Overview

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Overview

Between 1492 and 1870, at least 10 million Africans, representing hundreds of ethnic groups, were carried as slaves to the islands of the Caribbean and the Atlantic coasts of South, Central, and North America. Many thousands more were taken after the close of legal slavery or induced to emigrate as indentured servants. Despite the harshness of life both in slavery and after emancipation, they were more or less able to reconstruct a cultural identity on the basis of the elements of the African cultures that they carried with them and the social environments in which they found themselves.

Among the many cultural skills that Africans brought to the Americas were patterns of spiritual beliefs and practices that varied with each ethnic group. Some of the slaves were trained priests and priestesses of African spirits who carried with them powers of enchantment and healing. Thrown into the maelstrom of Atlantic slave societies, they found these skills to be valuable in meeting the challenges of plantation and urban life. In most cases the specific ethnic context of the beliefs and practices was lost, but in others sufficient numbers of Africans from the same region were able to reconstitute themselves as "nations" within the multiethnic societies to which they were taken. Through these nations, or communities, African beliefs and practices were preserved and developed in dialogue with the non-African traditions in their milieu.

The most influential African peoples in Latin America came from the coastal and forest zones of western Africa. Particularly notable were the Ashanti and Fanti peoples of present-day Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast); the Ewe- and Fon-speaking peoples of present-day Togo and Benin; the Hausa, Yoruba, and Ibo peoples of present-day Nigeria; and the many interrelated peoples of the former Kongo kingdom of present-day Zaire and Angola. Depending upon the conditions that members of each group encountered in the Americas, they were able to preserve more or less complex patterns of their spiritual beliefs and practices. Factors such as racial and ethnic demographics, agricultural and mercantile systems, and opportunities for manumission or escape all influenced the transplantation of African religions in the Americas.

Perhaps the most significant factor in the development of these traditions was the established European religion of a particular region. In the Roman Catholic colonies of Spain, Portugal, and France, slaves were baptized as a matter of law, and in some regions, particularly urban areas, the Catholic Church actively supported slave rights and manumission. The Catholic Church also accepted a wide variety of ethnic ceremonials as legitimate supplements to the orthodox sacraments. The Protestant chur-ches of the British and Dutch colonies, by contrast, did not legislate the baptism of slaves and lacked the political power to influence their legal or social status. Slaves and free blacks came to accept Christianity through nonconforming Baptist and Methodist churches, which emphasized local leadership, biblical foundations, and personal conversion.

The social and religious factors stemming from these European religious traditions were crucial in determining the ways in which the African religions developed in their particular milieus. While there are many exceptions, as a broad general rule, Africans and their descendants in Catholic regions developed religious institutions alternative and parallel to Christianity, such as Candomblé in Brazil, vodun (vodou, voodoo) in Haiti, or Santería in Cuba. In the Protestant regions, however, they created alternative forms of Protestant Christianity, such as Revival in Jamaica or the Spiritual Baptists of Trinidad. This dialogue of religious elements either by juxtaposition in Catholic regions or reinterpretation in Protestant regions has been the primary focus of researchers who see in African-derived traditions models for understanding culture change. More recently, researchers have looked to the traditions for light on issues of the multiple meanings of symbols and the coexistence of plural identities.

In the Latin American world, African religious traditions have been particularly influential in areas of intensive eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sugar production. The African-derived traditions of Haiti, northeastern Brazil, and Cuba have shaped the national cultures of those countries, and their emigrants have established the traditions in other Latin-and English-speaking countries. Perhaps the most famous of the traditions, Haitian vodou, owes its reputation to the role of devotees in the slave revolt that overthrew the French colonial authorities of Saint Domingue and established the "black republic" of Haiti in the midst of slaveholding colonies and the newly independent United States. Tales of voodoo barbarism were revived during Haiti's occupation by U.S. Marines in the twentieth century and continue to serve to discredit black spirituality in that country and elsewhere. Vodou means simply "spirit" in the Fon language of enslaved Dahomeans brought to Haiti in the eighteenth century, and the tradition centers on cultivating the spirits' protection and inspiration in meeting the harsh challenges of the lives of the Haitian poor.

In Brazil, particularly the Northeastern city of Salvador da Bahia, the African-derived traditions are called Candomblé. Due to Brazil's relative proximity to Africa, a thriving reciprocal trade brought not only slaves but free Africans to Bahia. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they established a number of houses of worship based on the African traditions of the houses' founders. The prestige of these early houses formed the model for the veneration of African spirits throughout Brazil. While the old Bahian houses pride themselves on the purity of their African liturgies, others have wedded elements of their practices to European and Amerindian ideas, thus creating thousands of variants known collectively as Umbanda. It is largely through Umbanda's popularization of Candomblé that African spirits known as orishas (Orixás) are popular throughout the country. The festival of Iemanjá, the maternal spirit of the oceans, is attended by hundreds of thousands on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro and millions of others throughout the country.

Africans in Cuba, like those in Brazil and to a lesser extent in Haiti, were able to maintain ethnic identities through religious organizations. The most widespread tradition is often called Santería, a name deriving from the correspondences developed between the spirits of the Yoruba people and the Catholic saints. Kongo practices form the basis of another tradition, known alternately as Palo or Mayombe. The secret religious societies of the Efik and Ejaham peoples have been transplanted to Cuba, where they are known as Abakua. While these traditions never achieved the approval of the wider society, their influence in festivals and popular music brought elements of their spiritualities to every sector of the Cuban population.

The traditions of Haiti, Brazil, and Cuba are only the best-known of African-Hispanic traditions. All the countries of the Atlantic littoral have produced more or less developed spiritualities that have their origin in Africa. The Haitian, Brazilian, and Cuban traditions have become most important because they have been studied by scholars and because emigrants have carried these traditions to other countries, where they often act as models for a renewed African consciousness. Haitians have taken vodou to the Dominican Republic and the United States; Brazilians have established Candomblé houses in Argentina; and Cubans have taken Santería to the United States, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

An extraordinary bibliography with nearly 6,000 entries may be found in John Gray, comp, Ashé: Traditional Religion and Healing in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Diaspora, a Classified International Bibliography (1989).

Other important studies include Melville J. Herskovits, The New World Negro: Selected Papers in Afroamerican Studies (1966); Roger Bastide, African Civilisations in the New World, translated by Peter Green (1972); Angelina Pollak Eltz, Cultos afroamericanos (1972); Leonard E. Barrett, Soul-Force: African Heritage in Afro-American Religion (1974); George Eaton Simpson, Black Religions in the New World (1978); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983); Kortright Davis and Elias Farajajé-Jones, eds., African Creative Expressions of the Divine (1991); Joseph M. Murphy, Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora (1994).

Additional Bibliography

Cros Sandoval, Mercedes. Worldview, the Orichas, and Santería: Africa to Cuba and Beyond. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006.

Daniel, Yvonne. Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.

Fernández Olmos, Margarite, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo. New York: New York University Press, 2003.

Greenfield, Sidney M., and A. F. Droogers, eds. Reinventing Religions: Syncretism and Transformation in Africa and the Americas. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.

Sweet, James H. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Joseph M. Murphy

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture