his name written by his master as a passport, a fetish, two keys,
money carefully done up in a rag, a wax candle of his own manufacture”
(1971:58). When a Cuban expedition finally captured and killed the cima-
rron Mariano Mandingo they confiscated “fourteen spears, four machetes,
four large baskets with magical paraphernalia” (De La Riva 1973:52).
It is difficult to know what to make of all this. There were palenques in
Havana and Matanzas provinces, but the more permanent ones were on
the other side of the island, four of which survived through the 1860s. El
Cobre had been a palenque for many years and was still one in the 1850s
when Philalethes visited Cuba (Philalethes 1856:38). All told El Cobre was
a palenque for fifty years, and El Cobre was not the only palenque to grow
into a town after the end of slavery and lose all resemblance to its former
desperate and fugitive existence. El Cobre remains a center of Santeria in
Cuba, and Jovellanos, where William Bascom conducted fieldwork on
Santeria in 1952, was once a palenque named Bamba (De La Riva 1973:52;
Franco 1973:47-48). Without more research it would be difficult to prove
that there 1s any connection between the Santeria practiced in either El Co-
bre or Jovellanos and the palenques that used to exist there. A more direct
connection is needed to prove this. Also it is doubtful that the palenques
were any more homogeneous culturally than the plantations that the ci-
marrones fled. For a context in which Santeria might have developed we
will have to look elsewhere.
Historian Herbert Klein estimates that in mid-19th-century Cuba be-
tween 20 and 50 percent of all African slaves worked in towns or cities in
nonrural occupations (1967:158). There they worked as artisans, trades-
men, domestics, factory workers, and day laborers. Shipbuilding, cigar
making, and construction of military fortifications were other urban occu-
pations using slave labor (Thomas 1971:169; Klein 1967:159). Urban
slaves and freedmen as well were prominent figures in Havana, Guantan-
amo, Santiago, and other towns. Those slaves who possessed a skill formed
an important element of the urban work force, and unskilled slaves
formed the major portion of the unskilled labor force in towns (Klein
1967:163-—64).
Urban slavery was a less restrictive institution than slavery on the plan-
tations. Many urban slave owners invested training and education in their
Slaves so that they would be more productive in their owners’ businesses,
and some slave owners rented out their skilled slaves as professional cooks,
musicians, etc. in order to gain additional income (Klein 1967:158, 163). In
this kind of arrangement the slave would hand over his earnings to his
owner, but he might not be living with the owner and the owner would not
have direct control over all the slave's activities (73). Some slaves used this
uncontrolled time to employ themselves, and by the mid—nineteenth cen-
tury slaves controlled a sizable number of bars and taverns in Havana (74).
For urban slaves the city provided contacts with freemen, contacts with
68 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
other urban slaves, taverns and clubs for recreation, and plenty of oppor-
tunities for escape and for plotting revolts. It also offered an abundance of
places to hide, since the slave could melt into one of the numerous classes
of other blacks residing there—free blacks, slaves working and living away
from their masters, slaves who had purchased their freedom, and Africans
freed by the British patrol boats that were trying to suppress the slave trade
(Kiple 1946:42—43; Klein 1967:161).
Free blacks in the towns worked in many of the same occupations as the
slaves, though many more were artisans and shopkeepers or owned small
businesses. Some also owned houses, and it was not uncommon for free
blacks to be literate (Philalethes 1856:33).
Most of these freemen were probably creole blacks, but a sizable num-
ber of Africans arrived in Cuba after being captured at sea before they
could be delivered to Cuban slave owners. The British landed them in Cuba
and set them free. It is not known how many of them became free blacks,
how many were reenslaved, or how many died soon after arrival, but Kiple’s
census lists indicate that the number of Africans entering Cuba in this way
increased considerably between 1846 and 1860. In 1846 there were 1,052
Africans who had arrived in Cuba as free people; by 1860 there were
19,000 (Kiple 1976:42-43; also see Corwin 1967:40-43). These Africans
would have arrived in Cuba’s major port cities and swelled the number of
blacks there.
Before 1854, when manumission by self-purchase became a matter of
record, the number of people who bought themselves out of slavery is con-
sidered to have been insignificant (Kiple 1976:42-43; Turnball 1840:147-
48). The mulatto offspring of white masters and African slave women
composed a large percentage of Cuba's free black population, and a com-
parison of the figures for mulatto freemen and mulatto slaves suggests that
the majority of masters freed their offspring from these unions (Thomas
1971:173). Cuba’s free population, therefore, was a heterogeneous one not
only ethnically but also physically and in terms of how and for how long
they had been free.
Despite their diverse origins all were subject to the generalized discrim-
ination against people of African descent. Far from equalizing the differ-
ences among them, racial discrimination seems to have exacerbated these
differences, producing marked cleavages in the ranks of the free black
population. Free blacks distinguished at least nine types of free blacks in
terms of their generational distance from slave status and amount of Eu-
ropean versus African ancestry (Martinez-Alier 1974:98). Free blacks fur-
ther distinguished among themselves in terms of whether they had been
born in Cuba or in Africa. Martinez-Alier commented on these cleavages in
the African population in terms of how they related to La Escalera, a fa-
mous but ambiguously documented conspiracy among sectors of the free
and slave populations to end racial domination by seizing the island in an
armed revolt.
Cuba: Pre-Santeria and Early Santería (1492-1870) / 69
Among the colored people a very general aspiration was to become as light and
to get as far away from slavery as possible. Instead of developing a consciousness
of their own worth they made their own the white discriminating ideology im-
posed on them from above. The same disdain with which they were regarded by
most whites they often applied to their peers. It is true there were occasional
outbursts of rebellion, such as the famous conspiracy of the escalera. And the
whites made much of the menace to the social order constituted by the colored
population. It is significant that those who participated in this conspiracy were
the most educated and socially advanced of the colored people, who were
bound to feel most strongly the injustice of the system. And at the other ex-
treme, it was slaves who proved most rebellious, killing overseers, escaping or as
a last resort committing suicide. The middle sector of the colored community,
however, those who had managed to make some status gains but had not yet
come up against the upper limits of mobility, probably constituted the most
status-conscious and conformist group. They not only accepted passively the
constraints imposed by the social order but lent it their active consent.
(1974:96).
but had proved a dismal failure in the Cuban countryside. Under the di-
rection of a diocesan priest the cabildo allowed for the accommodation of
African customs to the church’s worship. Through this guided syncretism
the priests hoped that the Africans would be swept up into the mainstream
of Cuban Christianity, in time forsaking African customs. In the meantime,
the church allowed cabildo members to inject an African flavor into the
European Christian rites. The cabildo’s ecclesiastical functions in Cuba re-
mained the same as they had been in Spain, in particular producing the
comparsas (carnival processions) and marching in the parades which cele-
brated the festivals of their saint or occupation. The cabildos also served as
centers of recreation, devotions, and social life generally. It was the cabildos
rather than the parish churches which were the principal organizations for
the religious life of urban Afro-Cubans up until the twentieth century.
Where impoverished versions of the cabildo existed in the countryside they
might have constituted the only non-familial sodalities. Wealthy people of
color sometimes endowed cabildos, and with the aid of the church and
fellow cabildo members, a slave was often able to purchase freedom (Or-
LIZ 1921:14—15).
According to Ortiz, whose 1921 article remains the most important re-
port on these organizations, the earliest of these cabildos was Nostra Se-
nora de los Remedios, founded in 1598 in Havana by free Africans of the
Zape nation. This cabildo was actually inside a church. One by one the
church and the free African population jointly established other cabildos.
Not much is known now about the internal organization of the cabildos be-
yond the fact that membership was by election and that the cabildos each
elected a person called el rey (the king) or capataz (boss or overseer) who
mediated between the cabildo and both the church and the police (Ortiz
1921:20). Ultimately 1t was the rey or capataz who was held responsible by
the church or police for any problems occurring at the cabildo. By the nine-
teenth century at least fourteen African nations had their own cabildos.
A major regular recreational activity of the cabildos was staging dances.
These were African dances performed in the style of the nation after which
the cabildo was named. The cabildo dances bore the names of the drums
which played for the dancing, and the drums themselves were considered
ethnically significant symbols of the different nations. Connected to the
distinctiveness of the different drum types were the distinctive songs, mu-
sic, language, and drum rhythms of each nation. Well aware of the possi-
bilities of interchange and the transfer of rhythmic patterns from one
drummer to another across cabildo and ethnic lines, cabildos generally
prohibited the playing of drum rhythms other than those of their own na-
tion at their dances (26). The most important dances occurred on the Cath-
olic religious holidays, but the dances performed remained African in
origin and style. It would be very surprising, indeed, given the intimate re-
lationship which exists between music, dance, and religion in African cul-
tures, if these dances did not turn into religious ceremonies at times,
72 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
complete with spirit possession. All of the elements were there, and most
of the time these dances would not have been supervised by the church
or the police.
The history of the cabildos from the late eighteenth century on through
the nineteenth century is one of increasingly restrictive laws and increasing
interference of church and state in their affairs until, finally, the cabildos
were driven underground just before the turn of the century.
The 1792 Good Government Law prohibited cabildos from staging
their dances on days other than Sundays and feast days and limited them to
the hours preceding or following the times at which Catholic priests of-
fered mass (18). Later laws, in 1835 and 1843, reinforced the earlier law
but were even more restrictive. This legislation is significant in that by de-
scribing the practices it intends to prohibit it gives us a clue to what may
actually have been occurring in the cabildos. The 1792 law forbade “negros
de Guinea” from raising altars to the Catholic saints for the purposes of
dances performed “after the manner of their land” and imposed a fine and
possible confiscation of the altars as punishments for repeated offenses.
This same law also forbade the cabildos to hold funeral rites for their mem-
bers, for at these rites they danced before the dead and wept before them
“as they did in their own lands.” ‘The law therefore enjoined them to pass
on the corpses to funeral parlors rather than perform their own rites (19).
Furthermore the 1792 law forbade the cabildos to participate in the street
festivals if they bore any ethnically distinctive insignia of their nation. If
they carried about African images or brought their African drums out into
the streets, they risked eight days of hard labor in public works. Besides
regulating the participation of the cabildos in public festivals, beginning in
1792 there was an increase in legislation governing the internal function-
ing of the cabildos. Article 36 of the 1792 Good Government Law forbade
the cabildos to sell alcohol or allow it to be consumed at their affairs (20).
Later laws, following the trend originating in Havana, were even more
restrictive. An 1835 law promulgated from Matanzas Province allowed the
cabildos to have dances only on festival days and pushed the celebrations
away from the main processions and out to the cities’ periphery. Repeated
infringements of the ruling netted the capataz a fine and loss of his posi-
tion within the cabildo (20). The Good Government Law of 1842 once
again attempted to restrain the participation of the Afrco-Cuban cabildos
in the church’s festival days by banning them from all except the annual
Epiphany celebration, the Dia de los Reyes, which was the most important
and popular of them all, not the least because one of the Three Magi was
represented as a black. Even the participation of the cabildos in this festival
operated under limits. Only the Abakwa sect was permitted to appear in
distinctive regalia. They sponsored a group of masqueraders appearing as
spirits. These spirits became identified in Cuba as diablitos, “little devils.” In
practice the law fell into disuse and all the Afro-Cuban fraternities entered
Cuba: Pre-Santeria and Early Santería (1492-1870) / 73
The next day being el dia de los Reyes, twelfthday, almost unlimited liberty was
given to the negroes. Each tribe, having selected its king and queen, paraded
the streets with a flag, having its name, and the words viva Isabella, with the
arms of Spain, painted on it. Their majesties were dressed in the extreme of
fashion, and were very ceremoniously waited on by the ladies and gentlemen of
the court, one of the ladies holding an umbrella over the head of the queen.
They bore their honors with that dignity which the negro loves so much to as-
sume, which they moreover, preserved in the presence of the whites. . . . But the
chief object in the group was an athletic negro with a fantastic straw helmet, an
immensely thick girdle of stripes of palm-leaves around his waist, and other un-
couth articles of dress. Whenever they stopped, their banjoes struck up one of
their monotonous tunes, and this frightful figure would commence a devil’s
dance, which was the signal for all his court to join in a general fandango, a
description of which my pen refuseth to give. . ... Only three tribes paraded the
streets of Guinea [the small town where the author was residing] but Havana ts
on this day in a perfect hubub, and the confusion that seems to reign among its
colored population is undescribable. On all the plantations the negroes, also,
pass the day in dancing to the music of their rude instruments; and the women,
especially, are decked out in all the finery of tinsel and gaudy clothes. Songs are
often combined with the dance, and in their native dialects they ridicule their
owners before their faces, enjoying with much glee their happy ignorance of the
burden of their songs. Their African drums are then heard far and near, and
their sonorous sound, now falling, now rising on the air, seem like the summons
to a general insurrection. (Wurdeman 1844:83-84)
a role in settling disputes among the slaves, and the African women who
collected herbs and made brews and infusions were the mainstay of plan-
tation medicine (38). Trees, hills, and fields could serve as shrines. A shrine
existed wherever a collection of appropriate objects could be brought to-
gether. All that was necessary was to invoke the orisha and offer a sacrifice
of some kind to “feed” at. Some elders created images of the deities in ce-
ment and wood and turned the insides of the barracoons into ersatz tem-
ples through inscribing the walls with a secret religious iconography (36).
In the urban areas worship took place in church cabildos, in the inde-
pendent cabildos (1.e., those not physically located in church buildings),
and in the homes of devotees. At the autonomous cabildos and in the
homes of free blacks it was possible to have permanent shrines and altars,
even if they had to be hidden. The cabildo and the home took the place
of the temple and became known alternately as the zle ocha (Yoruba, house
of the orisha) or casa templo (house temple). When permitted, the great re-
ligious processions, the comparsas, were the major public venues for Lu-
cumi worshipers, but temporary wayside shrines could be put up in parks
and near large trees, and the cathedrals also figures in the practice of Lu-
cumi religion.
Except possibly for the palenques, the countryside was barren of com-
munal orisha worship, communal ancestor rites, and an organized priest-
hood. Lone devotees and priests or priestesses from the Nigerian cult
groups continued their devotions but without any desire to proselytize and
often in great secrecy. Even being the son of a Lucumi did not automati-
cally grant access to the knowledge which the elders kept. “These blacks
[the old Lucumis] made a secret of everything. They have changed now,
but in those days the hardest thing you could do was to try to win the con-
fidence of one of them” (Montejo 1968:36). The urban cabildo, though,
provided the place for the reconstitution of the African priesthood and for
communal worship. Here drumming, song, and dance came together in
the drama of the orisha made visible in the bodies of devotees. Whether
communal ancestor veneration played a prominent role in cabildo rites is
not known. Perhaps the Egungun Society took part in the comparsas at one
time; it has not survived in Cuba to the present day. Veneration of the an-
cestors continued at small shrines in devotees’ homes. Inside the cabildo,
ancestor veneration came to refer to the lines of ancestral priests and
priestesses and blood kinship became ritual kinship after the manner of the
Catholic institution of compadrazgo. The sons and daughters of the orisha
became the ajthados and ajihadas (godchildren) of the priests. All the god-
children constituted a religious family of brothers and sisters. There was
a fusion of the Nigerian and Catholic institutions such that it is not pos-
sible to separate them and tell where one starts and the other stops (Bas-
tide 1971:159).
While visiting the Cabildo Lucumi of Havana in 1851, Frederika
Bremer met Africans who had been princes and chiefs in their homelands.
76 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
Olodumare = God
Olof1 = Jesus
Orisha = The saints
Ashe Eguns = The dead
Humans
“Non-living” things
Despite the respect they received, these men were not necessarily major
figures in the cabildo, for the reconstituted religious groups were now sep-
arated from any concrete institutional connection to their ancient king-
ships (Aimes 1905:22). Many cabildos maintained it in the form of the
official position called el rey. The king was elected and could not pass on
his position to his descendants. The symbolism, if not the reality, of king-
ship continued in el rey’s use of a highly decorated throne and regalia.
Metaphors of kingship, including the throne and elaborate regalia, re-
main in the rituals and chants of initiation into the priesthood (Brandon
1983:395, 402, 405).
Three important changes took place in the cosmology and pantheon
during the passage from Yoruba to Lucumi religion: syncretism between
the orisha and the saints, integration of the separate Nigerian cults into a
single religious structure, and the demise of the cults associated with the
earth (see figure 2).
In both the countryside and the city the orisha came to be called santos
(saints), and each orisha came to be identified with a particular saint (see
table 3). Which orisha were known and the saint with which they were iden-
tified varied some between locales. An orisha corresponding to one saint in
Havana might correspond to a different saint in the countryside. The same
was true within the rural areas themselves (Brandon 1983:174-80.) Yoruba
deities who were widely worshiped in Yoruba, Benin, and Dahomey are
prominent in the pantheon of Lucumi religion and those connected with
Oyo especially so.
Whereas the orisha had formerly been worshiped by separate families
and priesthoods, in the Cuban cabildos all the priesthoods and families
Cuba: Pre-Santeria and Early Santeria (1492-1870) / 77
gathered together under one roof. To deal with organizing access to the
priesthood, they drew on the old principles of hierarchy and ranking. The
orisha and their priesthoods were placed into a hierarchy topped by the
babalawo, the high priest of Ifa, the divination deity. The grades of initia-
tion inside the religion were correlated with the attainment of the secrets of
specific deities and possession of their witnessing objects (Brandon
1983:355-435; Sanchez 1978).
The cults of the earth disappeared. For the most part, neither in the
cities nor in the countryside did land belong to blacks. The slaves farmed,
but the land produced for the whites. Urban slaves and freemen no longer
farmed. Those free blacks and mulattoes who owned land in the western
sugar zones or outside of them seem not to have kept or supported these
traditions. In Lucumi religion the earth retained its symbolic role as the
78 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
Án Economic Transition
The economic isolation forced upon Haiti after its revolution left Cuba
with a virtual monopoly on the production of sugar for the world market.
Cuba's position went unchallenged until the 1870s, when competition
from Europe, which produced sugar from beets rather than cane, threat-
ened 1ts dominance. Sugar prices dropped through the 1890s; after that
they swung up and down precipitously. Large, efficient, aggressive sugar
producers survived, but the small farms went under. Out of this shake-out
a new system arose: an industrial complex of mills called centrales, renter-
planters (colonos) who ran the centrales, and a low-paid pool of seasonal la-
bor that worked the cane.
American businessmen capitalized the big land purchases, the railways,
the engines and machinery, and the water supply lines needed to run the
new centrales. The demise of the small sugar farms and the abolition of
slavery supplied the rest. A few ex-slaves who became colonos rented land
to till and planted cane for sale to the mills, but the majority of colonos
were whites and mulatto farmers and it was only the larger white colonos
that made much money. Most former rural slaves became seasonal wage
laborers alongside Chinese contract laborers, Amerindians imported from
the Yucatan Peninsula, and black immigrants from Haiti and the British
West Indies.
By the 1920s the effects of this combination of capital, land, and labor
were becoming clear. As more land was turned over to sugar, less was
available for subsistence and Cuba was forced to import more and
more of its food from abroad. The United States became Cuba’s main
80 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
market for sugar, its main source of manufactured goods and capital. Any
fluctuation in the U.S. price or demand for sugar sent convulsions through
the island.
The large planters, financial speculators, and merchants made mon-
strous fortunes from this arrangement. Palatial mansions suddenly sprang
out of the ground. The doors of exclusive country clubs that swung one
way to keep out the mass of Cubans swung the other way to let in American
gangsters, elaborate floor shows with chorus girls, and a Cuban economic
elite glittering with new money. At the same time the increasing mechani-
zation of the centrales and the wild seasonal swings in the demand for la-
bor ensured that the majority of workers, and especially the rural blacks,
were unemployed half the year.
These economic changes were echoed in the relations between races.
The number of African slaves imported during the eighteenth and nine-
teenth century sugar boom drastically darkened the racial composition of
the island’s population. The eastern areas of the island, which were not
given over to sugar cane, retained much of the socioracial structure of the
pre-1760 period, but in the west, where the sugar zones were located, the
racial continuum began to polarize. The intermediate range of coloreds
was a small part of the continuum there, and it was the extremes that stood
out and grew more numerous: the whites and “light coloreds” as owners
and employees of the large sugar estates on one hand and the “dark col-
oreds” and the mass of black slaves on the other. By the end of the nine-
teenth century Havana and the western sugar areas had acquired a
reputation for racism. The introduction of peoples from Yucatan and
China between 1853 and 1873 and the black immigration from the British
West Indies and Haiti, which the government encouraged between 1913
and and 1928, complicated the issue, but the main problem remained the
place of Cuba’s own large, impoverished, and culturally distinct black pop-
ulation. A pattern of increasingly harsh and partly public racial discrimi-
nation became evident. Efforts to “Cubanize” the work force by sending
the immigrant workers back where they came from were linked with efforts
to attract European immigration and lighten the complexion of the island
both culturally and physically (Hoetink 1985:67).
The condition of the Afro-Cuban population took a turn for the worse
after the wars for independence. The gains that had been made during the
wars evaporated immediately afterward. Afro-Cubans were underrepre-
sented in government and public administration, and they were boxed out
of the electorate. High illiteracy rates meant that only a small fraction of
Afro-Cuban males met the requirements for exercising the right to vote.
Opportunities in government employment, the hope of many an educated
black or mulatto, simply never appeared (Perez 1988:212). Establishment
of the Cuban Republic did not ameliorate the destitution in which the ma-
jority of the Afro-Cubans continued to live. The advent of a North Amer-
ican dominance replacing the dominance of Spain in 1898 may have
Cuba: Santeria (1870-1959) / 81
actually made things worse, since the American occupation troops infected
native Cubans with a racial virus even more virulent than the homegrown
variety. Discontent with what blacks gained from their participation in the
Ten Years War (1868—78) and the War for Independence (1895-98) fueled
attempts to organize black political parties, black participation in labor un-
rest, and a Negro revolt in May 1912 that cost thousands of lives.
These economic trends form the backdrop against which we can ob-
serve the fissioning of the Cuban middle class and the distinct ideologies
which it promoted during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the
early part of the twentieth.
The War for Independence was the death knell of the colonial planter
class’s economic dominance of Cuban society. This group had been the cre-
ole bourgeoisie of the colonial period, and the power of sugar had given
them a great deal of influence with the colonial government, but they had
never been that government. When the United States effectively usurped
both political and economic dominance of the island, it separated a for-
merly dominant social class from state power (Perez 1988:192). The creole
petit bourgeoisie now found itself in competition with their old elite. These
foreign-born Spaniards who had been governing on behalf of Spain were
no longer the dominant political class; nonetheless they held on to the eco-
nomic position and cultural positions which they had reserved for them-
selves during the colonial period when they had state power. In the early
years of the republic they retained important positions in retail commerce,
industry, and the Catholic Church. In many Latin American countries in-
dependence led to a drop in the number of peninsulares; Cuba went in the
opposite direction. Old families stayed and new ones immigrated from
Spain at the invitation of governments concerned with tilting the island’s
population back toward a white majority (Perez 1988:202).
The middle class, which had earlier divided over the issue of indepen-
dence, now debated whether Cuba had won its political independence from
Spain only to lose control of its economic resources to the United States.
Politics became a jockeying for power among the various factions of the
creole bourgeoisie (the separatist coalition, the new entrepreneurs, the in-
tellectuals and social reformers). The army and the mobilized proletariat
waited in the wings plotting their turn at the table. Whoever achieved state
power on the island found themselves beholden to and dominated by out-
side political and economic interests, especially those of the United States.
Political leadership was always transient and impermanent, frequently cor-
rupt, and often violent and repressive. The 1930s under the leadership of
Machado seem to have been particularly repressive. The political violence,
newspaper censorship, political jailings, torture, assassinations, executions,
and extensive police surveillance were the legacy of the 1930s and Machado
to future decades. By the 1940s and through the 1959 revolution, Cuba
Libre was a long gone, and various forms of domestic and international
gangsterism had settled in for the long term.
82 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
The various factions of the Cuban middle class took ambivalent, vacil-
lating, and contradictory stances toward the issue of African culture and
Cuban identity. In the fluid political and economic context of the postin-
dependence era, three contrasting attitudes toward the African religions
emerged: an anti-Africanist tendency, a syncretist tendency promoting the
blending of spiritism and the African religions, and an avant-garde ten-
dency among some Cuban intellectuals that promoted the African religions
as sources of artistic inspiration and national culture. These middle-class
ideologies had varying impacts on the Afro-Cuban religions.
ternal affairs. When the Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz met Emmanuel,
also in 1910, he found him a bitter and disappointed man. Emmanuel had
not abandoned his goal of representing the Africans of Cuba and their civ-
ilization before the government, but he no longer saw the cabildos as a use-
ful means of doing it. Instead, being an attorney as well as a minister, he
looked forward to receiving certificates of dissolution from them (28).
Neither the abolition of slavery nor the victorious War of Independence
made much difference in the treatment of the Afro-Cuban religions. From
1902 through the 1920s the wave of nationalism which one would expect in
a newly liberated country assumed a peculiar form in Cuba. The celebra-
tion of indigenous traditions was replaced by a campaign of Europeaniza-
tion which denigrated everything revealing the African presence. This
campaign to de-Africanize Cuban culture also drew the support of a mi-
nority of Cuban blacks, the negros finos (refined blacks), a culturally assim-
ilated, upwardly mobile elite that hoped to become members of the new
ruling class (Nodal 1983:160).
One part of the campaign focused on the persecution of the African
cabildos and the confiscation of religious paraphernalia, especially the rit-
ual drums which were such potent symbols of African culture. Laws for-
bade the use of these drums, and confiscated drums were destroyed.
African religionists tried any number of strategies to get around these
laws, including changing the structure and construction of their religious
drums. They added metal keys and wooden strips to them and changed
their shapes so that they looked more like “white drums,” 1.e., more creole
and less African.
Persecution of the Afro-Cuban cabildos pushed them underground;
they became fugitive again. The positive moral influence the cabildos once
represented—their public dances, recreational activities, funeral masses,
and mutual aid work—had all been sacrificed to no good end. What public
respect the cabildos had once possessed was now lost. Furthermore, per-
secution of the cabildos stigmatized them without providing anything to
take their place in the religious life of Afro-Cubans. The cabildos took on
the characteristics of secret societies coated with a thin veneer of Catholi-
cism sufficient to conform to the codes of the secular authorities and suf-
ficient to shield the African rites they still practiced (Ortiz 1921:30). Their
connections to the Catholic Church became even more tenuous than they
had been in the past. Instead members of the cabildos were forced into a
subterranean world where they now mixed with exploitative sorcerers, oc-
cultists, and adepts of the new religion of Espiritismo.
Espiritismo
Espiritismo is a variant of the spiritism founded in France by Hippolyte Ri-
vail (1804-69), an engineer who wrote under the pseudonym of Allan Kar-
dec. Kardec's spiritism was part of a wder European and North American
86 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
Between 1868 and 1895 the colonial government and the Catholic
Church closed ranks to battle against all the possible supporters of inde-
pendence from Spain. They suppressed liberal ideas along with political
separatists. Political parties, worker’s organizations, and ethnic associa-
tions all had to resist to survive. So did the growing spiritist movement.
At the same time that the Afro-Cuban cabildos were the targets of in-
creasingly restrictive legislation, Espiritismo was spreading in the cities
and countryside. It was inevitable that the two would meet within the oc-
cult underground that permeated Cuban society like a system of subterra-
nean waterways.
In some ways the healing-oriented Espiritismo probably appeared to
Early Santeria practitioners as a more congenial form of Christianity, a
truer Christian teaching than that of the Catholics, just as it claimed. Cer-
tainly some aspects of Espiritismo were familiar. There were the familiar
Christian concepts and symbols and, like both Santeria and Catholicism,
Espiritismo had saints. Espiritismo and Santeria both addressed them-
selves to the immediate issues of their devotees’ lives. Both religions pro-
vided alternative perspectives on the world, alternative values, and a basis
for personal identity. Both were opposed by the Catholic Church for this.
Repression provoked resistance, but the arena in which that resistance
took place guaranteed that some of what was being resisted would be ab-
sorbed. The two religions had resisted assimilation into the hegemony
of the state and its church but were affected by it just the same, because
more diffuse forms of Catholicism permeated Cuban culture outside the
official institutions.
The printed works of Kardec and Soler marked Espiritismo as a white
literate tradition like Catholicism and unlike Santeria. In other ways Espir-
itismo was both similar and different from Santeria. Espiritistas made fine
distinctions within the world of the dead which Santeria did not make and
generalized those which it did. Espiritismo threatened to creep into every
crevice vacated by the ancestral dead, but it did not give lineal ancestors an
exalted and powerful place. Even though Espiritismo had saints, they were
different. In Espiritismo the saints were pure and remote and not at the
ready call of the medium; instead, mediums relied on a variety of lesser and
more accessible spirits. As a result the spirit guides and angel guardians of
Espiritismo were lumped together with the saints or orisha; in turn the
saints or orisha assumed new roles as protectors, spirit guides, and guard-
lan angels.
Although both santeras and espiritistas believed in reincarnation, Es-
piritismo taught that reincarnation was progressive: through death incar-
nate souls gradually ascended the grades of a spiritual hierarchy and
eventually, after the tests of many lifetimes, became saints. The traditional
Yoruba concept of reincarnation, if it was still extant in Lucumi religion,
was nonprogressive. It was concerned with returning from death to Earth
Cuba: Santeria (1870-1959) / 89
in one’s family line rather than with rising in the hierarchy of an invisible
spiritual world after death. Nonetheless the spiritist concept seems to have
been adopted by some santeras.
Though more intimate in many ways than the relationship santeros
now had with the Catholic Church, in this regard Espiritismo was not any
different in kind. Orisha devotees continued to participate in the baptismal
and funeral rites of the Catholics. These rites could be utilized without be-
ing absorbed directly into Early Santeria's ritual system. Regardless of how
the santeros might interpret them, these rituals were conducted by the
Catholic priest and performed in church, the Catholic priest's ritual space.
The santeros could symbolically annex that space for their own purposes
and for the power, prestige, or legitimacy that lay within it, but they could
not control what went on there. Likewise the spiritist seances and most spir-
itist healing practices were not absorbed directly into Santeria either.
It is not surprising that the spiritist style of mediumship was not ab-
sorbed directly into Santeria. Insofar as spiritist mediumship was ceremo-
nial spirit possession, Espiritismo had nothing new to offer, but there were
other issues at stake. The way mediumship works in Espiritismo puts the
spiritist medium in direct competition with the diviner who has spent so
much money, time, and work training in his or her profession. The Sante-
ria divination devices themselves are symbolic of membership in the reli-
gion and also of a specific African ethnic heritage. The spiritist medium
does not use such devices but replaces them with other symbols. As I said
before, in Espiritismo the saints are pure and remote spiritual beings and
are not at the ready call of the medium. The result 1s that the medium usu-
ally serves as the vehicle for lower classes of spirits, while in Santeria the
saints speak through the divination devices and the santero has access to
them any time they are needed. Another aspect of Espiritismo which did,
however, have some impact on Santeria ritual was healing work.
Isolated techniques, objects, and gestures were brought over into San-
teria and remain in the practice of some contemporary santeros. ‘These
did not replace the Santeria rites but augmented them. If what santeros
now say and do is a clue to what went on in the past, santeros evidently
came to view the espiritistas as healers who were specialists in helping
people whose problems were brought about by causas. Causas are a cate-
gory of lowly evolved, intranquil spirits which are important in Espiritis-
mo’s explanations of disease and suffering but had not been a part of
Lucumi religion. Santeros who accepted the existence of causas could an-
nex the healing abilities of espiritistas by referring clients to them, thus
making use of their rites without having to participate in them. The espir-
itista remained for them a specialist in causas while the santero remained a
specialist in the worship of the saints or orisha. Mediumship and training in
Espiritismo then came to be seen as a developmental step toward the semi-
advanced levels of Santeria practice. In other words, once Santeria itself
90 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
had taken some of the ideological and ritual elements of Espiritismo into its
own framework, santeros regarded Espiritismo as a lower level of Santeria-
type practice.
One further mechanism for controlling the relationship between the
two religions was the physical or temporal separation of their rites. Rit-
uals from the two religious systems either take place in separate spaces or
in the same space at different times, with the difference in context indi-
cated by the presence of the appropriate symbolic objects. Even the santero
who was also an espiritista separated the times, locations, and symbols of
the two religions.
Afro-Cubanism
The survival of African culture, the early and continuing work of Fer-
nando Ortiz, and an energetic group of writers, painters, and musicians
gave the Cuban intellectual scene a peculiar dynamism in the 1920s. The
movement of Afro-Cubanism, an important ideological trend of the pe-
riod, was one product of this dynamism. Afro-Cubanism can be seen as a
response to the political, social, and cultural problems of the Cuban Re-
public and as a response to international influence of the European artistic
and intellectual avant-garde of the time. As a result we find the movement
concerned both with questions of race, social inequality, economics, and
Cuban national identity and with a kind of aesthetic primitivism and re-
course to the irrational with an implied critique of Western civilization de-
rived from Spengler in philosophy, Stravinsky in music, Picasso in painting,
and Lorca in poetry (Echevarria 1977:43, 52; Janney 1981:20, 24-25).
Other sources of that dynamism coming from abroad were artistic
trends in France, Germany, and the United States that reflected a reeval-
uation of African and African-American culture. The lectures and writings
of Leo Frobenius on African culture, the promotion and appropriation by
the European avant-garde of African sculpture and dance, of ragtime and
jazz, and the poetry and prose of the Harlem Renaissance turned previous
artistic attitudes upside down (Willet 1978; Frobenius 1913; Helbing
1972). The primitive became the advanced. Peoples without culture sud-
denly possessed it in extreme modernist forms. Black heads, formerly seen
as the abode of a dull and empty void, became filled with magic, an irra-
tional, intuitive élan vital with which avant-garde artists and intellectuals
hoped to vivify or destroy the decaying structures of Europe.
At the same time as Afro-Cubanism allowed the avant-garde intellectu-
als of Cuba’s middle class to establish a common ground with currents from
Europe, it also provided them with a sense of uniqueness within the mod-
ernist movement. Unlike the Europeans, Cuban artists did not have to look
abroad for the magical presence both of them sought; Africa existed right
on the island. If modernism delighted in the primitive, the irrational, and
the exotic, in dreams and hallucinatory rites, then the Cuban writer and
Cuba: Santeria (1870-1959) / 9l
artist had a prime source for all this. The magical, primal presence they
sought they found in a fiercely concentrated and in a relatively uncontam-
inated state in the religion and culture of Afro-Cubans. Moreover, this
presence of the magical was not new but had been there all the time, ig-
nored and suppressed by whites in the service of a European world on
the wane.
One of the fathers of Afro-Cubanism was the lawyer turned social sci-
entist Don Fernando Ortiz. The hallowed image he later attained as an
intellectual and cultural figure, particularly his relationship to the Afro-
Cubanist school, has tended to detract attention from the ideology and at-
titudes that informed his early work, 1.e., the body of writings that ignited
Afro-Cubanism in the first place (Becerra and Comas 1957; Le Riverend
1973; Guillen 1969). It is significant that Ortiz’s entrée to Afro-Cuban re-
ligions was through its most feared and reviled element: sorcerers. In the
beginning his interest in Afro-Cuban religions was neither aesthetic nor
cultural but criminological. He was interested in African culture as crimi-
nal activity. This is clear in his first and in some ways his most influential
and classic book, Hampa afro-cubana: Los negros brujos, which appeared in
1906. The book’s full title translates as “Afro-Cuban underworld: black
sorcerers, notes for a study of criminal ethnology.” Despite its mixture of
fictional and journalistic techniques and the wealth of archival material
and popular social mythology on which it draws, Los negros brujos is essen-
tially a treatise on criminology, complete with a set of police mug shots at
the end. It is a study of witchcraft and sorcery among Cuban blacks which
was aimed at producing a coherent and accurate description of the sorcer-
ers and their beliefs and practices in order to eliminate them more quickly
and efficiently. This issue assumed great moral urgency at the time, since
many whites were converting to Afro-Cuban religions. Ortiz’s effort was a
socially and morally committed one. He hoped to provide information that
would help save society from the degradation he thought would inevitably
result as whites came under the power of black sorcerers and joined them
in the activities for which they were best known to the police, the press, and
the general public: ritualized murders, necrophilia, and a long roster of lu-
rid and bizarre sexual practices.
The incendiary influence of Ortiz’s writings on the Cuban literary,
musical, and artistic avant-garde of the time cannot be overestimated.
The value of his early work to Afro-Cubanism was that it provided a first
Systematic account of Afro-Cuban culture, especially Afro-Cuban reli-
gious beliefs, myths, and rites. Los negros brujos was projected to be the
first in a series of works examining what was, from the viewpoint of a
white, middle-class, foreign-educated intellectual who had had practically
no contact with blacks, a submerged and unknown world. This promise
was richly fulfilled. Even so, in his early period Ortiz found the presence
of the African element to be a regressive force. There is a strong biologi-
cal determinist underpinning to his early works, and in Los negros brujos his
99 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
solutions to one aspect of Cuba’s social and cultural problem were ethnic
selection of the superior (white) over the inferior (black) race and the civ-
ilizing of the primitive mentalities of the blacks through cultural assimila-
tion (Ortiz 1973a:395).
While Ortiz’s early works provided fuel for Afro-Cubanism rather than
being a spearhead for the movement, he was actually converted to it after
it took shape. He retained the respect and admiration (not without reser-
vations) of the major figures in the movement, the generation of artists
that included poet Nicolas Guillen, novelist Alejo Carpentier, composer
Amadeo Roldan, and painter Wilfredo Lam. Their regard for him even
increased as his voluminous works on Afro-Cuban history, society, and cul-
ture appeared. His writing came even to span the Afro-Cubanist move-
ment itself through his monographs on its painting, poetry, and music.
As his writing and thought evolved—some of his ideas changed to the
point where he abandoned race as a concept—Ortiz's basic ideology re-
mained that of a liberal bourgeois reformist: positivistic, rationalistic, see-
ing the inevitable, gradual progess of Cuban history and society leading to
the obliteration of African culture on the island (Echevarria 1977:46—49;
Mullen 1987:117—19). On this he differed with the more radical Afro-
Cubanists. Afro-Cubanism proposed for the island a creole identity, a com-
posite multicultural, multiracial identity in which the African was central.
Afro-Cubanism opposed, therefore, both the anti-Africanist spirit of the
conservatives who, as we have seen, hoped to wipe out African culture and
religion by force and the liberal tendency, represented especially by the
early work of Ortiz, which sought to uplift and assimilate them out of ex-
istence (Carpentier 1946:236; Janney 1981:18.).
Afro-Cubanism became a dominant force on the literary scene around
1920 and soon showed up in the visual arts and concert music. Its period of
greatest activity was between 1926 and 1938. Journals were established and
a tremendous amount of creative and scholarly activity came out of the
movement. Much of this work depended on participation and firsthand
observation of the folk culture and religious life of Afro-Cubans and
brought many whites and mulattoes into contact with Santeria who might
never have sought it out otherwise (see Carpentier 1933 and Calvo 1932 as
examples). While the persisting historical rumor that Ortiz himself may
have become a convert to one of the Afro-Cuban religions in these years
has been denied by Nicolas Guillen, an at least tangential involvement with
the Afro-Cuban religions became fashionable during the period and some
other Cuban artists, intellectuals, and entertainers may very well have con-
verted and practiced (Guillen 1969:6).
Afro-Cubanism was a complex artistic and intellectual response to the
crosscurrents of Cuban social and cultural life. What began as a movement
with more than its share of épater le bourgeoisie overtones gradually began to
concern itself with the social and political issues of the Afro-Cuban popu-
lation as well as reevaluating the religious and cultural contributions of
Cuba: Santeria (1870-1959) / 93
Newspapers are hungry for this sort of thing. They present their material in the
most factual news style, but the basic misunderstanding and misrepresentation
is astonishing.
To most white Cubans the word “cult” is synonymous with “savagery” and
“crime.” Their knowledge of cults comes entirely from news columns and gos-
sip. Journalistic reports tell of ritual murders by the Kimbisa people in various
parts of the island, of all the horrible remnants of cult feasts found by the po-
lice, and the disappearance of children (“obviously” stolen for cult use) usually
white. The chief delight seems to be recounting the objects seized by the police
in raids, as though each one of them were prima facie evidence of debauchery
and degradation ... “objects dedicated to fetishism, images of Chango, snail
Shells, glass beads. . . .” (1944: 462-63)
94 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
We are turned back in a dizzying way in our religion in Cuba. One of the basic
points on which it rests or assents 1s to listen to, obey and respect the elders, it
being understood that the eldest in consecration [to the orisha] by his condition
as such, has seen, labored and learned the most; therefore he must have more
experience in the matter than younger people. In reality this is the logic, but
unfortunately in our religion in Cuba... here there is not one Lucumi who
teaches anyone, not even his own son. They set aside the things of the religion
because they fear what might happen: the continuous mistreatment aimed at
them on the part of the Spanish authorities (and to which they submitted). With
the advent of the Republic they were equally mistreated by their own country-
men who, forgetting that these Africans and their descendants poured out their
blood for the liberty of this bit of earth, made false accusations against them and
in many cases imprisoned them unjustly so that some influential personage
could be pulled out of jail only afterwards to hold him against his will at the
favor of politicians.
Present day priests and priestesses cannot have forgotten the persecutions
and absurd accusations that we have been made to suffer in a fully free Cuba.
Even recent events such as occurred in the year 1944, when there was the case
of Juan Jimaguas in the Perico; the author of this book himself has been the
victim of an ignominious accusation. There were the trampling . . . of those lit-
tle old people, their ochas [orisha shrines or altars] hurled out into the street,
many so embarrassed, so shamed that they sickened and died. These outrages
and abuses that the Africans and their closest descendants suffered infused such
fear and heaviness into their souls that they chose not to teach the religion to
their own sons. (Angarica n.d.:81)
For all these reasons brother Iguoros, we find that, as a rule, the majority of
contemporary elders suffer from a defensive superiority complex about their
Cuba: Santeria (1870-1959) / 95
years of consecration and yet are ignorant of many of the basic points of our
consecration. I will enumerate here a case of ignorance or bad faith on the part
of an elder that was encountered at a ceremony where the officiating Orihate
was as a disciple of mine. This was a Nangare and there was the singing, as is
natural, mentioning all of the dead elders of the family. Calling, getting his at-
tention was a woman, an elder, with forty or forty-five years of consecration say-
ing to him “In the Nangare it is not necessary to invoke the Dead.” My disciple
informed me, with great sadness on his part, that he had affirmed, and I had to
agree to this damning affirmation with as much pain, that this woman, in spite
of having forty or fifty years of consecration, she did not know or was not ac-
quainted with the origin of the Nangare. The Nangare, in distinct tribes of
Yoruba territory as in Arataco, Egguado, Takua, Chango, etc. had a particular
application: in these places it is employed uniquely and exclusively to refresh
the Egun [the ancestors]... . All this was made in those territories or tribes be-
cause of the constant warfare the Yoruba sustained with other regions and with
the purpose of pacifying the ancestral dead. It is for this purpose that they are
mentioned in the song: to all the ancestral dead, relatives, acquaintances and
the rest. (81—82)
The endowing of the enslaved and the colonized with demonic and ex-
traordinary powers does not exist solely as a facet of racism. It is a vital
element in aesthetic modernism as well. From its beginnings modernism
drew on a cult of the primitive and the exotic as sources of energy and in-
spiration. It needs to be asked whether, in essence, this is any different
from the upper class female who went to a santero for a love philter. In the
spirit of early modernism the European avant-garde tried to reform reality
by severing its own relationship to the past. The several faces of modernism
delighted in three refuges from the past: the gleaming, rationalized world
of modern technology (Futurism); exotic states of consciousness that could
be found within the self, such as insanity, hallucinations, and dreams (Ex-
pressionism, Surrealism); and non-Western, premodern societies where ex-
otic states of consciousness were thought to be a normal part of waking life
(Primitivism). What the artists of Afro-Cubanism sought was the source of
an ejaculatory discharge of explosive force, a violent outbreak of feeling
that would blast away the moribund edifices of their own half-European
heritage. They declared that they had found it in the person of the Afro-
Cuban and in the lore of the Afro-Cuban religions. Just as influential pol-
iticlans sometimes protected santeras whose owners helped them conquer
a heart or win an election, the success of Afro-Cubanism made it possible
for Cuban artists and intellectuals to present Santeria as folklore rather
than witchcraft and crime, and thereby build artistic reputations. Other
factors become evident as we follow out the ambiguous logic of repression
and resistance still further to its next step.
The conquered acquired the accoutrements of the conqueror's power to protect
their own powers from detection. After the turn of the twentieth century Cuban
blacks created a variety of political parties and other organizations to ad-
vance their cause. All this organizational and political activity yielded very
mixed results. The same period that saw Afro-Cubans elected to significant
seats in government also witnessed the 1910 ban on all political parties or-
ganized on a racial basis, the brutal crackdown on the Negro Revolt of
1912, and the continuing suppression of the Afro-Cuban cabildos.
For some believers today the equation of the saints and the orisha 1s not
real but is an historical residue, a practice standing over from when the Af-
ricans used the Catholic saints to mask the worship of their own deities.
This may also have been the case for some believers during the Santeria
period. For them syncretism was a strategy of subterfuge. It was assimila-
tion in the service of preserving the tradition. The believer gave some to
keep some. This is analogous to what happened to the ritual drums during
the anti-Africanist campaigns in the early days of the republic. When the
anti-Africanist campaign focused on the African cabildos and the confis-
cation of religious drums, believers in the Afro-Cuban religions changed
the structure and construction of the drums. They added European fea-
tures to them, metal keys and wooden strips, so that they looked more cre-
ole, less African, and could escape seizure (Nodal 1983). Once again, in the
98 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
process of resistance, the believer gave some to keep some. This apparently
contradictory movement is accompanied by another which parallels that of
the colonizer and which, while setting up the subaltern politics of magic
mentioned earlier, can be either benign or predatory.
The conquered tried to acquire the accoutrements of the conqueror’s power for 1n-
dividualistic advancement within their own group as well as within the wider society.
Not all magic succeeds, and in practicing magic the Afro-Cuban inevitably
experienced failures. Rather than skepticism, these failures may well have
led to more complex efforts. In this case the individual seized upon key
symbols of the powers of the dominant society and treated them as pow-
erful symbols through which social realities can be manipulated by means
of magical or religious rites. Viewed from below and in relation to social
and magical power, to include the saints in the pantheon of the blacks was
not necessarily submission to a higher power (even though it took place in
the context of dominance of Catholic ideology and religious hierarchy) but
was instead the acquisition of the saint’s power. Thus these Africans did not
convert to the saints but converted the saints to themselves; in this way the
Africans came to possess the saint, in order to work their will through its
means. As was the case with some whites, the saints of Catholicism and Es-
piritismo, along with the orisha, were all powers that existed for use in the
problems of this life and this world. This takes us to the final step in the
powerfully simple but peculiar logic we have been tracing.
The conquered, the enslaved, and the colonized acquired the symbolic accoutre-
ments of the colonizer’s or dominant class s power as one means of representing, to
and for themselves, the situation they found themselves in and as a means of setting
up a context in which they could make symbolic attempts to gain some control over
that situation. The notion of a dominant ideology and a subordinate one 1s
inadequate to describe the complex interplay that went on. Colonial Cuba
had rested on a network of underground canals admitting the sorcery of
three continents. After independence from Spain, the end of slavery, and
the suppression of the African cabildos, the underworld of the culture of
conquest folded into the culture of the conquered. This infolding was an
active process and a jab at the eyes of church and state power. Catholicism,
Espiritismo, and the Afro-Cuban religions were not mutually exclusive or
self-contained; they contested with one another while often drawing on a
shared pool of concepts and symbols (Hall 1985:104). Even so, Santeria
and Espiritismo addressed themselves to the immediate issues of their dev-
otees’ worldly lives as well as promoting alternative views of the world and
alternative bases for personal identity; that is why the church and the re-
public tried to stamp them out. State and church repression provoked re-
sistance, but the arena in which that resistance took place guaranteed that
some of what was being resisted would be absorbed. Santeria and Espirit-
ismo resisted assimilation into the hegemony of the state and the church
but were affected by them just the same because more diffuse forms of Ca-
tholicism permeated Cuban culture outside of the official institutions.
Cuba: Santeria (1870-1959) / 99
The earlier religious traditions that remained and diffused among the
Cuban population, whether they were from Catholicism, Lucumi religion,
or Espiritismo, were not simply testimony to the tenacity of tradition. In-
stead they were mythic images that reflected and condensed the appropri-
ation of the history of conquest and made it available to the experience of
contemporary believers. That history formed analogies and structural cor-
respondences with the hopes and tribulations of the present. The variety of
practices and mixed forms arising within Lucumi religion and forming the
Santeria of this period represented the appropriation and incorporation of
history into the present in a tradition which was imperiled both from
within and from without.
Cuban Postscript
It is difficult to get a picture of the state of Santeria in either the city or
the countryside on the eve of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. It may well
have been in decline in the cities of western Cuba as a result of persecu-
tions and disruptions in the preceding years. A study done in 1959 in La
Guinea, an isolated and conservative all-black community in Las Villas
Province, revealed a significant influence of Santeria as well as of the
Bantu religion Palo. But Palo had been losing believers there since the
1930s, and Santeria had declined in importance, too, because the local re-
ligious leader had died and there was no one to replace him (Herrera
1972:145, 147-50). If La Guinea is in any way indicative of what was hap-
pening in the countryside, then both of these Afro-Cuban religions were
on the wane before the revolution.
Santeria probably continued to serve the functions it always had: it sat-
isfied the inner religious needs of a significant segment of the Cuban pop-
ulation, mainly people of African descent but also poor whites in the
countryside and probably a wider spectrum of whites in the cities (Butter-
worth 1980:87). The African religion helped people cope with the prob-
lems of illness and the practical difficulties of everyday life. Within it
believers created and maintained important social networks which were
useful in themselves and a means for such upward mobility as Cuba’s un-
derdeveloped economy allowed for those who were a notch above blackness
and poverty. Those who did not find enough fulfillment and recognition in
work, play, or family could find it in the high prestige that believers gave to
their priests and priestesses.
A wide range of variation in ritual and degree of Catholic versus Afri-
can influence continued to exist both before and after 1959. At one end of
the continuum were Santeria houses, the majority of whose rites imitated
Catholic ceremonies complete with our fathers, hail marys, candles, in-
cense, and the appropriate ritual gestures and material symbols. At the
other end were houses where these Catholic elements never appeared. In
these houses neither chromolithographs nor statues of the saints adorned
100 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
the altars. Symbolic colors and stones represented the saints or orisha and
the emphasis was on ceremonial spirit possession (MacGaffey and Barnett
1962:249-50; Thomas 1971:520; Butterworth 1980:88). Furthermore,
among those who could still actually trace Yoruba descent, Santeria re-
tained the specifically ethnic and kinship dimensions which, at an earlier
period, had applied to all members. For some the worship of specific orisha
still descended down family lines and the orisha was not only a deity but an
ancestor as well (Thomas 1971:520).
Santeros fought on both sides during the struggle to overthrow the Ba-
tista government. Although some santeros fled the revolution, many could
not and many did not. During the years of struggle the revolutionary guer-
rillas were not moved by antireligious feelings but were convinced that con-
tradictions did not have to exist between the social revolution they hoped to
win and the religious beliefs of the Cuban people (see Granma 1977, for
example). The conflict between the revolution and religion was mainly a
political conflict between the revolutionaries and the social class that tried
to use the Catholic Church as a weapon to oppose the revolution. In the
countryside attendance at Afro-Cuban religious activities was independent
of all the cleavages that divided the communities and generally formed one
of the few arenas for social participation beyond the family. Santeria and
the other Afro-Cuban religions were a kind of social capital on which the
revolution could build. Many women who had been heads of Afro-Cuban
religious groups later emerged as leaders within the Cuban Women’s Fed-
eration. In both the countryside and the cities the revolution was able to
absorb leaders from the Afro-Cuban religions into some of its own political
organizations (Dominguez 1978:484, 491).
Although the Castro government declared that there was no contradic-
tion between the aims of religion and the aims of socialism, relations be-
tween religious groups and the socialist state oscillated between tolerance
and repression. The Afro-Cuban religions rarely surfaced in discussions of
the official policies toward religion. These policies were phrased in terms
of church-state relations concerning the Catholic Church and, to a lesser
extent, the Protestant sects. Since many santeros consider themselves Cath-
olics, they were affected by official policies aimed at the Catholic Church
and by policies aimed at religious groups in general.
The Catholic Church (including the Vatican) originally supported the
revolution, but within a year of Castro’s ascension to power the increasing
suppression of religious freedom became a serious issue for the Vatican
and for Cuban prelates. When the prelates organized protests, the govern-
ment accused them of criminal and antirevolutionary campaigning and
warned them to stay out of politics (Butterworth 1980:85). The revelation
that two Catholic priests had participated as chaplains in the abortive 1961
Bay of Pigs invasion led to the arrest of priests on the island and the closing
of churches. The government nationalized private education, thus elimi-
nating the Catholic schools, and it confiscated church and Catholic school
Cuba: Santeria (1870-1959) / 101
I have been told that when Santeria devotees performed obligatory sacri-
fices, which were increasingly under surveillance, all the meat not imme-
diately offered to the African gods was confiscated by the government.
To acquire the proper items became a difficult, expensive, and time-
consuming operation. Despite the fact that ceremonies often had to be de-
layed or postponed and despite the difficulties santeros often had in
bringing together everything needed for the ceremonies, they were able to
obtain what they needed through networks of economic exchanges with
relatives, other devotees, friends, neighbors, and people in the country-
side. Because of their continuing secrecy, their ramified networks, and
their mutual aid functions, the Afro-Cuban religions constituted an infor-
mal underground economy not under the control of the government and
thus came into conflict with the revolution.
While some santeros were opposed to the revolutionary government,
others were not or saw no relation between adherence to Santeria and el-
ther opposition or support of the government. Others regarded the sepa-
ration of religion and politics as desirable and adopted the government’s
views on this while remaining believers and religious people. Lazaro
Benedi, a santero and palero, was a prominent diviner before the revolu-
tion. In an interview with Oscar Lewis Lazaro, Benedi revealed an ambiv-
alence toward the place of the African religions in the new socialist society,
though he remained committed to both.
The fact that I am religious has not done me the slightest harm with the Rev-
olution or in any other way. After all if the revolution didn’t recognize the ef-
fectiveness of santeria, it would have suspended all religious festivities long ago.
On the contrary, it leaves us totally free to belong to any religion as long as it
doesn’t interfere with politics.
I went to the museum of the African religion established by Fidel [at Gua-
nabacoa] and was impressed. I’d never imagined a museum wholly dedicated to
religion! I still think that the African religion will disappear completely, but I
heard Fidel say that he wished they would build a temple to that religion, just
as the masons and the Catholics have their temples.
I’ve had many arguments with Catholics and believers in the African reli-
gion, and have never been able to come to an agreement with any of them.
There are those who say that the African religion is a myth, a dream, a web of
deceit. But I, and all believers, have faith because we've had proof. . . . Each per-
son must figure out whether he can reconcile his politics and his religion. . . .
We cannot allow the confusion of politics and religion. ... A man creates his
own faith as he goes along. I believe in the African religion, but I’ve had faith
in other things too. I believe the Revolution triumphed because of all the peo-
ple who believed in Marti’s ideas. When I find myself in difficult situations I
concentrate on my faith, saying, “I do what I’m doing to save part of mankind
and I trust this will help me” (Lewis, Lewis, and Rigdon 1977:130-31).
V.
Spirits in Exile
Despite the relative success of their adaptation to U.S. society, members of
the first generation of exiled Cubans experienced a great deal of stress
from a number of sources. The elderly in particular exhibited the harassed
double consciousness of the exile. Behind was the past, loss, separation,
nostalgia for the old ways, and sometimes death; ahead was the future with
its uncertainties, fears, and imagined perils. In the present, though, were
all the problems of adjusting to a society of strangers with a different lan-
guage and customs. Furthermore, Cuban émigrés entered the United
States during a period in which it was experiencing one of the most pro-
found social, cultural, and political upheavals in its history. What would
have been a trying experience in any case was made even more problematic
by the struggles and movements for social and cultural change of the 1960s
and 1970s. Psychedelics, flower power, the civil rights and black power
movements, women’s liberation, and the national crisis of conscience over
the Vietnam War leading to a series of economic recessions created a dense
and confusing context in which to adjust amid the profusion of positions
and responses. The Cubans seemed to be trying to get a foothold in a so-
ciety poised on the brink of chaos and confusion. This was reflected in the
relations between parents and children, especially in the differing rates of
adaptation to the new culture which are evident between generations
(Rumbaut and Rumbaut 1976:397). Experiencing the same kinds of stress,
the younger generation may react quite differently because of its greater
cognizance of U.S. culture, particularly U.S. youth culture.
Typical psychiatric symptoms of Cuban expatriates relate quite directly
to this situation. Depression, intense overwhelming anxiety, and inability to
surmount the complex emotional problems presented by the anomie of ex-
ile were frequent in the expression of these psychiatric patients (Ascarte
1970, quoted in Rumbaut and Rumbaut 1976:396). Fertility was very low
for Cuban Americans as compared with other U.S. ethnic groups, and the
population seemed to be aging with declining fertility (Boswell and Curtis
1984:101, 108; Jaffe, Cullen, and Boswell 1980:5 1-62). In a group where
so much of a woman’s identity depends on marrying, having children, and
working at home, the inability to have children provokes a constant psy-
chological and cultural strain.
The role of culture, particularly magic and religion, complicates the
picture Cuban Americans present in their encounters with mainstream
physicians. Psychiatrists have remarked on the predominance of religious-
mystical phenomena in the manifestations of emotional disorder among
Cubans (Rubinstein 1976:76—77; Bustamante 1968:115—16). When Sante-
ria emerges as an element of the cultural overlay underlying this process,
the physician may be presented with what appears to be a frank delusional
system but is in reality a deeply held religious belief spreading beyond its
106 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
normal context and domain (Bustamante 1968). Hence there are real dan-
gers of misdiagnosis for Cuban patients with American doctors.
It is not surprising that some Cuban Americans should go to santeros
for help. In the santero they find a healer who speaks their language,
shares their basic culture and world view, is able to describe and explain the
problems they have, and can set in motion a course of action to deal with
them. The adaptive nature of Santeria as a system of health care, partic-
ularly for mental health, has been seen as a factor promoting its persistence
and growth here (Sandoval 1979).
In New York and New Jersey immigrants from Cuba and Puerto Rico
have been extremely uncomfortable in the Irish- and Italian-dominated
Catholic churches. Discrimination, poverty, the language barrier, and the
paucity of real efforts by the church to reach out and embrace them led
many Cubans and Puerto Ricans to view the church as rigid, unresponsive,
and unable to help them in their daily ordeals. Many of these people leave
Catholicism entirely and become Pentecostals or irreligious. Others go into
some noninstitutionalized religious group with persisting Catholic connec-
tions such as Espiritismo or Santeria, sometimes both.
Lourdes Arguelles has noted the existence of anti-Castro groups in
Florida that are grounded in Santeria. These are military, paramilitary,
and political organizations involving older Cuban exiles and some younger
Cuban males.
They have some following among the younger Cubans who they train in covert
operations and paramilitary techniques. Connections with organized crime are
close and date back to pre-revolutionary Cuba. The subcultural milieu of their
terrorist groups, which are divided into military and political units, is domi-
nated by “Santeria,” the Afro-Cuban syncretist tradition of superstition and rit-
ual... . Participation in these groups is closely associated with low income and
status and/or social discrepancy. (1982:299).
As far as I am able to tell, there were Santeria priests living in New York
before the Cuban Revolution. My informants all agreed that the first
Santeria priest of Ifa to reside in the United States was Francisco (Pancho)
Mora. Mora came to the United States in 1946 and resided in New York
until his death in 1986. In 1954 he initiated the first santera in Puerto Rico.
He is credited with holding the first American Santeria drum-dance in
1964, and he initiated priests as far away as Venezuela, Argentina, Colum-
bia, and Mexico. At one point he tried to found a mutual aid society for
incoming santeros, but his plans to form a legal federation and to acquire
a building in which to conduct rites never came to fruition.
Mercedes Noble has been credited with initiating the first priestess in
North America, Julia Franco, in 1962. Noble was born in Cuba of parents
from the United States and initiated as a priestess of Santeria there in
1958. In New York she headed a multiethnic Santeria house composed of
Americans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans. Leonore Dolme, a Cuban santera
Santeria in the United States (1959-1982) / 107
who came to the United States right after the revolution, seems to have in1-
tiated the first black American priestess on United States soil in Queens,
New York, in 1961. This was Margie Baynes Quiniones, now deceased.
Dolme no longer lived in New York at the time of my research. Her house,
like Noble’s was multiethnic, composed of Cubans, black Americans, and
Puerto Ricans.
In addition to those inducted into Santeria on the mainland, a trickle of
U.S. converts obtained their initiations in Cuba. The first native black
American to be initiated into the Santeria priesthood appears to have been
Oba Osejiman Adefunmi I, born Walter King. He went to Cuba in 1959 to
be initiated into the priesthood in Matanzas Province just before the rev-
olution. Upon his return he set up a public temple for the religion, the
Shango Temple, and incorporated it as the African Theological Archmin-
istry. When he moved the temple to Harlem in 1960, it was renamed the
Yoruba Temple. The Puerto Rican priestess Assunta Seranno, recently de-
ceased, initiated priests in the Yoruba Temple when Adefunmi functioned
under a ban that forbade him to do so. Seranno became a santera in Puerto
Rico in 1960 and initiated Judith Gleason, who appears to have been one of
the earliest, if not the earliest, Anglo-American priestesses initiated in the
United States.
saints with the Yoruba deities and see them in trance as if they were spirit
guides. In this sense the saint or orisha undergoes a double degradation.
As a saint he or she becomes degraded to the status of a readily accessible
lesser spirit within the spiritist hierarchy. As the orisha he or she becomes
subject to the same stereotyping process as has led to the formation of the
other ethnic spirit guides present in Espiritismo: in Garrison’s words, “the
Madama (a Black motherly type who was a curandera, or herbalist, and of-
ten a slave, in her material life), the Congo (a strong African), the Indio (a
virile independent type), the Hindu (a wise philosophical spirit), the Gi-
tano(a) (gypsy).” The orisha, then, take their place alongside this parade of
older contributors to Espiritismo’s pantheon, and this points to an ongoing
process of accretion and consolidation within spiritist ideology. These eth-
nic stereotype spirit guides may be ideological representations referring to
earlier syncretisms of healing cult practices from a variety of sources (Gar-
rison 1977:83, 89). However, once this happens the orisha are no longer
what they were within the context of Santeria and their status within Es-
piritismo also becomes inherently ambiguous. Harwood has described the
spirit hierarchy within Santerismo (see figure 3).
The major way in which the orisha are represented in Santerismo is in
chants, prayers, and chromolithographs to the Seven African Powers. ‘This
septet of orisha is not reported as a group in the classic Cuban Santeria
monographs of Cabrera and Ortiz nor in the research of others who stud-
ied Cuban and Puerto Rican communities in New York and Miami in the
mid to late 1960s and early 1970s (Cabrera 1971; Ortiz 1973a; Garrison
1977; Halifax and Weidman 1973; Sandoval 1977, 1979). But both
Gonzalez-Whippler (1973) and Perez y Mena (1977) have identified them
among Puerto Ricans in New York.
The septet of African Powers controls every aspect of life with Chango (Santa
Barbara) representing sensual pleasure; Eleggua (Holy Guardian Angel) op-
portunity; Obatala (Our Lady of Mercy—Las Mercedes) peace and harmony
among people; Oshun (Our Lady of Caridad de Cobre), marriage; Oggun
(Saint Peter), war and work for the unemployed; Orunla (Saint Francis of As-
sisi), gives power by opening the doors to the past and the future; and lastly,
Yemaya (Our Virgin of Regla) fertility and maternity. (Perez y Mena 1977:133)
God
Pure spirits
Saints/orisha
Intranquil spirits
Incarnate spirits
ter appears the crucified Christ captioned as Olofi. Above Olofi’s head ap-
pears a Virgin Mary which is uncaptioned.
The Seven African Powers are represented in chromolithographs, on
glass votive candles, and in commercially printed prayers by their Catholic
manifestations as saints. These syncretized orisha are brought over as a
group and set into the ideological system of Espiritismo. The liturgical
songs of the orisha appear in the centros on phonograph records, and the
ritual elements that appear are often no more extensive than the giving of
bead necklaces (collares) in the color patterns of the individual Seven Pow-
ers. The form of the collares has also been taken over, and new color pat-
terns have been invented to represent other entities in Santerismo. I have
seen these being sold in botánicas as “collares de espiritismo.” The remain-
ing orisha known to Santeria remain outside the new form's pantheon and
have no representations of any kind.
Unlike Santeria, Santerismo is conducted in public centros where its
leaders provide reuniones and consultations after the manner of other
spiritists. The collares, the Seven African Powers, and the playing of re-
cordings of orisha songs are important elements in their reuniones and
make them distinctive, but none of the researchers reports the ritual danc-
ing which is such an important part of many Santeria events and ceremo-
Santeria in the United States (1959-1982) / 111
nies. While some cult leaders adopt the trappings of Santeria’s fictive
kinship system and call themselves madrina or padrino, their relationships
with their clientele retain the transitory, episodic nature typical of the es-
piritista and her client. The congregations of these mediums are constantly
in flux, and the lifelong bond between the madrina and ayijado found in
Santeria does not exist. Neither does the conception of the congregation as
a religious family with obligations toward each other as well as toward the
leader. Some leaders of these groups actually identify their practice to the
public as Santeria. Other mediums have adopted some of the simple lower-
level rituals of Santeria and call themselves santeros or santeras even
though they have no affiliation with a Santeria cult house. Others are me-
diums who have several initiations in Santeria but are not fully initiated
into the priesthood. While it is often said that priests who perform both
Santeria and Espiritismo should practice them in different places, it 1s clear
that many do not. Their economic condition and resources often simply
will now allow for it.
Santeria priests are ambivalent about the practice of Espiritismo in
that some think that it 1s bad for the santeros’ heads for them to also
work the dead; others believe that the santeros must mature in the Espir-
itismo before they can develop fully in Santeria. The relationship of San-
teria to Espiritismo therefore remains ambivalent: it is either bad for
the santeros’ relationship with their orisha, good as a subordinate less
powerful practice, or useful as a complementary system specialized for
specific purposes.
Santero(a)s insist that clients must be freed of all these malevolent spirit influ-
ences before they can undergo any of the major initiation rituals of Santeria. In
Santeria the working of the dead is seen as a means of symptom alleviation,
while the rites of the orisha are devoted to gaining health, personal and inter-
personal power, and success. Thus, for the purposes of curing specific com-
plaints Santero(a)s may also practice “the work of the dead” or they may refer
clients to Espiritistas to have their malevolent spirits “lifted.” (Garrison 1977:95)
work the saints and, in their role as Santeria priests, santeros do not work
the dead. Santerismo practitioners claim to do both.
The emerging practice is judged harshly by both espiritistas and
santeros. Espiritistas see the major motive for people going into this prac-
tice as being the ability to charge fees. Espiritistas do not do this, but
santeros do. By assimilating themselves to a position of santero or santera,
the Santerismo mediums can take over one of the attributes of Santeria’s
specialized priesthood, the ability to demand and the right to receive fees
for ritual services. ‘This leads the espiritistas, even those who do not harbor
a hostility to Santeria, to see the Santerismo mediums as exploitative. Many
white table espiritistas, however, are hostile to Santeria and regard it as a
form of black magic. Such people would regard Santerismo with horror
even if the issue of economic exploitation was not involved. Many santeros,
on the other hand, also condemn the Santerismo mediums for their treat-
ment of the saints as low level spirit guides and see them as charlatans who
claim powers in relation to the orisha which they cannot possess because
they have not undergone the proper initiations and do not use Santeria’s
divination techniques. These distinctions, which are so clear to the adepts,
are a source of confusion to the general run of clients seeking help. The
clients often have difficulty telling one type of practitioner from another.
Much of this seems to be about three things: the evaluation of blackness
in relation to Puerto Rican ethnic identity, the effect of spiritism on black-
ness as an element of ethnic identity, and interethnic competition between
Puerto Ricans and Cubans. Roger Bastide, in a discussion of the role of
Kardecan spiritism in Afro-Brazilian religion, once remarked that in the
use of spiritism by these groups “it is clear that what we have here is a re-
interpretation of the African ancestor cult and the cult of the dead through
Kardec’s spiritualism [szc]” (1971:168). The effect of this reinterpretation,
though, is not necessarily a strengthening of the African practices. In re-
lation to the rest of the system it may well become a means of negating the
residual African culture in societies where there were significant numbers
of enslaved Africans. Bastide sees this also and in another context remarks
that
spiritism represents a means of ascent to the man whose hopes and aspirations
are blocked by the dual barrier of color and social class. It is the only means
through which children of darkness, imprisoned in their skin, can dream of
transforming themselves, in their future existence, into children of light.
(1978:338)
Hence the effect of Puerto Rican Espiritismo on the evaluation of blackness
is ambiguous both on the island and in New York. The clash between the
realm of the sacred and the powers of secularization and capitalism which
occurred in Cuba had their counterparts in Puerto Rico. But nothing com-
parable to Santeria existed there. Instead, what occurred was an erosion of
black heritage, an erosion so corrosive that many of the practices derived
Santeria in the United States (1959-1982) / 113
from Puerto Rico’s blacks are now no longer identified with them (Perez y
Mena 1982:44). While belief in spirits and even communication with them
was a common thing in Puerto Rico and some form of African ancestor
veneration probably existed on the island at some point, when Espiritismo
became important there its effect in relation to blackness was also paradox-
ical. At the same time that Espiritismo provided a means by which the up-
per classes, not wanting to identify themselves with the Africans, could still
do what the Africans and lower classes did, 1.e., communicate with spirits
albeit “scientifically,” 1t also provided a legitimization of the ancestor ven-
eration already flourishing there (Perez y Mena 1982:36).
The paradox is further extended by the observation that the resurgence
of spiritism in Puerto Rico over the past thirty years can be connected with
unsettled conditions on the island, with confusions of identity, disruption
of traditional norms, anomie. This collective insecurity feeds into the de-
sire for power, understanding, and relief. But it also feeds into projections
of fear, and that collective fear has often been directed by “white” Puerto
Rican spiritists at black Puerto Rican spiritists without an understanding of
the African origins of the practices of both groups (Seda Bonilla 1969:112—
13, 152).
Espiritismo, which has a lower-class black image on the island of Puerto
Rico and is associated with areas reputed to have a high concentration of
people of African descent, is redefined by Puerto Ricans who migrate to
New York. There it 1s ceases to be represented as confined to one segment
of the population or restricted to only a few areas of the island. In the new
context practitioners begin to view Espiritismo as a strong symbol of a spe-
cifically Puerto Rican identity (Brown and Garrison 1981:21; Morales-
Dorta 1975; Harwood 1977.) Practice of Espiritismo becomes a symbol of
the homeland, almost a national or ethnic symbol representing an identity
that contrasts with general American norms and values. The eruption of
blackness, in the form of the Seven African Powers present in Santerismo,
therefore represents an affirmation of Africa as an aspect of Puerto Rican
ethnic identity. Once the Seven African Powers become encapsulated and
redefined with the context of Santerismo’s ideology and embedded in its
symbolism, they cease to be Cuban. They have been appropriated ideolog-
ically, and in terms of ethnicity they have become Puerto Rican. This is pos-
sible for Puerto Ricans on the mainland, and is found there, because of the
forging of new self-definitions that the Puerto Rican undertakes as the re-
sult of the total migrant situation, including contacts with Cuban santeros.
The acceptance of the orisha, the botanicas, and a positive approach to the
African heritage as a means of symptom alleviation allows the migrant to
accept as positive an element which was negative on the island (Perez y
Mena 1982:50).
All this, however, is on the level of ideology. Whether the practitioner
calls the practice Santeria or something else, neither rejection nor accep-
tance of this label prevents the incorporation of elements of Santeria ritual.
114 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
The bringing over of the Santeria ritual paraphernalia also brings over an
aspect of the santero role which justifies payment. In Santeria the saints
always work for a fee, and this concept is incorporated into Santerismo
along with the ritual materials. As Perez y Mena has observed, the effect of
this is the professionalization of the spiritist and the desire to imitate some
aspects of the social organization of Santeria (1982:374—75). The Santer-
ismo spiritist puts himself or herself into competition with the santero by
trying to build a socioeconomic organization comparable to the cult house
and by arming himself or herself with a version of the santero's powers, rit-
uals, and paraphernalia in order to compete for clients. At the same time
the Santerismo spiritist continues to place his or her beliefs, practices, and
terminology within the ideology of Espiritismo. For those leaders who view
Santeria as sorcery or black magic, this allows them to discourage clients
from going to the Cuban santeros. For those who do not hold this belief, it
allows them to mark themselves off from the santeros in terms of the spir-
itist’s acknowledged supremacy in the work of the dead.
The second new formation of Santeria, Orisha-Voodoo, which I have
dubbed Phase IV Branch 2, needs to be looked at from a dual frame of
reference and within a dual ideological context. To understand it fully one
needs to look at it in relationship to the black nationalist movements of the
1960s and to persisting Santeria. As an arm of the black nationalist move-
ment, Orisha-Voodoo differed from other black nationalist groups in that
its ethos and cultural ideal derived from Yoruba religion. From the point of
view of Santeria, Early Orisha-Voodoo represented a semi-independent
offshoot which had dispensed with the worship of the Catholic saints or any
connection with the Catholic Church. It was composed of U.S.-born blacks
who departed from Santeria tradition in their orientation toward Africa
rather than Cuba as their homeland and in a number of other ways, such
as their promotion of traditional Yoruba social practices, including polyg-
amy, and their revival of the cult of the ancestors.
The movement was begun by Oba Ofuntola Osejiman Adelabu Ade-
funmi I in 1959. Adefunmi was born as Walter King in Detroit in 1928. He
was baptized a Christian at age twelve but withdrew from the Baptist
Church at sixteen. By that time he had already begun studying about Af-
rica and African dance and ballet. Undoubtedly his father, a former mem-
ber of the Moorish Science Temple and a participant in Marcus Garvey's
Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s, had a profound
influence on him as a young man. His first exposure to African religion
was when he joined the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe in 1948. He left
the troupe in 1950, settling in New York, working as an artists’ model
there, and making trips to Egypt, Europe, and the Caribbean. It was in
New York in 1954 that he joined the African nationalist movement and be-
gan to found nationalist political organizations based on the practice of Af-
rican religion. This was a period marked by much study of anthropological
and political literature, attempts at liaisons with Haitian Vodun practitio-
Santeria in the United States (1959-1982) / 115
ners and the remains of the old Harlem Garveyite movement, and culti-
vation of personal relationships with Africans and people knowledgeable
about African culture. In 1959 he went to Matanzas, Cuba, and was initi-
ated into the Santeria priesthood as an Obatala priest, making him the first
Afro-American to do so. Once back in New York he founded the Shango
Temple with Chris Oliana, a Cuban who had gone with King to Cuba and
had received initiation into the priesthood at that time. King and Oliana
parted ways before the year was over and the Shango Temple dissolved. In
1960 King incorporated his organization as the African Theological Arch-
ministry, moved it to East Harlem, and renamed it the Yoruba Temple. By
this time he was using his African name, Oseijiman Adefunm1.
In its early days the Yoruba Temple was extremely race conscious. Ade-
funmi taught a mixture of political nationalism and African culture. Later
he began to emphasize the need for cultural redemption and encouraged
members of the temple to find personal and racial identity through study-
ing African dance, music, and art as well as wearing African dress and
learning the Yoruba language. He stressed that black nationalism did not
have to be destructive and eschewed all forms of racism. For example,
whites were allowed to attend all but the most secret of the temple’s cere-
monies. “There is no room for racism in our religion,” he said. “If the re-
ligion 1s valid for blacks, it applies to whites as well. We teach that when an
Afro-American has self-respect, he has no need to fear or hate the white
man” (quoted in Clapp 1966:5).
This did not mean that he did not see a fundamental opposition be-
tween African and Western cultures. He did: “The purpose of Western cul-
ture 1s to perfect the physical world. Africans want to perfect the spiritual
environment. Our achievement is ‘human technology.’ Here in America we
have been briefly conquered by European culture, but we are Africans
nonetheless.” He and his followers found the resolution of this conflict in
the practice of Orisha-Voodoo. This involved utilizing the orisha idiom as
an array of personality types for blacks to use in the search for a personal
and cultural identity.
Adefunmi said that Orisha-Voodoo involved a worship of one’s own personality,
with the recognition that one must limit the forces controlling the personality.
The religion was frankly idolatrous, but idolatry made good psychological sense
because it gave worshippers a set of ideal types they could use to understand
themselves. Africans had been robbed of such ideal types when they were
brought to America. “People can find their identity through their own partic-
ular god,” he said. “The religion has resulted in the rehabilitation of a lot of
mixed up people.” (Clapp 1966:16)
itage of each group as a basis on which they could organize politically un-
der the banner of black cultural nationalism.
In the hierarchy of the Santeria priesthood Adefunmi belonged to the
lowest rank, the olorisha, or owner of the gods. Furthermore, he had been
told that he was destined to become a babalawo, an Ifa diviner. That made
it impossible for him to initiate people into the Santeria priesthood. He re-
lied on Assunta Serrano, a Puerto Rican woman who had been initiated
into the priesthood in Puerto Rico, to do this. Serrano was an espiritista
medium as well and held spiritist sessions at the temple for its members.
Adefunmi was also forced to rely on the presence of Cuban and Puerto Ri-
can santeros to legitimize the temple’s initiations. The presence of a Cu-
ban babalawo at the initiation of a new priest was absolutely mandatory if
the initiate was to be recognized within the Santeria community. While at-
taching himself to Cuban and Puerto Rican priests to study rituals with
them in both New York and Puerto Rico, he also continued reading an-
thropological works and other sources of information on Yoruba and West
African religion.
Adefunmi's relationships with the established Cuban priesthood be-
came strained as time went on, but especially so after the founding of the
African Nationalist Partition Party. The Cubans were not eager to intro-
duce Santeria to black Americans on a large scale. In Cuba everything
about the religion was secret, and the Cuban priests did not share Adefun-
mi's desire to proselytize among blacks. Furthermore there seem to have
been some elements of racism and ethnic prejudice in their attitudes. They
felt blacks were not ready for the religion and would denigrate it or, worse
still, attract the attention of the police (Hunt 1979:27). There were other
differences, too. Some members of the established priesthood did not view
Santeria as being African in origin at all but saw it as having always been a
Cuban occult practice. “There was some resentment among certain white
Cubans when informed that the Religion was of African origin. They had
come to regard it as a Cuban form of freemasonry!” (Adefunmi 1981:4).
In spite of their reliance on the Cuban priests, Orisha-Voodooists
(Yorubas) did many things that opposed their practices. Adefunmi had
built a public temple. This outraged the Cubans. Santeria’s long history of
persecution in Cuba had made secrecy not only an external adaptation to
attack but almost an independent cultural element in its own right which
defined Santeria as occult. In the new American context Santeria was not
a suppressed religious sect but a secret society. It was not so much that Ade-
funmi endangered himself or other santeros. What he had done was break
a socioethnic, rather than a religious, taboo. A similar instance of taboo
breaking was his dispensation of Yoruba names. In Santeria, knowledge of
an initiate’s Yoruba or Lucumi name was the mark of being an insider and
the names were used only among priests. Adefunmi gave out Yoruba
names freely to women who came to the temple seeking names for their
118 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
children and even to temple members who had not yet been initiated into
the priesthood. Moreover he encouraged blacks to use these names pub-
licly and to substitute them for their English or “slave” names. Open weekly
bembes and performances on television and film were all part of his cam-
paign to aggressively publicize the religion. Under his leadership members
of the Yoruba Temple performed at the African Pavilion of the New York
World's Fair in 1965. All this was consistent with his avowed intentions and
cultural nationalist orientation, and throughout this period he was able to
attract attention and new members to the movement.
But the public character of his activities ran entirely counter to what the
Cuban and Puerto Rican santeros were doing. Their reactions were telling
and fixed on key symbols. Adefunm1's violation of the secrecy taboo even-
tuated in death threats. Priests threatened to kill him by magical means.
Santeros condemned and prohibited African attire, a prime symbol of Af-
ricanness in Orisha-Voodoo and the black nationalist movement in general.
Most important of all was the Orisha-Voodooist’s refusal to use saints’ 1m-
ages in their shrines and on their altars. The replacement of these Catholic
symbols with carvings copied from photographs in books of African art
containing the actual Yoruba images was more than the Cubans could
stand. For them it was clear that there could be no Santeria without the
santos. Replacing the santo’s representation with some unrecognizable
alien figure taken from a book was a violation of what they considered the
core of their religion—devotion to and aid from the Catholic saints. It was
also tantamount to saying that the religion was not Cuban. For Adefunmi
the removal of the saints’ images was simply the most obvious expression of
his explicit intention, that is, to purify Santeria of all non-African influ-
ences and return the remaining Yoruba-Dahomean elements to the form
in which they had been practiced in West Africa.
Not all of the bad feeling existing between the Cubans and Adefunmi
was being sent out by the Cubans. Adefunmi himself became more militant
and under the influence of others in the African Nationalist Independence
Partition Party was becoming more racist in his attitudes (Hunt 1979:28).
This was not helpful in his dealings with the established Cuban priests, be-
cause by U.S. definitions the majority of these priests and all the babalawos
were white. More black Americans were becoming involved in Santeria,
both inside the temple and outside as the black power and black pride and
black nationalist thrust swelled. Increasingly the Cubans directed black as-
pirants away from Adefunmi, calling him racist and incompetent, and in1-
tiated the blacks themselves.
These animosities did not deter Osejiman Adefunmi from attempting
to carry out his original aim of unifying the different African-based rell-
gious groups around some version of a black nationalist perspective. In No-
vember 1965 Adefunmi met with a group of Cuban and Puerto Rican
santeros to discuss a real unification of the American and Caribbean
groups. Juan Rene Bettancourt, former president of the Federated Asso-
Santeria in the United States (1959-1982) / 119
ciations of Black People of Cuba under Fidel Castro, mediated this confer-
ence (Clapp 1966:23). Nothing came of this attempt at conciliation,
however. The Cuban and Puerto Rican priests wanted nothing to do with
Adefunmi's black nationalist politics. They did not identify their interests
with those of African Americans. Adefunmi's acerbic and exasperated re-
sponse to this was to tell the Cuban and Puerto Rican priests that they were
still “just a bunch of Christians” (Clapp 1966:23). This marked his final de-
cisive break with the Cuban Santeria establishment. Though he no longer
could expect much from the established priests, there were Afro-Cubans
who were secretly sympathetic to the aims of the Yoruba Temple and con-
tinued to pass on vital ritual and other information to Adefunmi and oth-
ers in the movement (Adefunmi 1981:4).
In 1965, after a series of severe personal and organizational crises, Ade-
funmi was forced to close the temple. He soon brought in a Puerto Rican
diviner to purify and revive the temple so that it might reopen. The diviner
was not successful, and the temple closed again until early 1966. The read-
ing of the year for 1966 revealed the proper sacrifices, cleansings, and
herbal baths to revive the temple, and Adefunmi carried out the work him-
self rather than relying on the Cubans or Puerto Ricans. The success of this
work gave him great satisfaction and began his gradual divorce and inde-
pendence from Santeria (Clapp 1966:40). He was already talking about
founding a Yoruba village in South Carolina, but this idea was not put into
motion until 1970. By then he had closed the Yoruba Temple and left New
York. In April 1970 he initiated three Afro-Americans without either the
presence or the advice of any of the Cuban babalawos or santeros. In Au-
gust he initiated a second group of priests with the assistance of a Nigerian
priest and a former temple member who had been initiated by the Cubans
(Cohn 1973; Hunt 1979:39-41). To my knowledge none of these people
are acknowledged by the Cubans as legitimate priests. Hunt wrote that
Omowale, Adefunmt's first initiate into the Orisha-Voodoo priesthood, “ar-
gued that the Cubans had decided for themselves how they wanted to re-
organize the religion and so, too, had the Brazilians. Therefore it was time
for Black Americans to decide what the religion and culture meant to them
and how they were going to preserve it” (1979:39-40).
In Santeria’s Phase IV, Early Orisha-Voodoo was clearly a case of cul-
tural interpretation followed by divergence. This phase of its history
conforms to a situation A.F.C. Wallace described as a typical process and
Situation for the origin of a revitalization movement: the triangular
alliance-and-identity dilemma (1966:112). In this dilemma one group (A)
finds itself surrounded by two other threatening or competing groups (B
and C). One of them (B) it admires and wishes to identify with in some re-
spects, while the other (C) is defined as an enemy. If group A wishes not
only to identify with group B but also to form a political alliance with it and
is reyected, the result is a dilemma. As long as group A is unwilling to re-
define the enemy (C) as an ally, the only solution remaining is a revitaliza-
120 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
tion movement within group A itself. This redefines the whole situation
and gives group A a new identity, one so strong that it feels that it can go
it alone without an alliance or an identification with either of the other two
groups. Except for the fact that Orisha-Voodoo was already in the initial
stages of a revitalization movement when this sequence of events occurred,
this process describes almost exactly the dilemma of Early Orisha-Voodoo.
White culture and increasingly whites themselves were defined as the en-
emy of Orisha-Voodoo and the black nationalists with whom Adefunmi was
allied. He had sought out Santeria practitioners as allies against the enemy,
admired the storehouse of Africanisms in their religion, and identified
with them to the extent of joining their priesthood and becoming one of
them as had other members of Orisha-Voodoo. But however deeply felt
the alliance and identification were for Adefunmi and other Orisha-
Voodooists, they were still tactical. For in their minds initiation into Sante-
ria took place in the context of an ongoing political and cultural struggle
against the hegemony of white culture over blacks. The strategic project
still remained the repudiation of white culture as a means to the cultural
and political liberation of blacks. When they sought alliance with the
santeros to struggle together against the enemy white culture, they were
rejected. Orisha-Voodoo then redefined the situation so that it did not
have to be dependent upon Santeria for its priesthood. From the point at
which it determined that it had the right to recreate Santeria and Yoruba
religion in its own terms and the strength to consciously create a more sat-
isfying culture, Orisha-Voodoo could initiate its own priesthood, assert it-
self as a force in its own right, and pursue its own direction, independently,
without any alliance with either white culture or Santeria.
PLATE 10. Don Fernando Ortiz presents Santeria bata drummers to
Cuban intellectuals from a concert stage. Havana, 1930s. Photogra-
pher unknown. Herskovits Papers courtesy of the Schomburg Cen-
ter for Research in Black Culture.
PLATE 14. The author (second from left) at a spiritist session in the Bronx, New
York, 1981. Photograph by Ana Hernandez. Courtesy of the Inner-City Support
Systems Project. The woman in the center is a Puerto Rican spiritist medium who
was also initiated as a Santeria priestess in Cuba in the 1950s. In the course of this
session the woman on the far right was possessed by the Orisha Yemaya. The dark-
skinned woman on the author’s right makes quick movements with her arms while
she is going into spirit possession. Author’s collection.
PLATE 15. Santeria drum-
dance, or bembe, for Yemaya
(La Virgen de Regla) and
Ochun (La Caridad del Co-
bre) in the Bronx, New York,
1980. Photograph by the
author.
In searching out the contributions of Africa to the New World, the ten-
dency to concentrate on individual traits which are traceable to African or-
igins (words, performance techniques, aspects of family life, etc.) often
leads to ambiguous or tendentious results. In many cases such a strategy
proves impossible given the present state of knowledge, the specific inter-
ests of past investigators, and the momentous changes occurring in Africa
itself. Even when found, and even when traced back to specific African eth-
nic groups, such individual items do not constitute the only, or perhaps
even the most important, contributions. Indeed such items, even when
they occur in abundance, are equivalent to a list of words from a poorly
known language. Their continued existence is important but as a simple list
the words are the surface of the phenomenon. Perhaps the individual
words and their origins are not nearly as important as the patterns and
structures that organize them. J. Dillard, from the point of view of the stu-
dent of creole linguistics, has insisted on this point for language and it may
well be true for other domains as well:
Once the idea that such organizational principles exist 1s seriously enter-
tained a further possibility comes into view: not only might such principles
of organization be preserved in New World contexts; they might also be
generative and shape adaptations and new cultural production whether
using African, European, or distinctively Afro-American materials. We
would have new productions and adaptations according to preserved prin-
ciples buried beneath the surface of disparate African and non-African
traits. If this is so we can retain much that has been learned, but we
should also begin to reorient our approaches to complement survivals with
structures, adaptations with processes, and retentions with principles of
creativity.
The dialectic between continuity and change is what the two sections of
this chapter are about. The first is concerned with Santeria tradition and
the mechanisms of collective memory; the second is concerned with syn-
cretism and focuses on selected aspects of Santeria as examples of this type
of religious and cultural change. I will put forward my own perspective on
syncretism in Santeria, one which differs from the perspectives of other
scholars who have written about African-American religions.
the African orientation has persisted, he wrote that we need to ask how it
could have been maintained and what mechanisms and circumstances al-
lowed it to be maintained. He went on to describe a number of necessary
conditions for that maintenance.
new data related to these problems and try to place that data into a frame-
work different from what has been proposed so far by many previous in-
vestigators of Afro-Cuban religion and thus provoke, and possibly orient,
future research in a somewhat different direction.
In this section we approach these questions—how could the African
tradition have been maintained and what mechanisms and circumstances
allowed it to be maintained?—from the vantage point of collective memory.
Since we have treated circumstances in detail in earlier chapters, we will be
much more concerned with mechanisms than with circumstances. Our ori-
entation is essentially as follows.
Culture can be regarded as a form of information. Informational re-
sources can accumulate and can be distorted, transmitted or lost over time,
and managed. Management of the available informational resources involves
a system through which the culture manages itself. This self-management
includes determining how information is distributed, transmitted, and
stored. The cultural information defining a system or maintaining its dis-
tinctiveness must be transmitted intergenerationally, and in order to be
transmitted and persist it must be remembered. There are four major types
of information storage through which individuals, groups, and societies re-
member: personal memory, cognitive memory, habit memory (or bodily in-
corporation), and social or collective memory. The mechanisms through
which these forms of memory are transmitted collectively are interpersonal
linkages, strategies for memory encoding, performance, and strategies of
repetition.
Though social or collective memory is the least investigated of the
forms of information storage, it 1s difficult to conceive of either the content
of the individualized forms of memory, the persistence of individual and
social identities, or longstanding and widespread cultural traditions per-
sisting without it or something like it. The classic treatment is that of Mau-
rice Halbwachsin The Collective Memory (1980). Recent treatments of social
or collective memory particularly germane to my argument are Bastide’s
chapter on the subject in his monograph on Afro-Brazilian religions
(1978a), Michel Laguerre’s treatment of the evolution and transmission of
medical traditions in Afro-Caribbean folk medicine (1987), and Phillip
Connerton’s general theoretical study, How Societies Remember (1989). Con-
nerton’s work has been particularly influential on the treatment that
follows.
It is Connerton who distinguishes the four kinds of memory: personal
memory, cognitive memory, habit memory, and social or collective mem-
ory. His typology of memory will serve as a useful starting point, after
which we will begin to apply it to the problem at hand: the mechanisms
underlying the continuity of Yoruba religion in Cuba.
Personal memory refers to an individual’s ability to recall events from his
or her own life history. Persons in possession of personal memory can recall
events from their own past, and when the events are successfully evoked
130 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
they come located in a context, the context in which the persons, places,
things, and events gained their meaning. Personal memory is also con-
cerned with the self that was involved in the past events as well as the self
that is recalling these events in the present. It is in relation to the self that
we recognize in personal memory both a distance and a continuity.
We can recall an image from our past, but we cannot live the past dif-
ferently; we cannot alter it in any way that would affect what we have be-
come. The pastness of these images seems irrevocable, the images
themselves veiled, the time distant. Yet there is continuity to the self in per-
sonal memory as well. A sense of continuity with our own past experiences
exists because the self who experienced the events in the past is the same
self who remembers them in the present.
Because of personal memory we are able to have a coherent sense of
identity and a persisting sense of self. With the aid of personal memory we
gain the ability to relate consistently to other people and even to conceive
of them as having identities like our own. Our past personal history is a
very significant source for our conception of who we are in the present, yet
a great portion of our conception of ourselves and our knowledge of our-
selves is fashioned by how we view, now, what we have done in the past. Our
evaluations of our personal past also condition what we see as our possi-
bilities for the future.
Cognitive memory is the form of memory that allows us to remember the
meanings of words, recite a line of poetry or a song lyric unaided, and re-
call narratives such as jokes and stories. Schemas and models of the envi-
ronment, like the mental map of a city or neighborhood we use when
giving directions to someone who is lost, are stored in cognitive memory, as
are such statements of abstract relationships as mathematical equations.
Our ability to recall instructions for properly carrying out any procedure
(whether it is a recipe or a line of reasoning) and our ability to remember
what the outcome should be (a good meal or logical truth) are other ex-
amples of cognitive memory.
For cognitive memory it is not necessary that the object of memory it-
self be something that is past. Cognitive memory does not require that the
object of memory be past; it only requires that the object of memory was
encountered, experienced, or learned in the past. Information summoned
from cognitive memory arrives relatively detached from personal memory.
The person need not be able to recall anything about the episodes of learn-
ing or their context to retain and use the information.
Out of the stream of all our previous activities, consciously and uncon-
sciously we shape isolated physical and cognitive acts into a large number of
coordinated sequences of acts which form practices of some kind. Riding a
bike, writing one’s name on a piece of paper, greeting a person by shaking
hands, playing a melody on a musical instrument, reading a book, and
speaking one’s own native tongue in ordinary conversation are common
everyday examples of such practices. Once we initiate a particular practice
Continuity and Change / 131
we call up, en bloc, the numerous individual behaviors which compose it;
these acts form a stream in which each behavior or thought follows the next
almost automatically. Our ability to retain these practices in readiness and
to execute them when needed is what we mean by the term habit memory
(Connerton 1989:94). In habit memory the difference between knowing,
doing, and remembering almost evaporates because demonstrating posses-
sion of a specific habit memory requires the capacity to reproduce a par-
ticular performance and to do it, more or less effectively, whenever the
need arises. Habit memory is concerned not with facts but with actions, not
with the cognitive knowledge of rules or codes but with the ability to ex-
ercise mental and physical skills.
We often may not be able to recall how we acquired the specific knowl-
edge or skill or where or when we acquired it. Lack of use or lack of prac-
tice may put us in the position where we are not even sure that we have
acquired a knowledge or skill or still remember it. Only when we find our-
selves in situations like this are we forced to make the additional effort to
use conscious recollection as a guide to what was formerly an habitual act
or performance. In this case the only way we can recognize for ourselves or
demonstrate to others that we actually do remember the skill is to try and
perform it. Habit memory, then, is not the same as a ready knowledge of
codes, rules, maps, or procedures; nor is it simply an addition to cognitive
memory. It seems almost to be a substrate for the practical use of the con-
tents of cognitive memory because the trajectory of repeated, consistent,
successful, and convincing performances of the rules, codes, maps, and
procedures requires it.
Philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Bertrand Russell considered
personal and cognitive memory as “true” or “knowledge” memory and dis-
tinguished it from habit acquired through past experience. They at-
tempted to separate mental acquisitions from bodily ones and privileged
the mental while regarding the body as inferior. For them memory had to
be a cognitive act to be of any philosophical significance, and this decisively
excludes habit. Yet habit is an intrusive feature of our mental life and is
often present where at first sight it appears not to be. It is especially dif-
ficult to separate cognition and habit or motor memory in the realm of
culture, where it is clear that both cognitive acquisition and bodily incor-
poration are avenues for culture learning. Herskovits recognized this:
If we assume that culture is learned, it becomes apparent that the enculturative
experience, the cultural expression of the learning-conditioning process, is so
effective in shaping thought and behavior that the major portion of the
response-patterns of the individual tend to be automatic rather than reasoned.
In this sense, then, cultural stability derives from the fact that so much of so-
cially sanctioned behavior lodges on a psychological plane below the level of con-
sciousness. It is only when these automatic responses—which, it should be
recognized, may include overt or implicit reactions—are challenged, that emo-
tional and thought processes are called into play. In terms of cultural dynamics,
132 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
craft guild, a war party, a children’s play group, and so on, serves as a stor-
age unit” (Roberts 1964:440).
While we can assume that there is a theoretical limit to the amount of
information any one individual or combination of individuals can learn
and remember, it is probably true, also, that no individual receives as much
instruction, possesses as much information, or has amassed as large a
memory bank as the individual can possibly absorb. The fact that transmis-
sion usually takes place in a cultural context further limits the actual capa-
bilities for the storage of information. In practice, transmission in cultural
context involves selecting particular information, channeling it to specific
groups of individuals, and articulating both the groups of individuals and
the information in such a way that the memories and experiences conveyed
to them are stored and can continue to be transmitted. This may mean that
the information becomes (at least potentially) available to all members or
that, while the information remains in the group’s store of collective mem-
ory, certain groups of people have access to it while others do not.
The vehicle of collective memory consists of a group of human beings
linked through communication. This network of human communication,
though, is always being punctured: disease strikes people and renders them
uncommunicative. Members of the group leave the network and go to a
place beyond regular contact. Worse still, they may withhold memory will-
ingly or become truly unable to remember. Finally and inevitably, each gen-
eration 1s winnowed by death.
The fact that a social group endures beyond the life span of any single
individual member does not ensure that it is able to “remember” in com-
mon or that it will be able to do so in the future. The main means of re-
placing the disappearing nodes in the web 1s through socializing children
and adults before the older members die. Older members of the group
must transmit their mental representations of the past to the younger
members. Only in this way will the two generations even have the oppor-
tunity to share a common image and representation of the group’s past;
only by repeating this process with every generation does the group actu-
ally come to feel and think of itself as possessing and sharing a common
past. A group’s failing memories and disappearing elders may be partially
replaced also by adding individuals from other groups and by continuing to
socialize them. Much of tradition as well as collective memory resolves,
then, into acts of person-to-person communication. One of the lifelines of
collective memory is a continually renewed chain of person-to-person
transmission within institutions and persisting social networks. If this is the
case then the description of the storage pattern of a society is essentially a
description of the formal, informal, explicit, implicit, individual, and group
roles (Roberts 1964:441).
The ideas of individual and collective memory provide only tentative
clues to the formation of Santeria and other Afro-Cuban religions during
134 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
the colonial period and the postindependence era. While these ideas help
us to look for and reveal the ways through which the Afro-Cuban slaves
and their descendants reconstituted the religious experiences of their old
religious communities, they also bring into relief a number of problems. It
is some of these clues and problems that we now turn to explore.
Many local cult groups existed in the Yoruba territories. Many were sim-
ply local religious groups whose deities might not have been venerated any-
where else in Nigeria. Other deities, however, were widely worshiped
throughout the whole area but institutionalized as local groups and indi-
vidual priests in their communities. The hierarchy of Yoruba religious au-
thorities really began at the family level, where the family head carried out
religious functions on behalf of the people residing in his compound. Cor-
responding officials existed at the level of the ward, the town or village
quarter, and for the village or town as a whole at public shrines. Especially
in the period before the Owu and Egba wars, it was probably family heads
and quarter-level and village-level priests who were brought to the Amer-
icas. During the Owu and Egba wars, though, entire villages and towns,
and hence entire priesthoods, were enslaved. The higher-level temple or-
ganization charged with the veneration of the most widely spread deities
and those most closely connected with kingship were centered in the cap-
itals and in the courts. It is possible that priests and priestesses from these
temples were not enslaved and traded across the Atlantic, but this is by no
means certain. It was inevitable that some priesthoods would not appear in
Cuba. Their priests or priestesses were not enslaved or there were not sut-
ficient numbers of devotees of the particular orisha. Perhaps groups of
specialists and devotees tried to organize themselves into a priesthood of
purely local significance but were unsuccessful. Maybe the personnel were
there but their knowledge was too limited, so that the worship of that par-
ticular deity died with them. In the earliest period of slave importation,
priests or devotees may well have perished without either biological or spir-
itual descendants.
The lone Yoruba slave priest or priestess was only able to reconstruct
that part of the collective memory which he or she had experienced and
that part of the religious knowledge and experience that had been com-
municated to him or her by other people in Africa. This did not encompass
the totality of the African ethnic group’s experience. Probably not even all
of the priest’s personal past remained accessible because the environment
was so different; there were no Yoruba compatriots, and there was little op-
portunity to put the knowledge to use in the service of others (Laguerre
1987:16). One probable exception to this is ancestor veneration, the cult of
the dead.
In Yoruba territories the ancestor cult was called Egungun. The Yoruba
scholar S. O. Babayemi, an Egungun lineage member and participant in
Egungun ritual since childhood, has described the social and spatial con-
texts in which the Egungun are venerated in Nigeria.
Continuity and Change / 135
In Africa, the worship of Egungun has historically been linked with family lin-
eages. These Egungun function either individually in the interest of their par-
ticular families or collectively in the interests of the community. When they
function collectively they transcend family and lineage alignments. When nec-
essary, Egungun are invoked individually or collectively on the graves of ances-
tors (oju orori), the family shrines (ile run) or the community grove (igbale).
The ancestors were invited to physically visit the earth through masquerades
referred to as Egungun or Ara Orun (inhabitants of heaven). Many community
Egungun led their communities in wars or performed other social, political and
ritual functions. (1980:1-4, 25)
Mintz and Price have suggested that among Africans in diaspora cog-
natic descent groups evolved their particular form in order to maximize
the number of people participating in ancestor rites (1976:35). Such
groups probably came into existence early in the history of slave importa-
tion, and in the plantations and cities of the Caribbean they would have
had few tasks they could perform other than ancestral rites. Since cognatic
descent groups include all the ancestors of a person and all the person's
descendants, even lone Yoruba males who never formed families could
participate in their rites. Unless they were reinforced by continuous im-
ports of fellow ethnics, one would expect that any ethnic basis restricting
participation in the descent group ancestral rites would become attenuated
through time and successive generations of interracial and interethnic mat-
ing. Even in the absence of fellow Yorubas, then, Yoruba people would
have participated in and maintained the ancestral rites of the cognatic de-
scent groups because of the central role the ancestors played in shaping the
ongoing life of the community and the individual lives of community
members.
In the situation where there were many other Yorubas, the role of
maintaining the habits and the images of past religious experience was
probably largely performed by adult women, older men, healers, and di-
viners. Adult women, whether or not they were priestesses before impor-
tation, passed the lore on in the course of child care and rearing.
Conscientious older men took on the role of keepers of family and cult tra-
ditions. Healers and diviners on the plantations and in the cities could
function as religious specialists who worked on behalf of their own relatives
and friends and on behalf of others to give guidance, to advise, heal, and
settle disputes within the slave community. All of them, adult women, adult
males, healers, and diviners, were in a position to transmit their memory to
a younger generation.
The survival of the cult of the dead into the present day attests to the
importance of ancestors in every African ethnic group. Beyond that it
points to the centrality of kinship for Africans. Newly imported Africans on
the plantations and in the cities of the Caribbean, despite their far-flung
origins, would have shared some quite broadly defined conceptions con-
cerning kinship. Among all the enslaved Africans there would have been
136 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
This deity comes from the Mandingas. This deity left his territory because of
war and other reasons; as other prisoners were imported so were they. Just like
the Takuas, the Magino and other peoples, it happened that they brought thou-
sands of Lucumis to Cuba; it was they who made Ozain speak here as he had in
Africa.
Ozain came to light when there was formed a Confederation of Council of
the orisha; before this conference only Inle was known.
Inle preceded Ozain in what was actually Ozain's work, being known till
then as the greatest expert on herbs. Before all the Olochas [santeras] knew
Ozain, Inle was the god of medicine, medications and all medicinal substances.
When Ozain finally arrived on these shores, Inle had to take a second place with
regard to herbs. (Angarica n.d.; my translation)
from the collective memory because there were still Mandingas in Cuba,
but what this Mandinga brought to the Lucumi became defined as Lucumi
and entered the tradition of Lucumi religion.
In another example we can see the opposite kind of situation, one in
which the status of the new information has to be changed in order to
make it fit into a preexisting religious structure. “Thomas Chappel has pro-
duced evidence to show that the present veneration of twins as deities in
Yoruba territories 1s the result of the reversal of an earlier practice of twin
infanticide. Chappel's research and interviews with high-ranking Yoruba
priests led him to the conclusion that the Yoruba practice of twin infanti-
cide was transformed into a cult of twin veneration some time between
1750 and 1850 (1974:250). The statues of the Ibeji, a little pair of wood
carvings which the mothers of deceased twins carried and cared for,
changed from being representations of the souls of dead twins into being
orisha. If Chappel's dates are right, a Yoruba cult devoted to the venera-
tion of the twins could not have arrived in Cuba before 1750. In Nigeria
the twin statues continued to be kept by women who had borne twins and
lost one or both of them, but the veneration did not develop a priesthood.
In Cuba, however, possession of the Ibeji carvings, or the religious dolls
that eventually replaced them, ceased to be solely the prerogative of moth-
ers who had lost twins. Lucumi also received the carvings if they were one
of a set of twins whose brother or sister had died (Anagarica n.d.:55). This
was not the end of the transformation, however. In Cuba the Ibeji, now de-
ities, developed a priesthood, and images of the twin deities were incorpo-
rated into the hierarchy of initiation rites. In his description of the Ibeji,
Anagarica notes correctly that in Africa there were no Ibeji priests. He
then goes on to say that in Cuba there weren’t any Ibeji priests being in1-
tiated until about two generations before himself, roughly the 1890s
through 1910 or so. At that point there was an Ibeji priesthood where
there had not been one before and there was also knowledge which Ibeji
priests had which was not there before (55). The Ibeji priesthood could not
be “remembered” or “come to light” the way Ozain’s did because it did not
already exist, yet now it is considered just as “traditional” as any of the
other priesthoods.
The councils made their decisions on the basis of the informational re-
sources available to them at the time and in line with their own goals and
intentions. Early on they had set a basic orientation in which the extant
knowledge and memory of all the available orisha cult groups and priest-
hoods were to be housed within a single hierarchically organized structure.
The intended and unintended consequences of their decisions modified
the social contexts in which future action took place. Their decisions af-
fected how new information from previously unknown Yoruba priesthoods
would be institutionalized. In this instance continuity represented a re-
peated process of recollecting and rebuilding in line with traditional social,
cultural, and religious goals. What this yielded was a subtle mutual trans-
Continuity and Change / 139
both are now used in New York (Bascom 1980; Brandon 1983:247). In
Yorubaland the ikin were a set of sixteen Guinea palm or kola nuts. In
Cuba the ikin were small seedlike nuts or tiny coconuts which were known
as “coconuts of Ifa.” In Cuba, and now in the United States, the divining
chain is by far the more frequently used technique. The diviner inserts
eight pieces of gourd, mango seeds, tortoise shell, or brass between the seg-
ments of the chain, then holds the chain in the middle so that each of the
eight objects that render the outcomes of the divination can fall “open” or
“closed” independently of the others. There are, then, sixteen possible out-
comes for each half of the divining chain, with a total of 256 (sixteen times
sixteen) possible outcomes for one throw. The complete divining apparatus
includes a divining board on which the diviner spreads a powder in which
he marks the outcomes of his divinatory casts. Each outcome has a name,
a graphic representation, and a set of verses, stories, and prescriptions con-
nected with it which it 1s the job of the diviner to have at his command.
Since divination is seen as a means of receiving communication from the
orisha, in this case Orunmila, the outcomes are what “Ifa says.” After the
divination outcome is revealed, everything else is either prescribed or de-
pendent on the particular lore a specific diviner has stored in memory. All
this is a nearly exact reproduction of Yoruba practices.
The Ifa diviner tells the client a myth or story explaining how someone
in the past had a similar problem and what was done about it, then gives a
set of instructions for the client to follow, usually involving a ritual and a
sacrifice of some kind. Stories embodying themes of the outcome follow.
Not all of the characters in these stories are orisha. Many are diviners or
clients, and in some cases even the named outcomes have become person-
ified as mythological characters (see Bascom 1952:174). The situations in
the stories revolve around fundamental problems of living in society, prob-
lems which are sometimes complicated by the malevolent magical practices
of friends and enemies. They also contain historical and geographical in-
formation. These stories tell not only of people who sacrificed and followed
what “Ifa said”—these people succeeded, prospered, and got what they de-
sired—but also of those who did not follow the advice of the oracle—these
people failed, destroyed themselves and others, or drove what they needed
even further from them.
Through Ifa a complex, tense, or obscure situation is transformed into
a precedent—a category of problems with which the diviner and the orisha
already know how to deal—and into the form of a system of specified ob-
ligations between humans and the orisha cast as propitiations, exchanges,
atonements, thanks offerings, purifications, and protective measures.
In Santeria divination in Cuba and the United States, the names of the
outcomes, the divination technique, most of the objects used, even the or-
der in which the divination outcomes are learned point to an unmistakable
African and, more specifically, Yoruba origin, as do the names of the dei-
ties who appear in the stories and the place names that are evoked (Bran-
don 1983:253-255; Bascom 1952). It cannot be ignored, though, that at
142 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
the same time as the ritual aspects of divination show great and specific
continuities with African tradition, there is a part of the mythology and
lore of the diviners (what Ifa says) which shows the imprint of the Cuban
experience, particularly in reference to African ethnic groups with which it
is extremely unlike that Yorubas had any contact in their home territories
but certainly encountered in Cuba. If we approach Santeria divination rit-
ual not as a type of symbolic representation but rather as a kind of stereo-
typed performance, what contrasts it with myth 1s that myth seems to have
a reservoir of possibility on which variations can be played, while Ifa divi-
nation ritual does not permit such variation.
The Ifa divination ritual appears to have been held more tenaciously
and been sustained in traditional form over longer periods of time than its
mythology. In Santeria divination, ritual action seems to define a broad
channel for the more variable and more rapidly changing elements of myth.
But the divination ritual does not really interact with the myths the diviner
tells, except to impose upon them some very general constraints which fol-
low from the nature of the outcomes to which the myths are attached and
the use of these narratives as paradigms and exemplars of problems and
problem solving. The interpretation of the diviner’s narrative tradition 1S
conditioned both by its traditional content and the contemporary situa-
tions of clients. The continuity of these myths, then, is in the hands of the
diviners, for it is they who must apply them to contemporary problems.
In an earlier period anthropologists used to emphasize the conserva-
tive, integrating, and stabilizing roles of social and religious rituals. Con-
temporary anthropologists are just as likely to see ritual performances and
cultural media as throwing light on the ways in which cultural themes and
values are communicated as well as on processes of social and cultural
change (Singer 1972:77). Ritual performances, however, are not simple re-
flections of culture nor direct unmediated expressions of culture change
either. As Turner has suggested, cultural performances may themselves be
active agencies of change. Through cultural performances a culture
achieves a separate vision of itself and may create a canvas on which it
paints a picture of what life would be like if people could change how they
lived with each other or even the very nature of their own individual lives
(1986:24).
Turner has a predilection for viewing ritual and performance as agents
of change. This pushes him to deny that rituals which appear to create an
image of society “as it is” are a dominant form within the genre; rather it
is those performances which create an image of society “as it is not”
(whether that image is of a future state, a remote past, a distant place, or
another world) which he seems to see as dominant, especially rites of pas-
sage which are examples par execllence of ritual as transformation. |
would prefer not to prejudge the issue and to leave it up to observation to
see which of these tendencies predominates in any particular case. Indeed
in any particular case there may be conflict or disagreement even among
Continuity and Change / 143
of sequences of natural and cosmic processes and social events and trans-
posed into a calendrical frame of reference, one of equal and undifferen-
tiated time units. The calendar puts beside the structure of sacred time,
formed out of all the periods repeatedly marked off for specific and nota-
ble commemorative ceremonies, the structure of a profane time that oc-
curs between these intervals. Despite the tendency of the calendar to make
one day like the next, the sacred and profane times are not reducible to one
another. Each day may belong to two different orders of time, the day on
which events take place in the world and the day of remembrance on which
one celebrates the memory of some past person or event from a sacred
mythic history.
The commemorative ceremony shifts the community into ritual time,
but that time itself 1s split and remains on two contiguous but nonidentical
planes. At the same time as the African-style commemoration is linked to
and correlated with the public Catholic processions, mass attendance, and
feasting and takes advantage of the heightened ritual activity, santeros tem-
porally differentiate their worship within this larger movement into a sa-
cred ritual time.
Not all santeras coordinate their African-style drum-dance celebrations
honoring the orisha precisely in accord with the Cuban Catholic calendar,
as shown in table 4. There arises a kind of temporal aura surrounding the
Catholic saints’ days which allows Santeria to establish a relationship of cor-
respondence with them which nonetheless remains bivalent. For santeros
these two commemorative feasts have never entirely merged. The Chris-
tian and African celebrations never take place at the same time, and one
never substitutes for the other. They refer to contiguous and intersecting
but nonidentical pasts. The full dual complex of celebrations reflects and
commemorates this intersection. If the saint is properly celebrated by a
Sunday morning mass at church and a public religious procession, the or-
isha comes down to earth the night before at a devotee’s home or in a
rented hall to receive its homage of drums, dancing, and food. Both the
calendar and this peculiar rhetoric of repetition are a zone of compromise.
Continuity and Change / 145
The repetition of this dual religious calendar, among other things, contin-
ues, commemorates, and repeats this prototypical divided moment of
accommodation.
Verbal encoding determines how we represent linguistically, both to
ourselves and to other people, the information stored in memory. Santeria
structures many recurrent ritual contexts in such a way that participants
are compelled to use Lucumi, a verbal code which is archaic and very dif-
ferent from their ordinary language. The differing contexts in which the
two codes are used signal a distinction between sacred and profane lan-
guage and marks one language, the sacred one, as the medium for address-
ing deities, spirits as well as humans, and the other for everything else. The
compulsive repetition of a sacred and archaic tongue has a raison d'étre as
long as rites refer back to some prized earlier period, and there is a special
authority given to texts transmitted in this code. Such texts have to be seen
as true in a way in which translations of the same texts into another lan-
guage would not be true. They also need to be seen as having been trans-
mitted without error. Since neither Santeria nor its parent Yoruba religion
is a revealed religion with a sacred book, the motive for use of the archaic
code in Santeria is not fidelity to a revelator or an original pronouncement
or text which itself has divine authority; rather it resides in a kind of re-
sidual ethnic factor in which, among other things, the Yoruba deities and
ancestors are expected to like and heed best requests that are addressed to
them in their own native tongue.
Lucumi has not been the object of a great deal of investigation. At one
time it was thought to be a pidgin. Cuban Lucumi speakers considered it to
be Yoruba or a combination of a number of Yoruba dialects. In Bascom’s
Cuban studies he always referred to it as Yoruba, and he was the first sci-
entist to assert that it was genetically related to Yoruba. In 1953 linguist
David Olmstead tested Bascom’s assertion by undertaking a comparison of
Yoruba and Lucumi texts which he collected in Nigeria and Cuba, respec-
tively. He used a comparative method of investigating phonemic corre-
spondences in cognate items. While Olmstead was able to show that the
great majority of the phonemes of Lucumi also occur in Yoruba, only 48.5
percent of the words in his Lucumi texts were indubitable Yoruba cognates.
Nevertheless, a great number of terms were very plausibly identical to or
clearly related to Yoruba words in both sound and meaning. Some of the
phonemic differences were clearly traceable to the influence of the Spanish
language. Lucumi also differs from Yoruba in its use of pitch and stress and
how pitch and stress combine to indicate differences in meaning. Some Lu-
cumi words and phrases are neither Yoruba nor derived from Spanish.
These forms might well be traceable to other West African languages,
possibly to the Kwa group (to which Yoruba also belongs) and particularly
to Ewe or Fon. Even in New York there are a few old santeros who are
said to be conversant with Fon and who, within the context of Santeria,
perform minor rites that, according to my informants, derive ultimately
146 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
These pantomimic dances, their gestures, steps, costumes and symbols are as
carefully planned as ballet. . . . Their allegorical movements are so stylized that
the uninitiated are unable to understand them without interpretation. In fact,
these religious dances of the Yoruba are much more than ballets, for there is
always singing as well, and in some cases the poetry of the songs is like a myth-
ological parable which the faithful hear and which they find represented in the
pantomime of the dance. (Oritz 1959:261)
This tight-knit complex of song, dance, and ritual gesture kept the mental
images associated with the different orisha available for the devotees who
could get the assistance of older people to help them understand the myth-
ological meaning of what they were seeing.
In some instances, though, people possessed by the orisha actually in-
teract with each other to bring about some result or to enact some facet of
mythology. The most vivid example I observed was in 1979 at a Cuban
Santeria house in New York during a bembe for a newly initiated Ochun
priest. The orisha Yemaya, Ochun, and Oya are considered to be sisters,
and the appearance of all three at this bembe was hoped for as a particu-
larly auspicious event that would augur well for the career of the new ini-
tiate. At the time these notes begin there were three people on the dance
floor who were already possessed, one by Yemaya and two by Ochun. They
then set out to bring an Oya priestess into the possession state so that all
three of the sisters would be there. The whole thing was done in dance.
What had occurred was that the goddesses, people who were already
possessed, were inviting the Oya priestess to join them in the possessed
state, to become a goddess herself. By removing her beads and headwrap
and forming a circle behind her, the onlookers prepared her for that tran-
sition. What was recognized in the dance was transmitted to her through it,
and finally through the dance it was realized, too, when she entered the
center of the dance area in possession, miming the deity. Thus the myth-
ological triumvirate was completed.
The image of the African past held and recited in Santeria’s mythology
is conveyed, sustained, and reinforced in its ritual performances. This
means that what ts collectively remembered in ceremonies celebrating the
orisha, commemorating the ancestors, and so forth is more than the col-
lective equivalent of personal or cognitive memory contained in the my-
thology. Santeria ritual demands not only that participants be competent to
execute the performance but that they become physically and emotionally
involved for the ceremony to work for them. The ceremony must be per-
suasive, SO participants must not only know what to do and how to do it;
they must also be physically habituated to the actions, they must have in-
ternalized in their bodies certain habits and ways of responding for the cer-
emonies to work. To the degree that these habits and ways of responding
have been passed on from the earlier African tradition and continue to be
learned as part of socialization into the religion, they are a component of
social or collective memory and religious tradition, as well as being exam-
ples of the kind of motor habit memory Herskovits referred to. Not unlike
habit memory, ritual requires the capacity of the group to reproduce par-
ticular performances by participating in them at social settings whenever
the need for them arises. Ritual performances, like habit memories, have
their full reality only as practice, but in the case of rituals these are prac-
tices set within the ongoing processes of social life. When an entire reper-
toire of physically habituated motor responses and ways of responding,
such as religious dance and ceremonial spirit possession, are modeled on
and perpetuate an earlier African tradition, the effect of calling them up is,
among other things, to recreate the past and participate in It.
What was most important for the transmission of the African tradition
was the preservation of intact versions of the ancestral institutions—or
reinterpreted or even reified versions of these institutions—alongside a
Continuity and Change / 149
Earth Floor
(abode of the ancestors, source of food) Table
Bowl Bowl
touches touches
Earth table
greets upon entering a room, by prostrating before the priest just as before
an orisha shrine. In public places and non-Santeria contexts the greeting
may be modified from a full bodily prostration to a greeting in which the
person bends over and touches the ground in front of the godparent’s feet.
Within the prostration, then, is embedded an image of kinship and hi-
erarchy which is signified by being performed as human movement. In
prostration one does not simply state or indicate submission or inferior sta-
tus; one actually becomes physically lower and hence also symbolically and
socially lowered. All these messages are incorporated into a single compre-
hensive bodily performance.
One of the most intriguing examples of this kind, and one which also
involves some religious and ecological symbolism, came to light when a Pu-
erto Rican santera explained to me a piece of dinner etiquette. The Sante-
ria house to which she belonged, a very traditional and well-respected one
among the Cubans of New York, had a number of rules around meal tak-
ing which were explained to me by harking back to still older nonverbal
behaviors. “When eating, your feet should touch the floor,” she said. “As
for the plates and bowls on the table, never pick them up and dish your
food out of them. This is ungrateful. Take your dish over to them and, leav-
ing them where they are [i.e., on the table], take the food from them.”
From further questioning I found that this etiquette was related to tradi-
tional Yoruba habits concerning eating sitting down on the earth. “Primi-
tive” fashion, she called it, without disdain (see figure 4). Eating this way 1s
still done in many Santeria houses on certain ceremonial occasions, and in
very conservative houses new priests and priestesses take their meals seated
on floor mats for a year after initiation (Brandon 1983:434).
152 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
We have already seen that Lucumi plantation slaves were able to fashion
altar images and statuary out of wood and clay and that they marked the
walls of their barracks with signs understood only by initiates (Montejo
1968). The faces of the gods could be shaped out of mundane things and
might well have gone unnoticed. Temporary or permanent shrines, since
they were small collections of common objects imbued with invisible pow-
ers through invocation, herbs, and sacrifice, could be erected in the fields
or even in the barracoons. Still, it is unlikely that large collections of such
objects were ever allowed to accumulate in one place on Cuban plantations
during the slavery era unless they were very well hidden.
Just as the rural slave priests and devotees from the different cult
groups probably practiced their cultic rituals independently of each other
in the beginning, so were the faces of the different orisha probably spatially
separated. Where they all came together was in the city and in the coun-
tryside, later, after the abolition of slavery. In Early Santeria the sacred em-
blems which would have been separated and spread throughout a Yoruba
community or the entire Yoruba territories were concentrated, com-
pressed, and juxtaposed to each other within a single altar. The presence of
these shrines in the homes of santeras means that their homes are capable
of becoming temples at any time. Creating these altars was possible be-
cause the individual orisha altars were collections of portable objects that
could be assembled and disassembled and placed beside other altars to cre-
ate a single comprehensive spatial context. Doing this was the spatial equiv-
alent of the corresponding social structural decision to integrate the
separate orisha cult groups into a single religious sect. At the same time, in
the postslavery rural areas and in the western Cuban cities, these orisha
altars and shrines began to take on some of the characteristics of other folk
Catholic altars, for keeping home altars was one of the major practices of
Cuban folk Catholics as well as church Catholics, spiritists, and the adher-
ents of other Afro-Cuban religions. The Santeria shrine became a parallel
to this altar-keeping tradition, one of a set of ethnic and class variations on
this nearly universal Cuban religious practice. Santeria altars are at once
material culture, historical records, and forms of popular art. There is a
visible symbolism which evokes mental images of the orisha, but there is
also a hidden symbolism which evokes not only a mental image but also a
power, ashe, which by its very nature is invisible and has no mental image
of its own. Hence Santeria shrines consist simultaneously of the exposed
and the concealed, the visible and the hidden.
The visible symbolism represented in plate 11 has its origins in myths,
ritual prescriptions, and dreams. The color symbolism is ritually prescribed
and is related to the corresponding colors of each of the santos. Numerous
attributes of the orisha serve as symbols for them in the shrine. These orig-
inate in myth and spill over into ritual, particularly the ritual dress which
the deities assume once they have possessed a devotee. While attempting to
portray the characteristics of the deities according to their ancient mythical
154 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
models, santeras have had to work with what was readily available to them.
Many of the shrine objects are bought and manufactured objects which
were not created to symbolize the santos. The objects have to be taken out
of another context, often a nonreligious one, and put into the religious
context of the orisha shrine. Brass and copper crowns are used to denote
royalty, not the beaded headdress traditional for Yoruba kings. Miniature
oars and miniature ships’ steering wheels evoke the image of the sea god-
dess Yemaya. Ogun requires railroad spikes, European-style anvils, and
iron pistols and pots.
Both the tradition of stereotyped narrative (myth) and the tradition of
stereotyped action (ritual) are storehouses of mental images and concepts
intended to be spoken, remembered, and acted out. All the variety of altar
symbolism is an extension of ancient images already contained in the my-
thology and ritual in interaction with the ecology and technology of the
new environment. The relationship between the concept in the mind and
the sense image (whether present or remembered) is intrinsic. They are
two sides of the same coin, but the relation between the sense image and an
object in the external world is always symbolic, metaphorical, and to a
greater or lesser extent arbitrary (Leach 1976:19; Fernandez 1974:120;
Bucyznska-Garewicz 1979:253). Mythology and ritual provide a set of tem-
plates, guidelines, or exemplars, however, from which conventions can be
extrapolated to cover new instances and to generate new practices. Mental
images of the orisha derived from the mythology and ritual were projected
onto objects from the new environment which could be made to contain
and reinforce the images from memory by representing them externally in
a visible material form that was continually perceptible. Believers at-
tempted to preserve these images and memory collectively by recreating
religious icons or by taking mundane objects, placing them in the appro-
priate spatial context, then designating them as religious icons pointing to-
ward the orisha and distinguishing one orisha from another (see Ojo
1979:336-39). In the process they also incorporated new objects into the
altars on the provision that they were in consonance with the already ex-
isting symbolism or personal characteristics of the deities as represented in
mythology and ritual experience. These objects, then, could become signs
pointing to the presence and existence of the orisha once they became sta-
bilized by convention and habitual use. Any arbitrary association that is re-
peated consistently over a long period begins to appear to be an intrinsic
part of the symbolism which may have always been there. The visible, the
changed and changing face of the gods, embraces materials from scattered
sources. It is an accumulation of symbolic objects of remembrance and tra-
dition, African and Cuban, religious and secular. Put into the space of the
shrine or altar, the objects acquire religious significance and through plac-
ing the objects in the shrine, personal experiences have religious signifi-
cance conferred upon them. In some shrines Catholic symbolism seems
outwardly fused with, yet inwardly separated from, symbols regarded as
Continuity and Change / 155
African. In all cases, however, new symbols are embraced as long as they
can be reconciled and fulfill a function in the old system of belief and in
the social situation of the time.
Now that all of the orisha, symbolized by porcelain tureens, are con-
tained in a single space, they are not simply placed next to each other but
stacked up in a hierarchy in which Obatala, father of all the orisha, is top-
most and Yemaya, their mother, just below him. When the shrine is in use
and in effect becomes an altar, all the appropriate orisha objects are re-
moved from the shelves that usually house them and are placed on the
floor so as to be in contact with the earth (see plates 11 and 12). The san-
tera puts a straw mat in front of the altar so that devotees may prostrate
there (see plate 12). This is done on all important religious occasions. In
ceremonies or altars erected for a particular orisha, the order of prece-
dence which is shown by elevation may be altered. The change of spatial
position signals the specific kind of altar involved. Such is the case in plate
12, which is not a general altar but a throne erected specifically for Yemaya
(Our Lady of Regla), something which is revealed also by the presence of
the crowned black female doll, the chromolithograph, and the blue cloth
covering the large tureen constituting and containing Yemaya’s witnessing
objects. If the photograph reproduced here were in color it would be easy
to recognize the cloth-covered tureens flanking the central one as belong-
ing to Obatala and Ochun because of the color symbolism involved.
Despite the attention and expense lavished on this external visage, ul-
timately all the visual symbolism is but decoration, the accumulation of the
efforts of generations of devotees to represent in a semi-public fashion the
faces of the santos. The visible symbolism. is an accommodation to external
circumstances and an extension of the symbolism of sources of power that
remain hidden and invisible. The sources of this hidden power are con-
cealed within the tureens: a set of stones bathed in an herbal infusion and
sacrificial blood. It is in this nexus of stones, herbs, and blood that the or-
isha reside; it is here that their powers are concentrated and are available
to humans; it is here that humans gain some control over the ashe of the
santos. What is concealed here is not only the ashe but also those elements
of Santeria which are least compatible with either official or folk Catholi-
cism yet represent the union and condensation of the whole array of pow-
ers encompassed within the Yoruba cosmological system. The stones serve,
then, as a powerful symbolic link to the African past. According to believ-
ers, the most powerful stones are those brought from Africa, and some Af-
rican slaves brought to Cuba concealed such stones in their stomachs
(Bascom 1950:523). No one possesses such stones anymore but the stones
in the priests’ orisha shrines are connected with Africa nonetheless once
they have been baptized in the African fashion, that is, “fed” with herbs
and with blood from sacrificed animals.
Bascom, who studied Yoruba culture in Nigeria as well as in Cuba,
noted a difference between the two regions in the ritual emphasis placed
156 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
on stones and herbs. To him, stones and herbs seemed to be more central
to religion, more focal, in Cuba.
On the basis of my own field work among the Yoruba, stones (or ¿mponri),
blood, and herbs do not seem to assume the same importance that they hold in
the minds of Jovellanos worshipers. The mythology or theology of the gods, the
prayers and verbal formulae, and the rituals themselves seem of equal, if not
greater importance. . . . The focal elements of Cuban santeria [the stones, herbs
and blood] may not represent a carry-over of the focus of West African religion,
but a shift in emphasis which has occurred as a result of culture contact. In this
instance, acculturation would have resulted, not in a coalescence of beliefs, such
as 1s represented by the syncretism of African deities and Catholic saints, the
use of plaster images, chromolithographs, candles, and holy water, or the rec-
itation of the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary in santeria rituals, but a shift in the
opposite direction. The present evidence is largely negative, but this interpre-
tration is at least plausible. (1950:526—27)
Bascom’s Cuban research was brief, three months in the summer of 1948,
and his descriptions of Santeria ritual seem to be about the more extreme
Catholic-oriented end of the continuum. (I have never seen a recitation of
the Lord’s Prayer or Hail Mary in any of the Santeria ceremonies and rit-
uals I have attended.) In the light of the material presented earlier in this
chapter and of the history detailed in previous chapters, I believe that in
Santeria the evidence of a “shift in the opposite direction” from syncretism
with Catholicism is no longer largely negative and is quite plausible, espe-
cially given the veil of secrecy and hiddenness which surrounds the stones.
In Nigeria the secrecy of some religious knowledge was conventional
and gave the different priests distinctive types of powers. This was the se-
crecy that separated the family of descendants of one orisha from those of
another and separated the laity from the priesthood. Secrecy assured that
the potentially lethal power which the truth was thought to possess would
be under responsible care and control, for truth had life-destroying as well
as life-enhancing powers. While it was not intended that religious truths
would be kept secret perpetually, it was recognized that revealing them in-
volved control of their possibly deadly effects so that their life-giving effects
could be released (Buckley 1976:418—20). In the plantations and cities of
Cuba this became a secrecy that protected the sons and daughters of the
orisha from the slave master and the police.
What we seem to have here is continuity at one level in the midst of
change on another. At the same time as there is an emphasis on elements
defined in the present context as prototypically African, these elements are
also kept hidden for a number of reasons: for fear of persecution or dis-
approval, for the protection of the things themselves, and because of the
African convention of secrecy that attends the esoteric truths of religion.
Secrecy and hiddenness, too, can be forms of emphasis. The stones, blood,
and herbs remain hidden, concealed in the place where the strong powers
Continuity and Change / 157
reside, more powerful and more truthful because they are hidden. They
are maintained and transmitted as part of the collective memory accessible
to all santeros. Knowingly or unknowingly they are a jealously guarded fo-
cus marking differences between Santeria and Catholicism and emphasiz-
ing the continuity of African religious traditions.
The memory of an African, then, was part of a web of collective mem-
ory that spread throughout an African ethnic group. The uprooting of the
person from African soil, the purgatory of the Middle Passage, and the
casting down as a slave in the Americas did not obliterate individual mem-
ories, but there was a decisive break, an abyss, that separated the old com-
munity in Africa from the new slave community. The cultural resources of
any group never remain constant. When the innovations of individuals be-
come acceptable to the group, when knowledge diffuses from one group or
location to another, when people migrate between the city and the coun-
tryside, and when there are significant demographic shifts in the popula-
tion, the cultural resources of a group are affected. Normally any group
would want to pursue a two-sided strategy of self-management in which it
added to its informational resources while conserving the resources it al-
ready had. Internal problems of gaps and breakdowns in the transmission
process virtually guarantee that there will be some changes in cultural re-
sources over time. Many changes in the cultural resources of a group,
though, are the result of conscious decisions by individuals and organized
collections of individuals within the group. Some changes in cultural re-
sources may even be the result of decisions made by people outside the
group (Roberts 1964:442). A variety of external forces promoted the dis-
integration of African religious consciousness; other external forces pro-
moted the transformation of that consciousness into Catholicism; but there
was an internal process at work, too, that militated against a total recon-
struction. I do not wish to make a case for a pristine, frozen kind of con-
tinuity. That simply is not the case. The African religious system could not
be reconstructed in its original form because memory of it was reshaped by
the activities and experiences of later generations of Afro-Cubans, slave
and free, in the diverse contexts of Cuban society in which they found
themselves. Here we begin to encroach on the problem of Afro-Catholic
syncretism in Santeria. What I have tried to do 1s to suggest some ways in
which the continuity of the tradition may have been accomplished and to
show how the reconstruction of the Yoruba religious system in Cuba was
not only an individual accomplishment but a collective one as well.
Problems of Syncretism
The traditional models for anthropological research have been oriented to-
ward the study of relatively simple, relatively isolated, small-scale “primi-
tive” societies on one hand and marginal, nationally based, culturally
distinctive ethnic groups on the other. Anthropologists could carry out
158 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
studies of these groups with the assumption that for each of them there
was but a single culture. To assume that these monocultural societies and
groups were culturally uniform as well was entirely consistent with that
point of view and projected an ideal of cultural purity that became en-
shrined in the form of a temporal and methodological fiction, the eth-
nographic present. Multicultural societies and the kinds of events and
situations I have described in previous chapters could only be seen as some-
what exceptional cases, culturally impure because they are tainted by con-
tact between cultures and by the odor of history. For this reason the study
of culture contact and syncretism has remained a comparatively undevel-
oped aspect of anthropological research and theory.
The history of Western religious polemic also reveals an intellectual
predilection for purist and elitist philosophies. Syncretic religions, such as
Santeria, certainly look bad in the midst of the emphasis on credal purity
and religious exclusiveness that has dominated the history of Western re-
ligions. In the center of religious battles over doctrine, interpretation, and
ritual, the syncretist 1s a traitor, someone whose loyalty and faith are ques-
tionable. From this point of view the best that can be said about syncretism
is that it is an effort of would-be peacemakers to reconcile conflicting re-
ligious traditions by wishful thinking. Syncretism is unity at the expense of
truth and is inevitably superficial because what bothers syncretists is not
truth but religious conflict. The worst that can be said is that syncretism ts
evidence of insincerity, confusion, and ambivalence. Syncretism is corrupt
and lacking in doctrinal integrity. “The believers are confused and do not
realize that they participate in different religions. In their confusion syn-
cretists distort and impoverish religious tradition. Such objections to syn-
cretic religion tell more about the terms of Western religious debates than
about religious phenomena themselves.
The Western religionist’s assumption that religious groups must have
clear doctrinal boundaries and mutually exclusive memberships parallels
anthropological assumptions about culture and society. Yet cultural strug-
gle and the fusion and separation of peoples and civilizations are part of
the whole of human history. Continuity and discontinuity, persistence and
disruption, survival, disintegration, and death mark the path of the history
I have tried to trace, scouring the dominant and subordinate, the oppres-
sor and the oppressed. In the Americas, Amerindian, African, Asian, and
European peoples were brought together under an economic system dom-
inated and controlled by Europeans. Intact preservation of the lifeways of
the homeland was not possible for any of these peoples. Nowhere have
their traditions continued to exist without change. Slavery, conquest, and
colonialism favored neither the calm dissolution of cultural differences nor
the formation of homogeneous monocultural societies. Syncretism in this
context is emblematic of oppression, change, youthfulness, and cultural
impurity.
Continuity and Change / 159
previously had do not simply vanish. For at least some people the old
meanings remain the primary ones, the only ones which are truly correct.
For others the old meaning becomes one of an array of possible alternative
meanings. And for others the old and the new meanings are fused under a
broader conception. For all of them knowledge of the appropriate context
in which the idea, word, or representation can occur 1s crucial. The same
applies to syncretism, in which the reality to which an image, word, or ges-
ture refers becomes redefined while the same word, image, or gesture con-
tinues to be used. This creates a situation in which the important and
fundamental cultural categories people use become at once semantically
rich and internally inconsistent.
Cultural systems using such categories can persist over long periods.
Most of the postcolonial world and all multiethnic or multiracial societies
are in this situation, a situation in which the ideological, ethnic, racial, and
economic conflicts which exist within a highly differentiated cultural sys-
tem are all expressed by a common set of symbols and concepts. Since the
conflicts are real and the concepts, symbols, representations, and catego-
ries are continually being contested and redefined, they are always incom-
pletely synthesized.
The roots of this cultural system in Cuba are in the period 1492-1760,
when the Cuban population was small yet very diverse and atomized. The
Spanish conquest of Cuba was the crucible in which Amerindian, African,
and European influences, objects, and ideas began to interweave. A par-
allel intermingling took place on the biological level, and a subtle and elab-
orate racial terminology evolved in which an ideology of “pure” types gave
way to a graded racial continuum only partially related to skin color and
ancestry. A relatively widespread yet mixed creole culture and a system of
racial relations that functioned without either fixed color lines or group
endogamy emerged out of this period. The creole culture continued to
evolve by absorbing elements from Spanish, Islamic, West and Central Af-
rican, and Amerindian sources. But a set of distinctions gradually arose sit-
ing the main cultural groups and trends in the society between two poles:
Spanish and African.
When, in the period of the mid-eighteenth-century sugar boom, immi-
gration (largely black) became the order of the day, the newcomers were
absorbed into a national culture and system of racial and ethnic relations
that was already set and coherent. The culture and system of racial and eth-
nic relations later came to include populations from Haiti, Jamaica, China,
and the Yucatan Peninsula. Incorporating diverse groups into a starkly yet
fluidly class-structured society produced a great deal of cultural variation.
Nonetheless the creole culture continued to be seen as poised between
the poles of Africa and Spain. Whether in the form of political divisions,
economic inequality and poverty, ethnic group stereotypes, or racial and
religious hostility, difference and division became fundamental in the
structure of Cuban society. Though under severe strain at times, both the
Continuity and Change / 161
Developmental
Continuum Location Form of Hegemony
Yoruba religion Aja area Feudal-like, monarchi-
West Africa cal regimes; religious
hegemony
Yoruba religion Cuba Colonial dominance;
hegemony of official
Spanish Catholicism
Lucumi religion Cuba Colonial dominance;
(Early Santeria) hegemony of official
Spanish Catholicism
Santeria Cuba Since 1960s dominance
of socialist hegemony
Santeria USA Dominance of secular
capitalist hegemony
Santerismo USA Dominance of secular
capitalist hegemony
Orisha-Voodoo USA Dominance of secular
, capitalist hegemony
cidents of heritage and birth were made coherent by coalescing them into
a unique socioreligious category and what members came to think of as a
distinct and unchanging heritage. Of all the tributaries, only the Yoruba
tended to be remembered as ancestral; all innovation and change were fit-
ted into 1t.
It is useful to look at the cultural continuum as having two levels of
structure, external and internal. As we shall see, the internal variation
within the continuum contributes some of its most important characteris-
tics and gives rise to a number of situations that seem confusing, contra-
dictory, and anomalous but which are also very common.
Let's take the instance where the creole cultural continuum emerges
out of the contact of populations from two systems. The cultural contin-
uum which forms between the two systems thus has two poles. Using
Yoruba religion (Y) and Catholicism (C) as examples, the external structure
is simple and looks like this:
Y YC C
Continuity and Change / 163
Y YC C External
Y YC Cc Cc C Internal
Y Y YC Cc C
Y Y Cc cy C
The internal structure, however, would be even more complicated (see fig-
ure 7). If we combine the developmental continuum (the sequence of
164 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEW WORLD
Y YC Cc External
Y YC Cc Cc Cc Internal
Y 2d YC Cc C
Y Y Cc C Cc
YE YCE CE External
YE Y Y YE YCE € CE C Cc Internal
E YE EH YE? CE CYE HE EC: E
E E E E E EC ESE EC
E External
E E E Internal
stages) with the simplified version of the structural continuum which was
renovated at each stage of the process, we get some idea of the actual com-
plexity and variety of religious practice that must have existed on the
ground. Here we restrict ourselves to the Cuban situation.
We can see that succeeding stages need not entirely eliminate earlier
ones and that at each stage of the development of Santeria there is a ren-
ovation of the structural continuum that was the product of the previous
stage (figure 8). This differentiation in the realm of religion I take to be
symptomatic of the highly differentiated cultural system that existed in
Cuba.
Any cultural continuum is identified by arbitrary boundaries that break
up the series of intermediate forms. The boundaries can be of many types.
Often they are part of a more general system of differences related to be-
havior, belief, physical features, social status, or ancestry by which the pop-
ulation is divided into categories of religious, ethnic, racial, or other social
groups. These differences can be lifted out and shown as representations of
the groups because they derive their meaning from a repository of popular
images and myths as well as the personal experiences of individuals and
Continuity and Change / 165
Restructuring
Continuum
Developmental
Continuum
Y External
Y
Y Internal
Y
Y
1492
Y YC C External
YC Y YC O. 0 C Internal
Y Y YC C C
Y Y Cc CY C
1870
Y YC C External
YCE x. YC C Cc Cc Internal
Y Y YC Cc Cc
Y Y Cc Cc C
YE YCE CE External
E External
Internal
E E E
1959
the historical knowledge of the various groups. The content of such ethnic,
religious, or racial stereotypes varies from case to case and may well change
over time. In the case of Cubans of African ancestry, the stigma of slave
status and African origin lay stamped onto the skin and the memory of free
and slave alike. Powerful images clustered around these physical and social
differences were the legacy of generations of Afro-Cubans.
At the same time as prerevolutionary Cuban creole religious culture
was highly differentiated, there was but a small number of common con-
cepts and images in which that differentiation could be expressed because
of the hegemony of the state and the union of the state with Roman Ca-
tholicism. Groups within Cuban society assimilated the hegemonic culture
at different rates and in different ways. These groups are distinct from each
other, but they are also linked. Yoruba religion was preserved in the urban
cabildos, possibly in the maroon communities, and among rural slaves, but
the guided syncretism the church hoped to foster was most evident in the
cabildos. In slave quarters in the countryside, where the priests rarely
tread, there was a more diffuse Catholic influence emanating from the cre-
ole culture as much as or more than from the church or priests.
Despite the fact that they assimilated Catholicism in different ways,
most Cubans were prepared to assert that they were Catholics and behaved
as Catholics did. This did not mean that they all necessarily agreed on what
Catholics did or didn’t do but rather that the category of Catholic was a
meaningful one by which they distinguished and described religious behav-
ior and was both compulsory and commonplace in the prerevolutionary
period.
We have seen that in Cuba many people regarded themselves as Cath-
olic even if they didn’t go to church, if they practiced a form of Catholicism
different from what went on in church, and even if they practiced in a way
which the church condemned. For many the crucial incident cementing a
Catholic religious identity was infant baptism. Moreover, as the population
of Cuba grew and became more diverse, so did the number of religious in-
fluences, even though official Roman Catholicism remained dominant and
hegemonic.
Folk Catholics, church Catholics, people who practiced the different
African religions at home and went to church, people who practiced mixed
Afro-Catholic rites exclusively, as well as those who went to church and
practiced Espiritismo, or Afro-Catholic-Spiritist religion, all claimed to be
Catholic. The semantic content of the term Catholic thus became both rich
and internally inconsistent. What it meant to be Catholic in Cuban creole
culture was in a continuous process of redefinition through time.
If we take only a few of the social and cultural differences that were rel-
evant during the development of Lucumi religion and correlate them with
probable religious practice, we get the diagram in figure g, period 1. The
four groups are the Spanish-born governing elite (the peninsulares), the
white creoles born on the island, and two groups of Afro-Cubans, the Lu-
Continuity and Change / 167
cumi and a putative group of other African nations. At the same time as
the four groups are differentiated in terms of nativity and ethnicity, they
are linked by being included under Catholicism; this was the hegemonic
intention all along. However, in terms of the internal structure of each
group they are at once linked to the others but also differentiated from
them. Lucumis and Spanish peninsulares both considered themselves
Catholic, but the peninsulares were supposed to be church Catholics while
Lucumi practiced varying mixtures of Yoruba religion and folk Catholi-
cism, or possibly one or the other alone. This was the situation in period 1,
Lucumi religion—Early Santeria. With the advent of Espiritismo some of
the spiritists include themselves as Catholics and some people who already
think of themselves as Catholics continue to do so even if they also practice
Espiritismo, so the internal diversity accumulates even further (period 2).
Nonetheless, the term Catholic remains a meaningful category of religious
identity for all the groups even if it does not have the same meaning for
everyone or apply to the same cultural content when people at different
points on the continuum make use of it.
The acceptance of Catholic terms as the idiom in which distinctions
could be made that applied to all the groups was intended to unite them.
At some level it did. Hence a series of bridges can be constructed across at
least four religious systems at different points. The saints’ images were only
the most obvious cultural key to this set of bridges because they were a cen-
tral symbol for adherence to Catholicism and because of the imposition of
the saints’ images as representations of social as well as spiritual powers. We
have previously noted the difference between folk Catholic and official in-
terpretations of the nature of sainthood. These differences did not mean
that folk Catholics at home and priests at church necessarily used very dif-
ferent images to represent the saints. They did not. One could go from of-
ficial Catholicism to a folk Catholicism which need not be mixed with either
spiritism or African influences (although it might be), through Espirit-
ismo, and over to Santeria and even other Afro-Cuban religions by a series
of bridges and transformations. These would be provided in part by vary-
ing interpretations of the cult of saints. From this perspective folk Cathol-
icism, Santeria, and Espiritismo look like uninstitutionalized saint cults
parallel to the cult of saints in the hegemonic Roman Catholic religious
institution.
In light of the foregoing discussion of the role of common concepts, it
would not be inappropriate to argue that any talk of syncretism is irrele-
vant, that syncretism is really a product of the outside observer's knowledge
of history and of his or her relationship to the religion under study. The
concept of syncretism is irrelevant to insiders and is not a factor in their
religious consciousness.
Syncretism is a concept of the historian and anthropologist, not of the
believer who has no scientific or historical interest in his religion. Yet some
version of the idea is inherent in the statements and intuitions of believers
168 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
Period 2. Santeria
Catholic
Spanish | Creoles | Lucumi Other African nations
c IGIPIFIHIHI HFY| HYF | YHF | FY | YF| YI H| FX| HX | HFX | x
FIGURE 9. The meaning of Catholic at two periods of the developmental continuum.
Y = Yoruba religion, C = official Catholicism, F = folk Catholicism, P = philosophical
spiritism (the científicos), H — mystical, healing oriented spiritism, X= palo,
Congolese religion. When letters appear in combination they appear in decreasing
order of cultural influence. For example, in FY folk Catholic influences are more
prevalent than Yoruba ones, while in YF the opposite is true.
who do have such an interest and constitutes a folk science and body of dis-
tinctions and observations on which we must draw. Believers may make dis-
tinctions among religious traditions and syncretized elements of them in
relation to a collective memory in which making these distinctions has be-
come traditional and stereotyped and if there exist, in the present, distinct
social contexts or institutions to which believers can refer them. It might be
that the actual content of these categories, contexts, and social institutions
need not be the same as they were in the past as long as their relationship
to each other ts the same, 1.e., as long as they occupy similar positions in the
structure of ideas and social life as they did in previous periods.
While it 1s often stated that syncretists, and by implication, Santeria dev-
otees, do not know that they are practicing two religions, it cannot be said
that Santeria adherents do not make a distinction between Catholicism and
the African religions. At least some do, and there is evidence for this.
Lazaro Benedi Rodriguez, who had been active as a diviner before the
Cuban Revolution and was involved in both Santeria and Palo, was inter-
viewed in 1969 by members of the team led by Oscar Lewis which produced
Living the Revolution. He clearly does not identify the African and Catholic
religions but distinguishes them.
I’ve had many arguments with Catholics and with believers in the African reli-
gion, and have never been able to come to an agreement with any of them.
Continuity and Change / 169
There are those who say that the African religion is a myth, a dream, a means
of exploiting the ignorance of others, a web of deceit. But I, and all believers,
have faith because we've had proof. It's exactly the same in the case of Cathol-
icism. Men pick and choose among its teachings, and in the end each does what
is most convenient for him. (Quoted in Lewis, Lewis, and Rigdon 1977:130—
131)
Benedi was not alone. Francesca Muniz, despite the fact that she referred
to the deities of Santeria as the saints in a passage quoted earlier, distin-
guished “her religion” from church Catholicism on the basis of the statues
and images found in the church.
In my religion, the only things that are like the statues [of the Roman Catholic
Church] are the Elegua. There are other stones, and each has a name. We don’t
have images and statues or pictures like the Church has. Things are symbolically
represented by colors and stones, but not by things which could have been made
by man. I don’t know why it’s that way. (Quoted in Butterworth. 1980:88)
The African gods are different, though they resemble the others, the priest’s
gods. They are more powerful and less adorned. Right now if you were to go to
a Catholic church you would not see apples, stones or cock’s feathers. But this 1s
the first thing you see in an African house. The African 1s cruder. I knew of two
African religions in the barracoons: the Lucumi and the Congolese. ... The
Congolese used the dead and snakes for their religious rites. They called the
dead nkise and the snakes emboba. They prepared big pots called nganga which
would walk about and all, and that was where the secret of their spells lay. All the
Congolese had these pots for mayombe. . . .
The Congolese were more involved with witchcraft than the Lucumi who
had more to do with the saints and with God. ... The difference between the
Congolese and the Lucumi was that the former solved problems while the latter
told the future. This they did with diloggunes, which are round white shells
from Africa with mystery inside. ...
The other religion was the Catholic one. This was introduced by the priests,
but nothing in the world would induce them to enter the slaves’ quarters. ‘They
were fastidious people, with a solemn air which did not fit the barracoons—so
170 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
solemn that there were Negroes who took everything they said literally. This
had a bad effect on them. They read the catechism and read it to the others with all the
words and prayers. . . .The fact is I never learned that doctrine because I could
not understand a thing about it. / don’t think the household slaves did either although,
being so refined and well treated, they all made out that they were Christian. . . There
was no love lost between the Congolese magic-men and the Congolese Chris-
tians, each of who thought they were good and the others wicked. This still goes
on in Cuba. The Lucumi and the Congolese did not get on either; it went back
to the difference between saints and witchcraft. (Montejo 1968:33-—37)
In skeletal form, here are some of the more salient attributes and distinc-
tions Montejo made:
Lucumi Congolese Catholic
African African Catholic
religion religion religion
saints, gods, and God the dead the priest’s gods
Saints witchcraft
crude crude refined
more powerful more powerful less powerful
divination magic ?
Shells pots ?
field slaves field slaves house slaves, priests
rebellious cowardly fastidious
disliked cane hardworkers house work, no
cutting at cane cane cutting
cutting well treated
Montejo equated gods and saints and linked the saints with Lucumi re-
ligion rather than with Catholicism. For him the saints and the orisha may
be the same powerful spiritual beings, but neither of them have anything to
do with the teachings of Catholicism (of which he claims to understand
nothing). It would be a mistake to view these distinctions as referring solely
to the historical origins of the religions. ‘These distinctions were important
because they stood in a relationship to groups that made up the contem-
porary world in which he lived. There were still people who identified
themselves as Congolese and there was still a Catholic Church with priests.
(“This still goes on in Cuba.”) Montejo also made use of a number of ste-
reotyped images (rebellious Lucumis, cowardly Congolese, and fastidous
white priests; field slaves as African religious devotees with Catholicism as
a religion for the house slaves and priests). With stereotyped images such as
these he was able to distinguish the three religions and to give them dif-
ferent placements within the social and cultural world of the Cuban sugar
plantation as seen from the point of view of a field slave.
At least two things are clear from the words of these three devotees
(Benedi, Muniz, and Montejo). The first is that at least some devotees see
Continuity and Change / 171
a difference between Santeria and official Catholicism and can say what the
difference is within an idiom dominated by Catholic terminology and sym-
bolism. That very same hegemonic symbolism can be used to distinguish
one religious form from another. This seems clear enough. The second
thing is that those who make this distinction do not all make it in the same
way or with the same means. None of them give any evidence that they
think they are practicing two religions, one African and one European. In-
deed they seem to identify themselves primarily, if not solely, with a reli-
gion they regard as African, or at least one which is not official
Catholicism. While this may not be true of all Cuban devotees and priests,
it is certainly true of some of them. If they are able to distinguish one from
the other, in whatever terms, it is not too far-fetched to think that they
might also be able to tell when they overlap.
Individuals might know quite well where they lie along the continuum
in terms of what they see as the relevant stereotypical characteristics of
other groups. They might also be aware of all or much of the range of be-
havior or belief which the continuum allows. They may not imitate the be-
havior of other groups. Then on the other hand they might do so, as
LePage describes in relation to the creole linguistic continuum.
Each individual creates the systems for his verbal behavior so that they resemble
the group or groups with which from time to time he may wish to be identified,
to the extent that: (a) he can identify the groups (b) he has both opportunity
and ability to observe and analyse their behavioral systems (c) his motivation is
sufficiently strong to impel him to choose, and to adapt his behavior accord-
ingly (d) he is able to do so. (Le Page et al. 1974)
Much depends upon the nature of the relationships between the groups
and the contexts in which members of the groups typically encounter each
other. Classification of a slice of behavior as Catholic (or Santeria or Espir-
itismo) depends on who is doing the classifying and where the behavior is
taking place. Events, behaviors, and situations drift back and forth between
stereotyped images of the ends of the continuum, and the content of ethnic
or religious stereotypes varies from case to case. People appear to be fol-
lowing multiple but incompatible rules, but their behavior is still systematic
and closely related to particular situations and contexts. The intersystem
brought into prominence when, for example, Palo and Santeria are the fo-
cus is different from that created when Santeria and Espiritismo or regla de
ocha and church Catholicism are the focus. Raymond Smith, using the cre-
ole language analogy again, describes a situation strikingly like that which
confronts us.
Different concepts are used in different contexts by the same people; the mean-
ing of a given usage has to be interpreted in its context of use. The situation has
been likened to the ‘post-creole speech continuum’ (DeCamp 1971) where a
particular speaker commands a certain range of the continuum of linguistic
172 / SANTERIA FROM AFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
In a situation like this the question “What religion is this person prac-
ticing?” needs to be answered within a framework that gives due recogni-
tion to the internal variation of the cultural system as a whole and the
characteristic way in which people divide it up and classify it in terms of
religion. Ambivalence and a kind of false consciousness combine to deny
importance to Catholic or African customs as such. The actual origins are
not seen as that important and in many cases are not known anyway. The
customs are honored not in their absence but only after they have been re-
defined and reconstituted as “Catholic” or “African.” If the relevant dis-
tinction 1s between Catholic and African religion, then it doesn’t matter if,
objectively, the “African” religion contains Catholic elements, is not trace-
able to a single, pure ethnic source, and differs considerably from any pre-
sumed African prototype. In the context of segmenting the continuum
between these two stereotyped poles Catholic and African, some part of it
will be defined and constituted as “African” in line with the polar stereo-
type and regardless of what other content may be there.
The kind of situation that results from this is illustrated in figures 10
and 11. Figure 10 represents hypothethical divisions and classifications of
the Cuban religious continuum into Catholic and African as seen from the
noints of view of two persons who are encountering each other (encounter
A). In response to the question “Who are the real Catholics?” the two per-
sons in this encounter disagree. The two can be imagined to be facing each
other with their different respective classifications of the same religious
continuum and projecting their classifications out into the world and onto
other people. One person applies the term Catholic extremely broadly,
while the other views only those who who do not mix their Catholicism
with any form of African religion as being real Catholics. In figure 11,
there is a similar encounter involving another pair of hypothetical classif1-
cations of the Cuban religious continuum into Catholic and African (en-
counter B). The two persons in this encounter disagree in a way different
from those in the previous encounter. They can be imagined to be answer-
ing the question “Who are the practitioners of African religion?” In the
more general context of the inclusive self-identification as Catholic, as we
saw before, the “African” becomes “Catholic” and different attributes are
relevant. In these kinds of situations only some attributes are considered
relevant by each of the parties and even those might not be consistent in
different contexts. Ethnic-racial identity needs to be seen as a process of
taking up or learning parts of a rich repertoire of beiiefs about what ts in-
volved in being African, Lucumi, Cuban, white, “in the religion,” etc.
The creole cultural continuum, therefore, contains no invariant prop-
erties and no uniform rules. The society and culture are continuously in
Continuity and Change / 173
| | lllllliu.
—q
alll OTHERS
SPANISH CREOLES LUCUMI CONGOLESE
Key
OC = Official Catholic
FC = Folk Catholic
Y = Yoruba religion
FCY = Folk Catholic-Yoruba
YFC = Yoruba—Folk Catholic
P = Congolese religion (Palo)
FCP = Folk Catholic—Palo
FCPY = Folk Catholic—Palo—Yoruba
PFCY = Palo—Folk Catholic—Yoruba
Others = Other African Nations
ui TA MA 0
ll dace
ui ? LUCUNI CONGOLESE ?
hi, a 4
li
HN
Key
OC = Official Catholic
FC = Folk Catholic
Y = Yoruba religion
FCY = Folk Catholic-Yoruba
YFC = Yoruba—Folk Catholic
P = Congolese religion (Palo)
FCP = = Folk Catholic—Palo
FCPY = Folk Catholic-Palo—Yoruba
PFCY = Palo—Folk Catholic—Yoruba
Other = Other African Nations
and reconstituted as being part of another. On this basis alone the content
of the cultural continuum cannot be considered to be fixed. But the cate-
gory structure, the boundaries drawn around the groups and structuring
their relationships, can persist over long periods, even while the range of
meanings and the specific meanings of the categories can shift and become
an arena of conflict, contest, and control in the process of defining per-
Continuity and Change / 175
sonal, group, and national identities. The intersystem, then, is the result of,
and also a means for, the efforts of peoples in a multiethnic or multiracial
class society to define themselves vis-a-vis one another.
The statement that syncretists do not know that they are practicing two
religions or have confused the two may be true for some people after the
syncretism has reached a certain stage and become a fait accompli, but it
cannot be said that this is necessarily true for those who are actually cre-
ating and carrying out the process. This is best seen in the transitions
which must inevitably occur between the periods of the developmental con-
tinuum. In the transitions between periods, borrowing does not go unno-
ticed because not everyone agrees with introducing new materials into the
religious tradition. Furthermore there is always a more or less prolonged
period in which the old forms and the new coexist. While it may be as-
sumed that something like this occurred in the transition from Yoruba re-
ligion to Lucumi religion—Early Santeria, there is not much evidence to
demonstrate that this was so. For the later transition from Lucumi reli-
gion—Early Santeria to Santeria following the infusion of Kardecan spirit-
ism, we have some data. These are the observations of Lydia Cabrera from
her fieldwork in Cuba in the late 1940s and early 1950s and her quotations
from santeros and devotees of the time (Cabrera 1971). We focus here not
only on Cabrera’s observations and her informants’ observations and dis-
tinctions but also on Cabrera’s own distinctions, for these were part of the
context in which the observations were taking place.
Cabrera was not surprised that Cuban blacks should pick up on Espir-
itismo. She attributed its spread among the Afro-Cuban population to
what she felt was the ease with which blacks went into the trance state. For
her, falling with the saint, 1.e., being possessed by one of the Yoruba deities,
was not much different from the trances of the spiritist mediums. One of
her informants also saw things this way.
It is astonishing the facility with which our negroes fall with the saint, that is to
say, into trance. Nothing is more logical, then, that espiritismo, multiplying its
centros all over the island, should count thousands and thousands of believers
and thousands and thousands of mediums among them. One cannot assume,
however, a weakening of the faith in the Orishas nor desertion of the cults of
African origin; espiritismo marches hand in hand with them, tightly united, in
spite of its pretensions of spirituality . . . of “spiritual advance, of light, of faith
and progress.” Many babalawos, oluos, babalochas, mamalochas, mayomberos,
villumberos, kimbiseros, now have spiritualist spirits and are also espiritista me-
diums. As one priestess of Santeria — who works the spirits and manifests Ca-
chita-Mama Cache-the Virgin of Cobre in alternation with the spirit of a
Congolese slave — said to me: “Ocha or palo. Doesn’t it come to the same
thing? Spirit, no more! Doesn’t one fall into trance with the saint as well as the
dead? In religion everything is the thing of the dead. The dead become saints.”
Saints and spirits are daily visitors in the houses of the Cuban people. “Espir-
itismo! Bah! In Africa, the same, the dead spoke. This is not new.” (29)
176 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
to do so, too. Furthermore the spiritist table became a context in which the
black medium could work with white mediums as an equal. Cabrera’s com-
ments on the color of the mediums have the aroma of the residual racism
we find even in liberal Cuban intellectuals of this period. Along with the
recurrent comments on “the African nature” and “our negroes” that ap-
pear in her observations, in this passage we must also note her suspicion
that the white mediums who manifested African spirits might not be as
white as they looked or as they claimed to be.
What is interesting is that the majority of the spirits that manifest themselves
through so many mediums of color, and through supposedly white mediums,
are spirits of tribal blacks, of African slaves, royal Congolese or angungas, all
“disencarnated” during the time of the slave trade and expressing themselves
like bozales, raw Africans straight off the boats. They call themselves Taito Jose,
Na Francisco, Ta Lorenzo Lucumi, Juan Mandinga, el Mina, el Ganga, el
Macua. These beings, who are very advanced in their spiritual evolution and
very high and luminous in space, also cure with herbs and sticks, in addition to
vases of water, “vases of presence or assistance.” In their consultations they pre-
scribe the same as the babalocha or the mayombero. The repertory of cleans-
ings, baths, ebbos, remedies doesn’t differ one bit and, like them, they prepare
talismans and amulets.
with the racial organization of other contexts: the possibility that the white
mediums were really black mediums.
Cabrera notes the emphasis on healing which separates this form of
spiritism from the spiritism of the cientificos. But she also notes that these
spiritists prescribed the same kinds of remedies as Santeria and Paleria
practitioners. I believe that this locates the particular kind of spiritism with
which she was dealing within a range of spiritist practice which included
spiritists who did not prescribe in the same way as santeros and paleros did
but also were not cientificos. There was a variety of spiritisms at this time,
not just one.
Just as the spread of Espiritismo did not separate most of its Afro-
Cuban adherents from the African religions they belonged to, Espiritismo
did not separate most of them from Catholicism either. Official Catholi-
cism remained exemplary even after the popularity and status of Espirit-
ismo grew to the point where some believers came to regard the spiritist
seance as equivalent to mass and likened it to the official rite performed by
Catholic priests. The spiritist session thus became la misa espiritual (the spir-
itual mass), just as the bembe drum-dance earlier had been called la misa
africana (the African mass).
This “spiritual mass,” in which one gives light to the disencarnated soul that is
still in darkness, though widespread, does not annul in any way the Catholic
mass for putting a soul to rest: “first, the dead asks for mass.” . . And this can-
not be set aside or disregarded. ... The spiritual mass consists in offerings of
flowers and vigils —“the flowers attract the spirits” — and in invoking the de-
ceased with the end of knowing its wishes and fulfilling them, to help if it is
confused, and to elevate it 1f it was a conceited being on earth, something “slow-
ing down its immaterial evolution.” In effect one assembles various mediums
around a table on which are placed bouquets of flowers and glasses (vessels) of
perfumed water (Pompey lotion and Florida water). Not only do the self-styled
professional mediums readily fall to the floor in trance but so do the relatives
and friends of the disappeared one, as do invited guests and curious people
who, attracted to those spiritist sessions “in which many spirits come down,” of-
ten attend without invitation. In these spiritist sessions appears, as in all that
concerns the religiosity of our negroes, the immutable African nature (heart).
(62)
Just as there were spiritist mediums who prescribed like santeros — a lot
of them probably were santeros, or were mediums who learned the tech-
niques from santeros at these sessions — so were there santeros who ob-
jected to some aspects of spiritism and thought that they had no business
being in the context of Santeria’s practices. These issues seem to have
arisen with particular force in reference to divination, ancestor veneration,
and funeral rites.
When a santero died, the cabildo to which he belonged sponsored two
Catholic funeral masses at a church, one nine days after death and a sec-
Continuity and Change / 179
ond a year later on the anniversary of the death. There was also a separate
African funeral rite. This was called Itutu. In this ritual a santero invoked
the dead person and divined his will through cowrie shells, the Ifa priest’s
divining chain, or the casting of fig leaves (Brandon 1983). By the time
Espiritismo assumed prominence among santeros, the practice of having
the African Itutu funeral rite done parallel with the two Catholic masses
had become the orthodoxy and tradition. After Espiritismo appeared
on the scene there arose differences of opinion among the mass of San-
teria devotees and priests concerning the status of the spiritual mass as a
death rite.
Some spiritist santeros evidently were at once so taken with Espiritismo
and so distant from the Catholic Church that they would substitute the
misa espiritual for the misa católica. This was never orthodox and, as Ca-
brera indicated, the Catholic mass for the dead could not be set aside or
disregarded. The implication is that those who did this were no longer
practicing Santeria or any of the African-based religions — they were doing
something else. What Cabrera did not address directly was whether there
were some mediums who used the misa espiritual to replace the Itutu in-
stead. Evidently there were, for at the spiritist masses held after the deaths
of santeros sometimes the spirit of the dead priest would come down into
the ceremony and protest the innovation.
Notwithstanding the favor that spiritual masses enjoy, one finds cases where
some “brothers from space,” who are conservatives, recalcitrants and intracta-
ble reactionaries, present themselves at the sessions. Although they [the medi-
ums and relatives] call them in the spiritual mass, they demand to speak their
sufferings by means of the shells, through Ifa or they speak through the same
saint in the head of some “son” [orisha devotee] that they don’t want the spir-
itual mass but rather “the real one, the one with fundamento (foundation).”
(63)
These spirits of the dead protested against the spiritual mass as not be-
ing real, as being without foundation, without roots in the traditional prac-
tice Of the cabildos. They protested against the attempt to supplant the
divination devices of the Santeria priesthood with the spiritist medium’s
body and trance state. In the context of the African Itutu the will of the
dead African priests had been known through the Yoruba divination tech-
niques; in the context of the spiritist seance these devices had no place.
Others felt the same about the changes that spiritism-oriented santeros
were introducing to the ancestor shrines that devotees kept in their homes.
Some people evidently regarded the spiritual mass and the spiritist’s white
table as equivalent to or as a substitute for the ancestor shrines which dev-
otees of Lucumi religion kept in their homes. Cabrera quotes an elderly
devotee, a living “recalcitrant,” who was witnessing the spiritist fashion
wash over the Lucumi tradition of the earlier period and simply decided to
practice as she always had.
180 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
“The spiritual mass is fashionable. Good . . . I always set up for my dead by set-
ting out for them the food they like most in a little corner in the toilet. That is
where they eat and are thus content,” one of my old acquaintances says to me,
concluding philosophically, “Mine have not come into the fashion of those that give
them light in space [the spiritists]. / light them a little oil lamp and that is enough for
them.” (62-63; my emphasis)
The two forms of the rites to the dead coexisted at least for the period
that the struggle between them went on. When the new form became tra-
ditional, some houses and religious families continued to use it. Others
continued to practice as they had before; they either came in line with the
new practices as time went by, or they continued in their old ways and con-
tributed to the structural continuum of Santeria practice existing at later
points in time. There was no rupture between these two phases, no total
break or gap between the Cuban contexts involved. Such a total break or
gap would have been the result of repeated transformations which were
massive, very generalized, and extremely rapid. This does not seem to have
been the case, for approximately ninety years after Espiritismo was intro-
duced to the island and at least fifty years after it probably began to seri-
ously affect Santeria, it had not eradicated the preexisting forms of that
religion. Collective memory records no such rupture because there was
none.
In the course of this argument I have taken the concept of syncretism
apart, “deconstructed” it. But this deconstruction has had an unfortunate
consequence. Once the concept of syncretism has been taken apart in this
way, It cannot be put back together again. The pieces are no longer there.
Instead of lying about like the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, these
pieces have dissolved into thin air. This points up a very important fact:
from the perspective of process it may well be that there is nothing distinc-
tive about syncretism and that what has drawn our attention to it is our
own knowledge of the history of the phenomena we are investigating, a
certain stance toward the societies involved, and what we see as the signif-
icant cultural differences between the interacting traditions. It is much as if
we were to observe someone pour two beakers of water each of which con-
tained a different food coloring into a common vat and assumed that the
major factor governing the process by which the two waters mixed was the
difference in food coloring rather than diffusion, which would be operat-
ing whether the waters were the same color, were uncolored, or differed in
some other property unrelated to color, such as temperature or viscosity.
From this there flows another observation, that there is nothing distinctive
about so-called syncretic religions, 1.e., from the point of view of process.
But far from pushing the study of these “impure” religions further to the
margins, this observation brings them to the forefront of study. It just
points up the pervasiveness of culture change in the modern and postmod-
ern world, its importance as a ubiquitous and fundamental phenomenon
Continuity and Change / 181
in the contemporary world and the recent past. It also points up the se-
lectiveness of borrowing, the reality of intention in borrowing, and the dif-
fering effects that borrowed elements exert on the recipient traditions.
Rather than resolving the problems of syncretism we have come in a
roundabout fashion to the conclusion that the concept of syncretism is a
problem for history and anthropology, a problem which cannot be resolved
but only dissolved. In my opinion the concept of syncretism is a black box
concept. The black box contains a number of processes which when illu-
minated turn the box white. In every black box there are two boxes trying
to get out. Here, one concerns processes and the other states. I believe that
processes are the more fundamental of the two. Whenever the innards of
the black box become illuminated, some of the box dissolves. I believe that
the concept of syncretism will dissolve into the study of cultural and social
processes and the effects of problem solving and manipulation, decision-
making, ecology, and creativity in relation to social and historical contexts,
that it will yield to tools that can handle variation, rapid change, and con-
text dependence.
It is my belief that these facts have, or ought to have, profound impli-
cations for theory and method in the study of sociocultural phenomena.
Any significant and continuing sociocultural phenomenon results from the
interaction of a number of processes operating over different time spans
and defined by different time boundaries. In such a multicultural contin-
uum or intersystem, much behavior is situation-bound, and it is necessary
to conceive culture in terms of levels of organization in relation to specific
contexts.
from the old days. People do not live in those days anymore; they live in the
present.” Still, it is possible for people to have it both ways if they are will-
ing to accept both the present and the past as best. Inside the story line
“the old ways are best” it is easier for people to accept the present as best
if they think it is old. It fits the story line better. In this way people can say
that they are doing what they have always done even if they are not. This
is possible because whether or not they are actually doing what they did at
a previous point in time does not affect what they say about their relation-
ship to their own past. It is the relationship to their own past which is at
issue, and the main effort is not only to make both the past and the present
“best” but to keep the past and present aligned, like two mirrors facing each
other.
Today a quivering, invisible web connects all human societies; this web
is so sensitive that an event occurring on its most inaccessible node can send
a tremor through the whole world. These tremors do not come from con-
temporary events alone. We now know more about the history of the world
than was ever possible to know before. There is simply more history than
there used to be, and it continues to accumulate and become more acces-
sible. An historical event that affected only a small number of people when
it occurred can have massive consequences visible today in widely separated
regions of the world. Whatever happened to some people in the past af-
fects virtually all people today.
A series of little-known wars among Africans affected trade agreements
with Europeans and caromed through the massive trade in slaves which
formed a foundation for the economic, cultural, and political development
of Europe and the Americas. Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans met
in specific places and situations, ports of call where their three civilizations
flowed into each other without abandoning assumptions of foreignness
and difference. Each had an orientation toward the world into which it had
to fit the others and endow them with meaning. These assumed meanings
shaped the realities of contact and were shaped by those realities. This
skein of assumed, interdependent, and deformed meanings was the matrix
for the creole culture of conquest and colonization. Spanish priests “chris-
tened” sugar plantations with the names of Catholic saints, while Afro-
Cubans carried out rites “baptizing” ceramic tureens and iron pots with
African and Spanish names; upper-class white Cubans went to African
medicine men for a witchcraft they could insert into their own demonology
and in the process made the medicine men witches; the military gleam of
unsheathed swords flashed at the elevation of the communion host while
the priest’s unintelligible Latin droned on; Africans danced funerals in
front of a Virgin Mary that had black skin, a silk dress, and scarifications;
white mediums cured clients with tobacco smoke (which they took to be an
Indian practice) while smoking cigars to draw near the spirits of Congolese
Slaves. The practical affairs of colonial life—making sugar and profits, syn-
thesizing religious traditions, plotting elite sorcery, uniting state and
184 / SANTERIA FROM ÁFRICA TO THE NEw WORLD
Wright, “the ultimate effect of white Europe upon Asia and Africa was to
cast millions into a kind of spiritual void; I maintain that it suffused their
lives with a sense of meaninglessness. I argue that it was not merely physical
suffering or economic deprivation that has set over a billion and a half col-
ored people in violent political motion. . . . The dynamic concept of a spir-
itual void that must be filled, a void created by a thoughtless and brutal
impact of the West upon a billion and a half people, is more powerful than
the concept of class conflict, and more universal” (1957:34-35). For that
billion and a half people, the past becomes ever more necessary and famil-
lar; it is the foundation on which they build a reappraisal of both the
present and the future. Needless to say, I cannot predict to which group the
reader belongs, but I can hope that this work will be of some benefit, for
someone in each era must make clear the facts with utter disregard to his own
wish and desire and belief. What we have got to know, as far as possible, are the
things that actually happened in the world . . the historian has no right, pos-
ing as a scientist to conceal or distort facts; and until we distinguish between the
two functions of the chronicler of human action, we are going to render it easy
for a muddled world out of sheer ignorance to make the same mistake ten times
over. (Du Bois 1969:722)
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Index
power, 39; economics and commodities, Ethnicity, African: among slaves in Cuba,
4, 44-45, 52, 79-80; mixed labor force, 56-57; continuing relevance of, 161—62;
39, 41; settlement, 37; and slave trade, and Early Santeria, 74; and ethnic and
43, 53-55; and sugar production, 52, 53, racial identity, 172; and nations in Cuba,
79; Cuban Revolution, 100. See also Slav- 55, 50; and religious categories, 181-82;
ery, Cuban and tradition, 182. See also Lucumi
Cultural categories: Catholicism as, 166— Etiquette: and collective memory, 149-52;
67, 168; and creole culture in Cuba, gift exchange, 149-50; meal-taking, 151—
160; and cultural continua, 164, 166, 52; prostrations, 150-51
171, 172—75; and syncretism, 159—60 Exiles, Cuban: class and racial composition
Cultural continuum: and Catholicism as a of, 104; cultural and medical problems
cultural category, 168; in Cuba, 161; and of exiles, 105-106; exile involvement in
cultural categories, 172—75, 181; Santeria, 104
described, 7; developmental continuum,
161-62, 168, 175; and individual per- Family: state as larger version of, 10; role
ceptions and behavior, 171—72; proces- of family in transmission of orisha wor-
sual model of, 164—65; restructuring ship, 59-60. See also Kinship
continuum, 163—64; structure of, 162— Fon, 6, 145
64; and syncretism, 170—71. See also Cul- Franco, Julia, 106
tural categories Frazier-Herskovits debate, 126
Cultural hegemony: and Catholicism in Funeral rites, African: and Catholicism in
Cuba, 45, 48, 166-68; and dominant Cuba, 72; and Espiritismo, 178-80;
ideology, 98 Itutu, 179
Cultural variation, 5. See also Cultural con-
tinuum and Intersystem Gangars, as slaves in Cuba, 56
Culture: as information, 129, 132; culture Garvey, Marcus, 114
change, 7-8, 159; culture contact, 158; Gezo, king of Dahomey, 28
and context, 181; national culture in Gleason, Judith, 107
Cuba, 5
Haiti: and Voodoo (also Vodun) 2, 6; and
Dahomey: kingdom of, 4, 9-11, 18, 23; immigration to Cuba, 79, 80
religion of, 2; and Yoruba city states, Halbwachs, Maurice, 7
27-28 Healing shrines: in Cuba, 51-52, 101-102;
Delgado, Morua, 84 and rites, images and devotions in Spain,
Dia de Los Reyes, 72-73 40-47
Divination: and Espiritismo, 89; and fu- History, 183, 184-85
neral rites, 178—79; Ifa divination,
140—42 Ibeji, 138
Dolme, Leonore, 106 Ibo, 56
Drummond, Lee, 7 Ifa: oracle, 140—42, 143; orisha, 9
Dunham, Katherine, 114 Ife (Ile Ife): city, 4, 20; and Oduduwa, 9g
Igala, Yoruba association with, 20
Ebi theory: as ancient constitution in West Ijebu,20
Africa, 10, 30 Immigration to Cuba, 4
Ebros, 56 Inle, 137
Egungun, 13; Egungun Society in Africa Intersystem (also cultural continuum), 181
and Cuba, 14, 75, 134-360. See also
Ancestors Jovellanos, 67
Egyptian mystery system, 6
El Cabildo Africano Lucumi, 73, 83 Kardec, Allan (Rivail, Hippolyte), 2, 85—
Emmanuel, William George, 84, 85 86, 87, 88. See also Espiritismo
Eshu (deity), 9 Kele cult (St. Lucia), 2
Espiritismo: and African ethnicity, 112-14; Kingdoms, Africa: dynamics of, 20; expan-
and Afro-Cuban funeral rites, 178—80; sion and religious assimilation, 30; inter-
científicos, 86-87; described, 85-89, actions between Yoruba, Benin and
161; in New York, 107; Santerismo as Dahomey, 29. See also Kings, West
variant of, 107; as uninstitutionalized African
saint cult, 167, 171, 17580. See also Kings, West African: in Benin, 22; and
Spiritism communal ancestors, 15; and control of
Espiritualismo, 111 trade in Benin, 22; and divine kinship,
Index / 205
19-20; and elite groups, 20; kingship Ogun (deity), 9, 152, 154
as heritage and metaphor in Santeria, Ogunwa, I. A., 152
75-76, 154; relations to subjects and be- Oliana, Chris, 115
tween kings, 10-11 Olodumare (deity), 13. See also Olorun
Kinship, African: and ancestor veneration Olokun (deity), 9
in diaspora, 135-36; definition and Olorun (deity), as owner of the sky, 15
functions of, 19; ritual kinship in San- Olmstead, David, 145
teria, 75, 149, 150 Onile (deity), 16; worship of disappears in
Kpengla (king of Dahomey), 27 Cuba, 78
Oranmiyan, 9
Ladinos, 40-41 Orisha: as ancestors in Cuba, 100; defined,
La Escalera, 68—69 14; as deities, 9, 13; geographical extent
Laguerre, Michel, 7, 129 of worship, 15
Los Negros Brujos, 91 Orishaoko (deity), 15
Lucumi: as ethnic identity, 55, 58-59, 78; Orisha- Voodoo, 3, 6, 114-20, 161; and
as a language, 56, 145-47; and Oyo, 55, black nationalism, 114, 115-16; and Hai-
57; as religion, 56, 78, 161, 169-70, tian vodun, 114-15; and Santeria, 114,
175; and Yoruba culture and descent, 117-18, 120; and triangular identity and
56; as Yoruba subgroup, 55. See also Eth- alliance dilemma, 119—20
nicity, African Ortiz, Fernando, 71, 85, 91-92, 109, 147
Orunmila (deity), 14. See also Ifa
Machado, Gerardo, 81 Oshosi (deity), 15
Magic, 98 Owu and Egba Wars, 27
Mandinga, and W. G. Emmanuel, 84; Oya (deity), 15, 147-48
post-slavery, 137, 138; as slaves in Cuba, Oyo: Alafin of, 9; causes of collapse, 27; as
56, 57, 58 empire, 21; exports slaves through Porto
Mandingo, Mariano, 67 Novo, 27; new Oyo city, 28; political and
Martinez-Alier, Verena, 68—69 religious system, 21. See also Lucumi
Marx, Karl, 184 Oyotunyi Village, 6
Memory: codes and mechanisms of, 139— Ozain (deity), 137, 138
40, 145, 147; coding and altar symbol-
ism, 154-55; cognitive memory, 130; Palo Mayombe, 99, 171, 175—76. See also
collective memory, 7, 129, 132-36, 143, Congolese
149, 152, 157; habit memory, 130-32; Palenques: and cimarrones, 65—66; and
personal memory, 129-30 Santeria, 67, 75
Moorish Science Temple, 114 Persecution: of Santeria, 5, 85, 95-99; of
Monocultural societies, 158 Jews and Muslims in Spain, 38
Montejo, Esteban, 56-57, 169—70
Mora, Francisco (Pancho), 106 Quiniones, Margie Baynes, 107
Morel de Santa Cruz, Pedro Agustín, 70
Multicultural societies, 158, 160 Race relations: in Cuba, 4, 80, 96; and de-
Muniz, Francesca, 169 Africanization campaign, 85, 97-98; in-
fluence of North Americans, 5, 80, 81;
Nations: and Afro-Cuban clubs, 57; in Ortiz and race concept, 92. See also Con-
Cuba, 55, 56; and social relations among tinuum, racial
slaves, 57 Redefinition: and Catholicism, 166-67,
Nangare ritual, 95 168; of cultural categories, 160; through
National identity: in Cuba, 5; and Cuban encounters, 172—74
middle class, 82, go; and Santeria, 101 Regla, 83
Nation of Islam, 116 Reincarnation, 88
Negro Revolt of 1912, 81, 97 Republic of New Africa, 116
Nobles, Mercedes, 106 Ritual: role of in Yoruba ontology, 17; as
Nobles, Wade, 127-28 memory and performance in Santeria,
142-43
Oba (deity), 15 Roberts, John M., 132
Obatala (deity), 16, 155 Rodriguez, Lazaro Benedi, 168—69
Ochun (deity), 147-48, 155
Odua (deity), 9, 10, 14 Sacrifice, 150
Ogboni Society: as secret society of the Saints: as charter for conquest, 48; cult of,
earth, 16; disappears in Cuba, 78 46, 47, 167; and cultural hegemony in
206 / Index
Cuba, 48-52, 74; as miraculous healers, Spiritism: and Kardec, 2, 85-86; See also
51-52; official and folk views of saint- Espiritismo
hood, 47-48; saints’ days festivals in Spirit possession, 147—48, 175, 179
Santeria, 144-45; In Santeria and Espir- Stereotypes, 5, 8, 173, 182
itismo, 89, 170, 175; and sugar planta- Sugar production, 4, 79
tions in Cuba, 49; syncretism with Symbols: and power, 8; ritual drums as, 85
orisha, 76, 77 Syncretism: between orisha and saints, 5,
Santeria: and anti-Castro political organi- 76; in Cuba, 59, 65, 167—71; and cul-
zations, 106; commemorative festivals, tural categories, 159—60, 170, 180-81;
143-45; contexts of, 1-2; Early, 3, 5; described, 158—59, 181; and domestic
and Espiritismo, 85-90, 98—gg; and eth- slaves, 64; and Espiritismo, 87; as orga-
nic identity in U.S., 106-107, 114; func- nization of cultural diversity, 7; on rural
tions of, gg; as health care system, 106; plantations, 61-64; and slave healers,
and Ifa divination, 140—42; mythology, 64-65. See also Creole culture
140, 141, 148; and Orisha-Voodoo, 114,
117-18, 119—20; persisting, 3, 5; ritual, Temples, 11, 12
140—42, 148; and Santerismo, 109-11, Ten Years War, 81
113-14, 161; and socialism, 100, 101— Tradition, religious, 7; and collective mem-
103; and spirit possession, 147—48, ory, 157; and ethnicity, 182-83, 184;
175, 179; and syncretism, 97—98, 167; phases of development in Santeria, 3
transmission to U.S., 106-107; transmis- Turner, Victor, 140, 142
sion to whites, 104, 105, 107; variation
in, 99, 161-62, 163-64, 180. See also Universal Negro Improvement Association,
Persecution 114
Santerismo: attitudes toward, 112;
described, 3, 6, 107—14; and Espiritismo, Voduns (deities in Dahomey), 9
108-109, 110, 111; and ethnicity, 112—
14; and Santeria, 109-11, 113-14; spirit War for Independence, Cuban, 81, 85
hierarchy, 110 West African Religion, 29-30
Secrets (and secrecy), 14; in Africa and Whydah, 10
Cuba, 1560-57; and altar objects, 17 Wright, Richard, 184-85
Seranno, Assunta, 107, 117 Wurdemann, J. G. F., 73
Seven African Powers, 109—10, 113
Shango (deity) 2, 9, 14, 15 Yemoja, also Yemaya (deity), 15, 147-48,
Shrines: public and domestic in West Af- 154, 155
rica, 11-12, 152—56. See also Temples Yoruba: and Atlantic slave trade, 27, 28,
Slavery, African: and kinship, 19; and 30; and Benin, 20, 25; British invasion
palm oil production in Dahomey, 28 of, 28-29; city-states, 4, 9, 18, 20-21;
Slavery, Cuban: in cities, 67; and free and Dahomey, 27, 28; and hierarchy, 12,
Blacks, 67—69; and La Escalera, 68—69; 13-15; migrations of, 21; Oyo, 21, 27;
and manumission, 68; persistence Yoruba-Aja Commonwealth, 10. See also
and abolition, 5, 84; and racial dis- Kingdoms and Kings, West African
crimination, 68—69; rural slaves become Yoruba religion: as an attitude toward life,
wage laborers, 79; slave religion in 11; cosmology and pantheon, 13-17;
countryside, 74—75; work and leisure cults of the earth disappear, 77-78, 175;
in, 62 described, 1, 2; differences from Lucumi
Slave trade: abolition in Cuba, 55, 82, 84; religion, 76-78; elders and transmission
and Dahomey, 28, 30; decimation of im- of worship, 60—61; as ethnic tradition,
ports, causes of, 53-54; demography of, 18; instrumental strain, 17; integration
54-55, 57-58; and transmission of reli- of separate cults in Cuba, 76—77, 136-—
gious traditions, 58, 60—61, 136; and 37, 138; openness to change, 18; organi-
warfare, 30; and Yoruba, 28, 30 zation of worship, 12-14; and orthodoxy,
Soler, Amalia, 86, 88 11; places of worship, 11-12; role of
Spain: Africans in, 40; Catholicism as state family in transmission of orisha worship,
religion of, 37-38, 45; and conquest 59—60; and spirits, 14-16; Santeria as
culture, 38-39; emigration policy and variant of, 1, 134; syncretism of orisha
national integration, 37; inhibits acquisi- with saints, 76, 77; transformation of in
tion of wealth in Cuba, 45; slavery in, Cuba, 74-78. See also Orisha
40. See also Ladinos Yoruba Temple, 107, 119
GEORGE BRANDON IS Associate Professor and
Director of the Program in Sociomedical
Sciences at the Sophie Davis School of
Biomedical Education of the City University
of New York. He is the author of a chapter on
Santeria in Africanisms in American Culture
(1990) and of articles in the Journal of Caribbean
Studies, the Journal of Black Studies, Oral History
Review, and the Gniot.
Anibvopalogy
Relisioms Studies
“Brandon-more than fulfills his promise to take the reader on the transat-
lantic journey of the orisha and to explore the complexities of African
memory in the diaspora.”
ISBN 0-253-21114