iS

of the Americas
19 VAT the Search for erin
imate Sat of Afro-Atlantic aT

Edited by Stephan Palmié

BRILL
Africas of the Americas
Studies of Religion in Africa

Supplements to the Journal of

Religion in Africa

Edited by
Paul Gifford
School of Oriental and African Studies, London

VOLUME 33
 Africas of the Americas

Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of

Afro-Atlantic Religions

Edited by
Stephan Palmié

LEIDEN + BOSTON
2008
Cover Photograph by Bnan Brazeal

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Africas of the Americas : beyond the search for origins in the study of Afro-Atlantic
religions / edited by Stephan Palmié.
p. cm. — (Studies of religion in Africa, ISSN 0169-9814 ; v. 33)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-90-04-16472-7 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Afro-Caribbean cults. 2. Africa—Religion. 3. Caribbean Area—Religion.
I. Palmié, Stephan. II. Title. III. Series.

BL2565.A36 2008
299.6097—dc22
2008008544

ISSN 0169-9814
ISBN 978 90 04 16472 7

Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,

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 CONTENTS

Introduction: On Predications of Afficanity ..ccccnnnnnccnnnononannnnnns» l

Stephan Palmié

On Leaving and Joining Africanness T'hrough Religion:

The ‘Black Caribs’ Across Multiple Diasporic Horizons ...... 39
Paul Christopher Johnson

From Igbo Israeli to African Christian: The Emergence of

Racial Identity in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narratiwe ...... 79
James Sidbury

Governing Man-Gods: Spiritism and the Struggle for

Progress in Republican Cuba ....onoccccnonccncnonncnnnonananncnanananonononos 107
Reinaldo L. Román

Divining the Past: The Linguistic Reconstruction of ‘African’

Roots in Diasporic Ritual Registers and Songs ............::ceee 141
Kristina Wirtz

Ecué's Atlantic: An Essay in Methodology ......cccccccnnoconnnncnnnnnanns» 179

Stephan Palmié

Dona Preta’s Trek to Gachoeira ....ocoocnccccncnncncnncnononononacarononcnonoss 223

Brian Brazeal

Transatlantic Dialogue: Roger Bastide and the African

American Religions ........oonoccnnnnnonnnonnnnnannnonanancncnnnnnncnnnonccnnnnnos 299
Stefania Capone

Peasants, Migrants and the Discovery of African Traditions:

Ritual and Social Change in Lowland Haltl ....ooonomonccnnnncnonno» 293
Karen E. Richman
vl CONTENTS

African Accents, Speaking Child Spirits and the Brazilian

Popular Imaginary: Permutations of Africanness in
Candomble ou... eee eeccccsssssncceecessseeceeeeessseeeeeeeeessseeeeeeesessenees
Elina Hartikainen

Free to Be a Slave: Slavery as Metaphor in the Afro-Atlantic

ReliglonS ....ocooonocccnnnooncccnonnononancnnonanononnononononnnncnnononnnrnnnnccnnccnnnnns
J. Lorand Matory
 INTRODUCTION: ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY’

Stephan Palmié

Of Passports, Fly Whisks, and the Limits of Empiricism

Are ‘Africa’ and ‘Africanness’ unproblematic, self-evident, and histori-

cally invariable concepts? Or are we dealing with terms whose mul-
tiple and changing meanings are the products of complicated, and
conflict-ridden histories, become inflected by the positionality of those
who deploy them, and so need to be opened up to analyses that go
far beyond the commonsense conceptions which they ostensibly seem
to denote? In her recent book Mapping Yoruba Networks, Kamari Clarke
(2004: 107-111) offers an ethnographic vignette that eloquently speaks
to these questions. Here we find Clarke arriving at Lagos airport in
the company of the king of Oyotunji and several of its dignitar-
ies. Oyotunji is a black American intentional community in South
Carolina, ideologically integrated by a version of African American
cultural nationalism often referred to as “Yoruba Reversionism’ or
“Yoruba Revivalism’. Its denizens have modeled their collective life
on a theocratically structured interpretation of “Yorubaness’, initially
largely gleaned from the ethnographic literature, and onginally legiti-
mated, theologically, by the king’s 1958 initiation into the Cuban regla
de ocha, a religious formation the origins of which tends to be traced
to the Yoruba (Hunt 1979, Palmié 1995, 2005a, Clarke 2004). Clarke’s
travel companions are African American heritage tourists, but not of
the ordinary kind. They are on a mission to recover, as they see it, the
religious knowledge, ritual authority, and, ultimately, cultural identity
that was stripped from them by North American slavery, became avail-
able to them once more (albeit in corrupted form) through Cuban
sources, and had finally been ratified as ‘theirs’ by the Ooni of Ife

' My thanks go to Brad Weiss for the initial invitation to edit the special double
issue of the Journal of Religion in Afnca out of which this volume grew. I would also
like to extend my gratitude to Ingrid Lawrie for her invaluable editorial assistance,
and to Ingeborg van der Laan for taking this project to a next step. Bobby Hill
and Karen E. Fields offered generous and trenchant critique on an earlier version
of this introduction.
2 INTRODUCTION

who, in 1981, crowned the Detroit-born Walter Serge King, now Oba
Efuntola Adelabu Adefunmi I, as the sovereign of the first Yoruba
kingdom outside of Africa. ‘The Nigerian immigration officers, however,
do not quite see it that way. Unimpressed by the ‘traditional’ Yoruba
attire, facial scarifications, and linguistic competence of some of the
sojourners in Clarke’s group, they apparently cannot perceive them as
anything but a particularly curious, and perhaps somewhat worrisome
species of dyinbé—a Yoruba-term for Europeans, and by implication,
foreigners more generally (Abrahams 1958). Bemused by the North
American visitors’ heavily accented attempts to speak Yoruba, they
reply in English, and eventually let them pass.
For Clarke, the encounter raises questions akin to those this volume
aims to address: ‘whose “Africa” is “Africa”?’ she asks (Clarke 2004:
139), ‘whose “Africa” is “African”? ‘That of the uniformed Nigerian
border guards, that of the African travelers in suit and tie who crowd
the airport, or that of the black American visitors robed in ‘traditional’
cloth and bedecked with cownie shells? And how might such questions
possibly be answered? What, other than the sheer political weight of
the American passports allowing residents of Oyotunji to cross the
Nigerian border into what they perceive of as their ‘homeland’ might
plausibly call into question their self-identification as ritually reborn
Yoruba? On what grounds might the conception of ‘Africanness’ they
claim for themselves be contrasted to that legally operative for the
Nigerian immigration officers? On what grounds might either one be
ratified or contested? Part of the question obviously turns on what
semantic functions we might want terms like ‘Africa’ and ‘Afnicanness’
to discharge, and how we would want to calibrate the limits beyond
which their application renders their meanings too vague or contradic-
tory to retain any sense of conceptual precision.’

? Phylogenetically speaking, all humans are, of course, Africans. But this does not
help in trying to conceptualize the relations between those of us who stayed on that
continent, and those who left it in prehistoric—let alone historical—times. In a nar-
row political sense, the plight of Clarke’s travel companions is a mirror image of the
Black Hebrew Israelites’ longstanding struggle with the state of Israel over its refusal
to grant them right of residence under the Law of Return. Onginally from the US.,
and settled in the Negev for some thirty years now (mostly on expired tourist visa),
the Black Hebrew Israelites no longer claim that the Israeli settler state usurped the
part of ‘Africa’ known as Palestine. Yet their persistent refusal to bow to rabbinical
authority and formally convert makes them ‘unrecognizable’ as Jews under Israel’s
laws (cf. Weisbord 1975, Markovitz 1996, Landing 2002).
 ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY 3

But the issues raised by the ‘Africanness’ claimed by Clarke’s travel

companions go deeper than a mere disjuncture between everyday lan-
guage and analytical terminology exposed bya situational, but otherwise
fortuitous semantic dissonance. Much of my own work has focused on
Afro-Caribbean religions, and it is, perhaps, no accident that questions
concerning the epistemological status of attnbutions of ‘Africanity’ to
religious practices occurring ‘out of Africa’—dquite naturally, or so it
seems to me now—grew out of my experience of doing fieldwork on
‘Santeria’ or, more properly, regla de ocha, an Afro-Cuban religious com-
plex that has long been regarded as one of the more ‘Afncan’ of African
American religions (Palmié 1991). Needless to say, like many others who
do research on such phenomena, I was not only prepared to find remark-
able correspondences between contemporary Afro-Cuban practices and
the ethnographic literature on Africa, I actually found them. Again, like
many others, I initially saw little reason to question the epistemological
premises upon which such discoveries were necessarily based. If a ritual
object in Afro-Cuban religion looks like a Yoruba ceremonial fly whisk,
and is called by the term for a Yoruba fly whisk—inike—then where is
the problem? Nor was I fully conscious of the intellectual pedigree of
such discovery procedures, and the classic ethnological syllogism upon
which they rest, viz., that what looks alike must have a relation that can
be expressed in terms of spatial contiguity and/or temporal succession.
But—as Clarke’s Nigerian immigration agents might have appreci-
ated—this is only where the problems start.
Different from the case of Clarke’s immigration officers, there 1s no
unambiguous authonity to which an ethnographer dealing with fly-whisks
can appeal. Objects, after all, carry no passports.’ As a result, what Marilyn
Strathern (1985, 1991) identifies as the ‘empiricist dilemma’ began to vex
me as soon as I left the field, and started to pore over my notes and the
literature which had both enabled and constrained my choice of what
counted as relevant data. ‘The problem Strathern puts her finger on is
this: once we become uncertain about the possibility of discrete definitions

> That objects sometimes carry trademarks hardly disambiguates matters—as

evidenced by the Chinese ongins of a number of emblematically ‘African’ ntual
goods routinely purveyed in North American botánicas (retail stores that cater to
practitioners of Afro-Cuban or other “African derived” religions). Cf. Coombe and
Stoller (1994) on what one might call the ‘social life of commodified “Africana””,
and Long (2001) and the contributions to Polk (2004) on esoteric retailing and
botánicas more generally.
4. INTRODUCTION

of the elements of a relationship, we are in a descriptive fix as well.* For

what does 1t mean to say that Yoruba and Afro-Cuban fly whisks stand
to each other in a relation of, say, ‘identity’, ‘functional equivalence’,
‘genetic devolution’ or “historical dependence’? And what do such choices
of analytical narratiwe (for with each of these choices goes a story) turn the
Afro-Cuban ceremonial fly whisk into? An ‘African’ implement merely
displaced to another continent by the vagaries of history? An object
unequivocally defined as ‘American’ by its concrete social context of
use? Or something which marks a collapse of the categories ‘Africa’ and
‘America’ into each other (and, hence, the impossibility of representing
relatedness)—not because of any essential or historically acquired features
of the object, but because of the nature of our question?
Here then is the set of questions that inform this volume—which
originated in a special issue of the Journal of Rehgion in Afnca. It is a set
of questions that Andrew Walls, the journal’s founding editor, wisely
circumvented in naming it the Journal of Religion in Afnca, and it may be
formulated as follows: how can instances of religious behavior—‘iY or ‘out
of Africa’—be qualified as ‘African’? On what conceptual grounds—other
than entrenched western geopolitical commonsense’—might such predi-
cations become possible in the first place, and meaningful in the second?
What are the implications of such usage? And what might it implicate its
user in? What, to recur once more to Clarke’s example, might—as she
indicates—have led her African American travel companions to think of
themselves as perhaps more ‘Yoruba’ than the Yoruba-speaking agents

* Neither the ‘terms’ of a relationship, nor the ‘relation’ they constitute are natural
givens. ‘They are heuristic constructs. As David Parkin (1987: 55) summed up the
issues involved in the kinds of comparison African Americanists have long engaged
in, ‘moving from (a) the creation of similarity out of inexplicable [ethnographic]
diversity to (b) explicable differences arising from similarities to (c) a comparative
statement of relational effect will yield acceptable results only when placed within a
cultural region’. This, however, is not at all a presumption from which the kind of
transtemporal and transcontinental comparisons characteristic of much of African
American anthropology can proceed—at least not in an inductwe fashion. For exami-
nations of epistemological questions similar to the ones at hand in very different
ethnographic and historical context, see “Thomas (1989) and Harrison (2006).
> If “Africa” (and, for that matter, “Europe”, America”, ‘the Middle East’, etc.) can be
said to exist, this is, as Agnew (1999: 91) puts it, at least partly a question about ‘the
degree to which we can believe that regions are “real” in the sense of marking off
distinctive bits of the earth’s surface or the product of political and social conventions
that appear and disappear as human history takes its course’ (cf. Wallerstein 1991,
Lewis and Wigan 1997). For a provocative formulation of a version of geo-referential
relativism based on a performative notion of “emergent mapping’ and the coincidence
of divergent, only partially commensurabe spatial ontologies see Turnbull (2007).
 ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY 9

of the Nigenan state they confronted in Lagos airport upon their return
to their elective ‘motherland’? What was ‘African’ about the Africa they
encountered there, and what was ‘African’ about their own vision of the
event, trying as they had to fly under the radar of the critena of exclusion
enforced by the sovereign state of Nigeria—which happens to secularly
engulf their spiritual homeland? Clarke leaves us with an image of polite
evasion. Her re-born Yoruba travel companions do not want to appeal
to principles, they want to cross a border. But the problem, she makes
clear, persists. What can count as “Africanity”, what attributes might be
constitutive of such a quality, and what range of phenomena might be
included—or excluded—from such a concept’s ‘proper’ semantic scope
is a deeply problematic question.

How Afnean’ is Afnca?

Not surprisingly, these are issues rarely raised in classical treatments

of religion in properly continental ‘African’ locations. Little is there in,
for example, Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer ethnography, Marcel Griaule’s
work on Dogon cosmology, Victor Turner’s analyses of Ndembu
ritual, or, indeed, William Bascom’s account of Yoruba divination that
might warrant questioning the ‘Africanity’ of whatever it is the Nuer,
Dogon, Ndembu, or Yoruba are doing when we say that they engage
in ‘religious’ activities. If anything, what has come under scrutiny is the
appropriateness of the post-Reformation western category of ‘religion’
to characterize whatever is going on.° Likewise, we have long become
wary of the notion that the ethnonyms usually tagging the descriptions
of such practices could stand for self-enclosed, pelagically distributed
local ‘African worlds’ (Forde 1954) frozen into place by colonial regimes
and the regimes of knowledge that emerged in tandem with them.’
And we have come to acknowledge the inescapable historicity, indeed
often highly dynamic and open character, of the supposedly ‘closed’
systems of ritual and belief that an earlier anthropology had flattened
out under the default rubric of timeless ‘tradition’.? What has not been
called into question is the ‘Africanity’ of these ‘religions in Africa’.

° E.g. Brenner (1989), Shaw (1990), Landau (1999), Peterson (2002).

” E.g. Southall (1970), Amselle and M’Bokolo (1985), Fardon (1987, 1990), Hutchinson
(1996), Amselle (1998).
” E.g. Comaroff and Comaroff (1992), Geschiere (1997), Baum (1999), Peel (2000),
Shaw (2002).
6 INTRODUCTION

And yet, it is by no means clear how, or to what extent, the ‘Nuer-

ness’, ‘Dogon-ness’, ‘Ndembu-ness’, or ‘Yoruba-ness’ of the rituals and
conceptions represented in these classic ethnographies might translate
into, or be subsumed under, a larger class of phenomena sharing an
ascertainable quality that we might call ‘Africanity’. ‘That mere geo-
graphical situatedness cannot be a criterion becomes obvious once we
consider the case of so-called ‘world religions’. Here the degree of
‘Africanization’ that Christian or Islamic theology and practice can
endure without sliding—in the eyes of both their proselytizers and
analysts—into pagan/kafhr heterodoxy, ‘syncretism’, or subversive
appropriation has long been debated.”
In such discussions, the problem characteristically gains a proces-
sual (or even teleological) dimension in which both ‘African traditional
religion’ and religious forms preconceived as “extraneous imports’ are
often tacitly presumed to represent the ‘known’ endpoints between
which actual practice appears to problematically oscillate over time:
‘Africanity’ of belief and practice is what the successful convert is sup-
posed to leave behind, but often ‘slides back’ towards or, worse yet,
imposes upon hijacked elements of Christianity or Islam. In other words,
‘Africanity’ designates that place and time where properly universal (1.e.,
notionally non-localized, context-independent) religions are not, have
not arrived yet, or have been replaced by, or contaminated with, the
local particularisms of that curiously residual product of the western
imagination known as ‘African tradition’.
What we see at work here is a longstanding discursive ‘economy of
African alterity’ (Mbembe 2002); a ‘strategic formation’ in Said’s (1978)

’ E.g., Droogers (1977), Comaroff (1985), Kaplan (1986), Lewis (1986), Ranger
(1986, 1993), Comaroff and Comaroff (1991-1995), Brenner (2000). What is at issue
here is not only a matter of what an older sociology of religion might have called the
difference between ‘ethnic’ and ‘universal’ religions. We have plenty of examples dem-
onstrating that indigenously African religious formations—particularly regional oracles,
Initiatory societies, or cults of afflicuon—transcended not just the boundaries of local
communities, but broad swathes of ethnically heterogeneous social space (e.g., Werbner
1977, Janzen 1982, Schoffeleers 1992). In fact, at least in one case—that of the by
now virtually global ‘Orisha Movement’—the claim has been made that an originally
‘African’ religious formation has attained the status of a world religion (Clarke 2004,
Palmié 2005a, Matory 2005) What is more, while postcolonial African theologians
have, for some time now, sought to reclaim Christianity as a properly ‘African’ religion
in its own nght rather than a ‘foreign import’ (MacGaffey 1981), others such as e.g.
Ali Mazrui (2002) have made the case that Islam can only be regarded as exogenous
to Africa on the basis of imperialist geopolitical fictions that artificially separated the
Arabian peninsula from the African continent. Cf. MacEachern (2007).
 ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY 7

sense, in which the term Africa has always functioned as a ‘name for a
distance’ (Miller 1985). ‘This is one of the reasons why ethnonyms such
as Nuer, Dogon, Ndembu, or Yoruba (at least when considered in their
canonical ‘ethnographic’ locales and “presents” can become subject to
historicization without losing too much of their indexical value. ‘Terms
such as ‘Africa’ or ‘African’, however, can hardly escape unscathed a scru-
tiny of the complexities and contradictions of their largely heteronomous
history.'? Nowadays, one might, thus, say with some justification that
Evans-Pritchard lastingly ‘Nuer-ized’ the people who (under certain
circumstances, and probably reluctantly so) may have called them-
selves Nuer in the 1930s.'' Yet what was involved, historically, in the
centuries-long processes that resulted in the ‘Africanization’ of ‘Africa’
is a different matter altogether—particularly since most ‘Africans’, be
they Nuer, Dogon, Ndembu or what have you, only learned that they
were ‘Africans’ when slave traders, missionaries, or colonial officials
told them so, and began treating them “as such”.!'* By then, however,
they invariably had begun to bear not just the material burden of
the slave trade, its imperialist sequel and the neo-colonial forms of
dependency that continue to this day. They also came to shoulder the
weight of a foreign intellectual formation that had been in the making
for centuries and that was to set the terms of their integration into the
global realities of ‘Africanity’ brought on by the final closing of alien
military and discursive frontiers around them at the beginnings of the
twentieth century.
The question ‘what is African about Africa?’, however, represents but
a permutation of the conceptual problems that have dogged all analyses
of ‘African’ religion ‘out of Africa’—however the semantic value of
the term ‘Africa’ happens to have been construed, not just by scholars,
but equally if not more importantly by those who have claimed, and
nowadays claim, the predicate ‘African’ as an essential qualifier of their

'° Cf. Hammond and Jablow (1970), Barker (1978), Brantlinger (1985), Miller
(1985), Mudimbe (1988), or Appiah (1992).
'! Which is to say nothing about the ‘Nuer-ization’ (or, perhaps “Tallensification’)
of other so-called ‘stateless’ African societies which came into the orbit of British
anthropological segmentary lineage theory! Of course, few of us today remember the
rather charming candor with which Evans-Pnitchard (1940: 3, fnl) himself admitted
that the very term ‘Nuer’ was of Dinka origin, and that he used it only because
it had been ‘sanctioned by a century of usage’—largely by people who thought of
themselves as anything but Nuer.
'2 For particularly cogent explorations of the earliest, and in many ways crucial phases
of such processes of ‘Africanization’ see Prestholdt (2001) and Bennett (2005).
8 INTRODUCTION

religious practices. No student of New World phenomena that were

ever somehow associated with Africa could afford the epistemological
nonchalance with which most classical colonial Africanist ethnographies
simply bracketed the ‘Africanity’ of their objects of study as a matter
too self-evident to warrant attention.’ The question they all faced, in
one way or the other, was how to identify what Melville J. Herskovits
(1930) was to call ‘African retentions’ in New World cultures without
a sense of what constituted an ‘Africanism’ in the first place.'* What
were its signs or symptoms, what the rules of recognition by which such
a ‘thing’ could be read off of forms of sociality and cultural praxis
occurring “out of Africa”?””

Ajncan’ Ongins and the Interactwity of ‘Kinds’

Obviously, notions of ‘Afncan ongins’ had informed perceptions of African

American behavior since the beginnings of racial slavery in the New
World, but they took shape within a complex field of knowledge. Biblical
imagery, elements of classical and early Renaissance anthropogeography,
reports of travelers and traders, stereotypes of the ‘character’ of various
African ‘nations’, and concrete New World experiences of interaction
with enslaved Africans and their descendants defined a shifting and his-
torically mutable matrix within which changing social constructions of

'3 An obvious—and obviously bizarre—exception can be seen in late nineteenth

and early twentieth century British hyperdiffusionism most evident in the so-called
Hamitc Hypothesis which partly stripped select Africans of their 'Africanity”, and
imbued them with Middle Eastern origins. For the deeply troubling afterlife of such
conceptual practices in contemporary Darfur see De Waal (2005).
'* Note here the terminological conundrum: although Mudimbe (1988) uses the
concept of ‘Africanism’ analogously to Said’s deployment of the term “‘Onentalism’
as circumscribing a discursive formation supposed to represent “things African”, its
(analytical) value is compromised not just by older usages of ‘Africanism’ (which the
OED traces to Milton’s remarks on the African Church fathers), but by the twentieth
century rise of institutionalized African Studies, whose practitioners to this day tend
to call themselves Africanists .(cf. Miller 1985, Martin and West 1999).
'5 This moment has received some attention in the case of cultural goods circu-
lating outward from ‘Africa’ to the ‘west’. Compare Steiner (1994) on ‘African art’,
Coombe and Stoler (1994) and Stoller (2002) on commodified emblems of (generic)
‘Africanness’, and Ebron (2002) on African music”. Sylvanus (2007) presents the even
more complex case of ‘African’ wax-print textiles—a locally nostrified import to Africa
(originally from Dutch Indonesia, later the Netherlands, and now increasingly China)
that has now become emblematic of ‘Africanness’ in Parisian boutiques.
 ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY 9

the ‘otherness’ of black people in the New World became representable as

African (whatever this adjective meant in each particular instance).
Ironically, the first systematic efforts at refashioning elements of
such conceptions of racial alterity into indices of cultural Africanity in
the work of scholars such as the Brazilian Raimundo Nina Rodrigues
(1862-1906) or the Cuban Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969) were initially
motivated by the desire to eradicate what local elites perceived as an
embarrassing, noxious legacy of a slaveholding past that threatened to
retard, even undermine, their respective nations’ civilizational progress.'®
Yet the method they pioneered—the formal comparison of New World
cultural ‘traits’ with ethnographic descriptions of putative African pre-
cursors culled from what Mudimbe called the ‘colonial lbrary’—was
to set the agenda for much twentieth-century anthropological research
on the ‘African origins’ of New World cultural forms (Wirtz, Palmié,
this volume).
In fact what Latin American scholars and modernist reformers like
Nina Rodrigues and Ortiz achieved (not incidentally largely on the
basis of missionary ‘Africanist’ literature) was to give the chronotope
of ‘Africanity’ a lease of life in the Americas. It is in their work and
vision that ‘Africa’ once more emerges as a temporalizing device: it
indicated a past that needed to be known in order to more effectively
combat its hold on the future of modernizing nation states. Even in
cases where ‘Africa’ eventually came to be reconfigured as a valued
aspect of self-consciously hybrid national projects after the 1930s—as
in Ortiz’s later work (Palmié 1998) or that of Gilberto Freyre or Roger
Bastide (Dantas Gois 1988, Capone 2000, this volume)—such attempts
at nostrifying and thereby domesticating “things African’ nonetheless
retained the allochronic orientation of the earlier ‘search and destroy’
scholarship that had inaugurated the African Americanist enterprise—a
fact that is clearly evident in the neo-Tylorean terminology that to
this day characterizes the patrimonialization of ‘authentically African’
surowals in both Cuban and Brazilian official discourse.

'6 Cf. Dantas Gois (1988), Maggie (1992), Palmié (1998, 2002), Bronfman (2004),
Román (this volume). But see also Moses (1998), Adeleke (1998), or Edwards (2001)
on similar attitudes among African American missionaries and intellectuals at the
time whose self-declared project it was to redeem their ‘benighted brethren’ in
Africa, and eradicate ‘uncivilized’ or ‘backward’ practices among their New World
black consociates.
10 INTRODUCTION

Once Melville J. Herskovits established Nina Rodrigues’s and

Ortiz’s model of local ‘African Americanist’ knowledge production
on a hemispheric scale and revalorized its political aims as the search
for the ‘past’ of racially excluded populations in New World nation
states, the ‘discovery’ of ‘Africa in the Americas’ became an endeavor
of rapidly growing academic and extra-academic significance. This
was particularly so once actors and groups contextually identified as
‘black’ in the U.S. (but increasingly also elsewhere) themselves began to
embrace ‘Africanity’ as a form of positively valonzed difference. What
had once been branded as a ‘racially determined’ inability of black
people to conform to socially dominant white norms, framed as the
result of otherwise unexplained forces of African ‘cultural tenacity’, or
simply explained as a deficit in Americanization’ due to racist exclusion,
now could be claimed as the active, even prideful continuation of a
transatlantic cultural heritage in the Afncan Diaspora.'’ As on the African
continent itself, the terms of an originally (and perhaps essentially)
racist Africanist savoir came to be selectively transformed into bodies
of—racially emancipatory —diasporic connaissance.
It is precisely in such temporalizing translations of ‘race into culture’
(Michaels 1992) that we should see the origins of what David Scott
(1991, 1999) has sharply criticized as an epistemologically naive and
ideologically dubious ‘verificationist’ orientation in African Americanist
anthropology. While earlier critics of programmatic searches for African
origins such as M.G. Smith (1965) mainly concerned themselves with
methodological shortcomings and questionable assumptions about
cultural dynamics (see Palmié and Wirtz, this issue), Scott explicitly
takes issue with their central claim: that anthropologists could authon-
tatively ‘answer such questions as whether or not or to what extent
[contemporary African American cultures] are authentically Afncan’
(1999: 108).
Like Gordon and Anderson (1999: 284) who argue against naturalistic
conceptions of ‘African diasporic identities’ as pre-defined by ‘essential

'? Cf. Jackson (1986), Apter (1991), Segato (1998), Capone (2000), Yelvington
(2006). I have so far sought to avoid the term ‘African Diaspora’ not only because
its current use is of relatively recent ongin, but also because its seemingly self-evident
recurrence to a notion of ‘Afncanity’ pre-empts some of the questions this volume is
concerned with. For a critique of the ‘diaspora’ concept that explicitly raises these
concerns see Zeleza (2005).
 ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY 11

features common to various peoples of African descent’, and instead advo-

cate ethnographic attention to the production of “diasporic identification’,
Scott 1s concerned with the fact that in concrete social contexts (rather
than in, say, abstract metageographical debate) terms such as ‘Africa and
‘Africanness’ do not enjoy any kind of transparent prediscursive reality.
Scott thus urges a sustained analysis of the situated ideologies, discourses
and institutional practices within which Africa’ and “Africanity” function
as ‘animating, constituting figures”. What, he asks, are the ‘networks of
power and knowledge within which these figures are deployed’, and
what ‘the sorts of moral identities’ and communities they are supposed
to render imaginable and socially real (Scott 1999: 108)?
What comes into view here is of far broader relevance than a mere
poststructuralist critique of an outmoded, epistemologically naive,
and ultimately politically troubling empincism in African Americanist
research. If the essays collected in this volume have a single unifying
concern, it is to demonstrate that the objects of knowledge created
by continental divisions of scholarly labor are artifacts of specific and
historically mutable interests and epistemological accentuations. The
‘Africa’ under discussion here does not refer to an entity that could
be presumed to be given in any simple, self-evident fashion. It is not
just a ‘place’ but a trope that encodes and evokes complex, historically
sedimented, and contextually variable bodies of knowledge pertaining
to the nature of human beings, social arrangements, and cultural forms
that have variously entered into its semantic purview.
What is more, once we consider this ‘Africa’ as a topos that circulates
not only within various disciplined expert languages of supposedly
universal semantic range, but between these and a plethora of extra-
disciplinary, and indeed explicitly politicized discourses, it becomes
clear that the entities this ‘Africa’ brings into focus are ‘interactive’
rather than ‘natural’ kinds (Hacking 1999). ‘These are phenomena that
not only cannot be presumed to remain stable irrespective of how,
and by whom, they are named. Rather, they react to the process of
naming—waxing and waning, expanding or contracting, transforming
qualitatively, and sometimes even coming into being (or to naught) as
a result of designation. To turn such names into predicates of forms
of social identification or cultural practices therefore not only yields
inevitably situated projections; rather, such predications themselves
can exert powerful transformative influence upon the realities they are
supposed to qualify or represent.
12 INTRODUCTION

Still, however useful Hacking’s formulation is to any attempt to

disrupt objectivist classificatory endeavors in the social sciences, it
neglects precisely the moment that several of the contributors to this
special issue aim to highlight—viz. what we might provisionally call the
performativity of self-naming. ‘This moment was thrown into particu-
larly sharp relief by the controversy that arose in the wake of Vincent
Carretta’s (1999) suggestion that Gustavus Vassa aka Olaudah Equiano,
the canonical author of the first African American slave narrative, had
not been born in Africa (as its author claimed), but in North America.
It had long been known that Vassa/Equiano had interpolated materials
from various eighteenth-century sources into his account of his childhood
in a region of the Bight of Benin he called ‘Eboe’. Sull, the possibility
that the description of Africa he gave in The Interesting Narratwe of Olaudah
Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Wntten by Himself (originally published
in 1789) was not based on experience ‘in Africa’ nevertheless aroused
considerable scholarly passion.’®
What went largely unnoticed are two intriguing possibilities: first, if
Vassa/Equiano had indeed been born in the Carolinas, might he not have
systematically gathered information about Africa from first-generation
Africans there, which he then collated with printed sources at his disposal
(thus, in effect, becoming the first Africanist’ historian in a modern sense)?
Second, and even more apposite to the discussion at hand, regardless of
the place of his birth, his dislocation from the African continent may have
enabled him to enunciate a universal ‘African’ identity, rather than one
grounded in notions of descent, local affinities, or language (Byrd 2006,
Sidbury, this volume). If so he may not have been an ‘Igbo’ (whatever
that could possibly have meant in the eighteenth century). But, we may
be entitled to ask, was he not an ‘African’ in a rather thoroughly modern
sense?
‘As for those diverse historical peoples one might today retrospec-
tively name “Africans”’ writes David Chioni Moore (1998: 32), “the
idea, the name, and the identity of Africa as a fully continental entity
became only apparent with extra-African contact’. ‘Most dramatically’,
he continues (ibid.), ‘this came in the horrific crucible of the Atlantic
slave trade’. Like W.E.B. Dubois’s (1946: 7) earlier observation that the
“idea of one Africa” as a referent of claims to identity ‘stems naturally

'8 See Byrd (2006) and Lovejoy (2006) for useful, if partisan, overviews of the
controversy.
 ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY 13

from the West Indies and the United States’, Moore’s proposition
reminds us not just of the horrors attendant upon the emergence of
‘Africa’ as a transculturally salient representation. It also indicates the
diasporic origin of a question the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee
Cullen, in the 1920s, posed in the name of the members of a racially
discriminated minority within the US American nation state: ‘what is
Africa to me?”.'”
As Moore (ibid.) insists, the ‘first? Africans, paradoxically, were [...]
initially diasporic, located only in places like Brazil, the Caribbean, and
the US South’ rather than on the continent itself’. If so, then we must
surely take into account that ‘[t]hroughout the trans-atlantic exchange
that led to the creation of traditional as well as modern black cultures,
Africa has been endlessly recreated and deconstructed’ (Sansone 2003:
59). ‘Africa’, as Davis (1999: 72) aptly puts it, is a ‘contested icon’, not
an essence: a ‘project’ rather than a ‘primordiality’. Less a foundational
past than a possible future (Palmié 1995, Nelson 2002) that becomes
collectively imaginable—like all socially relevant forms of historical
knowledge—at the intersection of contextually specific “spaces of expe-
rience’ and ‘horizons of expectations’ (Koselleck 1985). This, however,
is something we can empirically investigate—if, that is, we take seri-
ously the widely divergent conditions under which Countee Cullen’s
question has been posed in different parts of the Americas (or on the
African continent itself), and focus on the cultural and political work
performed by the no less diverse answers it has received at different
times and locations.

What is Africa to Whom?

Hence the obviously tentative goal of this volume: to indicate the poten-
tial of historical and ethnographic approaches that deliberately question
the assumption that the ‘Africanness’ of places, people, and practices
represents an objective quality whose presence or absence could be
empirically assessed. What the essays collected here advocate instead
is a systematic focus on the diverse (and at times contradictory) ways

'9 This, incidentally, holds true not just for the Americas: if Kenyatta seems to
have discovered ‘Africa’ on the banks of the Thames while studying at LSE, Senghor
did so on the banks of the Seine. For an exemplary and in many ways still unsur-
passed exploration of this moment see Shepperson and Price’s (1961) study of John
Chilembwe’s protracted ‘Africanization’.
14 INTRODUCTION

in which conceptions or representations of ‘Africa’ and ‘Africanity’ are

socially deployed in the construction, reflexive validation, or-—indeed—
at times critique or rejection of contextually specific modes of identi-
fication, forms of practice, collective visions of morally salient pasts,
or futures to which the actors we encounter in documents or concrete
interactional settings aspire. To do so not only allows us to circumvent
an all-too-common tendency which, in the words of Wilson Moses
(1998: 20, emphasis in the onginal), reduces the ‘designation African’ to
a range of biogenetic meanings associated with ‘the zdea of “blackness”
as it has been institutionalized in the history, customs, and legal tradi-
tions of the United States” and thereby unwittingly implicates us in the
reproduction of essentially racist forms of discriminatory knowledge (cf.
Gilroy 2000, Palmié 2007). Rather, a perspective that addresses “Africa”
and ‘Africanity’ as theoretical problems instead of ontological givens
also ought to enable us to ask how and to what extent these terms
have variously come to take on ethically, morally and politically salient
meanings not only in the African Diaspora, but among individuals and
groups located on the African continent itself.
The potential of such a perspective becomes clear in Johnson’s (this
volume) efforts to historicize and thereby de-naturalize conceptions
of ‘diaspora’ in the case of the Garifuna. Clearly, hike many other
Caribbean migrants in the US., the Ganfuna have not only had to learn
that they are ‘black’, but that being forced to accept such a predicate
implies joining an ‘imagined community’ integrated not just negatively
by a common experience of racial exclusion, but positively by forms of
solidarity grounded in presumptions of a common ‘homeland’ in Africa.
What renders Johnson’s case material so compelling in this regard is
that the ethnogenetic processes out of which contemporary Garifuna
senses of collective selfhood emerged were not—or not in any socially
relevant sense—predicated on a sense of primordial Africanity. This,
of course, is not to say that the Garifuna did not traditionally (or do
not now) understand themselves as being ‘in diaspora’. It is to say that
the ‘diasporic horizon’ most relevant to their sense of collective identity
has undergone more than one—contextual—shift: from an ‘Africa’ their
original ancestors on St. Vincent may still have remembered, to the
sacred memories and coordinates of their present “spirit geographies’
that came to attach to the site of their ethnic fusion with native Caribs
on St. Vincent upon their removal to Honduras, and on to their belated
‘discovery’ of African (here ironically: Yoruba) ‘roots’ under the impact
of North American notions of racially configured ‘Africanity’.
 ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY 15

A similar shift in diasporic horizons lies at the heart of James

Sidbury’s (this volume) argument about Gustavus Vassa aka Olaudah
Equiano’s famous account of his fashioning of an African Christian
identity—only that here the tropological as well as teleological foun-
dations upon which Equiano’s Interesting Narrative came to rest lie in
eighteenth century Methodist providentialism. Perhaps wisely, Sidbury
eschews taking a stance in the controversy raging over Equinao’s
true place of birth (Carretta 1999, 2005, Lovejoy 2006, Byrd 2006),
and instead parses Equiano’s account to show how biblical narrative
templates led him to a prophetic vision of Africa as a future ancestral
homeland for black Christians. ‘Thus situating his ‘African’ experience
within a remarkably dense, and thoughly ‘western’ intertextual network
organized around a paradigmatic narrative of history as soteriology,
Equiano literally emplots his own life as an exemplary instantiation of
redemptive African becoming (cf. Peel 1995). Drawing multiple analogies
between the cultural practices common in ‘Eboe’ (the ‘country’ where
he says he was born) and among the Old ‘Testament Hebrews, Equiano
quite explicitly styles himself as an ‘Eboe’ Saul whose protracted Atlantic
experiences transformed him into an ‘African’ Paul.”
But analogy was not what Equiano was after. For him, it seems, text
and life were intertwined in deeper and more essential ways. Citing
various theological authorities, Equiano actually concludes that ‘the one
people had sprung from the other’. On the authority of John Gill’s 1788
Exposition of the Old Testament and John Clarke's The Truth of Chnstian
Religion (1786), he tells us that ‘the pedigree of the Africans’ reaches back
to ‘Afer and Afra, the descendents of Abraham by Kenturah, his wife
and concubine’ (Equiano 2003: 44). Thus taking a just barely emerging
idiom of African vindicationism beyond mere analogical apologetics for
the poor sons of Ham and into the realm of genealogy, Equiano seems
to have independently invented the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ more than
a century before ideas of Middle Eastern origins began to seep into
an emerging indigenous African historiography, and almost 150 years
before C.G. Seigman put an ‘anthropological’ stamp on it by publishing

20 Equiano’s (2003: 41-44) account of his claimed place of birth, the ‘charming
fruitful vale of Essaka’, thus, depicts an African Canaan, if there ever was one:
replete with circumcised men, purifying themselves ‘like the Jews’, secluding their
wives during menstruation, and governing themselves like ‘the Israelites in their
primitive state’ through ‘chiefs and judges’.
16 INTRODUCTION

his ‘authoritative’ version of this—ultimately rather nasty—theory in

1930 (Zachernuck 1994).
This, in itself, however, was an astounding ideological achievement,
prefiguring the emergence on explicitly continental, even global ‘African’
(rather than locally configured) identities on the continent itself by at
least a century, 1f not more. As Sidbury writes, if in ‘the Protestant
theology that Equiano came to believe, Christ’s new promise broadened
and fulfilled the covenant with Israel that God had offered in Genesis’,
then ‘similarly, Equiano’s new identity as a Christian African redeemed,
broadened, and fulfilled the promise of his Igbo origins’—and so it
would for the future African transnation in Chnist into which he sought
to induct his black brethren whether on the continent or in the dias-
pora. Consider how counterintuitive such a move might have been for
anyone born on, or associated with, a continent that slave traders had
come to call ‘Africa’, and whose inhabitants had become predefined by
conceptions of ‘Africanness’ that were, during Equiano’s lifetime, devoid
of any but heteronomic, and usually highly dehumanizing, meanings. If
anything, and irrespective of where he was really born, 1t was Equiano's
great achievement that he grabbed discursive hold of this false epithet,
-and turned it into something lastingly real.
Román's contribution illuminates another aspect of this moment.
His discussion of the trials and tribulations of two early twentieth
century Cuban ‘man gods’ likewise not only problematizes the notion
of ‘origins’, but the implicit forms of racialization that tend to accom-
pany attempts to sort out what is ‘African’ or ‘European’ in New World
cultural formations. Paradoxically, in the case that Roman 1s con-
cerned with, this seems to have been more of a concern of latter-day
scholars, than of the Cuban state agents, journalists and self-declared
champions of scientific social reform for whom ‘Africa’ and ‘Africanity’
predominately figured a sign of only vaguely racialized ‘backwardess’.
Bent as these self-conscious modernizers were on creating ‘political
and intellectual domains [...] inscribed in the language of rights and
dependent on scientific disciplines that would banish suspect practices
and knowledges to the trash heap of progress’, for them, ‘Africa’,
at best, became palpable as a residual category—comparable to the
detritus of ill-understood rituals the police variously tried to construe
into evidence by which to criminalize Cuban citizens of, by then, all
imaginable phenotypes.
Indeed, what made some—though certainly not all—of the man-gods
who erupted into the early republican Cuban public sphere so difficult
 ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY 17

to deal with was the muddled, unknowable and perhaps, in Amselle’s

(1998) terms “primordially syncretic’ nature of their ministrations. As
Roman plausibly surmises, because the forms of Spiritism practiced
by the two man-gods his article discusses in detail already represented
irreducibly unruly mixtures of ‘science’ and ‘superstition’, ‘tradition’ and
‘modernity’, what made one of them the target of official wrath and
turned the other into a media cynosure was neither skin color, nor the
origins of their charismatic missions (for Manso, the publicly praised
Spanish immigrant man-god had actually developed his thaumaturgi-
cal gifts under the tutelage of Mustelier, the native Afro-Cuban healer
who became the object of persecution). Rather, it was that Mustelier
stubbornly refused to conform to what Manso gladly seems to have
acceded—viz. to phrase his redemptive message in a way that did not
threaten the new forms of secular, rationalist governmentality that had
begun to define ‘that which is not African’ in the imagination of the
early twentieth-century Cuban republican elite.
Whether Mustelier—or Manso for that matter—thought of his
ministrations as “African” in any positive way we will never know. Nor
could we—and this is the point that both Johnson and Román aim to
emphasize—without doing injustice not just to the historical record,
but (more importantly) to the forms of consciousness we think it
reflects. As in the case of the ‘encounter’ between ‘Chnistianity’ and
‘traditional African religion’ in Africa (Peel 1990), attempts to construe
unspecified (and fundamentally unspecifiable) notions of ‘Africanity’ and
‘Europeanness’ into chronotopically pnor reference points from which
to assess New World developments (whether conceived of as ‘hybrid’
or not) are bound to run into an epistemological snag that Wirtz (this
volume) sees as characteristic of much African Americanist research
conducted along such lines. Taking a cue from Matory’s (2005: 3)
observation that contrary to the notion that ‘homelands are to their
diasporas as the past is to the present and future’, the Afncan diaspora
might well be said to have created its homelands, Wirtz proceeds to
delineate some of the semiotic strategies by which both scholars and
practitioners of ‘African-derived’ religious traditions in the New World
have established the ‘pastness’ of an ‘Africa’ they hold to be determi-
native of the essence of the practices they study or engage in. What
she finds is that the epistemological operations that Santeros engage
in to recuperate and telescope into the present divine presences and
meanings notionally ‘rooted in’ a transcendent ‘African past’ uncannily
resemble those by which linguists and other scholars literally ‘divine’
18 INTRODUCTION

the ‘African origins’ of New World cultural forms on the basis of (often
minimal and ambiguous) empirical clues that are processed through an
ideology of transhistorically relevant ‘African source languages’ (and,
by extension, ‘source cultures’).
What 1s more, since scholarly and practitioners’ discourses on ‘Africa’
and ‘Africanity’ have long intersected and fed on each other (Palmié
2005a, 2005b), both are, as Wirtz suggests, ‘engaged in meaning-making
through a divinatory process’ that aims to reveal ‘deep, hidden mean-
ings that collapse past and present into a transcendent “tradition” that
is always relevant in the present moment, and that can therefore stake
out precedence over other, competing interpretations and practices
unsanctioned by etymological claims’. Here a circle closes: the politics of
Afro-Cuban religious practice and those of scholarship on Afro-Cuban
religion have effectively converged. Palmié’s article takes its departure
from just such a scenario—only that in the case of the male sodality
abakua with which he deals, such a convergence has yet to be achieved.
Instead, the ‘diasporic horizon’—as well as the ‘African ongins’ of the
ancestral beings that are ritually called into the twenty-first-century
Cuban present to re-enact abakua’s timeless foundational drama—are
still geographically unrealized. Contemporary members of abakua do
not doubt that the term ‘Enllenison’ references ‘Africa’. But the ‘Africa’
they have in mind 1s not a localizable geographic entity: it is the product
of those ritual activities by which abakuá has reproduced itself for more
than 170 years—not just in Cuba, but in a vanety of (often seemingly
unlikely) locations throughout the Atlantic basin.
What Palmié's contribution aims to highlight in this respect is the
illusory nature of conceptualizing the history of abakua—as well as that
of its supposed African source and the relation between the two—as a
linear pattern of historical devolution. Just as the ntual language Wirtz
deals with is not a ‘decayed’ version of a ‘proto-Yoruba’ beyond proper
linguistic reconstruction, but the result of cultural ‘work’ expended in
successive New World presents, so is the relationship between Cuban
abakua and its various (ethnologically plausible) ‘parent’ institutions
in southeastern Nigeria and the Cameroons /ustorically ill-conceived as
that between an ‘African’ antecedent and its New World permutations.
Instead, Palmié aims to historicize the ‘careers’ of both abakua and
its supposed ‘African precursors’ as a ‘total’, conjunctural pattern of
Atlantic scope. The goal, as he puts it 1s not to raise the—obviously
loaded—question ‘is there an Africa in the Americas, and how can we
 ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY 19

find it?’ It is to develop conceptual frameworks ‘within which we might

phrase useful questions about both places at the same time’.
Still, although the case of abakuá provides a rare glimpse of the
structural forces involved in the emergence and —virtually fractal —pro-
liferation of a truly translocal cultural constellation, on an ethnographic
level of analysis the conceptual transformations abakuá ritual wreaks
upon local constellations of space and time remain paradoxical within
the intellectual framework of classic African Americanist scholarship.
As Routon (2006) and Palmié (2006) have argued, tracing out a linear
devolution from an ‘African past’ to the Cuban present of contempo-
rary abakua is to misconstrue what Comaroff and Comaroff (1992: 27)
have called the “endogeneous historicity’ of the local worlds brought
into being through, and reproduced in, the ritual instantiation of
precisely that past in contemporary New World space-time. Whatever
‘Enllenisén’ may be in the experience of the participants in an abakuá
ceremony, it is not “back in the past’, nor ‘over there’ in Africa”, but
phenomenologically present: visible in ritual chalk markings (‘firmas’)
on the ground and the bodies of neophytes, audible in the mystical
voice of ecué (a hidden friction drum), palpable in physical interactions
with masked dancers—embodied spirits—that are lured into a place
that merely looks like a twentyfirst century alleyway or the patio of
an abakua meeting house in Cuba, but instead envelops a time-space,
and, in a sense, historicity entirely of its own.
Brazeal’s contribution similarly leads us away from objectivist con-
cerns with ‘African pasts’, yet 1t does so with a significant shift in
emphasis. Dissatisfied with the tendency among Brazilianist anthro-
pologists to produce increasingly self-referential “ethnograph[ies] of
verificationist anthropology”, Brazeal takes a ‘skeptical view of what, if
anything, Africa has to do with the local construction of authenticity
of adepts of Afro-Brazilian religions and the efficacy of the services
that they provide’. In the case of the odyssey of a Bahian backlands
priestess his essay recounts in splendid ethnographic detail, what is at
stake is not an unrealized ‘diasporic horizon’ in any transcontinental
sense. Instead, it is a local horizon of credibility and mutual respect
that the protagonists of his story—inhabitants of a heterogeneous and
complex religious landscape—find themselves struggling to negotiate.
To be sure, the linkages of the Bahian Recéncavo’s candombles in
Cachoeira to the great terreiros of Salvador and their ‘African traditions’
are clear enough. The ‘Brazilian innovations’ of sertanga priestesses like
20 INTRODUCTION

Brazeal’s protagonist Dona Preta are obvious as well. But what—or

so Brazeal asks—do such classifications of historical provenance (and
the valuations inevitably attached to them) tell us about the ways in
which practitioners of the traditions interlinked within a historically
old regional ritual economy spanning both the Recéncavo and the vast
hinterland of the Sertao counter the inevitable skepticism of clients
who approach them across the boundaries of local ritual repertoires?
And what about the labor priests invest to co-construct with them the
experience of ritual efficacy that marks off the ministrations of a true
adept from those of the unscrupulous charlatan? No matter here that
the Federacáo Nacional dos Cultos Afro-Brasileiros (FENACAB) has
been laboring hard to establish its standards of ‘African’ orthodoxy and
authenticity in the Sertao: what counts for Dona Preta, the backlands
priestess of a thoroughly heterodox (and, ultimately ‘charismatic’,
rather than ‘traditional’) cult is whether she can find help to resolve a
deeply felt existential predicament from an adept of a ritual tradition
that, even though it is not hers, might bona fide be presumed to deliver
satisfactory results. In the end, Dona Preta does not achieve her goal.
If so, however, by the end of Brazeal’s recounting of her tnals and
tribulations, the issue of ‘Africanity’ as a criterium for ritual legitimacy
has become phenomenologically (and, arguably, analytically) moot. As
moot, indeed, as that of the ontological location of Enllenisén, the ‘true’
birthplace of Olaudah Equiano, the difference between St. Vincent
and Yorubaland in the contemporary Garifuna diasporic imagina-
tion, or the predictability of the religious repertoires of Manso and
Mustelier as based on the socio-racial positions they inhabited. Dona
Preta’s criteria are contextual and pragmatic. Yet at least as far as the
ethnographic illumination of local worlds is concerned, Brazeal asks,
ought not ours be so, too?

Alterity and Mimests

The fact that in all of these cases, ‘objective’ history, and the “endog-
enous historicity’ inherent to the reproduction of identities, practices,
standards of legitimacy and credibility resist linear transition narratives
from a ‘past’ ‘in Africa’ to the ‘American present’ points towards a
paradox at the heart of the African Americanist enterprise. It is to this
paradox that a second set of essays in this volume on the ‘Africanity’
of religions ‘out of Africa’ aims to speak. As Stefania Capone (this
 ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY 21

volume) puts it, the ‘field’ of African Americanist knowledge produc-

tion developed around a fundamental tension between that which
‘Africa was’ and that which it ‘is not’: a tension “between continuity
and discontinuity, between commitment to and betrayal of origins,
between purity and degeneration’ mapped across a distance not just
in space but time. Note here the heterogeneous temporality on which
all attempts to elucidate these tensions necessarily had to rest: the
very enterprise was dependent on keeping past and present, Africa
and America, conceptually apart, so as to construe relations between
them. Such conceptual separations became crucial once scholars such
as W.E.B. DuBois, Carter G. Woodson and Melville J. Herskovits had
managed to lastingly call into question the views of contemporary
US. sociologists such as Franklin E. Frazier that slavery had destroyed
those vestiges of ‘African culture’ that survived the Atlantic passage
and that the full ‘Americanization’ of black people in the U.S. had
been impeded by continued post-emancipation social exclusion.*' By
the same token, however, precisely because scholars aiming to counter
perspectives such as Frazier's located the source—and legitimacy—of
African American cultural ‘difference’ in Africa, Strathern’s dilemma
began to haunt the body of knowledge emerging from their efforts.
This was so because observable New World presents now needed to be
read against constructions of (empirically unobservable) African pasts.
Doing so, however involved a sleight of hand: for the latter had to be
designed in such a fashion that they would render legible the former,
and reveal a relation of continuity—even if, at times, as a forgone con-
clusion: stated in the form of assumptions about, for example, ‘cultural
tenacity’, or imputations of resistance against ‘acculturative pressure’,
and deductively projected onto appropriately selected data (cf. Palmié
2007). Tropologically speaking, the Old World metaphor of ‘Africanism’
was shifted towards the realm of transatlantic metonymy—not without,

*! Frazier’s approach, of course, needs to be situated in an antiracists political

position, prominent in the U.S. at the time, that sought to press for African American
social inclusion and civil rights by asking, as Franz Boas (himself a founding mem-
ber of the NAACP) had done as early as 1911, to what extent African American
cultural forms that racist whites saw as evidence for the unassimilability of black
Americans ‘are due to racial traits, and how far they are due to socials surroundings for
which we are responsible (Boas 1921: 271, emphasis added). Boas answer was clear:
‘{e]verything points out that these qualities are the result of social conditions rather
than of hereditary traits.’ (ibid.)
22 INTRODUCTION

however, taking pains to keep predicate and object from dissolving

into each other.
The African Americanist field” thus came to be emblematic of con-
ceptualizations of continuity that, in all but the most obvious cases of
formal similarity, called for auxiliary formulations that, in Wirtz's (this
volume) terms, are perhaps best classified as the conceptual equivalents
of divinatory instruments. Obvious cases in point are Bastide’s ‘theory
of the mask’, his ‘principe de coupure’ or Herskovits’s own concept of
‘socialized ambivalence’. ‘These, too, aimed to stabilize the construct of
a thoroughly allochronic ‘African past’ against which empirical data on
New World phenomena could presumably be assessed. ‘The results at
times bordered on the ludicrous, as in the case of Herskovits’s famous
‘scale of intensity of New World Africanisms’ that classified New World
cultural forms along a qualitative axis ranging from ‘very Afncan’
through ‘quite African’, ‘somewhat African’, ‘a little African’, ‘traces
of African custom’ to ‘absent’ (Herskovits 1969, cf. Apter 1991). But
as Capone shows, such attempts to commensurate ‘African past’ and
‘New World present’ almost inevitably led to notions of surface and
depth structures. The latter consisted of ‘authentically African’ forms
of ‘difference’ discoverable underneath (or, in Bastide’s case, alongside)
spurious accretions of modern, Western ‘sameness’.** What we find
thus are ‘modern’, “Western”, “New World” accidents (such as Catholic
statuary, the use of tobacco, literacy, non-African clothes, etc.) disguising
‘traditional’, ‘non-western’, ‘African’ essences: expressions of an ‘African
ethos’ (now more neutrally conceived of as ‘culture’) capable of tran-
scending time, space and ‘the accidents of history”, as R.F Thompson
(1990) once put it in a memorable flourish of culturalist reification.
As Robin Horton (1970) argued long ago, a good deal of such for-
mulations as Bastide’s rested (and continue to rest) on an artificially con-
structed ‘African other’ that provided the foil for romantic “Occidentalist’
(Carrier 1995) fantasies about primitive authenticity. Hence the peculiar,
but principally unsurprising, equivocations of Bastide—and Meétraux,
who (as Richman shows) ought to have known better—on the ques-
tion of temporal linearity in the constitution of cultural ‘continuity’.
Obviously, deductive reasoning from a priori conceptions of ‘Africanity’
played a considerable part in this story. As in the case of Herskovits

22 For a more recent and quite sophisticated attempt to salvage the analytical opera-
tor of an ‘underlying’ West African ‘interpretative paradigm’ see Apter (2002).
 ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY 23

who seems to have spent no more than six consecutive months in any
single African American field site, often was utterly unaware of the
potential bias of ‘informant centered’ research, and had formulated
his ideas about ‘African continuities’ before he ever ventured on his
first field trip to Suriname (Blier 1988, 1989, Price and Price 2003),
Bastide—nolens volens—spent more time at the intellectual drawing
board than among those people whose ‘psychocultural orientations’
he sought to characterize. But even as prolific and accomplished an
ethnographer as Métraux was unable to see beyond the networks of
social relations that shaped his knowledge-producing activities, and the
intradisciplinary discursive networks that oriented his research analyti-
cally. As a result, and like many other foreign researchers, he found
himself—unwittingly to be sure—inserted into a project fomented by
his ethnographic interlocutors.
This project was to validate a peculiar set of ritual innovations that
a single enterprising mediator of the sacred had begun to put in place
since the late 1930s. As Richman (this volume) argues, 1t was not just the
agency of this particular ‘servant of the lwa”, Misdor, and his sons and
initiates who strategically engineered truly innovative forms of “African
tradition’ in Léogane over whose reproduction they began to assert an
increasing monopoly. The very assumption that ‘vodou’ constituted
a distinct, and distinctly Afro-Haitian ‘cultural configuration’ which
foreign scholars hke Métraux brought to their research was also very
much on the agenda of local nationalist elites, from Louis Price Mars
onward to the young country doctor Francois Duvalier, who, one should
not forget, co-authored a number of ethnographic essays before rising
to dictatorial notoriety in the 1960s (e.g. Denis and Duvalier 1955).
But this local conjuncture between the agendas of religious entrepre-
neurs like Misdor,”’ foreign anthropologists such as Métraux and local
nationalist scholars also enabled the mediating role of ‘semi-insiders’
like Odette Mennesson-Rigaud, or, in the Brazilian case, Pierre Verger
(who, in all fairness, never considered himself an anthropologist, and,
at least in the case of the Brazilian Candomblé, relished not only in
confounding received notions of tradition, but in willfully obscuring
the path of its transmission).

23 On Misdor's far better documented Brazilian equivalent Martiniano do Bomfim

see Matory (2005) and Palmié (2005a).
24 INTRODUCTION

‘Taking the ‘mimetic interplay’ between local and anthropological

forms of knowledge to the point where the maj unleashed by the
‘hotness’ of Misdor’s son’s drumming plunged foreigners into trance,
Mennesson-Rigaud’s mediations even helped refashion spirit possession
into a ‘quintessentially modern experience, which 1s inwardly directed
at knowing the autonomous self’ through a ‘consummation of the
subject’s desire to know the Other’, as Richman puts it. At the same
time that anthropologists ‘lost it’ at Misdor’s temple in their search for
self-authentication through the enchanted ‘Other’, they authenticated
regimes of praxis that had little, if anything, to do with what Misdor’s
project aimed to strategically replace by drawing up new horizon of
Africanity. So it was in the case of Verger who, during his life-long criss-
crossings between the Bights of Bahia and Benin, played a strategic role
in engineering some of the latter-day conjunctures and convergences
from which what Capone calls ‘ntual panafricanism’ was to emerge
in the last third of the twentieth century.** In both instances, what we
find are Hacking’s (1999) ‘looping effects——though they emerged in a
fashion where the ‘objects of study’ exerted far more control over the
classificatory process than most of their students ever suspected.
Métraux obviously never aspired to such middleman status, and,
even if he had, the unfolding of Duvaliersme in the 1960s would have
checked any foreign interference in Papa Doc’s mobilization of ‘Africa’
in the service of ideological domination. Stull, as Richman’s fine-grained
historical analysis shows, the interrelations between the gradual erosion
of ‘traditional’ patterns of Haitian landholding and the emergence of
ever more assertively ‘African’ forms of priestly hegemony over media-
tions between the (consequentially increasingly separate) spheres of the
sacred and the mundane are inadequately characterized as eventuating
in unmediated form. Instead, Misdor’s efforts ultimately and prob-
ably not at all accidentally converged with the particular ‘Africa’ that
Herskovits and Métraux (not unlike Haiti’s nationalist elite at the time)
saw as definitive of Haiti’s ‘diasporic horizon’—and so as the compara-
tive ‘baseline’ for their analyses of vodou. This ‘Africa’, however, had
only recently begun to take shape in Léogane and other peri-urban

** Tronically, this moment was prefigured, on a theoretical level, by Bastide’s—in

many ways fascinating—rejection not only of New World versions of négritude, but
also of what (with Mbembe [2002]) one might call contemporary African modes of
‘self-writing’, and his ostensibly bizarre suggestion that Africans would do well to look
towards Bahia for models of authentic, non-alienated ‘Afncanity’. On Verger’s role
as self-appointed transatlantic ‘messenger’ see Capone (2004: 274—281).
 ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY 25

environs of Port au Prince. What is more, it had done so not because

some ground swell of collective memory (a la Bastide) had suddenly
enabled the re-connection to an ‘ancestral knowledge’ accessible only
to ‘blacks’ uncontaminated by types of ‘formal syncretism’ that might
obliterate ‘essential’ categorical distinctions between ‘Africa’ and the
‘West’. It did so because the restructuring of Haiti’s internal political
economy in the wake of the American occupation all but closed the
door to a formerly viable peasant economy, and opened another one
for producers of what Richman aptly calls novel ‘ritual products’ (cf.
Matory 2005). The consumption of such products, in turn, began to
underwrite a regime in which the production of export labor soon
became crucial to any sense of ‘tradition’ and ‘African continuity’ (cf.
Richman 2005).
The result of the conjunction of a predetermined anthropological
vision with such local projects is a characteristic perspectival torsion:
what is ‘old’ and what is ‘new’ is not read in a chronological sense. It
is deduced from pre-conceived ‘phaseological’ notions of what needs to
come ‘before’ and what ‘after’. An epistemologically naive ‘objectivist’
(Bourdieu 1977) orientation towards ethnographic knowledge produc-
tion thus became conjoined with a so-called “ethnohistorical” project
that effectively undercut any serious attempt at studying the history
and politics of local deployments of the trope of ‘Africanity’. At times,
the result was spectacular misrecognition—to the degree that the novel
‘African pasts’ and ritual products set in circulation by Misdor and
other cultural entrepreneurs like him came to define the ethnographic
standard against which historically older practices were measured,
and consequently disregarded as unrepresentative of Haitian vodou.
No matter that Métraux (1972: 365) perceptively wrote that “Voodoo
belongs to the modern world and 1s part of our own civilization’. He,
too, became complicit in its allochronic ‘Africanization’.

Beyond Linearity

But misrecognition of the New World ongins of ‘African pasts’ 1s not

the privilege of scholars predisposed to read ethnographic data in an
‘allochronic’ and ‘Afrotopic’ way. As Dianteill and Swearingen (2003)
have shown in the Cuban case, practitioners themselves have long
interpolated—sometimes strategically, sometimes by default—‘text into
life’ in modeling parts of their standards of practice on ethnographies
that, with time, have gained the status of canonized reflections of
26 INTRODUCTION

prior praxis. Such scrambling of temporal levels ‘on the ground’, as

it were, has led to a situation where ‘African American religion’ and
‘African American religious scholarship’ are often not easy to tell apart
(Palmié 2005b) and in several instances, it has led to the uneasy con-
junction of heterogeneous notions of what can—or cannot—count as
properly ‘African’ among practitioners of African-American religions
themselves.
Yet what has virtually entirely escaped analytical scrutiny are the ways
in which different, and sometimes conflicting, versions and valuations of
‘Africanness’ among practitioners themselves may have intersected (and
continue to do so) with local ‘cultures of race’. Although exploratory
in nature, Hartikainen’s essay reveals a facet of such processes of inter-
discursivity and the co-existence of differentially ‘racialized’ notions of
‘Africanity’. What she is concerned with are the rules of recognition, as
it were, that operate in the performative instantiation of a category of
spirits that, though omnipresent in the Bahian Candomblé, have hardly
received ethnographic attention—and, indeed, have only recently come
to be understood as properly individuated ‘spirit personae’ in their
own right. In 1948, Herskovits (1969: 21) thus characterized the spirits
nowadays known as erés as a mere ‘transitional stage’ that a medium
undergoes after possession by an African deity:
The deity is envisaged as having withdrawn from ‘his head’ but is replaced
by that attribute of the god which is his messenger, and his childhood
state. To see cult-initiates in this state—and it is not easy to do so—1s a
diverting experience. Some of them caricature the choreography of the
ritual dancing for the gods, some feed the drummers, stuffing food in
their mouths as they play their instruments, some sing children’s songs
or play children’s games or engage in mischievous pranks.
As Hartikainen notes, we cannot know whether the eré spirits’ current
phenomenology represents a hypostasis of what, formerly, was a mere
‘stage’ of possession trance, or whether observers like Herskovits simply
overlooked, or were steered away from taking cognizance of what even
then may have been well-individuated ‘African child spints’. Yet apart
from the fact that current conceptions of the erés appear to emphasize
their indispensability to proper ritual eventuation (if only because they
allow mediums to fulfill the embodied needs of human beings tempo-
rarily serving as vessel of the divine), the erés discharge a communicative
function that the awesome, but otherwise silent onxas simply cannot
fulfill: talk to their worshippers in a denotationally comprehensible
language. Hence the unfolding of an ostensibly counterintuitive semi-
 ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY 27

otic logic, glossed by one of Hartikainen’s interlocutors in terms of a

native theory of linguistic incompetence deriving from processes of
first language interference in second language acquisition in the mysti-
cal realm: what marks the erés’ Africanity are not so much utterances
in an ‘African’ sacrolect (or silence, for that matter), but their prolific,
and highly comprehensible, communications in a flawed register of
Portuguese that is immediately recognizable as eré-speech. Since the
erés are ‘African’ spirits, their command over Portuguese is not only
necessarily incomplete, but marred in specific ways that conform to
highly standardized expectations.
“Enregistered” as the linguistic defects signaling eré-speech (and so the
presence of ‘African child spirits” appear to be in Candomblé ritual
praxis, we are still left with the question of why certain, highly typified
speech mannerisms in Portuguese would signal the ‘Africanity’ of the erés.
The answer Hartikainen proposes is stunningly ironical, but 1s likely to
be born out in other cases as well—such as that of the Cuban spirit
register known as ‘bozal’. What Hartikainen suggests is that we are, in
fact, dealing with the product of local language ideologies based in the
historical residues that a longstanding Iberian tradition of parodic, and
indeed blatantly racist, literary representations of the linguistic incom-
petence of Africans and their descendants has left in the Lusophone
popular imaginary. That a skit delighting contemporary Brazilan audi-
ences on Youtube would not only conform, morphologically, to 16th and
17th century Iberian literary depictions of ‘Africanized’ Portuguese,
but also to the speech mannerisms of eré-spirits cannot, perhaps, be
taken as proof of the origins of conceptions of ‘Africanity’ in racist
stereotypes—forgotten as such and repeated as theology, as one might
say in twisting Bourdieu’s language. But it certainly provides grounds
on which to revisit the question of whether, and to what extent, con-
temporary New World conceptions of ‘Africanity’ can—or even ought
to—be subjected to anthropological or historiographical authentifica-
tion. If the question of Rastafari’s ‘historically authentic’ connection
to ‘Ethiopia’ might nowadays be justly regarded as irrelevant, then we
still have to face up to the challenge that—as the case of Rastafari
amply demonstrates—text can come to life.?? This is not to sound a

* Thriving on a longstanding Afro-Protestant tradition of prophetic Ethiopianism

and peasant protest, the ideology and popular movement that Leonard P. Howell,
Robert Hinds, J.N. Hibberts and others synthesized, in the 1930s, from sources as
disparate as (among others) the Bible, popular occultist literature, the Reader’s Digest,
28 INTRODUCTION

hollow empiricist caveat emptor. On the contrary: that the new leases
on life given in the Brazilian case to blatantly racist literary parodies
of African second language learners could possibly have resulted in
the criteria that nowadays authenticate ‘African’ spirit performances
might just as well be taken as one more instance of a dynamic that
we already see at work in the /nteresting Narratwe of Gustavus Vassa/
Olaudah Equiano. However ‘inauthentically African’ its sources may
be ‘in the last instance’, the cultural work performed by the eré-spirits,
we might say with Jackson (2006), cannot be judged on any grounds
other than the sincerity with which their audiences engage them (cf.
Sidbury, Brazeal, this volume). What ranges of experience the erés’ pres-
ence afford adherents of Candomblé to explore and express remains
inconclusive in Hartikainen's contribution. But the questions her essay
poses nonetheless point towards important lines for further research.
If much of this makes the history of African American anthropology
a prime field for the application of a Latourean 'symmetrical anthro-
pology”, Matory's essay marks a decisive step away from a tradition of
scholarship that might be analyzed in such terms. In part, this is so
because he pursues the trail of an ostensibly counterintuitive metaphoric
constellation—one that configures relations between humans and the
divine in terms of slavery and mastery—laterally across contemporane-
ous Afro-Atlantic space, rather than into an ‘Afncan past’. The latter
endeavor is by no means unthinkable (terms translatable as ‘slavery’ do
seem to figure as predicates of relations of hierarchy and submission
in some West African religious traditions). Yet Matory’s choice of a
transversal approach not only avoids the anachronism attendant upon
the classic African Americanist conceit of translating space into time
in the search of appropriate “African pasts’ as units of comparison. It
also reveals a fundamentally ‘modern’—‘western’, if you will—tension
at the heart of a range of African American religious formations. ‘This
is a tension that reveals itself in the fact that several of the New World
religious idioms forged or appropriated by descendants of slaves mobilize

Marcus Garvey’s Black World, National Geographic Magazine, and the Jamaican daily press,
eventually not only turned into voracious semiotic transformer of racist discourses
about Africa, but came to develop its own linguistic ideology, hermeneutic praxis, and
lectal specificity (/-tesvar\—all geared towards ‘liberating’ the Bible from the captivity
imposed upon it by the King James translation so as to reach genuine ‘overstand-
ing’, and transcend an (again: increasingly de-localized) state of “downpression’ in
‘Babylon’. See Hill (1981), Breiner (1985-86), Dijk (1993), Littlewood (1995), Murrell
and Williams (1998), Spencer (1998), Homiak (1999), and Pollard (2000).
 ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY 29

notions of ‘slavery’ not as antitheses to full social personhood, but as

a condition of spiritual empowerment, healing, or moral and ethical
rectitude that is to be actively (if not always consciously) embraced
rather than resisted.
Speaking explicitly from the vantage point of early twenty-first cen-
tury US African America, Matory begins by questioning whether such
evocations of ‘slavery’ can be reduced to tropes of negative identifica-
tion. Here an essentially Hegelian tradition going back to Moses I.
Finlay, David Brion Davis or Edmund 8S. Morgan (who all emphasized
the conceptual inseparability of ‘slavery’ and individual ‘freedom’ in
the emergence of an ideology of ‘modern’ civic autonomy and indi-
viduality) might posit that slavery has long performed the ‘labor of
the negative’ in stabilizing fictions of personhood, individuation and
agency within what Stuart Hall (1980) calls ‘societies structured in
dominance’. For Matory, however, this solution ultimately amounts to a
tautological restatement of the hegemonic tenets of a particular liberal
consensus—ideologically most highly elaborated in the US where the
contrast between the masterful market agent and the human commodity
of the slave marks the epitome of abjection (cf. Bauman 1997). Casting
a glance across the expanse of the Afro-Atlantic World, what Matory
proposes instead is to treat ‘the north American discourse of ‘slavery’
and ‘freedom’ as they might be viewed through the lens of the Afro-
Latin American religions’ where the trope of slavery performs all but
litotic work. ‘To be sure, Matory insists that the ‘metaphoric value of
the slave as a ‘model of and model for’... the lives of worshippers’ of
Afro-Atlantic religions 1n the twenty-first century remains configured, to
a certain extent, by local notions of ‘race’. Yet it nonetheless becomes
clear that widespread conceptions of enslaved spirits as a source of
power and healing as well as notional submission to divine masters
play havoc with the kinds of—ultimately ideological—romantic fictions
arising out of typological contrasts between ‘Africanity’ and ‘western-
ness’, ‘resistance’ and ‘accommodation’, ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ that
have plagued African Americanist research right from its inception as a
properly disciplined form of knowledge. No less than “Africa”, ‘slavery’
is not (or not just) ‘in’ the past.”°

26 Compare here Eglash’s (2007) survey of master-slave metaphorics in twenti-

eth century engineering—from ‘slave’ and ‘master’ clocks, to hydraulic cylinders,
servomechanisms, robots (from the Czech world for slave, ‘robotnik’) to ‘slave’ and
‘master’ drives in personal computing. While Eglash is unwilling to settle for any
30 INTRODUCTION

As Matory shows, when practitioners ‘of Gandomblé, Ocha, Vodou,

Umbanda, Spiritism, Islam, and Black North American Christianity
regularly invoke slavery in efforts to name and reorganize present-day
relationships and thus to restore the well-being of the participating
individuals and communities’, what is at issue is not the past in any
objectivist sense of a bygone historical moment. It is a vision of the
past—imagined, though by no means imaginary—that, in Koselleck’s
(2004) terms predicates a ‘space of experience’ in relation to a ‘horizon
of expectations’. In the end, Matory thus brings us full circle: from the
construction of an ‘Africa that never was’ (Hammond and Jablow 1970),
through its tropological work in African-Americanist anthropology in
its—willfully or unwittingly obscured—dialogue with emergent Afro-
Atlantic regimes of religious ‘Africanity’, and on to the trope ‘slavery’
as lived and enacted by citizens of. modern capitalist nation states. In
fact, when North American black worshippers of the Abrahamic deity
project their future deliverance as enslavement to the ‘good master’, or
when socially white Cuban American spiritists conjure up the future-
oriented agency of dead Africans who rearrange ‘not only the relation-
ships between dead masters and slaves but among the living people who
worship them’ (Matory this issue), Davis’s (1999: 72) notion of ‘Africa’
as “a “project” rather than a “primordiality”’ gains added poignancy.
As in Johnson’s (this volume) conceptualization of ‘diasporic horizons’
there may be ‘African Pasts’ in the future—unrealized as of yet, but
already thinkable as potentialities, and so principally within reach of
“discovery” (Paine 1995, Strathern 2005).

The Future of the Past

Coined by Mark Dery (1993, cf. Nelson 2002, Eshun 2003), the term
‘Afro-Futurism’ may be an apt qualifier for the ‘recursivity’ of the divi-
natory procedures by which, for example, forerunners of contemporary
Afrocentrism since the nineteenth century have striven to engineer
forms of synergy between biblical texts and prophecies, African travel
literature, Egyptophile Onentalist writings, western esoteric traditions,

specific explanation for the proliferation of such metaphorics (whose origins do

not seem to antedate the twentieth century), it is clear that their tenor nonetheless
implies relations of autonomy and control on the one hand, and dependence and
subordination on the other (however inappropriate such imagery may, at times, be
in regard to the factual interactivity between specific devices).
 ON PREDICATIONS OF AFRICANITY 3]

translations of the Qu’ran or the Kebra Nagast, colonialist ethnogra-

phies, and other sources of revelation of a willfully occluded ‘African
Past’.2’ This is a moment common to both Rastafari ‘reasonings’
aiming to liberate the Bible from its captivity to King James’s textual
corruptions, Elyah Muhammad’s transformations of Ezekiel’s fiery
chariot into a black celestial ‘mother plane’, the divine geographies
on which the Black Hebrew Israelites base their claims to residency
rights in Israel, or the ‘roots readings’ through which members of the
contemporary American Yoruba Movement re-emplace themselves in a
delocalized, global Yoruba-nation. And it is brought to its logical conclu-
sion in Sun Ra’s sonic projections of intergalactic mystical Africanity,
Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s Black Ark dub esotericism, or George Clinton’s
P-Funk Afronautcs that refigure contemporary African Americans as the
descendants of alien abductees.” In all these cases ‘Africa’ becomes the
object of deliberate and often highly methodical explorations of what
is already conceived of as principally knowable within what Strathern
(2005) calls pre-existing ‘systems of co-implications’. What they all
achieve in their various and often highly idiosyncratic ways is to set up
‘iterative loop[s], passing output of an operation back as inputs for the
next stage” (Eglash 1997: 116) of a spiraling, fractal hermeneutics that
spins out hitherto unknown, future African pasts and traditions.
The final lesson, then—and I think it ought to hold for studies of
‘religion’ both ‘in’ and ‘out of Africa’—may be this: whether conceived
of in terms of articulations between regionalist bodies of knowledge, or
as a problem arising from spurious forms of historicist inquiry, the very

27 See Elkins (1977), Deveney (1997), Palmié (2002: 79-158), or Nance (2002) for
concrete examples. Cf. Gilroy (1993, 2000), Moses (1998), Howe (1998), and Walker
(2001) for more general, and largely critical, treatments of this tradition in black
Anglophone discourse. However, 1 would disagree with the latter authors when they
characterize contemporary Afrocentrism in the US merely as a ‘backward-looking’
intellectual current. Instead, one could argue that what several varieties of Afrocentrism
concern themselves with 1s precisely the future of the past (cf. Eshun 2003). That
Kwanzaa is now an officially recognized American holiday celebrating African values
ought to give one pause in this regard (cf. Hernandez-Reguant 1999).
8 See Hill (1981), Breiner (1985-86), Littlewood (1995) and Homiak (1999) on
Rastafari; Leib (1998) on Elijah Muhammad; Weisbord (1975), Markowitz (1996),
and Landing (2002) on the Hebrew Israelites; Palmié (1995) and Clarke (2004) on
the American Yoruba Movement; Corbett (1994) and Szwed (2000) on Sun Ra; and
Dery (1993), Corbett (1994), McLeod (2003) and Eshun (2003) on George Clinton
and Lee Perry. For an insightful exploration of the interdiscursive linkages between
modern occultism, anthropology, and system of racialization in the intellectual
genealogy and contemporary representatonal syndromatics of ‘alien abduction’ see
Roth (2005).
32 INTRODUCTION

notion of ‘Africanity’ demands more scrutiny than either Africanists or

African Americanists have been willing to invest. ‘Africas’ have been
proliferating in the New World ever since the first slaves stepped ashore
on the western littoral of the Atlantic. And yet, the visions, practices,
and projects such ‘Africas’ constituted—and continue to constitute—are
ill-understood as mere transcontinental and transtemporal reflexes, resi-
dues, or memories of an originary set of dispositions or essences. On
the contrary, and in line with the considerations merely sketched here,
if the study of ‘Africa in the Americas’ were to be transformed from a
foregone conclusion into a question—a question capable of bringing
its own conceptual foundations into analytic purview, then we ought to
seriously consider “reorienting the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic
temporality towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective” (Eshun
2003: 289). Doing so will not only allow us to acknowledge the funda-
mentally emergent nature of the ‘African past’ (and indeed, any past),
and so to sidestep spurious concerns with historical authenticity (another
fundamentally emergent criterion). It will also, and perhaps even more
importantly, open up to historical and ethnographic investigation what
one might call the politics and poetics of ‘Africanization’-—..e. the pro-
‘duction and reproduction of ‘Africa’, ‘Africanity’, and ‘African origins’
as socially salient signifiers, claims, and projects among differentially
situated social actors and collectivities, including scholarly communi-
ties of discourse. And in precisely that sense, it ought to enable us to
monitor and critically assess our own involvement with, and investments
in, the making and authorizing of novel ‘African pasts’ and ‘traditions’
that may be dawning on the horizon as I write these lines. If anything,
this is the challenge this volume aims to pose to a future anthropology
and history African American religious cultures. If it has managed to
indicate the contours of a set of genuine epistemological problems in this
respect, I would regard the effort of its contributors well rewarded.

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 ON LEAVING AND JOINING AFRICANNESS THROUGH
RELIGION: THE ‘BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE
DIASPORIC HORIZONS

Paul Christopher Johnson

Introduction

Not all religions, or families of religions, are of the diasporic kind.

Diasporic religions are compnised of practitioners who share references
to sacralized spatial horizons, against which the group projects its ritual
acts to evaluate their ‘fit’. Diasporic horizon is an apt phrase here because
it connotes both a spatial edge of longing or nostalgia and a temporal
edge of futurity and desire (Axel 2004: 27, 40). In the first sense of a
spatial edge, a diasporic horizon 1s the ideal model that guides diasporic
religious actors in their efforts to derive ritual efficacy from spatial
authenticity. Certain remembered places are treated as sacred in the
sense of being the source of deep and abiding identity, and religious
power is acquired through the perceived fidelity of actions done here
to the ones done there; there in the direction endowed with ‘mythi-
cal feeling value’ (Cassirer 1955: 85). ‘The second edge, the temporal
one of futurity and desire, suggests how diasporic afhliations map the
authentic past always and inevitably in relation to a present situation.
This is not necessarily in the narrowly instrumental sense of the ‘past
as used for present purposes’, Halbwachs’s notion usefully critiqued by
Rosalind Shaw (2002: 12); but, more modestly, how the memories of
a distant site take shape in a material context that exerts ‘retroactive
force’ on the past, and in a context of specific ideas of future redemp-
tion (Benjamin 1968: 254-255; Lefebvre 1991: 65).
And yet this opening gambit for some limited conceptual clarity is
inadequate to descnbe flesh-and-blood people, who in everyday practice
often conduct themselves in relation to multiple such horizons. ‘Take
the example of the Garifuna, formerly known by Europeans as the
‘Black Caribs’, to whose religious practices this essay devotes atten-
tion. Garifuna society derived from mixed Amerindian, African and
European antecedents, and is now mainly located in some sixty villages
along the Caribbean coast of Central America, the majority of which
40 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

lie in Honduras. For the Garifuna in Central America, the spatial axis
of authentic religious practice has for over two centuries been that of
their former homeland and place of ethnogenesis, the small island of
St Vincent. It is from St Vincent that the ancestors return, through
spirit possession, to join with their living descendants in ritual events
whose ‘spirit geography’ (Shaw 2002: 46-69) portrays the memory of
origins on that island. During the last generation, however, with the
local decline of available fruit-industry employment, about a third of
the population (100,000 out of 300,000) has migrated abroad, especially
to New York City.’ This leave-taking created a new diasporic horizon,
as the Central American villages left behind now acquired the glow of
ancestral fidelity and religious power. Yet the New- York-based Garifuna
are also becoming increasingly attentive to the African components of
their story of origin, to a degree that has not occurred in homeland
villages of Honduras. Through the process of migration from Honduras
to New York, and of reframing ntual events within the physical environ-
ment and the social networks of the city, the Garifuna are joining the
religious African diaspora, as they re-read their ritual events in relation
to the practices of neighboring Santeros, Vodunsi, Spiritists and assorted
devotees of the Yoruba orishas encountered in the Bronx.
This cultural transformation entails both agency and its constraint. For,
alongside the voluntary ethnogenetic and religious move of joining the
African diaspora, lies the involuntary conversion of becoming racially
‘black’, in part by being read into that category in the USA. The two

' All references to contemporary Garifuna religious practices, when not otherwise
cited, are based on my own fieldwork. Fieldwork was conducted in multiple Garifuna
villages of Honduras, most intensively in Corozal and in San Juan, as well as in the
Bronx, New York. At Honduran sites, research was carried out in stints of from two to
five months per year from 1997 to 2001. Research in the Bronx was carried in annual
month-long visits between 1998 and 2004.
I take these rough figures from the recent publication of Sarah England (2006: 13),
who derives the figures from Summer Institute of Linguistics estimates of Garifuna-
speakers in various locales, newspaper reports in the US and her own calculations of
fertility rates since the data was recorded. Honduras has an estimated 100,000 Gan-
funa in forty-three villages and cities; Belize, 12,000—20,000 in six villages plus Belize
City; Guatemala, 16,700 Garifuna in Livingston and Puerto Barrios; and Nicaragua,
1,500 in three villages. But given that many of these figures are a decade old, and in
view of high fertility rates, England estimates the total Central American population
at around 200,000. Major US centers of Garifuna residence include New York, Los
Angeles and New Orleans. Census numbers in the US are impossible to calculate since
Immigration and Naturalization Service figures are tabulated by country of origin.
England estimates the US population at 100,000—200,000; I lean toward the more
conservative end of that estimate here.
 THE ‘BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 4]

conversions—of joining the African diaspora and becoming black—are

indices of intertwined new subjectivities and subjectifications (Ong 1999:
18), new opportunities for social afhliation and novel sources of oppres-
sion that limit social mobility. Those subjectivities and subjectifications
collude, however, in raising African historical horizons to prominence
since African diasporic and black identifications, though by no means
isomorphic, overlap with and often reinforce one another. Migration’s
subordinations are not only losses, then; they are injustices that are
also the conditions of new self-knowledge (Butler 1997: 2, 14-17).
Just so, emigrants’ religious practice is not merely stunted by virtue
of being dislocated from its indigenous sites of performance, but also
transformed and invigorated. Emigrants critically reevaluate, and
revalue, the question of authentic origins. By selectively remember-
ing the past and the left-behind terntory as an ideological problem,
new opportunities for social and political alliances, as well as cultural
defense, are opened. Those new religious identifications and affiliations
fashioned by those Garifuna New Yorkers ‘in diaspora’, moreover, give
rise to further productive tensions when they are remitted to the home-
land and juxtaposed with local practices, resulting in distinct homeland
versus diasporic redactions of ‘the tradition’.
The Garifunas’ multiple diasporic horizons serve different roles and
to some degree are in tension with one another as anchors of varying
identifications, creating dynamism that precludes stagnation or closure.
The Central American diasporic horizon links them with Honduran
Amerindians on specific occasions and for certain purposes, especially
around issues of contested land rights (England 1999, 2006). And the
St Vincent horizon aids the Garifuna in prosecuting and processing
their historical relation and resistance to British colonialism, as well
as current restitution claims against Great Britain for their forced
deportation from St Vincent in 1797. The African diaspora opens
new opportunities for historical reflection and political affiliation both
in the USA and globally. The Garifuna show how a single group can
simultaneously view itself against multiple diasporic horizons; or, put
differently, strategically shift between discourses of diasporism and
indigenism (Matory 2005: 109).
‘Diasporas’, the Garifuna case suggests, are not naturally or other-
wise preexisting social forms that conserve religious traditions in new
spaces, or even transform traditions in the process of their recreation.
They are cultural configurations that actual social actors and histori-
cal groups move in and out of, activating them to varying degrees. By
42 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

joining a diaspora and becoming diasporic, a given religious group

expresses the rising value and meaning of a possible memory-set and
identity-formation. But joining a diaspora is a constructive and not
merely expressive act. As a group begins to view itself against new
historical and territorial horizons, new religious, ethnic and even racial
identifications are disclosed from the past, transforming the meanings
of the present (e.g, Benjamin 1968; Gadamer 1975; Lefebvre 1991;
Ricoeur 2004). ‘This broad trajectory describes a book-length argument
on the Garifuna of which this essay is but a part. In this section, my
goal is more focused. It is to try to sharpen the now dulled analytical
point of calling something ‘diasporic’ by asking when a group 1s not,
or ceases to be, ‘in diaspora’. If I am to argue that the Garifuna are
presently joining the African diaspora through religion, why were they
not ‘in it’ before; or, how and when did they ‘leave it’? ‘To begin to
consider the question, we will first need to restore some analytical bite
to the key term, diaspora.

Diasproliferation: Who isn’t in diaspora?

The notion of diaspora has been progressively widened over the last
century to include not only Jewish, Greek and Armenian cases, but
also diasporas as disparate as those of the Portuguese (Klimt and
Lubkemann 2002), the Mormons (Smith and White 2004) and the
New Orleans victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (Gross 2005);
or even the dispersion of parts of the self from a position of social
valuation to one where little is accorded them, as in ‘the sexual
diaspora of older women’ (Merkin 2006: 18).? It suddenly appears,
in other words, that everyone is in diaspora. Why not? We all came from
somewhere else, and are at least dimly enough aware of it to be able to call up
sentiments about the fact. Ethnic revivals are, moreover, a prudent reactive
move, a standard means of vying for a fair share of the socio-economic
pie (Barth 1969; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Rumbaut and Portes
2001: 5; Baumann 2000; Berking 2003), and ‘diaspora’ has become
their reliable vehicle. Its practical, colloquial uses suggest afhliations

2 The pattern begins with Zionist references at the end of the nineteenth century; its
application to the African diaspora was initiated under that nomenclature around mid-
twentieth century. The Armenian and Greek cases also predate the application to the
African one, but were not as frequently invoked or discursively dominant (Gilroy 1993:
23, 205-208; Cohen 1997).
 THE ‘BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 43

given by virtue of biological descent, which allegedly transmit ‘blood’

continuity across space.
This inspires groups and galvanizes political mobilizations, but for
analytical and comparative purposes it falls short on at least two counts.
First, in this view there exist natural groupings of humans who, under
conditions of emigration, inevitably become diasporas. The problem
with this is that there are no such ‘natural groups’ and, it. follows, no nat-
ural diasporas either. The second obvious problem with everyday uses of
‘diaspora’ is that the category 1s overly broad. It is not helpful to say that
we are all members of diasporas, though it is true that, if we expand the
temporal horizon widely enough, all human beings are descendants of
East Africa (Palmer 1998).* The reason most of us are not East African
diasporans, though we all have ancestors from there, is because that
memory 1s not part of our conscious experience; nor is it constitutive, so
far as we know, of our bodily habitus; nor are all of us read by others as
members of that category. Folk invocations of diaspora fail to specify the
cultural particularity of diasporans, the fact that it depends not merely
on having a family tree with branches in another place, but that the double-
consciousness in relation to place 1s central, even actively conjured in their
lived experiences. Diasporans feel a gap between here and there, where they
are really from. They may even value that gap, seeing it not as a deficiency
but as a resource or mark of distinction, and effortfully cultivate a sense
of it (Malkki 1997: 62).
If colloquial uses of ‘diaspora’ are confusing, there are conflicting
analytical meanings conflated under the term as well—as social form,
as type of consciousness, as mode of cultural production (Vertovec
2000: 142)—and at least three techniques of definition exercised in
social scientific literature: that of etymology, that of typology and that

2 On this score of temporal frame, Palmer (1998) notes that the common use
of ‘African diaspora’ today is actually only one in a much longer set of ‘streams’
of African diasporas, the first beginning 100,000 years ago. He places the second
stream around 3000 BCE, with the mass movement of the Bantu-speaking peoples
within the African continent and to the Indian Ocean. The third major stream was
a trading diaspora initiated around the fifth century BCE, as traders, merchants,
slaves and soldiers emigrated to Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The fourth major
African diasporic stream is the one commonly meant by the phrase today, caused
by the Atlantic trade in African slaves. The fifth stream began during the nine-
teenth century with the end of slavery and continues to the present. Palmer notes
that the key issues of racial oppression and resistance to it as the salient features
are characteristic only of the last two streams, together comprising the ‘modern’
African diaspora.
44 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

of relation. The first of these is the route of roots, the tracing of its
etymology as a way to delimit the term’s semantic range (e.g., Cohen
1997; Baumann 2000; Sheffer 2003). Diaspora: from the Greek verb,
sperrein (to sow, or scatter, as in seed); and the preposition dia (over); thus,
‘to scatter over’. The same Indo-European root, sp-, appears in words
like ‘spore’, ‘spread’ and ‘sperm’. Diaspora was first used by Greeks
to describe the colonization of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean
world, and it probably connoted a sacrificial loss of the homeland for
the cause of Greek expansion; hence irretrievable separation though
not necessarily forced migration or enslavement. ‘The word took on a
different valence as applied to the Jewish experience, as a translation of
the Hebrew term galut in the Greek version of Hebrew scripture, the
Septuagint, connoting severance, exile (Deuteronomy 28: 25, 58-68)
and the Jewish dispersions (732 BCE, conquest by Assyria; 586 BCE,
conquest by Babylonia; 70 CE, conquest by Rome). Yet at least in the
later context of rabbinic teaching it also carried the promise of ultimate
return (Cohen 1997).
A second technique of definition has been the attempt to specify
the empirical contents of a diaspora, so as to enable us to differentiate
- ‘diaspora societies’ from other societies (Safran 1991; ‘Tololyan 1996;
Van Hear 1998; Baumann 2000; K. Butler 2001). Most obvious in
these typological lists is the dispersion of a present group or of past
ancestors from an original center to two or more new sites. Next is
some retained collective memory about the homeland. A further cn-
terion is the maintenance of relations with the departed homeland, at
least as an imagined community, which defines in significant ways the
contemporary experience of the hostland. The best of these list-based
definitions then call attention to the need for institutional infrastructures
that make and sustain diasporic sentiments. A fifth common feature
invoked is that a diaspora group remains at least partly separate, distinct
or alienated from the mainstream society within the host country. A
sixth typical characteristic offered is the nostalgic idealization of the
ancestral homeland and ancestral time, which may or may not be linked
with the valuation of actual permanent return (Appadurai 1996: 37-38;
Tweed 1997: 94; Baumann 2000: 327).
The list-making technique has been helpful in generating a rough
consensus. Still, perhaps the most fruitful approach for restoring some
theoretical usefulness to diaspora and diasporic religion is that of
defining the term by relation; by considering the question of what
diasporas are not, and when one is not in one. ‘To put this differently,
 THE ‘BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 45

if groups undergo “de-diasporization” (Van Hear 1998: 48), what exactly

does this entail? One of Nicholas Van Hear’s examples seems clear
enough: people can go back to wherever they consider home; when
they do so on a permanent basis, they cease to be in diaspora. Recent
examples include ethnic Germans and Greeks returning to homelands
from the former USSR after 1989; another example is Palestinians
returned to the West Bank from Kuwait from 1990-1992 (Van Hear
1998: 6, 48, 195, 200). Another way a group can be non-diasporic is by
remaining always in transit, for example as nomads, such that the lack
of any established homeland location precludes any sense of territorial
dislocation (Cohen 1997). The Bedouins and the Romani provide pos-
sible examples. Yet another non-diasporic style is the community that
is entirely uprooted to a new homeland, and is therefore not dispersed;
it remains intact, merely in a new place, and the key spatial feature of
diaspora, the engagement of hostland and homeland communities across
a gap, 1s forfeit. Finally, at least as a logical possibility we can imagine a
group that remains dislocated from a homeland community, but which
so fully assimilates in the hostland that it is no longer cognizant of the
homeland, and abandons the sort of co-responsibility that is constitutive
of active diasporas (Saint Blancat in Baumann 2000; Werbner 2000:
17). Diasporic affiliations and representations come into being under
certain historical conditions and may be transformed or disappear under
others (Clifford 1994: 315).
Closer to this journal’s concerns, Eugene Genovese long ago sug-
gested that the brutality of slavery prevented Africans from remember-
ing and practicing their religions intact. He viewed African American
Christianity as a blend of African, European, Mediterranean Christian
and Amerindian cultures (Genovese 1972: 209-12). Yet for Genovese,
as for Herskovits (1958), this did not mean leaving the African dias-
pora, as it did, for example, in E. Franklin Frazier’s (1974) evaluations
of African American religion. Even slaves, in Genovese’s perspective,
maintained an African worldview, as demonstrated, for example, by
the import of concepts of the ancestors, just as Shaw’s (2002) vivid
descriptions of spirit geographies in Sierra Leone suggest the mainte-
nance of a form of practical, implicit and embodied rather than dis-
cursive memory. Something like this perspective, the claim of a latent
or embodied African diasporic tie despite the absence of a conscious
spatial horizon in memory, or outright expressions of Africanness in
discourse, has remained prominent in various guises, most notoriously
in Paul Gilroy’s ‘changing same’—a kind of continuity based, so far
46 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

as I understand him, in a shared stratum of performative musicality

(1993: 101).* I shall return to this issue in the Conclusion. For now,
however, I suggest that in so far as Garifuna ancestors who return to
be feted by the living in Honduran Garifuna ritual performances are
dressed, presented and greeted as Island Carib Indians from St Vincent,
and in so far as Africa is nowhere to be found in songs describing the
ancestors’ origins or sojourns, then such ritual events are not usefully
interpreted as parts of an African diaspora.
The Garifuna case suggests yet another way of leaving, or of not being ‘in
the African diaspora’, and that 1s when a plurality of African homeland sites
are congealed through ethnogenetic processes into a different territorial/
temporal horizon of authentic origins and aspirations. ‘This is what
appears to have occurred on St Vincent. ‘Africa’ as a whole had not
yet in the late seventeenth century. emerged as a source of diasporic
consciousness—and would not for two centuries to follow—and the
Afro-Indians who came to be called the Black Caribs adopted St
Vincent as their home, their place of origins and; eventually, after their
deportation to the Central American coast in 1797, their reference
point or even a sacred source of ancestral spirits. This is no retrograde
assertion hable to Herskovits’ critique against those who say that ‘the
Negro is thus a man without a past’ (1958: 2). On the contrary: it is
to say that Africans have pasts that are not eternally determined by a
continent of origin. It is to fully enough restore ‘the past’ to Africans
that they may even, on occasion, leave Africanness behind, and then
adopt it again. This is easy to assert, however, and much more difficult
to demonstrate historically. In the next sections, I try to flesh out the
process of the replacement of African homelands with the emergent
diasporic horizon of St Vincent. The descriptions of the process of
religious reformation are by necessity bound up with details of the
ethnogenetic process in general.

* The question is whether the application of arguments about embodied memories

are helpful in discussing diasporic identifications, or whether the latter are more usefully
restricted to consciously held subject-positions, since someone—either a social actor or
her interpreter—must consciously match those bodily practices to spatial coordinates
in order for them to be considered ‘diasporic’—referring to a distant territorial hon-
zon—in any meaningful sense of the term.
 THE ‘BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 47

Ethnogenesis of an Afro-Euro-Amerindian ‘colomal tnbe’

Garifuna religion provides a stunning example of the religious exchanges

and encounters that occurred throughout the Caribbean Basin during
the centuries after Columbus’s landing. In comparison with the vio-
lence with which Europeans devoured Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Cuba
and Jamaica, including the violence of religious conversion, many of
the small, ‘lesser’ Antilles in the southeast corner of the Caribbean
archipelago remained relatively ignored until well into the eighteenth
century.
Enslaved Africans destined for Caribbean labor were abruptly
thrown onto the shores and mercy of the Island Caribs of St Vincent,
on an island named but ignored by the Spanish. Out of this sudden
cO-presence, an encounter not chosen by either group, a new synthetic
ethnicity and religion—what Mary Helms (1969) called a ‘colonial
tribe”—was born. The specific rapprochement by which the Africans
survived and, together with the Indians, founded the new ethnicity and
religious culture of the “Black Caribs’ remains something of a mystery,
despite the fact that the presence of a large number of ‘negroes’ seen on
St Vincent elicited no shortage of explanations from various European
observers. The British Major John Scott ascribed two Spanish slavers
intended for Barbados shipwrecked in 1635 off the coast of St Vincent
as the source of Africans, an event recapitulated by later authors often
enough to become the standard account of the origins of the Black
Caribs (Sieur de la Borde 1992 [1674]: 150; Young 1764: 7; Davidson
1787: 7; Morris 1787; Edwards 1799: 104; Leblond 2000 [1813]: 108;
Great Britain Calendar of State Papers 1880: 534, in Kerns 1997: 38;
Gonzalez 1988: 26; Hulme and Whitehead 1992: 171; Coelho 1995:
36). Sir William Young, Britain’s future Governor of Dominica, referred
in 1764 and more specifically, in papers posthumously published by his
son in 1795, to a similar shipwreck event that befell a Portuguese vessel
in 1675 (Young 1764; 1971 [1795]: 6).
In the paradigmatic shipwreck narrative, surviving Africans were
tolerated and assimilated by the Island Caribs for reasons that remain
opaque. To be sure, the Africans augmented Carib military forces that
were facing expanding European encroachments. Island Canbs had
already been displaced from many neighboring islands, and St Vincent,
along with St Lucia and Dominica, remained relatively autonomous
only as a result of a 1660 concord among European powers to allow
it to remain a sort of early ‘Indian reserve’, a compact renewed in
48 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (W. Young 1971 [1795]: 3-5;

Conzemius 1928: 187; Gonzalez 1988: 15—6). The small island reserves
were regarded as inauspicious for profitable agricultural development
because of their rugged, mountainous landscapes and rocky shores, by
contrast with their neighbor, ‘smooth polished Barbados’ (Young 1764:
26). As a key British slave entrepót from 1627 until the cessation of
British slave-trading in 1808, Barbados enjoyed no such calm.
Though the Island Caribs sometimes acquired large numbers of
Africans in one fell swoop—such as the five hundred they captured from
a shipwreck near Grenada (Vasquez de Espinosa in Thornton 1998:
284)—the shipwreck narrative of origins is not sufficient to account
for the rapid growth of the Black Carib population on St Vincent,
and there must have been additional influxes. One likely cause is that
there occurred much earlier interethnic alliances between Africans
and Indians. ‘The histonan John “Thornton (1998: 272-303) collected
descriptions of many Caribbean interactions between Africans and
Amerindians. As early as 1546, for example, a letter from the governor
of Margarita to the city council of San Juan, Puerto Rico, advised the
council to look out for Ganb Indians and ‘blacks who go with them’.
Another report from Dominica, as early as 1574, noted the Island Caribs
acquiring and integrating into their society both Spanish and African
captives acquired in periodic raiding expeditions (cf. Gonzalez 1988:
26). An Afro-Puerto Rican named Luiza de Navarette was returned to
her home isle in 1576 after four years of life as a slave to the Caribs,
and reported the widespread distribution of Africans in Carib villages
(in Hulme and Whitehead 1992: 40). ‘The Island Carib pattern of
raiding European colonies and capturing African slaves was common,
and was regarded as a serious problem by European powers. So much
so, notes Thornton (1998: 290), that one Spanish official, Sancho de
Alquiza ‘estimated in 1612 that as many as two thousand African slaves
were in Captivity in the Carb islands’. In 1658, the Caribs on the island
of Grenada accused the French of stealing thar African slaves, even
as Jean-Baptiste du Tertre in the 1660s reported precisely the inverse
complaint being levied by the French on Martinique against the Caribs
(in Gonzalez 1988: 26). In 1674, de la Borde described the situation
on St Vincent in the following terms:
There are a great number of negroes who live with them, particularly
on St Vincent where their stronghold is. They have so multiplied that at
present they are as powerful as them [the Caraibes]. Some of them are
fugitive maroons who were taken in war; these are slaves of the Caraibes,
 THE “BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 49

whom they call ‘Tamons; but the greater part came from some Flemish or
Spanish ship which was wrecked close to their islands (1704: 574; English
translation Hulme and Whitehead 1992: 150).°
As de la Borde made clear, the Island Cambs did not always or inevitably
treat Africans as slaves, but rather only those taken captive in military
operations. Depending on the specific local political dynamics, Africans
were at times enlisted as military allies, especially since, as ‘Thornton
proposed (1998: 293), many African slaves who found themselves in
Carib hands either by shipwreck, capture or marronage, had already
been seasoned by extensive military experience in Africa. Africans from
the Gold Coast were likely to have been excellent builders of large
canoes, moreover, and useful in the fashioning and manning of Island
Carib canoes reported to carry fifty persons or more (de la Borde 1704:
571; Davidson 1787: 18). There were surely amorous and reproductive
exchanges too. Father Raymond Breton reported from his sojourn on
Dominica in the mid-seventeenth century the special terms applied
to ‘les enfants engendrez des Sauvages & des Negresses’ (Breton 1968
[1665]: 26; Leblond 2000 [1813]: 109).
The 1635 date should therefore not be taken as a fixed moment
of Africans’ arrival, but rather as one of a series of syncretic events
by which Africans came to St Vincent. The ethnic group that by the
second half of the 1700s came to be called the ‘Black Carbs’ emerged
processually between 1600 and 1796, not only from the notorious
shipwrecks, but also from Island Carib raids, from maroons fleeing the
rising plantation economy on neighboning islands, and by intermarriage
with Island Caribs on St Vincent.*
Manifold sources of African arrivals suggest that no single ethnic
group can be regarded as the African progenitor of the Black Caribs.
Sir William Young reported the Africans shipwrecked in 1675 as being
of ‘Moco’ ethnicity, deported from the Bight of Benin in what is today
Nigeria (W. Young 1971 [1795]: 6). This society is often identified

7 There is a small but important discrepancy between the original French (at least as
I have encountered it in Hennepin’s 1704 version), and the English translation provided
by Hulme and Whitehead. Where Hulme and Whitehead’s version shows, “There are
a great number of negroes who live with them...’ (italics mine), the French version in
Hennepin reads, ‘Il y a quantté de Negres qui vivent comme eux...’ (italics mine).
£ By 1764, Sir William Young, Britain's future Governor of Dominica and a land-
holder on St Vincent, found the Island Caribs completely dominated, 'gradually extir-
pated or reduced to their obedience’ (1764: 8), and uses the phrase “Black Charaibs’
in writing by, at the latest, 1770 Gn Hulme and Whitehead 1992: 194).
30 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

with the ethnic group Efik, of the Cross River delta and the slaving
port of Old Calabar (in the Bight of Biafra, not the Bight of Benin,
as Young had it). Yet Young’s report provides at best a small piece of
the puzzle. Terms like Karabah, Efik, Igbo and Moko often served as
terminal-point ethnonyms for any number of interior groups joined
under a single name at a port of embarkation (Kolapo 2004). Given
the general demographic trends of the slave trade, the Spanish ships
earlier lost in 1635 would have been likely to have carried West Central
African cargo from Angola (Curtin 1969; Lovejoy 1983; Klein 1999).
And these groups were augmented by Africans of other ethnic groups
and languages arriving from nearby islands, especially Barbados, named
as the primary source by the Dominican missionary Jean Baptiste Labat,
who lived on Dominica at the close of the seventeenth century:
Besides the savages, this island is also inhabited by a very great number
of fugitive negroes, for the most part from Barbados, which, being to
windward of Saint Vincent, gives the runaways every possible facility
for escaping from their masters’ plantations in boats or on piperis or
rafts, and taking refuge among the savages. ‘The Caribs formerly brought
them back to their masters, when they were at peace with them, or took
and sold them to the French or to the Spaniards. I don’t know for what
reason they have changed their method, nor what has induced them
to receive these negroes amongst themselves and to regard them as
belonging to one and the same nation. They regret it now very much
and very unavailingly, for the number of negroes has increased to such
an extent, either by those born in the country or by those come from
Barbados to join them, that 1t much surpasses that of the Caribs, so
that the negroes have forced them to share the island and to relinquish
the windward side to them. But it is not even that which mortifies the
savages most, but the frequent kidnapping of their wives and daughters,
whom the negroes seize whenever they want...(Labat in Taylor 1951:
22; cf. Edwards 1799: 104).
Labat's specific citation of Barbados as the main source of maroon
additions to the Black Caribs increases the chances that many Africans
from the Gold Coast (Asante, Ewe, Fon, Fante), the center of the
eighteenth-century British slave trade to Barbados, would also have been
part of the emerging ethnic group. But the label “Moco” suggests that
the Bight of Biafra also provided slaves for Barbados. In that region,
slaves were captured from among the Yoruba, Efik, Igbo and Ibibio
peoples. Between 1627 and 1807, four hundred thousand Africans
were deported to Barbados, more than to any other destination in the
English Caribbean, and Barbados was an early tinderbox of rebellion
and desertion (Craton 1986; Bianchi 1988: 93).
 THE ‘BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 51

The reputation of St Vincent as a “free island” and destination for

maroons circulated and grew in the 1700s, attracting new arrivals. As it
did, the specific African territories that might have served as an anchor
of ethnic identity were complicated by a radical pluralism of cultures.
‘The Africans adopted, and were adopted by, the Island Carib tongue
and religion as a common lingua and religio franca.
What unfolded was an ethnogenesis forged in a relatively short cycle
of a shared resistance to slavery. For though never laboring as slaves, the
Black Caribs lived under the continual threat of enslavement, and very
much within the expanding sugar plantation system. There were, there-
fore, strong incentives attached to ‘becoming Canb’ for the Africans. It
offered a shared religious grammar for disparate African ethnicities, but
also the hope of a buffer against enslavement. Later in the eighteenth
century the British colonist George Davidson observed, after living near
the Black Caribs for two years, that they continued the Island Carib
practice of flattening their infants” foreheads because they “perceived
the necessity of a discrimination founded on more obvious marks than
that of complexion’ (1787: 10; W. Young 1971 [1795]: 8; cf. du Tertre
1992: 129). The young French doctor, Jean-Baptiste Leblond, observed
the same around 1767 (2000 [1813]: 80, 110, 136). In Davidson’s view,
Black Caribs appeared dangerously simular to enslaved Africans, and
sought to mark their distinctiveness through bodily modifications. But
if this was so, the reason for needing such distinction was the risk of
being confused with the runaway slaves whom they often aided through
encouragement and with arms (Morris 1787). The new ethnic group
was a ‘colonial tribe’, then, not only because it emerged in the 1600s
Caribbean contact zone, but also because it was born of the resistance
to European colonization.
Though Labat had described the Caribs treating the ‘negroes’ as
members of ‘one and the same nation’, his vision of their inter-group
transculturation as a generally harmonious one seems exaggerated.
Initially the Africans were captives and servants of the Island Caribs.
Armand de la Paix’s Relation from 1646 reported that, “Some Negroes
of St Vincent of the isles, being in Saint Lucia, massacred some French
people from Martinique by the order of their Carib master’ (in ‘Taylor
1949: 382), implying that the Africans were at least initially perceived
to be ruled by Island Carbs. Yet de la Borde observed in 1674 that
the Black Caribs were already as powerful as the Island Carbs (1704:
574). In 1700 the governor of Martinique, who then held jurisdiction
over St Vincent, divided the island between the western ‘Red Carib’
32 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

zone and the eastern ‘Black Carib’ domain. Shortly thereafter, by the
1720s, they were reported to be masters of the island. The British
Captain Braithwaite described being met by five hundred Black Caribs
as he put ashore on St Vincent, all of them armed and organized with
martial discipline. After entertaining some of them on board his ship,
he dignified them with the standard honorary cannon discharge, ‘and
received, in return, as regular vollies of small shot as I ever heard’
(Uring 1726: 109). By the early eighteenth century the Black Carbs
were already a semi-autonomous, well-formed social and military
organization, galvanized in and by the cauldron of the slave system
that surrounded them.
A detailed letter dated September 3, 1705, written by Monsieur
de Beaumont, a companion to the Dominican missionary Raymond
Breton, suggests the spatial separation and the tensions that had already
divided the Island Caribs from the Black Caribs. Beaumont interviewed
a group of Carib Indians who passed his ship in pirogues, en route to
the windward (eastern) Black Canb side of the island to exact a revenge
killing. ‘(he Indians indicated their openness to European military aid
against the Black Caribs, a prospect that left Beaumont salivating in his
report: “That would be a good catch. It is claimed that there are about
3,000 negroes, all strong, fit to send to the Spanish mines. There is a
war between them which can only be ended by a specific campaign,
since it is based on the fact that these negroes kidnap the women of
the savages, who are very jealous and never forgive’ (M. de Beaumont
1992 [1705]: 176). The spatial separation and rivalry between the
two communities was confirmed in Braithwaite’s report a few decades
later, of parleys with an ‘Indian Chief’ and a distinct ‘Chief of the
Negroes’ (Uring 1726: 108-10). As depicted in British narratives, the
Island Caribs were soon overshadowed and even eclipsed by the Black
Caribs. In the official correspondence of Valentine Morris, the British
Governor-in-Chief of St Vincent in the late 1770s,’ for example, the
‘Charibs’ he referred to were solely the Black Caribs who caused
him much trouble, dressing in ‘French colours’ and inciting runaway
Negroes to quit their masters (Morris 1787: 12, 16, 123, 126). The
shifting nomenclature, wherein ‘Carib’ was often now applied to those

’ From 1763, when Great Britain was ceded St Vincent by France, untl 1776,
St Vincent was administratively subject to the Governor of Grenada. Beginning in
1776 it gained its own Governor, namely Valentine Morris. It again fell to the French
(and Black Caribs) in 1777 before reverting to British dominion in 1783.
 THE ‘BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 53

of African descent, reflects the fact that the Island Caribs were by this
point severely diminished as a group of political consequence in British
eyes. Many of the ‘Yellow Carbs’ had fled to the islands of ‘Tobago and
Trinidad, and those remaining had been driven to the leeward (west)
side of the island (Davidson 1787: 8; Leblond 2000 [1813]: 110). Many
succumbed to the smallpox borne by Europeans to the islands, to which
they had httle immunity or resistance, a process that was already well
under way by the mid-1600s (Breton 1992: 110).*
We must exercise caution here, however. As Peter Hulme (2000: sec-
tion II) proposes, the mastér narrative depicting St Vincent as being
wholly under the control of the troublesome Black Caribs, a distinctly
African rather than Amerindian group, served Great Britain’s colonial
interests:

This Africanisation [of the Black Caribs] had a number of advantages

for the planters. It emphasised the Black Carib role as usurpers. It helped
avoid a repetition of the groundswell of British liberal opinion in defence
of the indigenous Carbs during the war of the 1770s—which had forced
the British to sue for peace. And it drew upon the traditional associa-
tion of blackness with savagery and evil, exacerbated by the success of
slave revolts in the Canbbean and, of course, especially in St Domingue
after 1791.

Further evidence for this allegation can be found in the report of Jean-
Baptiste Leblond, writing during the period of the first military clashes
between Great Britain and the Black Caribs, from 1772 to 1773. He
overheard colonists declaring that negotiating with the Caribs (instead
of taking the land by force) was unjust, ‘because the Black Caribs, far
from being the indigenes of the land, were originally from Africa’ (2000
[1813]: 153, translation mine). Africanizing the Black Caribs by stressing
their utter separation from the ‘Yellow’ or ‘Red Caribs’ had strategic
value for British colonists; it rendered their own land-appropriations
equal in legal and ethical status to the Black Caribs’ previous settling of
St Vincent. The point is that ‘Black’ was as much a political classifier
of groups especially resistant to colonial settlement on St Vincent as
it was a description of Black Caribs’ actual skin color, which probably
varied widely among members of the nation.

8 A small Island Carib enclave, established as a reserve in 1903, exists on the island
of Dominica; a small number of Island Carib Amerindians also remain on St Vincent,
though many were killed in the volcanic eruption of Mt Soufriére in 1902.
94 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

In 1763 St Vincent was officially returned to British colonial juris-

diction under the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years’ War
between Great Britain and France. Nancie Gonzales nominated this
as the temporal point in which the Black Carbs were properly born
as a distinct, unique society (1988: 32). War and trade with Europeans
dominated their livelihood in place of the former Island Canb raid-
ing and trading networks with other Caribs; a money economy had
begun to take shape as Black Caribs transported sugar to English ships
anchored off St Vincent’s rocky coast; and incipient chiefdoms were
formed around stable communities reliant on the domestication of fowl,
pigs, cattle, as well as newly diversified crops like tobacco. The director
of St Vincent’s botanical gardens, Alexander Anderson, writing in the
late 1790s, recounted that the Black Caribs at this tme traded widely,
transporting goods from Martinique to Trinidad in their great canoes.
They had even become players in the global market, as Black Carib
tobacco harvests were regularly transported to Martinique to be refined
into the ‘well-known Macuba snuff’, for European consumers (Anderson
1992: 217; Davidson 1787: 18).? Meanwhile, the Black Carib named Du
Vallée, like his brother the notorious chief Chatoyer, oversaw a small
cotton plantation purchased with loans from ‘English gentlemen’ on
which he directed the labor of nine slaves (Young 1992: 203, 212).
The economically astute Black Caribs remained vehemently ant-
colonial, but pragmatically so, and differentiated between the European
powers. French settlers, showing themselves relatively amenable to Black
Carib territorial claims, were more tolerated than Bntish ones. Enough
French settlers arrived on St Vincent that France militanly occupied
the island from 1778-1783, with the aid of the Black Caribs, while
Great Britain was engaged in the United States’ War of Independence.
Thereafter, when the island was restored to British control after 1783,
this time for good, the Black Caribs never shook the reputation as being
thoroughly *French’. After all, their names were mostly French, they all
spoke French along with Carib, preferred red wine to rum, and were
unmoved by the charms of the English Protestant missionaries. ‘The
British authorities had feared as much; their treaty with the Caribs

2 Davidson wrote that the Black Caribs sold their tobacco principally in Martinique,
where it was made into Macouba, named after a district in Martinique where they
formerly raised the best tobacco in the West Indies (1787: 18).
 THE ‘BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 55

from 1773 had stressed, in Article VII, ‘No undue intercourse with the
French islands to be allowed’ (Young 1971 [1795]: 92).

Black Canb religion on St Vincent

We know little about what the Black Canbs’ emergence as a distinct ethnic
group meant for the practice of religion until well into the nineteenth
century, following their deportation to, and settlement of, the Central
American coast. We must, therefore, triangulate between seventeenth-
century descriptions and nineteenth- and twentieth-century assessments
to try to reconstruct a profile of early Black Carib religion. Still, it is
clear that there were at least three obvious tributaries feeding the new
group’s religious practices.
Let us begin with the Amerindian tributary. We know something of
the religious practices from the Lesser Antilles based on seventeenth-
century French accounts—from the Dominicans Jean Baptiste du
Tertre, Jean Baptiste Labat, Raymond Breton, the Protestant Charles
de Rochefort and the Jesuit affiliate Sieur de la Borde, who described
Island Carib rites and beliefs on Dominica, Guadeloupe and St Vincent.
Often the early reports described the Caribs as having no religion what-
soever (e.g., Breton 1992: 110; Davidson 1787: 6), and presented the
practices in terms of their own pejorative polemics. De la Borde, to wit,
accused them of being ‘not unlike the Calvinists’ for want of priests,
altars or sacrifices, (1704: 523; 1992: 140), while British colonists in the
eighteenth century found their Catholicism, along with other ‘French’
tastes, abhorrent. Carib religion, in other words, was consistently read
in relation to the polemical contests that divided Europe, rendering its
interpretation a thorny task.
St Vincent held its own spirit-geography for the Black Caribs: the
Black Forest at the foot of the volcano was occupied by the presence
of a spirit, as was the Lake and the ‘Cavern of Death’ (de Jonnés 1920
[1858]: 121). If these indigenous powers remained on the island when
the Black Caribs were deported, they carried other aspects of their reli-
gious practice with them. Divination of illness and ceremonies of food
offerings to spirits were led by religious leaders known by the Carib as
praye or boyé; Raymond Breton called these priest/doctors boiyako (1992:
113). These officials, now called buyeis, were shamans in the classic sense
of that term (e.g, Eliade 1964). Undergoing an initiation through a
long period of seclusion, they learned to use tobacco and gourd rattles
96 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

in the achievement of trances, they traveled ‘on high’ with the aid of
their tutelary spirits to seek out and control malignant or neglected
spirits who had caused the illness; they mediated the spirits with their
voices for the patient and other audience members, ‘sucked’ the ill-
ness from the afflicted body in the form of a small bone or piece of
wood, and appeased malignant spirits with food offerings (de la Borde
1704: 539-44). Also like today’s buyeis, they performed divination, and
filled low tables (matoutou) with favored foods like cassava bread to feed
malign spirits (mapoia). The Black Caribs adopted this religious office
and techniques from their St Vincent hosts, the Island Caribs. De la
Borde offered the best description of ritual practices on St Vincent,
and is especially notable because of his simultaneous observation of
the presence there of ‘a large number of Negroes’ living like the Island
Caribs (1704: 574), offering a temporal reference point, the last quarter
of the seventeenth century, for locating when the transculturation of
Island Canb and African into Black Carib religion may have begun. De
la Borde described how “T'hey sometimes put the hair or bones of their
dead relatives in a calabash . . . and say that the spirit of the dead speaks
within it, warning them of the plans of their enemies’ (546, translation
mine). This ritual practice suggests either the possible borrowing of
West African religious practices, such that the exchange was a two-way
street, or at the very least an Island Carib ritual grammar that would
have been strikingly familiar in structure to many Africans.
Garifuna religion continues to rely upon the leadership of such
shamans. They orchestrate and direct sophisticated ritual performances
that satisfy hungry ancestral spirits (gubida) with the influence of the
helping spirits (hiyuruha). Contemporary buyeis use tobacco in trance and
prepare tables generously laden with cassava bread and cassava beer
to feed the spirits as their Carib progenitors did. Moreover, the red
dye manufactured from annatto seeds (rougou) used to paint the skin,
ubiquitous in the daily routine of the Island Caribs, remains crucial
in the Garifuna dijgú ritual. These bear witness to the legacy of Island
Carib practices in Black Canb religion.
The African religious tributary must have been important as well.
In the most elaborate ritual performances of contemporary homeland
Garifuna religion, for example, called diigii, three drums are used to
guide dances that culminate in spirit possession by returning ancestors.
Upon possessing the bodies of their living descendants, the ancestors
dance, consort and consult with the living. Nowhere are such collective
 THE ‘BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 57

possession dances mentioned in descriptions of Island Carib religion

(Gonzalez 1988: 29). ‘The patterns do, however, recall the West and
West Central African ritual uses of music and dance from the period.
Consider, for example, the report of Captain Nathaniel Uring from his
1701 visit to the port of Loango, Angola, prior to sailing to St Vincent.
While in Loango, Uring by chance heard drums and, curiosity quick-
ened, sought their source. He found the drums in use in what he took
to be a healing ritual. A sick woman lay on the ground surrounded by
six to eight women singing to the rhythm of rattles they held in their
hands, and the drumming of a man on a hollow tree trunk covered
with skin (1726: 43). Unng, like many before and after him, discerned
no religion among them, since their efforts appeared to be directed to
the spirits of ancestors:
I could not perceive that they had any Religion among them: They have
no Temples or Houses of Worship; nor did they pay Adoration to Any
Thing that I could learn, tho’ they built Hutts over the Graves of some
particular Persons of Distinction among ‘em; and in those Hutts I saw
several Utensils, such as they make use of in Eating and Drinking...I was
informed that it was customary for the Relations of the Dead to carry
victuals, and leave it in those Hutts in the Night in order to entertain
their deceased Friends... (46).

What is evident is that parts of ritual performed in Angola at roughly

the time of Africans’ arrival on St Vincent presented performative simi-
larities to de la Borde’s description of Island Carib practices a quarter-
century prior, notably the preparation of foods left for the ancestral
spirits. The caveat is that Uring’s report specifies more clearly that it
is ancestors, ‘the Relations of the Dead’, who are being fed, whereas
de la Borde’s surveillance separated his note on calabashes containing
hair or bones of the dead from the more thoroughly described treat-
ment of the zemeen and mapora spirits.
Contemporary Garifuna rituals, like those of the Island Carib sha-
mans, engage helping spirits to combat afflicting spirits, yet all of these
spirits are also ancestors. It is tempting, if perhaps too convenient, to
imagine today’s rites as a neat confluence of African and Island Carib
streams, joined in the late seventeenth century. Yet this must remain a
mere hypothesis in the face of the yawning absence of data on Black
Carib religion in the eighteenth century. For example, the colonist
George Davidson reported that the Black Caribs, ‘... have some faint
ideas of a Supreme Cause which created all things, but they conceive
98 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

that God commits the government of the world to subordinate Spirits.

They make use of several incantations against Evil Spirits, to prevent
their malignant influence’ (Davidson 1787: 9-10). Yet the precise
nature of the subordinate spirits can be only guessed at, based on the
triangulation with earlier views like de la Borde’s and later notes from
Central America, to which we turn momentarily.
Catholicism also played a key role in the formative stages of Ganfuna
religion. ‘Today, all traditional Garifuna religious actors consider them-
selves to be Catholic, and Catholicism provides the overall mythic
structure within which the ancestor religion is maintained. Malignant
(mafia) spirits, for example, typically spatially associated with ‘the bush’
(el monte), are considered manifestations of ‘the devil’, while positive
spirits are regarded as agents of “God’ (Bungiu). Postmortem rites begin
with ‘masses’ (lemest) adapted from official Roman Catholic liturgy
and continue with novenas (ninth-night masses) and anniversary masses
performed to remember and appease the dead. Catholic saints are
prominent on Garifuna altars, and specific saints hike Esquipula and
San António are called upon as miraculous sources of assistance.'? This
is certainly partly because of the visits of French missionaries. But it 1s
also possible that some of the Africans who settled on St Vincent were
from the Kongo kingdom that had converted in the fifteenth century,
and that they therefore arrived on St Vincent as African Christians
already (Bianchi 1988: 98; Thornton 1998).
Catholicism in Black Carib religion on St Vincent probably consisted
of selected elements that were elevated and given value while other
aspects were easily left aside or forgotten. As we will see in the next
section on the Black Caribs in Central America, for example, baptism
was very popular during the nineteenth century while marnage was
practically ignored, suggestive of the critical practice involved in what-
ever “syncretizing’ may have occurred. Such selective appropriations
motivated the British colonist George Davidson to complain about
the lack of concern on the part of French Catholic priests with any

'* The prevalence of saints in homes was noted especially by John Lloyd Stephens,
Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1841), in Kerns 1997: 34. Gonzalez (1988: 97) notes that ninety percent of
Garifuna consider themselves ‘Catholic’ in the contemporary moment, and that this
is not in any way regarded as contradictory with ancestor rituals. This has been my
observation in the communities where I have worked in Honduras as well, with the
key proviso that the number of evangélicos 1s higher today than 13 years ago, and that
these evangélicos aggressively resist and denounce the ancestor practices.
 THE “BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 59

thorough religious instruction (1787: 9), leaving the Black Caribs, in

his view, as yet in need of such religion as could make them ‘human
beings’ at all (6, 20). The Bntsh effort was a more activist one, and a
Methodist mission was under way even as Davidson wrote that would
grant them not only true (Protestant) religion but also the ‘blessings’ of a
British government (6-7). Yet the British Protestants made no headway,
not least because the Black Caribs’ allegiances already lay firmly with
French republicans and French Catholics. ‘The Methodist missionary
to the ‘Black Canbb Division’, Mr. Baxter, registered his frustration on
February 25, 1790: “The Black Caribbs still remain civil and kind, but
will hear nothing of religion” (Coke 1790: 13).
In view of the Black Caribs’ formation as a ‘colonial tribe’, the
fact of the resistance to Protestants, and of Catholicism’s influence,
does not surprise. Catholic priests were key players in the process of
Black Carib ethnogenesis. In 1763, when the British took control of
St Vincent from France under the Treaty of Paris, the Black Caribs
appointed as their political emissary the French priest they trusted more
than any other European, Abbé Valladares (Young 1992 [1795]: 193;
Kerns 1997: 31). And when Black Caribs allied themselves with France
against Great Britain during the same period, their relationship with
French priests helped to build that sense of affinity. British colonial
officials like William Young viewed that relationship in cynical terms,
as French political strategy ‘under covert of religion’, and ‘vamped up’
as spiritual consanguinity made through the institution of godparent-
hood (1971 [1795]: 17-19). But the Black Caribs seem not to have
perceived the French priests’ efforts as merely instrumental. By the
end of the eighteenth century, Black Caribs greeted Europeans with,
“Quelles nouvelles de la France? Quelles nouvelles de l'Angleterre?”,
as Young was asked on Christmas Day, 1791 (Young 1992 [1791]:
211). Though by the time of their deportation in 1797, only about
ten percent of the Black Carib were baptized (Gonzalez 1988: 82, 96),
in their nineteenth-century Central American homeland, virtually all
would become at least nominally Catholic.

The Ganfuna in Central Ámerica

The Black Caribs were closely bound to eastern Caribbean franco-

phone networks throughout the eighteenth century. Beginning after
1763, they frequently landed arms in St Vincent after canoe journeys
60 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

to Martinique, and at least one of their leaders called himself “Monsieur

le Général’ (Morns 1787: 20; Leblond 2000 [1813]: 111). But these bonds
grew tighter as republican proclamations of “Liberté, egalité, fraternité’
seemed to felicitously unite the Black Canbs’ own desires for autonomy
with those of French ‘democratical whites’ (Edwards 1819: 3) desire to
be rid of the British threat on St Vincent. For that threat was all too
present. Plans for the removal of the Black Carbs from St Vincent
were drawn up by the British as early as 1765; they arose again when
France declared war against Great Bntian in 1793. In 1795 the Black
Caribs, together with French settlers, erupted in insurrection against the
British. By 26 October 1796, 5,080 Black Carib captives had surren-
dered to the British, and most (4,195)"' transported to the tiny nearby
island of Baliceaux (Gonzalez 1988: 35). ‘There approximately half met
their demise through disease and the lack of shelter.'* The remainder,
reduced to fewer than two thousand, were again herded into the holds
of a British convoy chaperoned by the warship the HMS Experiment.
After a short journey that included brief stops at Bequia, Grenada and
Jamaica, on 11 April 1797 they were deposited on Roatan, just off the
coast of Spanish Honduras and the city of Trujillo.
Despite this abrupt and violent severing of the Black Caribs from
their homeland of St Vincent, the last decades of the eighteenth
century are recalled in contemporary oral histories as a golden age, a
paradise lost (Goelho 1995: 42). ‘They were prosperous, autonomous,
proud and beginning to face the global Caribbean economy on their
own terms. Chatoyer, their leader killed in the first days of the war,
is recalled today as the greatest Black Carib hero, and in a sense the
progenitor of all contemporary Garifuna.’* With his demise and the
society’s collective deportation, they were exiled from their homeland
and forced to indigenize a new terrain. Yet the transition was not
wholly a loss. In the move to Central America, St Vincent (Ganfuna:
Yurumein) was reborn in memory, now as a sacred place and diasporic
horizon. Moreover, with the transfer to a new territory, the ethnogenetic
process was completed. ‘To mark this juncture in the narrative, here I

'' Plus 44 slaves of the Black Carib and 102 Yellow/Red Caribs, though these were
all returned to St Vincent (Gonzalez 1988: 21).
'2 Alexander Anderson’s 1798 report mentions as causes not only disease but,
bizarrely, ‘too much food’ (1992: 228).
'3 Gullick notes that Chatoyer became a nationalist symbol of St Vincent during
the later twentieth century, most often in the genre of a ‘Black Power’ symbol (1995:
165).
 THE “BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 61

will switch to the contemporary ethnonym, Ganfuna, when not directly

quoting other sources.
Within a few months of their landing at Roatan, a single day's sail
from the mainland city of Trujillo, Honduras, the Garifuna were visited
by Spanish officials. ‘That the Spanish were satisfied by their sufficiently
anti-British animosity was fortunate. Having arrived in March 1797, by
May their existence was already precarious, despite Bryan Edwards’s
glib report to English readers that the Garifuna had been left in ‘a
situation remarkably healthy, with excellent water and a fertile soil’
(1819: 74). The British had indeed left provisions, but many of these
foodstuffs proved spoiled and unusable. One report suggested that the
ship containing their resources was even allowed to sink at anchor,
since the Garifuna were so utterly ‘grieved at their banishment’ from St
Vincent (Roberts 1827: 273). The situation was dire, and the Garifuna
were saved by being transported off the island by the Spanish, and were
for the first tme landed on American soil, in the port of ‘Trujillo.
The Garifuna arrived into a mainland context of multiple African-
descended, Amerindian and mixed ethnic groups. As they were
French speakers, their reception at Trujillo was facilitated by the pres-
ence of two to three hundred French-speaking exiles from Haiti and
Guadaloupe (Young 1847: 140; Crawford 1984:3; Davidson 1984: 16;
Gonzalez 1984: 53, 1988: 53), possibly including the Haitian revo-
lutionary military leaders Jean-Francois and Biassou (Bianchi 1988:
104). There was also a black community of Kongolese origin in the
vicinity of Trujillo as early as 1774, “Mondongo Negroes”'* fled from
the Honduran interior, where slaves were used in gold and silver mines
(Cavero in Bianchi 1988: 106). To the east of Trujillo were the Miskito
Indians and the Afro-Indian ‘Sambos’ (Miskito-Africans) whose story
of origin—of African survivors of wrecked slave ships being received
and incorporated by Amerindians—echoed the Garifunas’ story on St
Vincent.'’ To the northwest, in and around the city of Belize in British
Honduras, meanwhile, were Africans from Jamaica and other islands
of the Anglo colonial world. And there was also a quarter in Belize

'* Mondonga is a contemporary region in the interior of the Democratic Republic

of Congo, but during the slave trade and thereafter in Central and South America,
‘Mondongo’ referred in general terms to the fact that ‘the man in question came from
the interior, roughly to the north and east of the Congo (river) mouth...’ (Curtin
1969: 188).
'3 Hodgson 1757 reports this event, as appears in Bard (1965 [1855]: 338, 357;
cf. Thornton 1998: 284). The slaveships in this case were Dutch.
62 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

called “Eboe-town”, named for the West African Igbo speakers who lived
there (Gibbs 1883: 79). The presence of these communities points to
a possible further process of transculturation for the Garifuna on the
Central American mainland.
In part as a result of the pressure for land created by the sudden
influx into Trujillo, many Garifunas pressed on to found other villages,
especially in Mosquitia to the east, where further inter-ethnic liaisons
occurred with the Miskito (Young 1847: 130; Crawford 1984). ‘Though
the Garifuna were considered to be ngorously endogamous in their
reproductive patterns, including in their own ideal self-representations
(Roberts 1827: 274; Froebel 1859: 184; Sanborn 1886; Conzemuus 1928:
183; Solien Gonzalez 1969: 27; Kerns 1984: 112), it seems likely that
interethnic matches occurred, especially since men were typically away
from their home villages much of the time, employed as soldiers or on
woodcutting crews. Garifunas soon lived in near proximity and exchange
with the Miskitos; perhaps too near for the Miskitos’ taste on some
occasions, as the latter were displaced to settlements further east (Bard
1965 [1855]: 316). Nevertheless, during the traveler Orlando Roberts’s
visit to the Miskito king in the 1820s, two “Kharibee’ also arrived to pay
the king a visit, and Roberts observed that these Garifuna men were
“great favorites? of the Miskito leader (1827: 159-60).'° This account is
consistent with the record left by ‘Thomas Young—a representative of
the British Central American Land Company—attesting to Garifunas,
Miskitos and Creoles all being present at evening entertainments of
drumming and dancing (1847: 32). Oral histories of 1960s Garifunas,
meanwhile, report earlier generations having intermarried in significant
numbers with non-Garifuna blacks (Gonzalez 1969: 26).

Ganfuna religion in Central America

What was the shape of nineteenth-century Garifuna religion within

this new transnational network of Central American villages? Again
the sources are few and far between. ‘The Garifunas arrived at ‘Trujillo
as nominal Catholics, the recipients of French missionary efforts during

'© Beginning in 1816, Mosquito King George Fredrick II was crowned in Belize,
reestablishing the Mosquito Coast’s status as a ‘protectorate’ of Great Britain. Great
Britain maintained a semi-official propriety over that region until 1894 when it was
clearly declared as Honduran (until Cape Gracias 4 Dios) and Nicaraguan (south of
the cape).
 THE ‘BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 63

the colonial period on St Vincent. ‘The North American traveler and

diplomat John Lloyd Stephens reported in 1841 that every Garifuna
home in Belize included figures of the Virgin or other saints, and that
he himself was in demand to act as a godparent for children newly
baptized as Catholics (Stephens 1949: 20). Still, if his account shows
that the Garifunas were Catholic at least in name, it also indicates that
this was a selectively adopted version performed largely without priests,
a matter noted not only by Stephens but also by the first US consul in
Honduras, E.G. Squier, in 1855 (Bard 1965 [1855]: 317). When a rare
priest arrived in the village; noted Squier, women lined up en masse
to have their children baptzed. ‘Thomas Young (1847: 128) described
Garifuna villagers sending their children into the town of Trujillo for
baptism, presumably because priests rarely, if ever, circulated through
the remote Garifuna outposts. Yet if the Garifunas revered the ritual of
baptism, formal marriage was generally ignored (a pattern continuing
to the present), as men were frequently at work away from the village.
Moreover, the special efforts of the Church at specific sites and times,
such as that noted above in Trujillo beginning in 1813, or by the mis-
sionary Padre Manuel de Jesús Subirana (Apóstol de los Caribes””” in
the second half of the century (Davidson 1984b; Coelho 1995: 47),
are noteworthy precisely because they cast into relief the absence of
priests in most times and most places. Of this apparently unorthodox
form of Catholicism one observer suggested of the Garifunas in Belize,
‘He is a Christian where the Red Carib was an idolator, but he is, as
his congener was, polygamous, superstitious, and migratory’ (Gibbs
1883: 166).
To be sure, most travelers were ul-equipped to recognize, much less
understand, Garifuna religious culture beyond its familiar Catholic
features. For example, the early twentieth-century North American
adventurer Peter Keenagh echoed the eighteenth-century missionaries
by finding ‘no religion’ in Mosquitia at all, but rather only ‘a wild mixed
ideology including Black Magic, Voodoo and all the extravagances of
primitive superstition (1938: 123; cf. Bard 1965 [1855]: 245). Keenagh
cast in particularly pejorative terms a religious mélange perceived
by foreign witnesses as unsettling, but his caricature was not by any
means atypical. ‘The religious acts reported included ones about former

17 Subirana was born in Spain in 1807, and came to Cuba in 1850 and then to
the Republic of Honduras in 1856. His work among the Garifunas on the north coast
took place from 1858-1862 (Davidson 1984b: 449-451).
64 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

slaves in Belize who ‘followed the African rites they had brought with
them... keeping it up day and night’, especially in the weeks around
Christmas, which fell between mahogany-cutting sessions (Gibbs 1883:
76), as well as ‘duppy’ belief, Obeah and ‘soukeah’ men among the so-
called Sambos (Roberts 1827: 267; Gibbs 1883: 173; Conzemius 1928:
201; Keenagh 1938: 164-70). Even these caricatures are useful, however.
For example, rituals against evil spirits called mafia were noted among
the Paya Indians, as well as among the ‘Sambos’ in Keenagh’s report
(1938: 141-2, 164), even though mafia was initially a Carb category of
malicious spirits invoked on St Vincent since at least the 1600s. That
the same terms for spirits were in use among different ethnic groups
hints at a religious métissage that was continually under way.
That Garifuna religion of the nineteenth century was neither Catholic
nor African nor Amerindian in any simple sense is best revealed in
Thomas Young’s travelogue. Young described two main occasions for
large ritual feasts in the villages, one at Christmastime, the other dur-
ing so-called ‘Devil feasts’ (1847: 131). The description of the ‘Devil
feast’ is unmistakably the first detailed written account of what is today
called the diigii, a massive ritual event that recalls, reveres, placates and
consults with beneficent ancestral spirits (gubida), and combats the feared
mafia spirits. As described by Young, the feast lasted from three to seven
days and entailed the arrival of numerous friends and relatives notified
long in advance, who came to Mosquitia from as far away as Stann
Creek in British Honduras. All the guests brought contributions of
liquor and foods, and the plates of prepared edibles were presented on
tables decorated with ‘fancy tablecloths’ and glass decanters. Foods that
evoked memories of St Vincent customs, like cassava bread, were held
in special esteem. Large quantities of liquor in the form of aguardiente
were consumed, and women danced in a simple ‘to and fro’ movement
of the hands and feet, while singing in a ‘peculiar intonation of voice’
(133). Young described the event in terms that are condescending and
biased by his own Victorian Christianity, but which nonetheless are eas-
ily recognizable as roughly equivalent to today’s diigii. ‘That these were
uniquely Garifuna ritual events, rather than merely borrowings from
the Miskito or other nearby ethnic groups, was observed by Young as
well; he declared that Miskito (ncluding ‘Sambos’) rarely danced at all,
though Miskito onlookers watched the spectacle of Garifuna drumming
and dancing with quiet curiosity (135).
While Young’s account is far from comprehensive, we can infer fuller
details of the ritual feasts in Eduard Conzemius’s (1928) ethnography of
 THE ‘BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 65

a dúgú observed in 1920. Conzemius wrote that the feast was referred
to by Ladinos as a baile mafya (mafya dance). Conzemius described
the buyé, or shaman, the specialist who led the event and manifested
spirits of the ancestors (gubida) on behalf of an ill patient afflicted
by a malevolent spirit (mafya), and the use of red annatto dye on the
faces of participants. This is at least a roughly similar ritual structure
described for the Island Canb on St Vincent. ‘Though specific reports
of nineteenth-century Garifuna religion are scarce, cursory and biased
by colonial and missionary objectives, by comparing Thomas Young’s
account with earlier ones from St Vincent, and forward in time against
the ritual witnessed by Conzemius, we can trace at least the outlines
of continuities in ritual practice. Conzemius observed the preparation
of food offerings for beneficial gubida spirits who then expel sickness-
inducing ‘mafya’ spirits by the third day of the dúgu ritual, in a pattern
that at least in its basic structure continues today, and appears to show
continuity with seventeenth-century reports of the low matoutou tables
filled with food offerings for the spirits, as alluded to above.
Were the Catholic baptisms and saints in Garifuna homes a mere
outward cover for the ‘authentic’ practices that remained secret?
Conzemius thought so (1928: 200). But in view of the longer itinerary
of Garifuna religion, there is no compelling need to ascribe authentic-
ity to the dugu rites and the gubida ancestor spirits, and chicanery to
Catholic ones. The reverence for the saints and rituals like baptism were
obviously valued by the Garifuna, and selectively used on St Vincent
even when their position required no such posturing. Some features of
Catholic practice may even have been brought to St Vincent by African
Catholics themselves.
Meanwhile, as on St Vincent, Protestant missionaries aiso worked
near and among the Garifuna in the nineteenth century, especially in
Bnitish territory but enjoyed little success (Kerns 1997: 34). Still, the
Mississippian exile of the US Civil War, Charles Swett, attended evening
service at a Methodist church in the city of Belize in 1868, and there
encountered 200 ‘colored’ persons, some of whom may have been
Garifuna, compared with a scant three whites (Swett 1868: 79),'® and
Conzemuius noted many Protestant conversions of Garifunas in British

'8 Swett reported finding six churches in the town of Belize, including two Epis-
copalian, one Methodist, one Baptist, one Presbyterian and one Catholic (1968: 78).
Additionally, Gibbs (1883: 151) noted that a Wesleyan community of North Americans
was settled just a mile north of the Black Canb village at Punta Gorda.
66 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

Honduras by the 1920s (1928: 200). It 1s possible that the presence of

many black Protestants in the British territory swayed Garifuna settlers
there whom the English missionaries could not. If so, this slight shift
foreshadowed the last decades of the twentieth century, when fast-grow-
ing Protestant evangélico movements became a key presence in nearly
all Garifuna villages.
In sum, we can characterize nineteenth-century Garifuna religion as
composed of elements of folk Catholicism—the appeal to diverse saints
in the form of miniature icons and the attention to godparenthood and
baptism, but rarely to rituals of marriage or the Eucharist—embedded
within and intertwined with indigenous practices focused on singing,
dancing and feasting with ancestors who proffered powers of protec-
tion, cure, success and fecundity. ‘To these were assimilated possible new
influences from the Haitians in Trujillo (Gonzemius 1928: 192; Bianchi
1988: 114), and from Anglophone blacks of the British Caribbean, like
the practice of Obeah.** Garifuna religious culture was a transculturation
not only of Island Carib, African and French Catholic practices carried
from St Vincent, but an ongoing process of their implementation in
new spaces. Yet within this creative adaptive process there also emerged
a distant territorial anchor for Garifuna religious culture. St Vincent
acquired the prestige of origins, and was transformed from a lived to
an imagined place, a diasporic horizon against which the religious iden-
tity performed on the Central American coast was gauged. St Vincent
became the sacred place of authentic ongins, the place from which the
ancestral spirits return, and the place of a remembered golden age of
majestic self-rule and autonomy. It was there, the Garifuna say, that
they had been most truly a nation defined in their own terms.

Religion and becoming black in the Umted States

While the second diaspora of the Garifuna is not the focus of this
essay, a few comments are in order to at least gesture toward the
notion of ‘joining the African diaspora’ (see Johnson 2007, for a full
elaboration). The migration to the United States began in incipient

'2 Many Jamaicans arrived in Belizean, Guatemalan and Honduran port towns like
La Ceiba to work for the banana companies, beginning in the late 1800s, occupying
the so-called Barrio Inglés in that town (Solien Gonzalez 1969: 34; Posas 1993: 16).
Similar migration occurred in other Honduran port towns like "Tela, Puerto Cortés,
La Lima and Puerto Castillo.
 THE ‘BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 67

form as a consequence of the transnational fruit industry between the

Central American coast and cities like New Orleans. It gained force
as Garifuna sailors occupied merchant marine posts left vacant during
World War II, and then settled permanently on US soil. And it peaked
during the last generation after the 1965 reform of US immigration
law, which allowed familial migration paths by then already in place
to be traversed with progressively greater frequency. Among the many
surprises Garifuna migrants of the last generation report is the exposure
to new racial codes.
Homeland Garifuna do not have a rigid racialist view of themselves
or other groups. This may be in part because of their history of mis-
cegenation both on St Vincent and after arrival in Honduras. ‘Thomas
Young, in 1842, described ‘some being coal black, others again nearly as
yellow as saffron’ (in Gonzalez 1969: 25). Nancie Gonzalez’s fieldwork
from the 1950s recorded Garifuna oral traditions of having become
darker in color through intermarriage with other Canbbean blacks since
arriving on the Central American coast in 1797, especially with those
from Santo Domingo (1969: 26). Douglas Taylor (1951), among the
first modern ethnographers of the Garifuna, stressed their Amerindian
cultural features, and Gonzalez, the foremost contemporary ethnogra-
pher of the Garifuna, argued that they downplayed references to their
Africanness through the 1950s, only publicly adopting this identification
as Africanness became tolerated, and even fashionably ‘modern’ in
certain venues (Gonzalez 1988: 5). Virginia Kerns’s fieldwork from
the 1970s documents that Garifuna of Belize referred to themselves
as ‘Carib’ as often as ‘Garifuna’, depending on with whom they were
speaking (1997: 12).
There are reasons for the variability of Garifuna racial identifications.
Perhaps the foremost Honduran Ganifuna activist from 1970 until the
present, Crisanto Meléndez, reports that, through his Honduran educa-
tion in the 1950s and 1960s, Africa was never mentioned, and that he
came to this knowledge late in life, through attendance at international
conferences (1997, 2002). In my own fieldwork, Garifuna over forty
years of age report much the same (cf. England 1999; Gordon and
Anderson 1999). To cite merely one example of a story that has by
now become familiar, the shaman and political leader Felix Miranda
recounted his ‘conversion’ after emigrating to New York,
Coming here has really opened my eyes, a million-fold. Particularly about
who we really are. Because I had to find out who I was. One of the things
68 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

I dreaded was, what if somebody asks me who 1 am, I would say I am

a Garifuna, and they went, ‘What is that?’ Today I don’t have to panic,
because I know our African roots. But growing up in school, I thought
this whole thing was Indian!
Stil, Honduran Ganifuna were and are aware of being darker in color
than Honduran mestizos. In ritual performance this appears in the
special attention devoted to, for example, St Esquipula, “Cristo Negro”.
Moreover, some have cast their institutional lot with the category
“negro”, founding organizations like La Organización Fraternal Negro
Hondureño (OFRANEH) in the 1970s. But as Sarah England (1999)
incisively analyzed, black identity in the homeland is balanced against
other identifications called upon depending on the political context.
An indigenous Amerindian identification was used, for example, in the
1992 protests against the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the
Americas, and the attempts thereafter to pressure the Honduran state
into signing the International Labor Organization Convention concern-
ing Indigenous and Inbal Peoples in Independent Countries #169
(1996) (England 1999: 18-20). That identification has become even
more important in the battle over the proposed reform of Constitutional
Article 107, which would open Honduran beaches to foreign develop-
ers and potentially displace Ganfuna communities that have been on
those sites for, in some cases, over two hundred years.
In the move to the US, the pattern of a general fluidity of race
identifications punctuated by specific definitions for occasions of specific
political interventions is changed. It is both constrained and magnified.
It is constrained as the Garifuna are read into racial categories already
bounded by their proximal hosts—the large groups they are perceived
as being similar to: blacks (a racial attribution), Hispanics (a linguistic
or ethnic attribution), or Afro-Hispanics (a hybrid estimation). And it
is magnified through the process of ‘definitional duress’ (Tweed 1997:
95). For example, Maria Elena, a middle-aged Garifuna woman in
New York, reported first learning about the inflexibility of US race
categories when she was 12:
You know how I learned about race in this country? I used to sit in the
cafeteria with other foreigners who spoke Spanish or Portuguese. One
day, all of a sudden, our table started getting hit with milk cartons! The
American black kids were throwing food at us, thinking we weren’t speak-
ing English just to distance ourselves from being black. The school had
to have an intervention to talk about it.
 THE ‘BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 69

Her story recapitulates a common Caribbean narrative of the shock at

‘becoming black’ upon entrance to the US (cf. Foner 2001: 13; Waters
1999: 53-63).
Privately, New York Garifuna universally express tensions they
perceive with black Americans. The co-founder of Jamalali Uagucha,
Inc., a community development project run from a storefront office,
expressed it thus: “They want to run the whole show! They want to
pull our census numbers into their category, to get their stuff! But
we’re not just black, we're Garifuna.’ Yet in public speeches, the same
group proudly proclaims their 3,000 years of history from Yoruba
and Ashanti ancestry, and the ‘negro fact’ of Garifuna ethnicity. In
the US context, authentic roots are most often publicly presented not
via the indigenous identification, nor through Hispanic or Latino con-
nections, but rather by a strong discourse of African origins. This is
also the affinity most expressed by New York buyeis, both in practice
and in their own autobiographies.
The American metalanguage of race refracts Garifuna identity in a
new way. Among Garifuna immigrants interviewed by England, forty-
one percent report marking ‘Afro-American/Black’ on official census
forms, thirty-eight percent report marking themselves as ‘Hispanic’,
sixteen percent report marking “Other” and writing in “Garifuna”, and
five percent report marking ‘Other: Afro-Hispanic’ (England 1999: 26).
The three identifications present a racial mapping of the three diasporic
horizons described earlier, in Africa, St Vincent and Honduras. The
language of location on the African diasporic horizon is related to ‘black’
identifications; affiliation with the St Vincent diasporic horizon is related
to specifically “Garfuna’ identifications; and loyalties toward Honduras
or Central America are related to ‘Hispanic’ identifications.
Though for Garifuna in the US the repertoire of available identi-
fications 1s constrained by US racial codes, there nevertheless remain
multiple possible affiliations. ‘These are selected depending on context,
and indicate a process of code-switching. Just as Garifuna use religious
code-switching, from ‘Catholic’ to ‘traditionalist [and Catholic]’ to
“Cristiano” [evangelical Protestant] (McAlister 1998: 138; Johnson 2007),
they employ similar techniques with regard to ethnicity. For certain
issues like land claims in Honduras brought to venues like the UN, or
the attempt to claim reparations from Great Britain for the 1797 forced
removal from St Vincent, indigenous identity is expeditious. During the
New York mayoral elections of 2001 and 2005, networking on behalf
of Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer brought the Garifuna into
70 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

public action, and here their ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Afro-Hispanic’ identifications

came to the fore. In the quest to locate venues, alliances and support
for religious and other cultural events in the city, African diasporic
identity takes front and center.
What is unique in the Garifuna case 1s that the ethnic reaction to
being classified as ‘black’, at least in terms of religion, asserts ‘the
tradition’ through analogues with Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican
Santeria, Palo Monte, Santerismo and the Yoruba pantheon. In other
words, the religious reaction to the racial reduction is an African
diasporic one as much as a specifically Garifuna one. This leads to
a partial fusion between black and African diasporic identifications.
While Sarah England’s survey revealed a split in Garifuna census
identifications between ‘Black’, ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Other’ denomina-
tions, all of the buyeis I interviewed expressed strong sentiments of
identifying as black and Garifuna, rather than, say Hispanic-Garifuna
or Honduran-Garifuna. ‘This suggests that, unlike the pattern of the
exaggeration of ethnic markers used as resistance to racialization in the
US (ike being francophone Catholics rather than merely ‘black’, for
Haitian émigrés), Garifuna religious culture in the US leads to stronger
racial identifications. This occurs because Africanness and blackness
are fused in religious performances that link Garifuna tradition to the
prestige and power of West African origins, and because participating
in activities perceived as African culture in the racialist chiaroscuro of
US color-codes reinforces ‘black’ self-classifications (cf. ‘Telles 2004).
Many US-based and international Garifuna leaders see this renais-
sance as a recovery of Africanness, one that needs to be transmitted and
solidified in homeland villages, and they approach the desired conversion
to Africa-centrism with missionary zeal. In October 2004, for example,
an important Garifuna leader was returning from an international
conference in Senegal to his home in Belize, and stopped to meet with
several New York shamans for a strategy session, at which I was present.
The two expressed objectives of the organization are to act as a conduit
for Black Studies in Central America, and to seek reparations from Great
Britain related to the 1797 deportation. The strategies under discussion
were directed toward how to best re-Africanize the Central American
communities by constructing new symbols that would lead homeland
Garifuna into the pan-African network. ‘The Belizean leader described
progress on his plans for the construction of a “Garifuna culture park’ in
his home country that would include not only a museum, study center
and offices, but also a series of monuments—beginning with a forty-foot
 THE ‘BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 71

tall statue of the African continent, with the engraved caption, “We are
African’—to help implement the new pedagogy. Schoolchildren from
Garifuna territory throughout Central America would be bussed in to
tour the monuments with trained guides, to transmit to the children an
entirely new history. The purposes of the new Africa-centric teaching
were described as “the analysis of blackness and what it 1s’, and to push
toward a black curriculum in Garifuna education. As he reported, there
is substantial resistance from the homeland villages. In one example
he cited, a villager asked straight out, “What nght do you have to try
to change our memory from Carib to African?’
Despite such resistance, the group was agreed that the re-educa-
tion—the re-positioning of their traditional religion within the African
diaspora—was crucial to developing a greater internal pride and con-
sciousness, and to securing prestige and benefits as an authentic and
traditional culture in the international political scene. ‘The appeal to
territorial Africanness through its monumental force over the Belizean
landscape here appeared as an entryway to the discussion of the con-
dition of blackness. This offers the prospect of a counterpoint to a
Central America that 1s hegemonically mestizo in national mythologies,
in which blackness disappears, along with the Garifuna.
Whether one finds this missionary zeal to reform homeland Garifuna
self-perceptions as African and black an important recovery of origins,
or a pernicious globalization of US racial definitions, what is key to
note is that the recovery of the repressed, the return of Africa, does
not happen of its own accord. If this expansive African diasporan
culture is ‘in the air’, it is also a strategic intervention orchestrated by
key leaders, by which African diaspora culture serves as a platform for
the discussion of blackness, and race constructions more generally.
The return of Garifuna black cosmopolitans from New York to
Honduras, Belize and Guatemala carrying back a new racialized
self-consciousness is consistent with comparative evidence of other
Caribbeans’ emigrations to the US. Racializations are internalized and
then remitted to the Caribbean homeland. They are remitted by being
carried by return migrants, as well as via global media of film and tele-
vision that are overwhelmingly skewed to US-based representations of
racial types and tensions. The Garifuna, like other Canbbean groups,
are becoming not only a translocal society moving between Central
America and US cities, but also a globalized society deluged in signs
under which Africanness and blackness are merged. This globalizing
racializing process appears to be narrowing the discrepancy between
72 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

homeland and hostland articulations of race (McAlister 1998: 135;

Waters 1999: 88; Levitt 2001: 60). But what is different about the case
of Garifuna ancestor religion is that whereas religion or other forms
of culture are typically a means of ethnic resistance to racialization,
a means of fortifying sentiments of Haitianness, Cubanness, Puerto-
Ricanness, etc., in the face of the juggernaut of the US racial reduc-
tion, here religion serves as at once a source of specific ethnic pride
and as a gateway to a global black identity. As we saw, some leaders
then even construct strategies for converting homeland communities
to black consciousness.

Conclusion

In the foregoing, I have explored the notion that the Garifuna ‘left’
the African diaspora in the course of the ethnogenetic process that
unfolded on St Vincent and then on the Honduran coast. What does
that mean? African horizons receded in conscious memory, even as a
reference point in ritual performance. This progressed in roughly two
steps: first by becoming Caribs, albeit always marked by the color code
of ‘black’, and then by becoming properly Garifuna, a unique Afro-
Euro-Indian fusion whose sacred horizon was the shore of St Vincent. It
was, and still is among Central American Garifuna, from that homeland
that ancestral spirits return to aid and afflict the living.
Today, through the migrations to US cities and the return of those
migrants to Central American home villages, many Garifuna are again
joining the African diaspora. New memories, new diasporic horizons,
have been disclosed and made thinkable for the Garifuna in the space
of New York. The nature and style of this reclaimed Africanness 1s
strongly shaped by the Yoruba-centric tendencies of African diasporic
religious networks in the city, pushing the ‘recovery of the repressed’
toward specific niches. But that is a different chapter of a larger and
still-unfolding story.
To conclude I would like to briefly revisit the analytical issues raised
by the category of ‘African diaspora religions’. Earlier I referred to
the notion of ‘latent’ Africanness hinted at in the work of Genovese,
Gilroy and others. I then proposed, and attempted to give histoncal
justification for, an allegedly clearer analytical model, namely that of
‘leaving and joining’ diasporic positions. The hope was that this might
offer traction for answering the call for the production of not merely
 THE ‘BLACK CARIBS’ ACROSS MULTIPLE DIASPORIC HORIZONS 73

theories, but ethnographies and histories of diasporization (Gordon and

Anderson 1999). In reconsidering this proposal in light of the historical
trajectory presented, however, the two models hardly seem mutually
exclusive. How might we retain the thrust of arguments like Genovese’s
while at the same time attempting to give the notion of diaspora the
more precise parameters it direly needs? Perhaps in this way. We can
break the umbrella rubric of ‘diaspora’ into the study of at least three
(and probably more) different social phenomena gathered under its
shelter: 1) Diaspora in the form of relatively shared cultural dispositions
across multiple sites, to the eye of an outside observer, but which may
or may not exist as an internalized consciousness by religious actors.
2) Diaspora as an internalized conversion of consciousness, the subjective
self-understanding as being of a diaspora, whether or not a multi-sited
cultural resemblance empirically exists. 3) Diaspora as ‘diaspora’ and
hence ideology, a discursive artifact articulated in speech and in the
public sphere in order to achieve desired effects (Johnson 2007).
We might then begin to examine how the three forms are variously
intercalibrated with each other. In thinking of the present case, for
example, the Garifuna may always have remained ‘in’ the African
diaspora in sense one, even as, in sense two, they ‘left’ the African
diaspora. And the third sense is only now being engaged, beginning in
the 1960s.% "The model is more complicated than it appears because,
as New York Garifuna presently join the diaspora in the second and
third senses, the first sense is shifted—the underlying set of relatively
shared cultural dispositions performed in ritual begins to be tilted and
reified in a particular version of it, the Yoruba-centric model. Entering
or leaving diasporic ways of seeing in one sense, then, 1s always con-

20 Most specifically, the phrase ‘African diaspora’ itself was first employed by George
Shepperson in a paper presented at the International Congress of African History held
at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1965. ‘To cite Edward Alpers (2001:
4): Indeed, when George Shepperson first joined ‘African’ to ‘diaspora’ in 1965, he
explicitly did so because of the close parallels he saw between the Jewish diaspora and
the dispersal of Africans as a consequence of the slave trade. Shepperson argued that
African American and Caribbean intellectuals themselves had for a long time recog-
nized and articulated connections between their own people in exile and that of the
Jews. By his application of ‘diaspora’ to the experience of “The African Abroad’, as
the session at which he presented his paper was entitled and his paper makes plain, he
declared as an histonan and an outsider that he, too, saw such parallels. Shepperson’s
achievement here was to recognize the great similarities in the comparative histories
of these two great dispersions, especially the role of ‘slavery and imperialism’ in the
forced migration of both Jews and Africans, and to name the one by the term used
for the other.
74 PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

tingent on configuration of the other two. Of course, the actual work

of interpretation becomes far more complex with the consideration of
the multiple diasporic horizons in the historical repertoire of groups like
the Garifuna. Yet this admittedly schematic model might help us at least
begin to think comparatively about how diasponic honzons on the one
hand enclose and delimit the range of religious practice, and on the
other open out toward previously unimagined alliances and futures.

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 FROM IGBO ISRAELI TO AFRICAN CHRISTIAN:
THE EMERGENCE OF RACIAL IDENTITY IN OLAUDAH
EQUIANO’S INTERESTING NARRATIVE

James Sidbury

During the second half of the eighteenth century, black people living in
England and anglophone America began publicly to contest the nega-
tive connotations that white Britons attributed to the term ‘African.’ At
first glance the late eighteenth century may seem surprisingly late for
this to have happened. By then Englishmen had been heavily engaged
in the Atlantic slave trade for a century and they had been extracting
plantation labor from black people for even longer. Several obvious
factors help explain the delay: victims of the slave trade had to learn
English and find ways to get their work into print before they could
contest the racist assumptions that circulated in Bnitish print culture
during the age of the slave trade.
A less obvious but more fundamental barrier blocked blacks from
offering alternative definitions of ‘African’: until black people began to
conceive of themselves as ‘African,’ they had little incentive to develop
their own understandings of the word or the identity that it named.
The shared oppression that victims of slavery experienced at white
hands created conditions npe for the emergence of racial identity, but
people born in Africa during the era of the slave trade experienced
countervailing forces that militated against racial identity. They had,
after all, grown up with village-based, linguistic or political identi-
ties, and their traditional enemies had come from nearby. Most had
been enslaved by those traditional enemies—‘Africans’ in European
eyes—and thus had ample cause to hesitate before embracing a racial
identity rooted in European notions of difference. Nonetheless, a sense
of racial identity did emerge among the victims of Atlantic slavery. It
grew in part out of struggles on the ground in Amenican plantation
societies.’ It emerged on a different level—that of print culture—when

' For a case study see my Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in
Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730-1810 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
esp. chs. 1-2.
80 JAMES SIDBURY

the first generation of black authors writing in English laid claim to

their ‘African-ness’ and reinvented its meaning during the final quarter
of the eighteenth century.’
The most important of these authors was Olaudah Equiano. In
1789 he published the first version of his autobiography, a book that
would go through nine printings during his lifetime and one that has
gained recognition since his death as a foundational text in African
American letters. Equiano reported that he had been born in an Igbo
village in present-day Nigeria, kidnapped as a child and sold into
slavery to Europeans, and he wrote his life story after acquiring his
freedom and settling in London.’ In his title—T he Interesting Narratwe
of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by
Himself—he announced a major theme of his book.* He told the
story of Olaudah Equiano, the Igbo boy, and of Gustavus Vassa, the
African. ‘The Interesting Narratwe explained his journey from his ethnic
past, a past he explicitly equated with the Old Testament, to his African
Christian present. He offered that story as a prophetic call to others in
the African diaspora to recognize the ‘true’ path to the Christian and
racial identity that could promise them secular and sacred redemp-
tion. To reveal that promise he cast his explanation of the social and
cultural diversity of Africa into sacred time. The Interesting Narratwe
tells the story of Equiano’s metaphorical passage from an Igbo Israeli

* See my Becoming African in Ámerica: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007) for an extended analysis of the discourse cre-
ated by this process.
3 Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self.Made Man (Athens, Ga.:
University of Georgia Press, 2005), 2, 147; idem, *Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus
Vassa? New Light on an Ejighteenth-Century Question of Identity,’ Slavery and
Abohtion 20 (1999), 96-105 gives evidence that Equiano may actually have been born
in South Carolina. Cf. Paul Lovejoy, ‘Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa,
Alias Olaudah Equiano, the African.’ http://72.14.221.104/search?q=cache:3vwGU
1yOCnEj:www.yorku.ca/nhp/seminars/2005—06/ Vassa_and_Abolition_Slavery_and_
Abolition.pdf+joanna_vasa&hl=en&gl=uk&ct=clnk&cd=2. The subject of this essay
is the Equano/Vassa of the Interesting Narratwe rather than the historical figure, so I
will write as if Equiano was born in Africa. Carretta does the same thing for many
of the same reasons in Eguiano, the Afncan, ch. 1.
* Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus
Vassa, The African. Wntten by Himself, in The Interesting Narratwe and Other Wntings, ed.
by Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Books, 1995) is the fullest critical edition,
and quotations frorn the Narratwe (with page numbers in parentheses) are to this edi-
tion. Carretta has cross-referenced the reports in the narrative with a broad array of
other sources. Also see the helpful introduction to The Interesting Narratwe of the Life
of Olaudah Equiano, Wniten by Himself, ed. by Robert Allison (Boston and New York:
Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
 FROM IGBO ISRAELI TO AFRICAN CHRISTIAN 81

of the Old Testament to an African Christian of the New, a passage

from freedom to slayery to a renewed and greater freedom rooted in
religious awakening.
This essay traces Equiano’s journey from ethnic to racial identity.
Through that journey Equiano made one of the first attempts to under-
stand the relationship between the ethnic diversity of life in sub-Saharan
Africa and the unified ‘African’ identity he called into existence. While
that African identity can, for convenience and clarity, be called ‘racial,’
Equiano did not suggest that all black people were ‘Africans.’ He had,
after all, been as ‘black’ when an Igbo as he was as an African. Only by
converting to Christianity could black people, whether living in Africa
or the Americas, redeem the promise of their Old Testament ethnic
pasts by accepting their New Testament futures. In the Protestant the-
ology that Equiano came to believe, Christ’s new promise redeemed,
broadened, and fulfilled the covenant with Israel that God had offered
in Genesis; similarly, Equiano’s new identity as a Christian African
redeemed, broadened, and fulfilled the promise of his Igbo origins. By
then end of the Narratwe Equiano had fashioned an identity through
which he could strive to transform the lives of residents of villages like
that of his birth by bringing the ‘truth’ of Chnstianity to them. This new
identity would help ‘Africans’ resist the cruelty and barbarism inflicted
by false Christians engaged, whether actively or passively, in the slave
trade. As a latter-day prophet of ‘African Christianity,’ he called his
people back into existence by revealing God’s plan for them.

A quick sketch of Equiano’s life is in order. Sometime in or before

1755 a ten- or eleven-year-old boy named Olaudah Equiano was
kidnapped and taken from his village in what today is southeastern
Nigeria. During the next few months several masters and slave traders
exchanged Equiano as they transported him to the West African coast.
As soon as Equiano reached the coast, the traders took him on board an
American-bound slaver and sold him into the Atlantic slave trade.°

> See the sources cited in note 3 for complexities surrounding Equiano’s birthplace
and age.
82 JAMES SIDBURY

Equiano experienced many horrors: the Middle Passage, a slave

auction in Barbados and then another in Virginia, the humiliation of
being purchased as property by a Virginia tobacco planter.® The young
boy spent little time in Virginia, however, before a British ship captain
named Michael Henry Pascal bought him. Equiano served Pascal in the
merchant marine and then, following the outbreak of the Seven Years’
War in 1756, in the Royal Navy. He fought in naval engagements on
the open seas, off the French coast, and in present-day Canada. He
also spent time in England, converted to Anglicanism, and learned to
read. Following the war he expected Pascal to grant him freedom, but
instead the captain sold Equiano to be transported to the West Indies.
There, a Quaker merchant named Robert King purchased the young
man. Equiano served King as a sailor, clerk and laborer, and in the
process he traveled throughout the Caribbean and to Britain’s North
American colonies. Like many sailors, he began to sell goods that he
carried from place to place, and despite being cheated repeatedly by
unscrupulous whites, he eventually saved enough money to buy his
freedom.’
Upon winning his freedom, Equiano soon returned to England.
From a base in London he moved among a number of jobs, working
as a servant, a hair dresser, and periodically returning to the sea. He
spent time in Spain and Portugal, in Turkey, and participated in an
Arctic expedition in search of a northern passage to India. Like many
working people in England, he joined the Huntingdonian Methodists
and experienced what he believed to be his true re-birth as a Christian.
Shortly thereafter he agreed to serve as an overseer on a plantation in
present-day Nicaragua. He then returned to England and participated in
the early stages of the movement to found a colony in Sierra Leone for
free people of African descent. In the process he became an important
figure in London’s free black community and in British abolitionism.
Most that is known about Equiano comes from his autobiography.
He told a story that might once have been described as a tale of

° For the definitive source on Equiano’s life, see Carretta, Equiano, the African. Also
see James Walvin, An Afncan’s Life: the Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745-1797
(London: Cassell, 1998).
’ James Sidbury, ‘Early Slave Narratives and the Culture of the Market,’ in Eligah
H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf, eds. Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the
Atlantic World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 260-74 explores
the engagement of Equiano and others with the market and their attempts to use
it to win their freedom.
 FROM IGBO ISRAELI TO AFRICAN CHRISTIAN 83

assimilation: born into an Igbo village on the edge of the Benin

Empire, he was kidnapped, sold into slavery, and left with little choice
but to learn the culture of his British purchasers. Remarkably smart
and industrious, he made himself indispensable to a series of white
masters. After winning the nght to purchase his freedom, he continued
to exercise his skill at winning patrons by serving a succession of white
employers just as ably as he had served his masters. Along the way, he
learned to read and write, to dress hair, to navigate ships, to oversee
enslaved laborers, and he converted to Chnistianity. A quick misreading
of his autobiography, with its frequent and graceful invocations of the
Bible, of the poetry of Milton, and of Pope’s translation of Homer
could easily lead one to view it as the tale of the Igbo boy transforming
himself into the English man of letters.°
But if there are important elements of truth in that reading—Equiano
showed his ability to play the English man of letters—he provides a
warning against such a reading by invoking both his Igbo and Christian
names in the very title of his book. Names are always important, but
they were especially important in many west African cultures, includ-
ing that of the Igbo. There, children’s names were believed to help
shape the course of their lives. Equiano alluded to this notion when,
in the course of the first chapter, he noted that he was named *Olaudah,
which in our language signifies vicissitude, or fortunate’ (41). Names
continue to play an important role in his story as I will show later. In
the passage from Olaudah Equiano to Gustavus Vassa, the African, a
passage that was neither final nor unequivocal, the former Igbo boy
offered no narrative of assimilation; he told instead of the emergence
of a diasporic and implicitly racial (‘African’) identity.

II

Equiano’s text moved within at least two idioms—that of an emerg-

ing rationalist antislavery argument, and that of a prophetic Christian
language of identity-formation.” Most contemporary readers no doubt

8 See Adam Potkay, ‘Olaudah Equiano and the Art of Spiritual Autobiography,’
Erghteenth-Century Studies 27 (1994), 689 and throughout for the skill with which
Equiano deploys literary citations.
° Following the model put forth in J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History:
Essays on Political Thought and History, Chefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), ch. 1 (esp. pp. 7-17), we can say that Equiano's
84 JAMES SIDBURY

focused on his immediate antislavery message. He portrayed Bnitish

trade on the coast of Africa corrupting an almost edenic existence,
he graphically described the brutality of the Middle Passage, and he
brought the degradation of slave auctions into the realm of middle-
class English readers’ vicarious experience. Equiano reinforced this
by recounting his many passages back and forth across the Atlantic.
In these ways, Equiano confronted British readers—who presumably
thought themselves quite removed from ‘West Indian barbarity’—with
their nation’s intimate involvement in the evils of New World slavery.'®
This antislavery reading of the narrative, while familiar, merits brief
review, because it forms an essential context within which the search
for alternative parallel meanings must proceed. Equiano authorized this
antislavery reading when he said that the ‘chief design’ of his book
was ‘to excite in’ Parliament ‘a sense of compassion for the miseries
which the Slave-Trade has entailed on my unfortunate countrymen’
(7).'' Middling and aristocratic English readers, then, comprised a
key segment of Equiano’s intended audience. He sought to convince
that audience of the essential humanity of African peoples and of the
inhumanity of chattel slavery.
Thus, the detailed portrayal of his Igbo homeland with which the
narrative begins, in addition to the role it plays in the story of his emer-
gence as an ‘African Christian,’ serves first and foremost to refute the

nattative, like ‘any text or simpler utterance in a sophisticated political discourse 1s

by its nature polyvalent’ (p. 9). In fact, if untangling the knot of discursive strings
that contribute to the /nteresting Narratwe were the primary goal of this essay, far more
than two languages would have to be discussed. For the founding analysis of mult-
vocality (or heteroglossia), see M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed.
By Michael Holquist, transl. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex.:
University of Texas Press, 1981), chap. 4.
'° Catherine Molineux, “The Peripheries Within: Race, Slavery, and Empire in Early
Modern England,’ (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2005) for the simultaneous
engagement with and distance from slavery in the metropole.
'' This assertion comes in a letter accompanying the text to Parliament. Equiano
explicitly claims that he seeks to bring ‘satisfaction to...friends’ and to promote
the interests of humanity (33-4). For antislavery during the Age of Revolution see
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1975); Thomas Bender, ed. The Antislavery Debate (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1994) for Davis debate with Thomas Haskell,
and Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Cajntal: Foundations of Bntish Aboltionsm (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) for a recent important revision of
Davis. Alexander X. Byrd, ‘Eboe, Country, Nation and Gustavus Vassa’s Interesting
Narratwe,’ Wiliam and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 63 (2006), 123-49 for the uses of
‘nation’ and ‘country’ in the Interesting Narratwe.
 FROM IGBO ISRAELI TO AFRICAN CHRISTIAN 85

justifications of the slave trade that rested on the supposed benighted

and primitive state of Africa. Equiano showed that, at least prior to
European intervention into African affairs, his home was no land of
savagery and brutality.'* It was, instead, a land of self-sufficent farmers
in need of ‘little commerce’ (32), with a simple government designed to
render justice to its people through the Old ‘Testament law of retalia-
tion. Its people were devoted to public and private morality, and when
he described customs that differed from contemporary European mores
Equiano made an admirable ethnographer by explaining these superfi-
cially exotic customs in language that domesticated them. He reported,
for example, that Igbo men ‘indulge[d] in a plurality’ of wives (33),
but he undercut this apparent outrage against Christian morality by
noting the elaborate ceremonies through which the community exerted
control over marriage. The polygynous world that he reported fell far
short of the unbridled sexual practices that filled European fantasies of
Turkish seraglios, ‘primitive’ polygamy, or African sensuality. He closed
his implicit defense of the Igbo family by noting parallels between the
‘authority over his household’ (44) that an Igbo father enjoyed, and that
of the Old Testament patriarchs in the ttme of Abraham.
Equiano’s literary creation of his Igbo past did not involve falsifica-
tion or the idealization of Essaka, as his report of ‘native’ polygyny
illustrates. On the one hand, Africans lacked knowledge of Christianity,
which the author Equiano considered ‘true’ religion: he noted in a
letter to Parliament that he ‘ought’ to regard the horrors of his life as
a slave ‘as infinitely more than compensated by the introduction’ he
‘obtained to the knowledge of the Christian religion’ (7). On a social
level, he also showed the ways that European intervention in Africa had
corrupted formerly peaceful social relations. He reported, for example,
that the lot of slaves in African societies was entirely different from the
‘condition...of the slaves in the West-Indies!” (40) His account of his
own experience as a slave in Africa, however, belies that claim, by juxta-
posing two short periods during which he was a slave in the ‘traditional’
setting of an African village against a series of brutal experiences as
he was transported from his home in the interior to a slave fort on the

'2 See my Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007), chap. 2 for ways in which this and other claims
in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative were common to eighteenth-century antislavery.
86 JAMES SIDBURY

coast.!” In this way Equiano confronted readers with the effects of the
Atlantic slave trade on the domestic institutions of African peoples. He
made this connection explicit by suggesting that more Africans were
enslaved through wars initiated by white slave traders’ demands and
by kidnapping than by traditional judicial methods (38—9).'*
Equiano then described the Middle Passage in language that helped
initiate a convention in antislavery rhetoric by reversing European
assumptions about savagery and civility. He portrayed the slave ship
as a ‘world of bad spirits’ peopled by tragically imprisoned blacks
and barbaric ‘white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair’
(55). ‘These white savages so brutalized their prisoners that even after
being assured by other Igbo victims that he was ‘only’ to be sold to
labor, Equiano continued to fear that the savages would ‘put [him] to
death’ (56). Equiano made clear.that many residents of Africa knew
a great deal about the English by reporting that shipmates accurately
answered questions about his captors. But by reporting his crossing in
the naive voice of the ignorant child who was kidnapped, rather than
in the knowing voice of the adult author, he conveyed the utter shock
and fear created by the Middle Passage. In the process, he presented
the slavers as barbarians and their victims as civilized.’ The dichotomy
between humane Africans and brutal Europeans continued throughout
Equiano’s account, as “every circumstance’ he encountered on the voy-
age ‘heighten|[ed]... [his] opinion of the cruelty of the whites’ (58).
Nor did things improve upon his arrival in Barbados—the island cel-
ebrated in contemporary English letters as the civilized ‘ittle England’
of the Caribbean.’ The ship carrying him anchored in the harbor,

'5 Nonetheless, he provides a qualified defense of African slave traders: ‘I must

acknowledge, in honor of those sable destroyers of human nights, that I never met
with any ill treatment, or saw any offered to their slaves, except tying them, when
necessary, to keep them from running away” (51).
'* In this and other instances he contributed in the changing conventions of causality
that Thomas Haskell finds central to the emergence of a powerful antislavery move-
ment; see Haskell, Objectivity 1s Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore
and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), chs. 8-9.
15 See Henry Louis Gates, Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American
Tnterary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 153-6 for a discussion
of Equiano’s use of the ‘double voiced’ narration. Also see the later portions of
Equaino’s Narratwe for his adult-voice descriptions of the barbarity of slave trading
(pp. 104-5, 164).
'© Gary A. Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics,
1627-1700 (New York: New York University Press, 1984); Michael Craton, ‘Reluctant
 FROM IGBO ISRAELI TO AFRICAN CHRISTIAN 87

and the merchants and planters who crowded on board to inspect the
human cargo frightened the exhausted slaves into believing that they
were to be eaten by the islanders. Upon disembarking the enslaved men
and women were herded together ‘like sheep in a fold” and held until,
in response to a drum beat, “buyers rush[ed]...into the yard’ to make
ofters on those they wanted to purchase. Equiano witnessed “several
brothers...sold in different lots’; years later he remained haunted by
‘their cries at parting.’ He reverted to his knowing adult voice to ask,
in closing his account of the Passage, why these ‘nominal Christians’
insisted on sacrificing ‘every tender feeling...to...avarice’ (60-61). ‘That
such stories of slave auctions became clichéd standards in antislavery
literature owes something to Equiano’s early account.
Much of the rest of Equiano’s narrative includes stories, like that
of the auction, that became staples of antislavery literature during the
nineteenth century. He portrayed degrading treatment of domestic
servants when he described an iron muzzle that an enslaved cook on
a Virginia plantation was forced to wear. He depicted the inherent
insecurity of a slave’s life when he wrote of Michael Henry Pascal,
his seemingly-kind master, revoking the promise of freedom and sell-
ing Equiano into Caribbean slavery at the whim of a new romantic
interest.'’ He described the harsh work, sexual exploitation, and brutal
punishment that was the lot of West Indian slaves. By reporting that
Englishmen living in the islands disgraced themselves by ‘gratify[ing]
their brutal passion with females not ten years old’ (104), and that
other whites amputated limbs and branded bodies to punish slaves,
Equiano helped found the literary tradition that sought to make the

Creoles: The Planters’ World in the British West Indies’ in Bernard Bailyn and Philip
D. Morgan, eds. Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First Bntish Empnre
(Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 314-62
(esp. p. 361); and Jack P. Greene, ‘Changing Identity in the British Caribbean:
Barbados as a Case Study,’ in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial
Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Princeton, N,J.: Princeton University Press,
1987), 213-66 (esp. pp. 251-6).
17 Carretta has uncovered good reason to believe that Pascal’s real reason for
selling Equiano had less to do with the jealousy of his romantic partner than with
his ability to continue to hide the fact that Equiano was enslaved and serving on a
Royal Navy vessel during the Seven Years War, and thus that Equiano had a legal
claim to freedom (p. 267, n. 271).
88 JAMES SIDBURY

physical and emotional costs of slavery titillatingly present for readers

far distant from the actual abuses.'®
Equiano’s tale not only tries to make English householders feel the
abuses of West Indian slavery, it also breaks down the distance that
residents of the British Isles believed separated their homes from abuses
taking place in the colonies. While Pascal’s slave, Equiano sailed to and
lived in England before serving loyally on a ship of the Royal Navy
during the Seven Years War. During his stays in England, he became
a favorite in several elite households (69, 71). But neither English soil,
nor English friends, nor English law protected him, as he was forcibly
reminded when his master sold him back to the West Indies. Later, after
finally winning permission to buy his freedom, he returned to England
a free man. But even then he remained tethered to New World slavery,
returning to present-day Nicaragua to serve as a plantation overseer.
Equiano’s tales of these travels highlight the ways that slavery in
England’s New World possessions spread into England itself, implicating
the metropole in the barbarism of the distant American islands.'*
By emphasizing the deleterious effects of slavery on African life,
the brutality of the slave trade and of slave life, and English disregard
of responsibility for that brutality, Equiano fired an early salvo in the
battle to end slavery. Simultaneously, he helped found what became the
literary genre of the slave narrative, and contributed to that genre’s
emerging conventions by structuring his stories into a religious narra-
tive of spiritual deliverance. Like later authors of slave narratives, he
sought to undercut slaveholders’ clat1ms—and, by implication, the claims
of non-slaveholders who failed to work for aboliton—to morality and
religion by unveiling the hypocrisy of ‘Christian’ slaveholding.”°

'8 Karen Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-

American Culture,’ American Historical Review, 100 (1995), 303-334 for the classic
reading of titillation in antislavery.
'2 Molineux, “The Peripheries Within’ for cultural traditions that Equiano had to
combat in this regard.
“2 The most famous and effective of these efforts is Frederick Douglass's first
autobiography which, among other things, 1s an extended indictment of Christian
slaveholders. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. The Classic Slave Narratwes (New York:
Penguin USA, 1987). For African American autobiographical narratives published
before Equiano’s that also use the conventions of spiritual narrative, see James Albert
Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, A Narratwe of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of james
Albert Ukawsaw Gronniowsaw, An African Prince, As Related by Himselfin Vincent Carretta,
ed. Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the
Fxghteenth Century (Lexington, Kent.: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 32-58
and John Marrant, A Narratwe of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings uith fohn Marrant, a black,
 FROM IGBO ISRAELI TO AFRICAN CHRISTIAN 89

III

Equiano’s remarkable life provided voluminous material with which to

build his Interesting Narratwe. He visited or lived in Barbados, Martinique,
Jamaica, present-day Nicaragua, Virginia, Savannah, Charleston,
Philadelphia, New York, London, Plymouth (England), Falmouth, La
Rochelle, Gadiz, Malaga, Oporto, and Smyrna. Finally, he opted for
a more sedate life in England, marrying and raising a family while
participating in London’s small but politically active free black com-
munity. As a leader of that community he wrote his autobiography,
which sometimes reads like a picaresque novel whose hero goes from
one hair-raising adventure to another.” The narrative is punctuated,
however, with key moments that the author sets apart from the incidents
with which he holds the reader’s attention. ‘These moments reveal the
dynamic through which Equiano became an ‘African Christian,’ because
they center on transformations that he experienced and their effects
on his sense of self. These personal transformations are offered in a
prophetic voice that calls ‘Africans’ to their destiny as a people.
Thus, Christianity was for Equiano, as it would be for later authors
of slave narratives, far more than a convenient rhetorical stance from
which to condemn slavery and assert freedom. His search for ‘true’ reli-
gion stands as a central organizing principle of the life that he narrated,
and it was in his second birth as a Christian that he believed himself
to have achieved true freedom. Indeed, while one of the narrative’s
purposes was to support the fledgling British antislavery movement, one
must look to literary qualities rooted in the author’s path to ‘Chnistian
freedom’ to understand the influence of Equiano’s book on African
American intellectual and cultural history and why it has continued to
command such a broad readership.” By writing his life as a biblical

(now going to preach the gospel in Nova Scotia) born in New-York, in North-Amenca. Taken down
Jrom his relation, arranged, corrected, and published by Rev. Mr. Aldndge, Ibid., 110-32.
“1 For the picaresque in Equiano, see Angelo Constanzo, Surprsing Narratwe: Olaudah
Equiano and the Beginning of Black Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1987), 46; for picaresque in slave narrrative more broadly, but without a discussion
of Equiano, see Charles H. Nichols, “The Slave Narrators and the Picaresque Mode:
Archetypes for Modern Black Personae’, in Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates,
Jr, eds. The Slave’s Narratwe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 283-98.
22 See Gates, The Signifying Monkey for the status of Equiano’s narrative as a
foundational text in African American literature. Gates’s inexpensive and conve-
niently-assigned edition of Classic Slave Narratwes has contributed to the narrative’s
canonization in recent years, not least among a broad student readership.
90 JAMES SIDBURY

narrative which illustrated, and by illustrating brought into existence,

a ‘true’ path to knowledge and fulfillment, Equiano wrote Africans
victimized by the slave trade into western history’s grand narrative.
In the language of a prophet living after the age of direct revelation,
Equiano explained God’s plan for his chosen people by interpreting
God's actions in Equiano’s own life. This prophetic discourse of racial
identity co-exists with, rather than subverting or being subverted by,
the language of antislavery.
Like most autobiographers, Equiano offered his life as a model to
others. His narrative rivals Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography for its
proud explanation of a poor boy—in Equiano’s case, an enslaved
boy—working hard, saving and investing pennies, and using the market
to further himself. Yet unlike Franklin, Equiano’s faith in the efficacy
of self-help was finite: racist whites frequently cheated him out of his
rightful earnings, and he made it clear that he could not have achieved
freedom had not his fourth master been willing to sell it to him. ‘Thus,
his skills in the marketplace were necessary but not sufficient to effect
his escape from bondage.” His story was part of a broader history
of black people in the Americas constantly struggling to overcome
oppression, a struggle complicated by unscrupulous whites’ impunity in
cheating, kidnapping, and exploiting black people. This struggle could
only succeed through God’s blessing.
Only by forging a sense of Christian unity and working together could
good and oppressed peoples—sometimes ‘Africans,’ sometimes ‘sable
races, and sometimes ‘Christians’ of any race—overcome the wicked

3 Constanzo, 51 (for Franklin tradition). For an almost-contemporary narrative

with a less ambivalent faith in the market, see Venture Smith, A Narratwe of the life
and Adventures of Venture, A Natwe of Africa: But resident above sixty years in the Umted States
of Amenca. Related by Himself, in Carretta, ed. Unchained Voices, 369-87; and Robert E.
Desrochers, Jr., ‘“Not Fade Away”: The Narrative of Venture Smith, and African
American in the Early Republic,’ The Journal of American History 84 (1997): 40-66;
Sidbury, ‘Early Slave Narratives’ analyzes slave narrators’ engagement with the market.
Equiano occasionally expressed frustration with those who failed to help themselves,
but that frustration was aimed at whites rather than blacks. He makes this point
most explicitly when describing a shipwreck on a deserted Bahama island, during
which the ‘only four people’ who helped him save themselves or the other people
on the ship were ‘three black men’ and a Dutch creole soldier. Lest the reader
miss his obvious point, he reiterates that ‘not one of the white men did anything
to preserve their lives’ (128-9). Carretta (p. 279, n. 414) believes the Dutch creole
soldier to be a man of Dutch ancestry born in the islands; I, largely because of
the comment about ‘white men,’ believe him to be a man of African ancestry born
on the Dutch islands.
 FROM IGBO ISRAELI TO AFRICAN CHRISTIAN 9]

and achieve true freedom. But such cooperation is not, in Equiano’s

text, founded on naturally occurmring alliances. It is rooted instead in
the shared experiences of oppression that recreate an African people
who were dispersed in ancient times.
Some aspects of that story are commonplace.‘ For example, Equiano
began to perceive things that he shared with other residents of Africa
as he moved from his inland home to the coast in the hands first of
his kidnappers and then of a series of people to whom he was sold.
Throughout the long journey from his ‘own nation,’ he ‘always found
somebody that understood’ him until he arrived at the coast (51).” His
budding sense of allegiance to ‘Africa’ led him to combine his convic-
tion, as the ship weighed anchor, that he had lost all chance of ‘return-
ing to [his] native country,’ with the realization that he ‘even’ lacked
hope of ‘gaining the shore, which I now considered as friendly’ (56).
This uneasy entente between his Igbo self and an African (or racial)
one proceeded during the Middle Passage, where he learned enough
to understand one of his ‘fellow prisoners’ talking to ‘a countryman,’
even though ‘they were from a distant part of Africa’ (60). In fact, as
historian Alex Byrd has shown, Equiano moved from a narrow ‘ethnic’
to a broader ‘racial’ definition of ‘countrymen’ over the course of the
Interesting Narratwe.”°
The narrative continues along this familiar path when it moves
from Equiano’s incipient recognition that he shares something with
other victims of the slave trade to a more explicit assertion of African
diasporic identity. In the final chapter of his autobiography Equiano
referred to ‘African complexion’ (220) without attention to differences,
like those he mentioned earlier, among the darker peoples of Essaka

2+ Commonplace because of the influence of Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price,

The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press,
1992 [1976]). See my ‘Globalization, Creolization, and the Not-So-Peculiar Institution,’
The Journal of Southern History LX-XIII (2007), 617-30 (esp. pp. 624-25, 628-30) for
a brief discussion of current debates over creolization.
23 Of course given his experience as a victim of the slave trade, he did not mistake
shared linguistic traditions for commonality of interests, as shown when he referred,
in the same paragraph, to ‘those sable destroyers of human rights’ (51).
2° Byrd, ‘Eboe, Country, Nation.’ The standard black-nationalist interpretation of
the emergence of a diasporic identity during the Middle Passage is Sterling Stuckey,
Slave Culture: The Foundation of Nationalist Thought (New York: Oxford University Press,
1987), ch. 1. Stuckey’s analysis portrays as more ‘natural’ and unproblematic the
process that I present as partial and historically contingent. Compare with Kwame
Anthony Appiah, Jn My Father’s House: Africa in the Philsophy of Culture (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992) and Mintz and Price, The Birth of African Amencan Culture.
92 JAMES SIDBURY

and the ‘stout mahogany-coloured men’ who lived ‘at a distance’ (37).
He reported being full of ‘pleasure...in seeing the worthy Quakers
freeing and easing the burdens of many of my oppressed African
brethren’ (224). He even spoke of the planned colony at Sierra Leone
as a philanthropic project ‘to send the Africans from’ London ‘to their
native quarter.’ And he agreed, at least temporarily, to ‘go with the
black poor to Africa’ (226). Africa, rather than Essaka, had become
his ancestral home and, by extension, the home of men and women
from countless different villages like Essaka.
The Interesting Narratwe presents the journey he followed to reach
this understanding of himself as an ‘African.’ The starting point is
important, and Equiano begins with a detailed ethnographic analysis
of Essaka. ‘This ethnography is, along with the account of his ‘true’
conversion to Christianity, the narrative’s most fully-realized set piece,
and it explicitly and repeatedly compares Essaka with ancient Israel.
The Igbo ‘practiced circumcision like the Jews’ (41), used ‘purifications
and washings ...on the same occasions...as the Jews’ (41), and governed
themselves through ‘chiefs or judges’ just as had ‘the Israelites in their
primitive state’ (44). Igbos could hardly be considered barbarians by
Christians who considered themselves the heirs of God’s chosen peo-
ple.*” Equiano went beyond arguing by analogy that the Igbo were lke
the ancient Hebrews, endorsing the claim that black Africans descended
from ‘Afer and Afra, the descendants of Abraham by Keturah his wife’
(44). Children of Abraham, these Igbo chosen people could scarcely
be thought unworthy of legal protection, expecially once they accepted
the ‘true’ word of Christ.”* The narrative of identity-formation begins

27 Of course being identified with Jews was hardly an unalloyed good in eighteenth
century Europe, but its advantages were greatest among dissenting communities, many
of which were inclined to see themselves as the ‘new Israel.’ For eighteenth century
enlightened and Christian views of Jewish people, see Frank E. Manuel, ‘Israel in
the Christian Enlightenment,’ in The Changing of the Gods (Hanover, N.H.: University
Press of New England, 1983), 107-10, 119, 122; and Manuel, The Broken Staff: Fudaism
Through Chnstan Eyes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 168-9,
179. For a dissenting Englishman illustrating an extreme identification with ancient
Israel, see E.P. Thompson, Witness Agamst the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 29.
28 It is striking that Equiano also explicitly equates the Igbo with the Greeks, the
secular ‘fathers’ of ‘civilized’ European society (pp. 242, n. 44; 167-8). For several
essays exploring early modern efforts to trace the biblical ongins of subsaharan
Africans, see the special issue of The Willtam and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 54 (January
1997).
 FROM IGBO ISRAELI TO AFRICAN CHRISTIAN 93

by asserting Igbos’ status as the fragmented descendants of an ancient

diaspora.
Equiano’s Igbo origins, his insistence on the Old Testament roots
of his people, and the destiny to which he called ‘Africans’ intersect
in a story involving his name. Equiano was first sold into American
slavery in Virginia, but after a short stay on a plantation there, he was
purchased by Pascal. Pascal is introduced in a paragraph that begins,
incongruously, with the news that in Virginia Equiano was called Jacob,
but that on board the slaver he had been named Michael. After buy-
ing Equiano, Pascal, like all of the whites who had claimed ownership
of the young boy, renamed him, opting for Gustavus Vassa. Equiano
‘refused to answer’ to the new name, insisting that ‘he would be called
Jacob.’ Following eighteenth century Igbo custom in thinking that names
reveal the essence of their bearers, we should take seriously each of
the identities that Equiano chose to report having acquired during
his lifetime. Born the ‘fortunate one,’ he was kidnapped and became
Michael, the Lord’s angel and messenger, while crossing the Atlantic.
In Virginia he first experienced the world of a typical plantation slave,
and there he was Jacob, progenitor of a chosen people who would be
enslaved and then delivered by God. Finally, Pascal turned to the the
British stage and the pantheon of Protestant nationalist heroes to choose
the young boy’s final name: Gustavus Vassa (King of Sweden and title
character of Henry Brooke, Gustavus Vassa, The Delwerer of His Country:
A Tragedy in five Acts [1739)).9
Interpreting this history of naming requires care. Equiano lacked
control over the two names under which he wrote —Olaudah Equiano

22 Potkay, “Olaudah Equiano and the Art of Spiritual Autobiography,’ 683-6; Potkay,
“Introduction,” in Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr, eds., Black Atlantic Wnters of the
18th Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Amencas (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1995), 12-14 (discussion of Equiano’s names). Robert J. Allison, ‘Introduction
to Equiano,’ The Interesting Narratwe, 4 (Brooke’s play). Jacob later became central to
efforts by African American religious pioneers in the early republican United States,
as illustrated by the choice of ‘Bethel’—the place where Jacob dreamed of the ladder
and where God promised that Jacob would become father to a people (Gen. 28:
10-22; 35: 6-15)—as the name for the two founding congregations of the Afncan
Methodist Episcopal Church (Baltimore and Philadelphia). I discuss this in greater
detail in Becoming African in Amenca, chaps. 5 and 6. For a later example of the use
of Biblical names to reinforce a claim to a spiritual identity, see J.D.Y. Peel’s won-
derful analysis of Samuel Crowther’s decision to baptize his mother ‘Hagar’ in ‘For
Who Hath Despised the Day of Small Things? Missionary Narratives and Historical
Anthropology,’ Comparatve Studies in Society and History 37 (1995), 581-607 (esp. pp.
596-98). I thank Stephan Palmié for pointing out this parallel.
94 JAMES SIDBURY

and Gustavus Vassa—since one was given at birth and the other by
Pascal.* He did, however, control the presentation of his names, and,
as scholars Vincent Carretta and Paul Lovejoy point out, he rarely used
‘Olaudah Equiano’ in public print except in the Narratwe.** Whether
Equiano accurately reported having been named Michael and Jacob
is less certain. He explicitly warns readers that he has ‘considerably
abridged’ the account of his many adventures, and he offers an implicit
warning when, having written a powerful and vivid text that speaks
eloquently to his literary skill, he claims to be ‘as unwilling as unable
to adorn the plainness of truth by the coloring of imagination’ (195).
No reader having reached the final chapter of this remarkable book
could doubt the author’s ability to ‘adorn’ truth. This does not mean
that he sought to mislead his audience; only that he might have altered
parts of the story—like which western names he was given—in order
to convey his truths more powerfully.*? Regardless, his belief that this
history of naming bears reporting indicates its importance as an inter-
pretive key to his life story.
Equiano provided an initial glimpse at the relations among these
different personae in the rhetoric of his description of Essaka. The
narrative is autobiography, so the first chapter offers the adult man’s
understanding of the complicated relationship between the village of
his birth and his later life. Equiano does not summarize this relation-
ship in a single sentence or paragraph; instead, he indicates the ways
that he, as an adult, was simultaneously removed from Essaka and
indelibly marked by his kinship to it. He begins his description of vil-
lage culture with personal reminiscenses, and naturally enough he uses
the first person (‘our language’ p. 32), but within the same paragraph

°° He could, however, have chosen to write under a pen name—if he was in fact
born in South Carolina, Olaudah Equiano may have been a pen name.
31 His only extant use of Equiano outside the Interesting Narratwe is in a 1789 let-
ter to Wilham Dickson reproduced on p. 344 which is signed ‘Olaudah Equiano or
Gustavus Vasa.’ Appendix D of Carretta’s edition makes Equiano’s correspondence
readily available, and allows the tracing of Equiano’s signatures on public letters.
Equiano uses the following versions which do not appear in the Interesting Narrative:
Gustavus Vasa (327), Gustavus Vassa, the Ethiopian (330), and Aethiopianus (333).
In 1788 Equiano seems to have settled on ‘Gustavus Vassa, the African’ (once “The
Oppressed African’). Also see Lovejoy, ‘Autobiography and Memory.’
*2 If he altered his place of birth—and this is something we are unlikely ever to
know for certain then his willingness to alter facts to convey larger truths is even
more clear, as is the importance to him of the relationship between an African birth
and a diasporic African identity. See Peel, ‘For Who Hath Despised.’
 FROM IGBO ISRAELI TO AFRICAN CHRISTIAN 95

he switches to the third person (“Their mode of marriage’ p. 33).*

This might seem a slip by a self-taught author except that it recurs
throughout the first chapter, including one switch in mid-sentence: ‘Our
manner of living is entirely plain; for as yet the natwes are unacquainted
with ... refinements in cookery’ (p. 35; emphasis added). Nor does there
appear to be a reliable pattern in Equiano’s movement between the
first and third person: he moves from ‘Our tillage’ to ‘their... [agric
ultural] instruments,’ before noting that ‘we are visited by locusts’ in
the course of three sentences describing agriculture in the village of
his birth (38). Even if ‘mistakes’—and no similar mistakes occur later
in the text—these movements from the first to the third person show
Equiano to be both a native of Essaka and a man removed enough
from Igboland to write as, to use an anachronistic term, dispassionate
ethnographer. The author of the narrative wrote in both the voice of
an Igbo—Olaudah Equiano—and that of a Christian African of the
diaspora—Gustavus Vassa, the African.
Through stories of the middle passage, of the shared oppression of
Atlantic slavery, and especially of his passage from an Igbo descendant
of Abraham living in ignorance of Christ into a Christian African,
Equiano’s Narratwe provides a participant-portrayal of the emergence of
racial identity. Were that all that it offered, then it could best be used, as
it frequently has been, as a convenient and illustrative primary source
for the emergence of creole cultures.** But what makes the Narrative
especially interesting is its complicated presentation of the movement
from ‘ethnic’ to African identity. As the movement from first to third
person indicates, Equiano does not present the passage from Igbo to
African as the simple shedding of an ethnic past. Instead, he portrays
the local and ethnic identities rooted in African and various American
societies as powerful forces shaping the nature of the ‘racial’ identity
that he sought to bring into existence, an identity that he thought offered
the most promising path to freedom and equality. In the initial chapters,

3 Equiano altered paragraph breaks from edition to edition. Compare the single
paragraph on pp. 32-4 of the Carretta edition with the same material broken into
four paragraphs in the Allison edition (pp. 34-6). Carretta’s endnotes record the
changes from edition to edition.
** Because so many analyses that address these questions cite Equiano, it would
be pointless to provide a comprehensive review of the uses historians have made of
the narrative. For my previous use of Equiano in a way that illustrates a general
tendency among historians to simplify his presentation of these issues, see Ploughshares
into Swords, ch. 1 (esp. pp. 14-19).
96 JAMES SIDBURY

Equaino offers readers versed in Christian typology (or African naming

practices), a key to the prophetic language of identity formation that
accompanies his antislavery message. For Equiano, the path to this new
identity traveled through conversion to evangelical Christianity, and he
used his Interesting Narratwe to proclaim that path.
The path did not pass effortlessly over Equiano’s Igbo origins, or the
ethnic origins of other peoples he called to be ‘African.’ As Alex Byrd
has shown, over the course of the Narratwe Equiano expressed levels
of fictive kinship with others by using a variety of terms: countrymen,
brethren, Ethiopian, African, Negroes, and sable people. Of these, at
least one key term was used inconsistently: while ‘countrymen’ most
frequently referred to his fellow Igbo or, by the same token, to other
black people who shared a single ethnic origin, it could also refer more
broadly to ‘my African countrymen.’” And sometimes his use of the
term defies attempts to clarify its precise meaning. There is nothing
unusual in the loose use of a common term, but this case points to a
persistent tension that structures the second half of Equiano’s life story.
Despite his general portrayal of the emergence of an imagined diasporic
identity, he continually brought African ethnic identity back into play.
This could occur casually, but such differences also got reported at times
when Equiano was specifically attuned to cultural difference: “When
I came to Kingston [|Jamaica], I was surprised to see the number of
Africans who were assembled together on Sundays.... Here each dif-
ferent nation of Africa meet and dance after the manner of their own
country.” Equiano the author was an ‘African,’ but if his personal
transformation was to have a broader meaning, he had to confront and
make sense of the relationship between the ethnic and the diasporic.
He sought to do that in the three central episodes that structure his
account of life as a free man: his rebirth as a Christian, his return
to the West Indies as an overseer, and his involvement with the first
expedition to colonize Sierra Leone. None offers the single key to his
problem, but all help to create the crusader for ‘Afncan’ nghts whose
biggest contribution to a solution 1s the Narrahve itself.

35 Byrd, ‘Eboe, Country, Nation’ carefully traces and analyzes the ways that Equiano
used the term ‘countryman,’ moving from an ethnic (1.e. ‘Igbo’) meaning early in
the text to a broader diasporic and racial meaning toward the end.
36 Equiano, Narrative, 205, 211 (for restricting uses); p. 231 (‘African countrymen’);
p. 85 (for unclear use); p. 172 (Kingston). Byrd, ‘Eboe, Country, Nation.’
 FROM IGBO ISRAELI TO AFRICAN CHRISTIAN 97

Though Equiano was baptized into the Anglican Church while a

slave of Pascal, his ‘true’ rebirth in Christ began soon after his trip to
Jamaica. He returned from the islands to London, where he spent two
sedentary years before being 'roused by the sound of fame” (172) and
the interest of his employer to join an expedition seeking a northern
passage to India. “I'he hardships of the Arctic expedition caused him to
‘reflect deeply’ on his ‘eternal state’ (178) and to search with renewed
energy for a sure path to salvation. He read the Bible, attended Anglican,
Quaker, Roman Catholic, and Jewish services, and finally resolved to
travel to ‘Turkey aboard the Anglicana and turn ‘infidel’ by converting
to Islam. His plans to emigrate were cut short, however, when a friend
whom he had recommended to the Captain of the interestingly-named
Anglhcanat was forcibly removed by a former master and transported
back to a brutal death on the island of St. Kitts. Reawakened to the
work needed to cleanse the Anglican land of slavery’s corrupting stain,
Equiano left the ship in a failed effort to save his friend, an effort that saw
him contact the British abolitionist Granville Sharp and disguise himself
in white face. Equiano’s first antislavery effort turned the captains of
London “Iurkeymen’ against him, effectively blocking his intention to
reject Britain and ‘saving’ him from the ‘false’ path to God. He had no
choice but to renew his search for salvation within Christian traditions.
Almost immediately he was invited to a Huntingdonian Methodist love-
feast, and, after much struggle and another sea voyage, ‘the Lord was
pleased to break in upon [his] soul...and in an instant...the scriptures
became an unsealed book’ (190). At that point he began to view ‘the
unconverted people of the world in a very awful state, being without
God and without hope’ (191).
With the important exception of the providential role played by
antislavery, Equiano’s was a conventional eighteenth-century Methodist
story of rebirth in Christ. To this account he appended the extended
‘Miscellaneous Verses: or, Reflections on the state of my mind during
my first Convictions, of the necessity of believing the ‘Truth, and expe-
riencing the inestimable benefits of Chnistianity’ (194-7). This poem
offered a preliminary attempt to understand the relationship between
the universal promise of Christianity and his personal and communal
history. He told of being kidnapped from his ‘native land,’ of struggling
in the evil world in which he found himself, and of wondering why he
had ‘not in Ethiopia died.’ In the glow of his conversion, all of these
problems seemed to have been solved by the recognition that ‘works
can nothing do,’ and that salvation, as he quotes from Acts 4:12, ‘is by
98 JAMES SIDBURY

Christ alone!’ This solution remained central to Equiano’s vision of his

place on Earth—the famous portrait reproduced on the frontispiece of
the Narratwe includes a Bible opened to Acts 4:12, But his portrayal of
his ‘native land’ as the biblical Ethiopia denied the importance of eth-
nic difference by highlighting a shared mythic past for all sub-Saharan
African peoples. This idealized denial of cultural difference proved
unsatisfactory in the world in which Equiano lived.
He never directly addressed that problem, perhaps because doing
so would have profoundly complicated the antislavery message of his
narrative. He followed the account of his conversion, however, with
one of the most problematic incidents in his autobiography, and that
incident sheds light on the tension between ethnic and racial identity.
After a short voyage to Spain, where he defended English Protestantism
in ‘frequent contests about religion’ with a Catholic Priest (200), he
agreed to serve as an overseer for his ‘old friend, the celebrated Doctor
Irving,’ who had decided to build a plantation on the Mosquito coast
of present-day Nicaragua (202).°’ Equiano explained this odd decision
in explicitly evangelical terms: ‘I accepted of the offer, knowing that the
harvest was fully ripe in those parts, and I hoped to be an instrument,
under God, of bringing some poor sinner to my well-beloved master,
Jesus Christ’ (202). This effort to serve two masters, even two beloved
masters, was to fail miserably.
Despite the language of Ethiopianism in Equiano’s account of his
rebirth, his career as an overseer reflected his recognition of the con-
tinuing power and importance of African ethnicity even as he struggled
to find his place within the universal promise of Christianity. When he
and Doctor Irving boarded a ‘Guinea-man, to purchase some slaves’
for the new plantation, Equiano ‘chose them all my own countrymen’
(205). His account of his experience on the Mosquito Coast deals only
cryptically with his ostensible purpose in becoming an overseer—pros-
elytizing his ‘countrymen.”*® He spends far more time describing the
Mestizo natives of the coast in terms that violated eighteenth-cen-
tury notions of racial difference: a native prince reportedly referred
to Equiano as one of ‘the white men’ (204), and Equiano himself
included the Indians among the ‘sable people’ (209). ‘Though he did

37 Equiano had worked as Irving’s personal servant during different stints in London,
and it was with Irving that Equiano had embarked on an Arctic expedition.
38 Byrd, “Eboe, Country, Nation.”
 FROM IGBO ISRAELI TO AFRICAN CHRISTIAN 99

not romanticize ‘living in this heathenish form’ (210), he did note that
the confusing mixture of peoples permitted ‘merry-making... without
the least discord...although it was made up of different nations and
complexions’ (210). His mission to those enslaved countrymen did not,
however, offer a ‘Christian’ path to a gentler form of slavery: Dr. Irving
replaced Equiano with a cruel white overseer who drove the Igbo men
and women to try to escape in ‘a large Puriogua canoe’ that overturned,
so that ‘they were all drowned’ (217—18)}—a different kind of baptism
than Equiano had envisioned.
The experiment with ‘Chnistian’ slavery failed on other fronts as well,
for Equiano became convinced that there was no place in plantation
America for a free ‘African Chnistian.? On his way home from the
Nicaragua coast he barely escaped being re-enslaved or murdered, he
experienced arbitrary brutal punishment, and he was swindled out of
his wages. Such hardships, he made clear, were not reserved for black
transients: in Jamaica he accompanied a friend who tried to collect
a debt from a white man for whom he had done work as a tailor.
The white man ‘immediately took a horse-whip to pay’ the debt. Nor
could slavery work for the ‘humane’ master: the good Doctor Irving
died suspiciously in Jamaica after eating ‘poisoned fish.’ In response
to these ‘oppressions’ Equiano sought a vessel to escape the island as
quickly as possible. Following this escape from plantation America, he
never returned.
He did, however, revisit and reinterpret this evangelical effort while
revising his Narrative. In the first four editions of the narrative he
described the slaves he helped Dr. Irving purchase simply as ‘my own
countrymen.’ But beginning in the fifth edition he added the phrase
‘some of whom came from Lybia’ (205). Such a claim seems odd,
since Libyans were not generally victims of the Atlantic slave trade, but
Equiano added a footnote to ensure that readers would recognize the
metaphorical sense in which ‘his countrymen’ were ‘from Lybia.’ He
cited ‘John Brown’s Scripture Dictionary, 1 Chron. I. 33’ and ‘Purver’s
Bible, with Notes on Gen. xxv. 4.’ These sources, he says, report that
‘Apher, one Abraham’s Offspring [sic], led an Army against Libya,
and getting Victory, settled there, from whom his Posterity were called

*° Throughout plantation America slaves were believed to have dangerous (to

their masters) knowledge of poison. Equiano’s cryptic comment about poisoned fish
suggests that Doctor Irving was killed by slaves.
100 JAMES SIDBURY

Africans’ (p. 292, n. 569). As Equiano reconsidered his experiences

on the Mosquito Coast during his periodic revisions to the narra-
tive, perhaps he realized that his willingness to serve as a slave-driver
seemed incongruous to many readers. He offered a way for them to
understand his willingness to serve as Dr. Irving’s overseer within the
broader context of his struggle for ‘African’ hberation. By converting
blacks to Christianity, he hoped to recreate a unity among all sub-
Saharan Africans that had been lost in ancient history. He failed in his
Nicaraguan experiment, but he did not abandon the larger project.
While Equiano himself had found Chnistianity through slavery, his
experience on the Mosquito coast convinced him to look for surer venues
through which to spread his message. He returned to London tired of
the impositions that he suffered at the hands of white men at sea, and
took a position in service to a former governor of an African trading
fort. He continued to evangelize, seeking to bing Governor Matthias
Macnamara’s other servants to Christ, but he sought once again to
meld his religious and secular messages. At this point his quest under-
went a transformation. After failing to win followers among Governor
Macnamara’s servants, Equiano seems to have forsaken the role of
evangelist to individuals. ‘Thereafter he endeavored not to find a small
community to bring to Christ, but to write, travel, and speak in his
attempt to bring into being an ‘African’ people. Or, as his rechristening
of his ‘countrymen’ as Lybians suggests he came to conceive of it, he
sought to bring an ‘African’ people back into being. His goal was not
purely or even primarily secular, for ethnic difference and ‘native bar-
barity’ would be ended through conversion to Christianity; his religious
and secular goals became so intertwined as to be inseparable.
Thus, in seeking ordination from the Bishop of London as a precon-
dition for missionary work on the coast of Africa, he described himself
as ‘a native of Africa’ with ‘knowledge of the manners and customs of
the inhabitants of that country’ (221). ‘This homogenization of African
societies was not a single aberration. When the Bishop rejected the
request for ordination, Equiano traveled first to New York and then to
Philadelphia. ‘Though he had little to say of New York, he quickly went
to work in Philadelphia in support of his ‘oppressed African brethren’
(224). That term did not, however, refer to residents (or even natives) of
Africa. Instead, it referred to the creole black people of Philadelphia,
some of whom were being educated in Anthony Benezet’s. Quaker
school. During this trip, Equiano played the evangelist, but the mes-
sage he reported spreading was the secular message of African unity,
 FROM IGBO ISRAELI TO AFRICAN CHRISTIAN 101

a unity that rested in a shared history of oppression. It tied him to his

black brethren in Philadelphia, and tied them all to those suffering in
southern and West Indian slavery.
Equiano did not stay in Philadelphia as a local leader of its growing
free black community. Instead he returned to London where he contin-
ued his quest to build an African people. Finding that the government
had responded to ‘philanthropic individuals’ by funding an expedition to
send ‘the Africans from’ London to ‘their native quarter’ (226), Equiano
became involved in the fledgling movement to send poor black residents
of London to Sierra Leone.*® His growing prominence among black
Londoners and evangelical Methodists made him an attractive potential
recruit for white supporters of colonization, and they sent for him as
soon as he arrived back in the city. He signed on as as Commissary
of Provisions and Stores for the Black Poor Going to Sierra Leone,
which put him in charge of provisioning the expedition and traveling
with the settlers to supervise the distribution of government-purchased
goods. Equiano’s experience proved disastrous as he uncovered layers
of corruption that doomed the initial colonization effort to failure,
and he got himself fired by trying to oppose the influential commer-
cial interests benefiting from that corruption. Though he salvaged his
personal reputation and the financial investment that he had made
in the expedition, he was unable to save the lives of his ‘countrymen’
who had agreed to go on the first trip: they arrived inadequately pro-
visioned at the beginning of Sierra Leone’s rainy season and died in
horrifying numbers.
The practical failures of the individual expedition did not, however,
discourage his belief in the essential benevolence of the project itself.
British involvement in Africa remained an important part, but only a
part, of the salvation he sought for his ‘African brethren.’ He worked to
end slavery in the West Indies, and petitioned the Queen, soliciting her
‘compassion for millions of [his] African countrymen, who groan|[ed]
under the lash of tyranny in the West Indies’ (231-2). He hoped that
Britons, ‘(because to them the Gospel is preached)’ would play a prime
role in bringing ‘the auspicious era of. extensive freedom’ to ‘the sable

* See Richard West, Back to Africa: A History of Sierra Leone and Libera (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1970), 25-33 for basic story of early attempts to settle Sierra Leone.
Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Natonality: Black Emigration and Colonization,
1787-1863 (Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 3-10
covers some reactions to British plans among free blacks in the United States.
102 JAMES SIDBURY

people” (233). But his experience in the world had left him suitably
cynical about the limits of benevolence, and he couched his appeal for
British support of Africa in the language of self-interest. If slavery and
the slave trade were ended, and if Africa were brought into ‘a system
of commerce,’ Equiano calculated that British commercial and manu-
facturing interests would open lucrative markets that would bring far
more wealth into England than slavery ever could (233-5). His claim
that residents of African societies would be brought to ‘civilization’ and
‘true religion’ anticipated basic outlines of antebellum black nationalism
and of justifications of nineteenth-century imperialism.”
But the African continent would not be the ‘home’ of the ‘African
people’ that Equiano sought to call into existence. He, after all, remained
‘Gustavus Vassa, the African’ while remaining in England. And he
gave no indication that, following emancipation, the freedpeople of
the British West Indies should choose to migrate to Africa, nor did
he suggest that his ‘African’ friends in Philadelphia should desert the
Quaker city for the land(s) of their forebears. Instead he envisioned
a people who would move beyond the ethnic differences that divided
those living on the continent of Africa, differences that helped fuel the
slave trade, by uniting under the banner of shared religion. Given that
the religion they would share would be the Methodist version of the
Protestant ‘church of England, agreeable to the thirty-nine articles’
(220), that might seem to have been a recipe for assimilation and for
the disappearance of ‘Africans’ into the universalist pretentions of
Christianity. But Equiano did not expect that to happen. For if ethnic
pasts were to be superseded by a Chnistian present, they were not to
be erased. ‘They and the history of affliction and oppression that they
helped to engender would remain a part of the African Christian pres-
ent that would overtake them. The cosmopolitan, commercial, African
Christians who would arise in Africa, England, the Canbbean, and the
United States would end the scourge of slavery and take their place
among the peoples of the world.

*! Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 11 and throughout; Tunde Adeleke, Unafncan
Amencans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Cwilzing Mission (Lexington, Ky.:
The University Press of Kentucky, 1998).
 FROM IGBO ISRAELI TO AFRICAN CHRISTIAN 103

IV

Equiano lived in an era in which rationalist approaches to nature and

society competed with a profusion of non-elite prophetic voices offering
quite different explanations.* Equiano's call to an African Christian
identity is issued in a moderate prophetic idiom that works with the
text’s rationalist antislavery language, rather than subverting ‘rational’
political argument in the way that some contemporary prophets did.*”
Nonetheless, the diverse audiences to whom he sought to appeal led
him to encode his messages differently for the different audiences. ‘Thus
he offered an indictment of slavery to all readers as the obvious and
most forcefully argued polemic in the text. He pursued his narrative
of racial identity, a narrative that might have alienated many whom he
hoped would be receptive to his antislavery message, in a slightly veiled
manner that allowed those uninterested in it to ignore that message.
It can be most clearly approached by tracing the succession of bibli-
cal and national figures through whom he tells his story and through
whom he claims an authonal (and authonitative) voice.
The succession of names he claimed constitutes the simple outline
of this process, but it is not the whole story. For Equiano shared a con-
ventional evangelical appreciation of biblical typology and presented a
succession of scriptural identities for himself and others over the course
of his narrative.* Sometimes he pursued this strategy quite explicitly
through biblical quotation, as when he enjoined Europeans to recognize
the artificial nature of their apparent superiority over other peoples by

*? Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) and idem, “Demogogues or Mystagogues?
Gender and the Language of Prophecy in the Age of Democratic Revolutions,’
Amencan Histoncal Review 104 (1999), 1560-81 for the best analysis of this tension.
* Juster, Doomsayers, chap. 5 analyzes Richard Brothers and Nimrod Hughes along
these lines.
* I do not argue that he attempted to conceal his narrative of identity, but to
present it in a way that did not detract attention from his antislavery goals.
* Equiano invoked Biblical typology in noting, upon his re-birth as a Methodist,
that he was ‘then convinced that by the first Adam, sin came, and by the second
Adam (the Lord Jesus Christ) all that are saved must be made alive’ (190). See
Northrup Frye’s discussion of typology in The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New
York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), pp. 79-82 (initial definition) and
throughout. See Potkay, ‘Olaudah Equiano and the Art of Spiritual Autobiography,’
680-6 for Equiano’s use of Biblical types, though Potkay is more interested in tro-
pological than typological deployments.
104 JAMES SIDBURY

remembering that God had made “of one blood all the nations of men
for to dwell on all the face of the earth.’* Not surprisingly, these clear
invocations of the Bible frequently call Europeans to behave in truly
‘Christian’ ways by abolishing slavery. Through parables and echoes of
Biblical types, and by introducing hybrid secular/political types as well,
Equiano offered a less hopeful condemnation of European Chnistianity,
and suggested a more radical path to African Christianity.
Thus, in descnbing his experience on the slaver that first transported
him to America, a key leg in his journey toward Christianity, Equiano
offered a perverted echo of the miracle in which Christ fed multitudes.
Jesus had stretched ‘five barley loaves, and two small fishes’ first to allow
his disciples to eat ‘as much as they would’ and then to feed the ‘great
company’ ( John 6: 9-11) that followed him. In contrast, the sailors on
the slaver ‘satisfied themselves’ with a bountiful catch from the ocean,
and then, rather than feeding the hungry slaves, ‘tossed the remaining
fish into the sea’ (56). These men, metaphorical anti-Chnists, pointed
Equiano down a path toward a false Christianity.
It was, nonetheless, a path he sought to follow by fighting for the
British Navy in the Seven Years War, coming to see Englishmen as
superior, and converting to Anglicanism out of the ‘desire to resemble
them’ (72). As he learned more about Europeans and became more
discerning in his relations with them, he paradoxically reinterpreted
aspects of his ‘African’ past in light of his emerging Christian “under-
standing.’ One sailor began to teach him practical skills—‘to shave and
dress hair a little-—and to ‘read in the Bible’ and explicate its mean-
ings (91—2). Through these interactions he rediscovered the propriety
of what he had already known: ‘I was wonderfully surprised to see the
laws and rules of my own country written almost exactly’ in the Bible.
The piety that Equiano displayed during this tme of rediscovery led
his shipmates to call him ‘the black Christian’ (92).
Such piety did not, however, save him from falling victim to his
master’s power, and Pascal’s decision to sell him to the West Indies cast
him among those who reminded him of the injustice practiced by so
many professing Christians. The horrors he witnessed and experienced
pushed him back to the avenging God of the Old ‘Testament, provok-
ing thoughts of Moses” vengeance against “the Egyptian” and calls

* Equiano, 45; Acts 17:26.

*? Potkay, 'Olaudah Equiano and the Art of Spiritual Autobiography,’ 688 for
analysis of this reference to Mosaic vengeance.
 FROM IGBO ISRAELI TO AFRICAN CHRISTIAN 105

for ‘God’s thunder and his avenging power’ (98) to bring justice to the
world. Equiano the author portrayed this earlier self as a man caught
between two stages of secular and spiritual development: he had left
behind his Igbo ways in his attempt to assimilate to English norms,
and he had become convinced that Christianity offered the true path,
but he had not yet found that path. He was torn between a desire
to be English and a longing to call on the avenging God of the Old
‘Testament to destroy his (English) enemies. He was an Old Testament
prophet searching in a lost land for a path to the new promise that he
knew he must find.
It was as Gustavus Vassa, the African, that he discovered the
proper role for the religious and national prophet in the age of the
New Testament. Like the Swedish kings for whom he was named, he
fought a dual battle against the spiritual degeneracy of Catholicism
and for the nation, in Equiano’s case an African nation that must rise
to prominence if ‘sable peoples’ were to gain their nghtful place in the
world.* Having conquered Catholicism spiritually, he then embarked
on the political struggles that culminated in the wniting of the narrative,
his most important contribution to the building of an ‘African’—what
today would be called a pan-African—national movement.
The African movement that he called into being contained a ten-
sion that would remain central to the more formal theorizations of
pan-African ideologies offered during the nineteenth century. While
he never forsook his Igbo past or his identification with Igbo peoples,
the movement that Equiano sought to found would have erased much
that was distinctive about the Igbo in particular, or about the indig-
enous societies of West Africa more generally, by transforming them
through conversion to the ‘truth’ of Christianity. Properly understood,
however, this was not to be an act of ‘assimilation’ to European civi-
lization, in part because, to Equiano, Christianity was a universal, not
a European, religion. But more importantly, if one takes seriously
the trajectory of Equiano’s text and sees the emergence of African
Christianity—perhaps conceived as ‘true Chnistianity’—as the proph-
esied fulfillment of the promise of Igbo ‘Jewishness,’ then the national
movement unifying ‘Africans’ in Africa, America, and Europe would

*® The struggle with Catholicism, which came immediately after his rebirth as a
Methodist, involved his refutation of the false doctrines offered by a Spanish priest,
and his resistance to the temptation of a university education offered by that priest
(Equiano, 199-200).
106 JAMES SIDBURY

be a new and distinct development in the unfolding of sacred history

on Earth. Equiano underscored the relation between his past and its
culmination in his Christian present by explicitly equating himself to
the Biblical figure Jacob—also, of course, the name he reported being
given when a plantation slave in Virginia—at the moment of his true
rebirth as a Chnistian: ‘It pleased God to enable me to wrestle with
him, as Jacob did.’ Equiano, as prophet, left ambiguous whether this
new movement represented the ‘exclusive’ truth of God, or whether it
was a ‘national’ version of a ‘universal’ promise. Or, to put the same
point another way, he left ambiguous how exclusively one should read
his vision of Africans as God’s Chosen People.
 GOVERNING MAN-GODS: SPIRITISM AND THE
STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA*

Reinaldo L. Roman

Introduction

Few locales have been witness to as many theogonies as the Hispanic

Caribbean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.’ The
proliferation of new deities, prophets and saints, and their irruption
into the public realm so soon after the dawn of the 1900s, caused
modernization’s supporters throughout the region grave concern. The
new arrivals announced that the conditions for progress were not in
place everywhere; miscreants blocked the roads to regeneration and
threatened to lead the popular classes astray. In Cuba, journals and
newspapers ran reports in late 1901 about a man they dubbed mock-
ingly ‘el Dios Nuevo’. The ‘new God’ was Hilario Mustelier Garzon,
an elderly Afro-Cuban healer, whose Spiritist cures attracted hundreds
of rural easterners as well as the unbidden attention of government
officials. Mustelier’s notoriety proved costly: the press condemned him
and he was jailed twice. In 1904, however, even as news of the alleged
ritual murder of white children spread throughout the country, touching
off a bloody anti-witchcraft campaign, celebratory headlines greeted
another Spiritist.” Journalists and cure-seekers alike took to calling
Juan Manso Estévez, a Spanish veteran of the war in the Philippines,
‘el Hombre Dios’, or ‘Man God’. They credited Manso with uncanny
cures and a surfeit of charisma said to inspire devotion in the motley
crowds that gathered about him in the Cuban capital.’

* With kind permission of the University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hull).
Previously published in Spirits: Religion, Miracles, and Spectacles in Cuba and Puerto Rico,
1898-1956 (Reinaldo L. Roman; Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2007) pp. 23-50.
! Readers interested in man-gods elsewhere may consult Gruzinski, Man-Gods in the
Mexican Highlands, Van Young, “The Messiah and the Masked Man’ and Levine, Vale
of Tears.
y 2 See Chávez Alvarez, El crimen de la mña Cecilia, Helg, Our Rightful Share and Palmié,
Wizards and Scientists.
3 Some newspapers claimed that Manso was a veteran of the Cuban War of
Independence (1895-1898). According to La Razón (Remedios), Manso served in the
Philippines in the Cazadores de la Habana battalion. Cited in El Ins de Paz (Mayagúez,
Puerto Rico), 8 October 1904.
108 REINALDO L. ROMAN

Manso emerged as a media sensation, albeit after overcoming sus-

picions and arrests of his own. Many in Havana’s well-heeled circles
extended warm welcomes and it was rumored that a few sought his
ministrations. Meanwhile, Mustelier was forced out of sight, as journal-
ists bid him sarcastic farewells. Why was Manso endorsed as a healer
fit for the new century, while Mustelier paid for his alleged crimes in
jail? Was it a matter of race? Of differences in beliefs and practices?
Or was there more to their stories?
I propose that the contrasts in the healers’ careers had to do with
the rise of a governing regime that aimed to do better than punish
misbelievers. Under this dispensation, Cuban authorities and the press
sought to alter the conditions that gave rise to ‘fanaticism’, thus clear-
ing the route to a modern and rational political order. Manso’s and
Mustelier’s fates attest to a struggle between the political rationality or
governmentahty of the day and the ‘subjugated knowledges’ that man-gods
could be said to represent.* Mustelier faced prosecution largely because
he threatened a state-sponsored regime of knowledge; Manso thrived
because his proposal did not register as a challenge. And yet, Manso
and Mustelier did not practice different Spintisms. ‘The two man-gods
were connected by a spiritual genealogy that reveals the black ancestry
of Manso’s reputedly European and scientific Spiritism and disputes
scholarly accounts that would distinguish too sharply between orthodox
doctrine and Creole belief, or pure and syncretistic practices. Such
distinctions replicate the logic of the man-gods’ contemporary critics,
who were eager to separate the alien, primitive and superstitious from
the Cuban, modern and scientific. ‘That Manso came to Spiritism via
Mustelier, rather than through the writings of Allan Kardec or Conan
Doyle, argues against teleological assumptions about who imparted
which cultural forms to whom. In this instance, Spiritism did not trickle
down from the white literate classes, nor did Afro-Cuban religion rise
from the bottom of the social hierarchy through capillary attraction.
To make these claims is not to minimize the significance of race in Cuba,
where emancipation was a recent achievement (1886) and black citizen-
ship nights remained subject to bitter disputes. Racial differences and the
specter of Africa were invoked in the efforts to dismantle Mustelier’s ministry.
Journalists and politicians, ready to extirpate the ‘cancerous’ growths
that ailed the Cuban body politic, often identified Afro-Cubans as agents

* Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 81.

 THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA 109

of contagion. El Figaro, a leading Havana journal, observed with irrita-

tion that Mustelier's “cult” revealed just how “deeply rooted superstition
and ignorance still [were] among the innocent peasants of Santiago's
sierras’.” Nevertheless, it would be an over-simplification to assert that
Mustelier was condemned solely because he was black, or that Manso
met with acclaim primarily on account of his color.
Mustelier’s long career suggests that the gatherings associated with
man-gods became more worrisome to journalists and politicians alike
in the uncertain political climate of the early 1900s. A report published
in La Opinión, an organ of Havana’s freethinkers, lends credence to the
notion that Mustelier may have been active for fifteen years before his
arrest. In 1887, the journal denounced a healer and ‘messiah’ known
as “San Hilarión”, Mustelier’s most widely known ttle. ‘Though crit-
cal, the weekly did not call for repression. Instead, 1t decried Cubans’
putative tendency to seek deliverance through ‘fantasies’ rather than
‘politics’.° Such musings may or may not have consoled a readership
composed of freethinking autonomists. At the time, however, there was
little to be done about wayward Spiritists. Spain’s campaign against
Spiritism lost some momentum in the late 1880s following the passage
of a liberal law of associations (1888) that allowed for the registration
of Spiritist groups. Although church and colonial officials continued
to denounce Spiritism and curanderismo, vernacular healing practices
that many regarded as quackery, neither clergymen nor functionaries
were eager to confront men like Mustelier. Repressive actions against
Spiritists were rare unless the ‘propagandists’ in question were also
involved in separatist agitation.’
By the time of the healer’s arrest in 1901, the political climate had
changed. Although freedom of religion had become the law of the land,
neither journalists nor government officials were content with anodyne
philosophizing. The end of the War of Independence (1895-1898)
and the occupation of the island by the United States intensified a
decades-old concern with the state of Cuban culture and the appeal
of African-derived practices.® Gestures and measures aimed at curbing

> The author described the region as ‘doubly-superstitious’ because it was populated
by ‘Frenchified’ (read Haitian) blacks. El Figaro (Havana), 1 September 1901.
* The article did not include biographical details. La Opimén (Havana), 10 October
1887.
” Spain allowed the expansion of the Cuban public sphere precisely to quell the
anti-colonial sentiments. See Sartorius, ‘Limits of Loyalty’, chapter 3.
* The preoccupation with the dangers of ‘Africanization’ was a defining feature
110 REINALDO L. ROMAN

‘superstition’ became political necessities. In the years between empires,

those who wanted to see an independent republic established were
under pressure to demonstrate that Cubans were fit to rule themselves,
something that American officials questioned. Cubans intent on temper-
ing the revolutionary egalitarianism of the insurgency against Spain,
and those who favored annexation to the United States, demanded an
end to superstition, too. They cited the persistence of barbarism as a
reason to postpone the inauguration of the republic and the extension
of suffrage rights to Afro-Cubans. Even Cubans who rejected such calls
as betrayals of the patriots’ cause agreed that the island was in desper-
ate need of moralizing reforms.’ Legally established Spiritist societies
and some Afro-Cuban sociedades de color maintained that education and
vice-control measures were needed to ensure the country’s progress and
the political integration of black and mulatto citizens.

Troublesome genealogies, or the trouble with syncretisms

To call attention to these matters of genealogy and governance is to

highlight the shortcomings of a scholarly literature that has embraced
what Palmié has called * “idealtypical” forms of belief and practice’
in the study of Afro-Cuban religion.’ Though Mustelier was in fact
black, there is no compelling reason to regard his practices as especially
‘African’, just as there is little to suggest that Manso’s were particu-
larly ‘European’. Although it may seem self-evident that Africanness
should not be deduced from black skin, nor whiteness confused with
Europeanness, there is a scholarship of African-derived religions that
seems to propose precisely that. Sociologist Roger Bastide offers a
particularly clear illustration of this tendency in The African Rehgions
of Brazil. While asserting that ‘it is possible in Brazil to be a Negro
without being African and, contrariwise, to be both white and African’,
Bastide—and many scholars concerned with religion in Cuba—have

of political debate by the 1870s, when Spanish propagandists fostered the fear that
independence would transform Cuba into another Haiti. The charge succeeded in
dividing Cuban insurgents because it exploited internal cleavages in their coalition. In
the late 1890s, with Cuba’s victory over Spain increasingly likely, conservative patriots
worried that ‘rustic’ black and mulatto army officers could take power in the nascent
republic. See Ferrer, /nsurgent Cuba, 93-94, 173-187.
9 Pérez, Cuba between Empires.
10 Personal communication, November 2000.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA 111

espoused essentializing understandings of the linkages between black-

ness and African culture. Clearly perturbed by what he perceived as
‘adulterated’ Afro-Brazilian religion, Bastide declared it impossible
for authentic blacks to take part in Umbanda, a Brazilian practice
influenced by Spiritism that he saw as a sign of the development of
a “‘semi-European ethnic identity’ among mulattoes and acculturated
blacks.'' Accounts of this sort obscure the history of things ‘African’ in
modern Cuba. In examining these man-gods one can see that ‘African’
was used to designate more than the race and practices of black slaves
and their descendants. ‘African’ was reified in legal, scholarly and
religious domains; it was a qualifier applied to undesirable, allegedly
anti-modern conduct and a marker indicating just how far freedom of
worship would extend.
The notion that man-gods like Mustelier and Manso were leaders of
syncretic cults that combined African and European components does
not take us far from Bastide’s analysis. After all, students of syncretism
have long sought to untangle the African and European ‘elements’
that went into the making of hybrid forms, as if these were stable and
homogeneous. As David Scott has observed, the study of syncretism
in the Caribbean has often has taken a ‘verificationist’ form.'* In order
to counter colonial assertions that posited the cultural dispossession
of Afro-Caribbean people, many scholars have called on history and
anthropology to confirm the existence of surviving African traditions.
My own account seeks to reveal the mestizo logic behind the custom-
ary story of Spiritism’s syncretization and diffusion, and aims to show
that, when dealing with man-gods, it is nearly impossible to discern
original strains. This should not be a surprise; as Jean-Loup Amselle
has proposed, the boundaries of a culture and its practices cannot be
determined independently ‘of the interrelationships existing among
different cultures, nor of the fixing of such cultures in writing by the
emergence of a particular form of state’.'°
The man-gods’ careers illuminate the operation of a machinery of
government concerned—as David Scott put it—with ‘disabling non
modern forms of life by dismantling their conditions’ to generate in
their place new conditions capable of producing ‘governing effects on

'! Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil, 28, 77.

12 Scott, Refashioning Futures, 107.
13 Amselle, Mestizo Logics, 33.
112 REINALDO L. ROMAN

conduct’.'* The actions of the man-gods’ critics were not intended

to dispose of problematic individuals. They had a different point of
application: to create political and intellectual domains—often called
“public opinion'—nscribed in the language of rights and dependent on
scientific disciplines that would banish suspect practices and knowledges
to the trash heap of progress. Allegedly backward elements of Cuban
society were expected to abandon ‘superstition’ by choice in favor
of rational understandings and productive behaviors. I do not mean
to suggest only that the categories that corralled the man-gods were
products of an infatuation with science, nor do I want to imply that
Mustelier and Manso’s practices were ‘traditional’ rather than ‘modern’.
That would be to discount the importance of virulent racism and to
distinguish categorically between modernizers and man-gods, as if the
latter represented vestiges from the past. Instead, I aim to show that as
the political rationality of government gained ground, Manso, Mustelier
and others could either accept or reject the position that experts and
critics assigned them, but they had to communicate in new codes. The
man-gods did not resurrect ancient languages; they made Spiritism—a
practice that was itself a product of nineteenth-century visions of
progress—their own. Their exchanges with the authorities produced a
perceptible feedback; though proponents of an often-suspect Spiritism,
Manso and Mustelier helped to constitute the reality of other discounted
knowledges, notably African ‘witchcraft’ or brweria. Spiritists, so-called
witches and wizards, and those who would denounce them transformed
brujería into a ‘moral artifact’, a tangible object that defined behaviors,
policies and discourses independent of belief.'? The man-gods’ critics,
though emphatic in their profession of disbelief, became observers of
ritual procedures and cataloguers of objects the better to distinguish
between the malformed practices of the ignorant and truly criminal
activities. Moreover, as I suggest by way of provocation, it appears
that some practitioners who fell under suspicion, including Mustelier,
saw themselves as extirpators of witchcraft. One might argue that they
aimed to heal ailments that the new dispensation conjured.
It must be noted that the Cuban republic did not introduce the polit-
cal rationality of government to the island; that was already in evidence
under Spanish rule, as one can see in Spain’s efforts to deal with man-

14 Scott, Refashioning Futures, 34.

'5 Fields, ‘Political Contingencies of Witchcraft’, 578.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA 113

gods in the 1880s. But Manso and Mustelier do reveal changes in the
workings of state power. The two healers underscore profound tensions
between the republic’s legal framework, which purported to guarantee
religious freedom, and a growing need to regulate conduct. Although
the outcome of this conflict might seem pre-ordained, the victory of
government was not definitive. ‘The ‘new God’ is not quite dead.

The man-god menace

The term ‘man-god’ is admittedly imprecise. In Mexico, it has been

used in reference to seventeenth-century indigenous messiahs and to
describe the popular canonization of nineteenth-century clergymen
taken to stand for the king of Spain. The term has also been applied
to the living saints that emerged from penitential communities in
the Brazilian backlands in the 1890s and 1900s. Unlike their Cuban
counterparts, several of these figures led peasant millenarian rebel-
lions with no clear connections to Spiritism. In the Cuban context,
however, the term man-god had a distinct double valence. Turn-
of-the century critics seized upon it to underscore the alleged delusions
of men like Mustelier. But there is evidence of other usages, too. For
that reason, I wnte of man-gods with a measure of self-consciousness,
preserving the term as a shorthand and setting aside for the moment
questions of who believed what in order to focus on the struggles sur-
rounding the label and its application.
Several decades before Mustelier and Manso rose to prominence, cure-
seekers in eastern Cuba used terms such as hombre dios when referring to
healers who led congregations that Victor Turner might have dubbed
‘drums of affliction’.'° Such groupings consisted of ailing and often
dispossessed men and women, including those caught in the tempest
of Cuba’s anti-colonial wars, who after healing their own maladies
were inducted into collectives that were summoned to treat others.
As with Turner’s cults, the evidence suggests that the ministrations of
man-gods could have politicizing effects, even if these were not always
revolutionary 1n orientation.
Whether they came by their titles through self-ascription or via the
accusations of their detractors, Manso and Mustelier did not hark back

16 Turner, The Drums of Affhction.

114 REINALDO L. ROMAN

to a distant and unenlightened past. The two healers built on recent

trends with currency throughout the wider Caribbean. Man-gods and
their female counterparts, often women associated with the Virgin
Mary, had been known throughout the Hispanic Caribbean for a quar-
ter of a century. In the 1880s, for instance, a woman named Rosario
Piedrahita roamed the Cuban province of Villa Clara, where peasants
marveled at her cures. Our Lady of Jiquiabo, as she was known, healed
by means of wet cloths or ‘hydrotherapeutic compresses’, a method
that Fernando Ortiz linked rather fancifully to ancient pagan practices
rather than Spiritism.'*
In 1899, as Puerto Ricans readied themselves for the arrival of the
century of progress, Elenita, who was believed to be the Virgin Mary
incarnate, appeared on a promontory deep in the eastern mountains of
that island. A few years later, José de los Santos Morales, often called
‘el Hombre-Dios’, preached his first ‘missions’ in northwestern Puerto
Rico, launching the Hermanos Cheos movement. Simuarly, in 1908 a
healer called Olivorio Mateo emerged in the Dominican Republic. In
this instance, more than a decade of intermittent persecution culminated
with a bloody massacre of the healer’s encampment that helped to trans-
form Mateo into Dios Olivorio."® Nor were figures of this sort restricted
to Hispanic societies. Following far-reaching revivals in Britain and the
United States, Jamaica saw a proliferation of evangelistic prophets in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although they were
not called man-gods, some, like Alexander Bedward and Leonard P.
Howell, two Revival leaders with a profound influence on Rastafan,
were known to heal and to intimate their own supra-human status."
It is surely no coincidence that the period of the man-gods’ ascen-
dancy throughout the region was framed by extraordinary outbreaks
of violence, an institutional void generated by a collapsing colonialism,
and multiple threats to the autonomy of rural peoples, especially those
residing in Cuba’s war-torn eastern region.” Scholars have associated

'? Ortiz, ‘La Virgen de Jiquiabo’, 34-39.

'8 Reyes, La Santa Montaña de San Lorenzo, Santaella Rivera, Historia de los Hermanos
Cheos and Lundius and Lundahl, Peasants and Religion.
13 Austin-Broos, Jamaica Genesis, 83, 87; Bastide, African Cwilizations in the New World,
166; and Hill, ‘Dread History’, 49.
“2 The conditions under which Mustelier and Manso emerged are described pol-
gnantly in Pérez, Lords of the Mountain. De la Fuente notes that Alto Songo was among
the municipalities most deeply affected by post-war land grabs; 70 to 90 percent of
independent farms were lost in a few years. De la Fuente, A Nation for All, 105-107.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA 115

conditions of this sort with religious revivals, the birth of new religions
and millennial expectation since the publication of Norman Cohn’s
classic The Pursuit of the Millennium in 1957. While my aim here is to
concentrate on legal and knowledge regimes rather than on the factors
that might help account for the emergence of man-gods, of which only
some were millenarians, I should note that I do not find the argument
linking man-gods to disasters wholly persuasive. It is difficult to describe
the period in question, which lasted several decades, as a protracted
crisis without stretching the meaning of the term. It is also possible to
find such figures during periods of relative calm.’
Though following in the footsteps of numerous predecessors, Manso
and Mustelier were not traditionalists. On the contrary, they were
innovative, even iconoclastic figures. Far from claiming the inheritance
of folk Catholicism, they presented themselves as practitioners of a
modern science-religion. Mustelier and Manso were healers, advocates
of collective moral transformations, and scientists, too. While trading
in esoterica, Spiritists denied the existence of miracles and cast their
treatments and otherworldly communications as ill understood, albeit
natural, events regulated by laws that could be deduced through experi-
mental observation.

Spiritism in insurgent and republican Cuba

Although most man-gods were spared martyrdom, from the vantage

point of the state and its supporters—notably journalists and police
officers—the rise of such figures could be cause for alarm. In 1886
Spanish authorities in Cuba, understandably vigilant when it came to
disruptions that could aid the separatist movement, commissioned a
confidential report on Spiritist activity in Oriente, where it was feared
that ‘fanaticism’ might lend itself to political ‘manipulations’. Among
other disturbing findings, the report revealed the presence of a man-god
in the vicinity of Mayari. José Pérez, ‘who takes on the functions of
Jesus Christ and is called the new God’, was assisted by Manuel Pérez,
a self-appointed pnest, and their two wives, described as ‘mediums’ in
the document.” Though they were not involved in the insurgency, Pérez

21 For critiques of the crisis and response model, see Reinaldo L. Roman, ‘Conjuring
Progress and Divinity’, 360-393, and Pessar, From Fanatics to Folks.
22 APS, Fondo GP Materia: Espiritismo, leg. 576, no. 2.
116 REINALDO L. ROMAN

and his followers were suspects by association. After all, Spinitists had
been active in the struggle to end Spanish domination and they were
among the most acerbic critics of the Catholic Church.”
Evidently, the state’s suspicions were not always unfounded; some
man-gods could spell revolutionary upheavals. An 1886 letter to
Oriente’s provincial governor justifying the imposition of fines on
Spiritist groups mentions a ‘new sect that appeared in Guantanamo
whose chief or sponsor was the mulatto Emilio Lay, entitled God[,] and
the black woman Dolores Aranquet[,] entitled the Virgin’. ‘The group
was said to regard the Afro-Cuban insurgent, General Antonio Maceo,
as ‘God’ or ‘messiah’, Spirit communications had reportedly alerted
the group to Maceo’s imminent return from exile. The information
had led the man-god to post sentries on a hillside overlooking the spot
where the general’s landfall was anticipated.”
Although Mustelier and Manso were not accused of promoting
insurrections, it is worth noting that Afro-Cuban leaders in particular
could arouse fear of racial conflagrations. In 1886, Oriente’s governor
received a letter (dated August 28) warning him that ‘in the jurisdictions
of Bijarú, Encajó, Barajaguá and Mayarí, Spiritist propaganda [had]
grown greatly among the people of the countryside, and especially
among the colored race, which 1t [seemed was] being prepared for
a race uprising”. The agents allegedly responsible for inspiring Afro-
Cubans were identified as returning exiles intent on re-launching an
anti-Spanish war propelled with “the push of all religions”.”
Although Spiritist meetings often violated the law of associations in
effect until 1888, when Spanish authorities intervened against man-gods
and other Spiritists, their actions were usually measured. ‘They dissolved
meetings, imposed fines and arrested ringleaders. Given the upheavals
of the day, such restraint is surprising. One would have expected the
military to wipe out such threats. And, in fact, there was Circular 243
of 3 August 1886 in which the Governor General ordered Spiritism
‘extirpated’ throughout the island following the murder of a Spiritist in
Holguín.* To the consternation of local officials, the murder coincided

“ Bermúdez has argued that although most Spiritist centers were not engaged in
sedition, Spiritists were well represented among exiled Cuban separatists. Bermúdez,
‘Notas para la historia del espiritismo en Guba”, 8.
“£ APS, Fondo GP, Materia: Espiritismo, leg. 576, no. 2.
9 APS, Fondo GP, Materia: Espiritismo, leg. 576, no. 2.
26 APS, Fondo GP, Materia: Espiritismo, leg. 576, no. 2.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA 117

with a public show of Spiritism-inspired ‘fanaticism’. Only days after

the killing, a group of black men and women dressed in folded sheets
walked in procession to Holguin’s cemetery, where they chanted,
kneeled and reportedly invoked the spint of a deceased relative. ‘The
participants also said that they were on route to the Virgin’s sanctuary
in El Cobre. Stil, mass arrests did not ensue. Only a handful of the
most ‘agitated’ pilgrims were arrested.”
To be sure, surveillance could be intense. Indeed, the report quoted
above was commissioned in the aftermath of the vigil in the cemetery.
But even the author of that report counseled patience. Though he
conceded that there was some nisk that religion would be manipulated
to political ends, Jefe Provincial Celestino Castellanos pronounced
Spiritism in most of Oriente Province ‘free of any tendency that
would constitute a danger to public tranquility or the interests of the
Government’. He cautioned that violent repression would be counter-
productive ‘since the victims would become martyrs or advanced spirits
according to them’.”®
Evidently, the concern with Spiritism and man-gods intensified with
republican rule. As constitutional guarantees were put in place, man-
gods came under increased scrutiny that was justified as an attempt to
secure the very nights of citizens. On 23 October 1903, Circular No.
149 was issued following a murder in Bayamo in which a member of
a ‘clandestine’ Spiritist association was implicated. ‘he authorities in
Havana asked for the names of the suspects and ordered the association
shut if it was found to be unregistered. Havana also reminded the local
authorities that the point of a second circular (dated 30 September 1903)
was precisely to ensure that all associations were in compliance with
the law of associations so that ‘immoral centers’ could be investigated.
Following inquiries into several centers, Bayamo’s police denounced an
illegal Spiritist gathering. Captain Mesa’s remarks illuminate the nature
of the state’s emerging approach to the regulation of religious conduct.
Mesa noted that ‘while it is true that the Constitution of the Republic
and other current precepts concerning meetings guarantee citizens
the right to congregate freely’, he believed that municipal authorities
should ‘tighten their surveillance’ of all Spiritist activities ‘so that this
right could be sufficiently guaranteed without serving as a pretext for

22 Tbid.
8 Tbid.
118 REINALDO L. ROMAN

the consummation of acts that by their nature constitute crimes’. Given

‘the state of ignorance or fanaticism of the congregation’, the captain
warned, ‘synotic [sic] experiments and magnetic practices’ could result
in ‘the repetition of scenes contrary to culture and civilization”.*
In spite of all the circulars, the status of Spiritism remained nearly
as uncertain as it had been under Spain. Spanish law had accorded
Catholicism the status of state religion and limited the practice of
competing faiths. But Spiritism itself had appeared to government
officials as an unruly amalgam of practices, only some of which were
objectionable. With the United States occupation and the subsequent
adoption of a liberal constitution, Spintist societies multiplied, as did
the Protestant missions whose work the new freedoms promoted. But
in a republic whose dominant discourses increasingly favored secular
mores and rhetorical attachment to rationality, Spiritism was tolerated
grudgingly. The science-religion occupied a marginal space between
respectable experimental disciplines and quackery. While Spiritists could
claim the cachet of an association with ant-colonial fervor, and even
the imprimatur of intellectuals like Fernando Ortiz, Spiritism was never
rid of the suspicion that many practitioners were profit-driven fakes.
This, along with issues of public order, contributed to the authorities’
reservations toward Mustelier and Manso.
Church, state and professional authorities continued to perceive
man-gods as menacing figures; to them, such healers were superstitious
revenants come to rouse the populace and embarrass the country before
the civilized world. Man-gods did violence to foundational categories,
muddling the lines between knowledge and nonsense, healers and
physicians, and superstition and faith. ‘These, of course, were the very
distinctions that legislation, infrastructure projects, hygiene programs,
Protestant evangelization, and public and missionary education were
calling into being at the time that Mustelier and Manso began to
capture headlines.
Scholars date the diffusion of Spiritism in Cuba to the 1860s, when
the newly systematized body of old and recently minted doctrines
arrived from the United States and Europe and began to propagate
in spite of legal prohibitions.” Initially, the ‘philosophy’, which upheld

2 APS, Fondo GP, Materia: Espiritismo, leg. 576, no. 7.

2% There is no monographic history of Cuban Spiritism. Bermúdez's articles remain
the most useful accounts.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA 119

the perfectibility of the human, spirit communication, multiple spheres

of existence, animal magnetism and non-allopathic healing, circulated
largely in the form of books and articles authored by Allan Kardec.
Kardec, a Frenchman with medical training who specialized in peda-
gogy, had long been attracted to the study of Mesmerism, clairvoy-
ance and related phenomena that other men of science were coming
to regard as fringe during the first half of the nineteenth century.”!
Nonetheless, Kardec insisted on the natural, physical causes of the
occurrences he investigated and eschewed supernatural ‘idealism’ in
favor of ‘positivism’. Under his influence, fashionable table-turning
and spirit-communications sessions were transformed into systematic
inquiries guided by what Kardec regarded as scientific methods. In the
course of these investigations, he gathered fifty notebooks containing
messages from enlightened souls. These spirits also revealed to Kardec
(born Léon Denizard Rivail in 1804) that Allan Kardec had been his
name in an earlier incarnation. In 1857 Kardec published Le livre des
espnis, a volume that codified the lessons of Spiritism in a question-
and-answer format with the ‘celestial brethren’ supplying the answers.
Though Kardec was not widely known in British or North American
Spiritualist circles, Le Livre des esprits, Qu'est-ce que le Spiritisme? (1859)
and L’Evangile selon de spintisme (1864) sold widely in translation in Latin
America, especially in Cuba, Brazil and Puerto Rico.*?
In Cuba, as elsewhere, Kardec’s marriage of science and spirituality
appealed to the privileged literate classes, especially those with liberal,
scientific and anti-clerical inclinations. By the 1880s, however, Spiritism
was flourishing and gaining a wider following. According to Armando
Andrés Bermudez, a split accompanied this popularization: two sorts
of Spiritism began to emerge in the last decades of the nineteenth cen-
tury. The first sort was anchored in cities, private salons and registered
‘centers’. Its practitioners favored experiments, communications and
philosophical discussions. ‘The second form of Spiritism emerged in the
countryside, attracting ‘people of a lower cultural level, more inclined
to employing material elements such as water, incense, bush leaves,
images and crosses, who practiced rites involving chants and collective
movements, sometimes of indubitable African [afrovde] influence”.* In

31 See The Encyclopedia of Religion, s.v. Kardecism”.

In 1944 bookstore owners in Puerto Rico reported selling more than 20,000 copies
of L'évangile. El Mundo (San Juan, Puerto Rico), 30 July 1944.
3 Bermúdez, “Notas para la historia del espiritismo”, 12.
120 REINALDO L. ROMAN

this case, practical concerns displaced icon-free séances; healing sessions

that drew from a variety of systems, including folk remedies, prevailed.*
Admittedly, the Guban man-gods—characters that Bermudez thought
shrouded in legend—had no direct precedent in Kardec’s teachings;
the Frenchman’s humanism never went that far. ‘Though he did pro-
pose that ‘transmigration’ or reincarnation offered a mechanism for
the gradual improvement of the spirit over the course of many lives,
Kardec differentiated between ‘advanced’ spirits and God.
Rather than confirming scholarly narratives that emphasize the
deviation of the man-god’s rural brand of Spiritism from Kardec’s
doctrines, Mustelier and Manso point at the shortcomings of the schol-
arly account of Spiritism’s diffusion and corruption.” Salon-Spiritism
and the more clinically inclined variety had more in common than it
appears at first glance.
Bermudez was neither the first nor the last scholar to maintain the
existence of two Spiritisms. Scholars of the standing of Fernando Ortiz
have also insisted on such distinctions. In his early work La filosofía penal
del estintismo (1915), Ortiz praised (true) Spiritists for their adhesion to
science and pronounced them superior to all other religious groups for
the primacy they accorded reason over faith. Later, however, Ortiz came
to dismiss Juan Manso as a throwback to the seventeenth century who
employed the “supernaturalist techniques” of Spain's miracle-makers.*
More recently, Elizabeth Carrillo and Minerva Rodríguez have argued
without much elaboration that Spiritism (and Pentecostalism) spread
among the rural poor and the marginal urban classes who were less
committed to Catholic orthodoxy and already influenced by syncretic
and Afro-Cuban beliefs, a pre-condition that may have made such
populations more receptive to the new traditions.”
Two objections may be raised to these accounts. ‘The first, as men-
tioned above, is that this scholarship preserves the very distinctions
that Cuban courts employed in the prosecution of man-gods in the
early 1900s. Reliance on this scandalously partial archive makes the

3+ Carrillo and Rodríguez, Pentecostalismo y espiritismo, 8-9.

35 The precise mechanisms of diffusion have not been explicated. Carrillo and
Rodríguez suggest that both Spiritism and Pentecostalism spread among the rural
poor and the marginal urban classes. These groups, they argue, were less commit-
ted to Catholic orthodoxy and already influenced by syncretistic beliefs. Carrillo and
Rodriguez, Pentecostalismo y espiritismo, 10.
© Oruz, La filosofía penal de los espintistas and Una pelea cubana contra los demomos, 592.
37 Carrillo and Rodríguez, Pentecostalismo y espiritismo, 10.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA 121

proposal of two distinct Spiritisms dubious. While this does not neces-
sarily invalidate the distinction itself, a close examination of the man-
god’s Spiritism shows that their faith was not rural and local, nor was
Kardec’s Spiritism entirely urban and free of syncretism. Mustelier
operated in one of the many ruined sugar estates that dotted the east-
ern landscape in the aftermath of the War of Independence, but his
ministry attracted people from a wider region, including residents of the
city of Santiago de Cuba. Moreover, the man-god’s influence reached
urban centers; dozens of Spiritist societies throughout Oriente’s cities,
ostensibly of the ‘scientific’ variety, bore the name of ‘San Hilarion’.
Manso, for his part, criss-crossed the island visiting both rural and urban
locales and garnered his greatest tnumphs in Havana, where he was
embraced both by the poor and by sectors of a liberal, middle-class
Spiritist movement that he helped revitalize. Science and magic, and
reason and superstition, already racialized categones in the dominant
discourse, followed the Cuban pattern of race relations, ‘miscegenat-
ing’ in spite of the authorities’ efforts to ensure the purity of racial,
analytical and juridical categories.
Further, it is necessary to recall that Spiritism was a hybrid well before
it arrived in the Cuban countryside. It emerged in embryonic form in
New England, shortly after the Civil War, and grew popular among
abolitionists and religious non-conformists, and especially those seeking
to communicate with the spirits of the dead, a population whose num-
bers had grown as a result of war and disease. As Spiritism expanded,
it became a complex montage of scientific findings, universalized
Christian tenets, Swedenborgian philosophy, Asian notions spied darkly
through an Orientalist lens and Mesmerism. Though reifying ‘science’
and ‘progress’ and profoundly Eurocentric in its evolutionary schema,
Spiritism had a critical bite. Like theosophy, Spiritism could be seen
as belonging ‘within the archives of dissenting western imagination’.*®
Practitioners invaded the terrain of medical science and astronomy,
corroded the natural-supernatural divide, multiplied the spheres of life,
disaggregated the soul into multiple components, and denied scientific
‘materialism’. ‘These were qualities that the man-gods would deploy in
proposing their rejected knowledges and therapeutics.
It is impossible to ascertain with precision the number of Spiritists or
even Spiritist societies in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cuba.

8 Nandy and Visvanathan, ‘Modern Medicine and Its Non-modern Critics’, 159.
122 REINALDO L. ROMÁN

Nonetheless, it is possible to offer some sense of the growth of Spiritism

in Oriente, where it predated the man-god’s ministry by decades. In
August 1886 an observer noted that in barrio Bruni, located between
Mayari and Songo, “Spiritist meetings among people of color [were]
things of old”. In October of the same year, Celestino Castellanos
found that Spiritist meetings in Songo, Mayari, Nipe and Santiago
involved men, women and children gathered in groups of approximately
twenty persons. Although most participants were reportedly illiterate,
during the meetings prayers were read from a book called the Diccionario
espritista in order to ‘remedy their physical and moral ailments’.
Spiritism continued to prosper even after Mustelier’s arrest. An inven-
tory by provincial government reflects that there were one hundred and
sixty-nine legally constituted societies in eastern Cuba alone during the
first decades of the twentieth century.*® Forty-one—including one called
Los Hermanos de la Fé de San Hilarion—were located in Santiago
de Cuba; twenty-four had their headquarters in Bayamo, twenty-two
in Manzanillo and thirteen in Holguin. Alto Songo, the town closest to
Mustelier’s home, hosted three Spiritist groups.*'

An ailing man-god in Alto Songo

After four months of intermittent surveillance, on 10 August 1901 Col.

Juan Vaillant and a group of rural guardsmen arrested sixty-six-year-old
healer Hilario Mustelier Garzon.*” Mustelier was detained at his home
in El Quemado, a coffee and cacao farm established on land where the
Jagua Baralt sugar mill had once stood, near the town of Alto Songo.
He was taken to the hospital in Santiago de Cuba and placed in a cell
in the psychiatric ward, a move that crystallized the difference between
state-supported medical practices, capable of mobilizing the machinery
of discipline, and the ministrations of the man-gods. As the press would
have 1t, Mustelier appeared deranged, but enough doubts lingered as

22 APS, Fondo GP, Materia: Espiritismo, leg. 576, no. 2.

* APS, Fondo GP, Materia: Sociedades Espiritistas, leg. 2490, no. 1. The list is not
dated, but accompanying documents indicate that it was compiled between 1900 and
1906.
*' The listing does not mention Mustelier’s ‘Fraternal San Hilarión”, which was
founded in October 1901, but which seems to have disbanded by the time of the
inventory.
* Bacardi y Moreau, Crónicas de Santiago de Cuba, 267-268.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA 123

to his condition to warrant a period of observation. Physicians were

charged with determining whether the healer was truly an enagenado,
someone deprived of sense and judgment by reason of mental illness,
or a run-of-the-mill confidence man.*”
The suspicions that weighed against Mustelier in 1901 were evidently
weighty, but they were not perceived as ponderous enough to require
immediate repression. Songo’s mayor, J. Arias, charged that Mustelier
had ‘the lowly classes in constant movement, making them believe
in frauds and powers that he [said] God [had] conferred upon him’.
For the mayor the ‘existence of such an individual [lacked] any great
importance of itself’. His concern was that groups of as many as four
hundred ‘persons of all classes’ were gathering regularly around the
man’s house. Such mobilizations constituted a threat to ‘public order’,
particularly at a tme when the eastern countryside grew more ungov-
ernable by the day. Bandits, old insurgents, political bosses and others
vied with the central government for authority. In this context, the
man-god’s actions amounted to a usurpation of the power to convene
the citizenry.
Although the mayor and the courts appeared unaware of it, the trial
records list more than a few veterans among Mustelier’s associates. Had
this been known, it surely would have added urgency to the authoni-
ties’ worries; memories of uprisings by military bosses were fresh in
eastern Cuba. Leoncio ‘Tamayo, the secretary of Mustelier’s Fraternal
San Hilarion, had been a lieutenant with a national regiment of unas-
sioned officers. Daniel Vera, a healing medium who assisted Mustelier,
was also a mambi; he had been second sergeant in Santiago’s Moncada
infantry regiment. Other veterans in the healing cult included Manuel
Jiménez, a Manzanillo-born man who testified to his ‘blind faith’ in the
man-god, and apparently the Dios Nuevo himself. In 1902, Mustelier
applied for a soldier’s pension. Like many others of his social standing,
Mustelier was unable to document his participation in the war and his
request was denied.*

* El Figaro, 1 September 1901.

* APS, Fondo GP, Materia: Sociedades Espiritistas, leg. 2490, no. 2. See also the
“Cuban Liberation Army 1895-1898 Database’ online at http://www.cubagenweb.
org/mil/mambi/index.htm. The information regarding Hilario Mustelier Garzón is
drawn from a card found at the ANC in a catalog to the Fondo Ejército Libertador.
The card does not offer the dates of service but it notes correctly that Mustelier was
born in Santiago de Cuba, the son of Antonio and Escolastica, and that he was 67
124 REINALDO L. ROMÁN

The motivations behind Mustelier’s confinement to a medical facil-

ity were scarcely altruistic. His detention in a hospital in leu of a jail
allowed the authorities to preserve order in spite of legal strictures that
purported to guarantee freedom of religion. However, Mustelier’s men-
tal health examination was more than an expedient rationale for deten-
tion. The diagnostic exercise served to redefine policing as a positive,
scientific enterprise, a project that rested partly on the experts’ ability
to make distinctions regarding the etiology of criminal behavior.
In previous months, Arias had attempted to dissuade the healer
through intimidation. When those efforts failed, he resolved to arrest
Mustelier. In early April 1901, however, Governor Leonardo Rus stayed
Arias’s hand. ‘As long as the meetings in the home of the individual
popularly called “El Dios Nuevo” do not disturb public order and moral-
ity’, the governor pronounced, ‘they cannot be prevented’.* Central
government, distant from the difficulties of keeping the peace, could aim
to abide by the letter of the law. At the local level, however, the quest
for an expedient resolution continued. An alternative to the governor’s
wait-and-see strategy became available when attorney Nicolas Nin y
Valiente filed a complaint against Mustelier, questioning the healer’s
competence and thereby recruiting medicine as a direct instrument
of state power. Medical intervention removed the man-god from the
relatively protected terrain of religion, and pathologized the menace
he presented in a manner that was consistent with the government
of conduct: if ‘fanaticism’ was in fact a malady, it could be treated.
Modern medical technology could separate the human from the divine,
as it would conjoined twins.
The documents do not indicate the attorney’s motivations for filing
his suit nor do they state how long Mustelier was detained in the hos-
pital. It is certain, however, that the man-god was freed before the end
of September 1902 because a new set of charges was brought against
him then. Although the regulations governing the confinement of the
legally insane were in flux during this period, a government aiming to
uphold the rule of law was forced to face the facts.*° The healer may

years of age. Mustelier claimed to have served in Ist Corp of the Liberation Army. I
am grateful to Marial Iglesias for calling my attention to this source.
45 APS, Fondo GP, Materia: Espiritismo, leg. 576, no. 5.
+5 Several clarifications of the procedures to be followed in cases of insanity were
issued around this time. APS, Fondo GP, Materia: Dementes, leg. 449, no. 2.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA 125

have been eccentric, but even the state’s doctors had to concede that
he was far from insane.”
Mustelier’s detention at the hospital sufficed of itself to satisfy some
critics, who were mindful of the fact that a failure to incarcerate him
for good did not necessarily entail a breakdown in the operation of
power. After all, the point was not simply to punish a particular man
for an all-too-common set of infractions or even to discourage imita-
tors by way of exemplary punishments; the goal was to re-arrange the
conditions that made Mustelier’s challenge possible. In the eyes of his
adversaries, the law and fhe medical profession had desecrated the
man-god and neutralized the threat. Just as importantly, in curbing
Mustelier and his followers, some journalists felt that the conditions for
economic prosperity had been safeguarded, too. ‘The man-god would
no longer distract farmers and laborers from their tasks. ‘The farm in El
Quemado and its occupants could assume their proper functions after
decades of disruptions. It is in this context that one can understand
why El Figaro found early cause for celebration in the juxtaposition of
two photographs. The first showed Mustelier sitting and the other his
empty hospital cell: ‘Dear readers, there you have him in his cell.... until
the law transforms him to his human condition, and he returns to his
old ranch, to his vegetable plot, to his coffee plants, forgotten of men
and released from the hand of God'.*
The press was more zealous and less equivocating in its denun-
ciations than the mayor and the governor. Journalists charged that
Mustelier encouraged superstition and subjected those who came to
him to barbaric treatments, which in this case reportedly included the
rather extraordinary recourse of beating patients to exorcise demons.*”
Mustelier was said to head a ‘miracle-making cult’, to have established
a temple, to harbor messianic pretensions and to threaten the peace.
The last imputation found some confirmation during the man-god’s
arrest, when the Rural Guard felt compelled to fire their weapons in
the air to avert a niot of the pilgrims congregated around his residence.
According to some reports, by the time of the arrest the crowds had

*? On June 27, the governor had already instructed Arias to ascertain whether
the patient had any relatives who might take responsibility for him. APS, Fondo GP,
Materia: Sociedades espiritistas, leg. 2490, no. 2.
*8 El Fígaro, 8 September 1901.
* If true, this practice had long been known to Cubans; Catholic priests resorted to
similar measures when conducting exorcisms. Ortiz, Una pelea cubana contra los demomos,
158.
126 REINALDO L. ROMAN

reached as many as one thousand pilgrims. ‘The press was outraged and
castigated local authorities for their apparent inaction until Alto Songo’s
court decided to intervene.”

Practice and malpractice at San Hilanién’s temple

The testimony of Jacinto Duverger, the man who charged Mustelier with
assault during a healing session, and statements from several unnamed
sources, along with a healthy dose of speculation, hint at the nature and
extent of activities in El Quemado and give some sense of the mores
that regulated them. In hindsight, the scale of the enterprise figures
among its most striking features. Mustelier’s compound surpassed those
established by other man-gods and healers.” The complex had the
makings of a homegrown sanatorium, complete with multiple dwell-
ings, a temple, prayer chapels and convalescence quarters (barracones de
convalecencia) where cure-seekers would stay for as long as twenty days
while undergoing treatment. The site struck critics as a travesty; some
denounced it as a ‘grotesque Lourdes’ consecrated to the profit of a
deified Mustelier, which after all seemed to be the implication behind
titles such as Papa Hilarion, San Hilarion and Dios Nuevo. Mustelier’s
status was far from clear, however. ‘The layering of names and honors
suggests that the man-god may have been different things to different
people. The man-god offered no synthesis; Mustelier was filled with
accretions held in tension. Mustelier, in any case, reported the names
by which he was known and appeared to enjoy the praise, but he did
not claim divinity.
Duverger’s account suggests that Mustelier viewed some of his pro-
cedures as treatments for brweria, the very malady that the authorities
invoked and sought to counter with their raids on temples, the prosecu-
tion of alleged child-murderers, and the arrest of healers like Mustelier
himself.°? Duverger, a seventy-five-year-old Afro-Cuban man, claimed

°° I do not mean to imply that the press and the state were indistinguishable. Rather,
I want to suggest that the two operated dialectically to produce knowledge about
‘superstition’ and the ‘primitive’.
2 San Hilarión's temple was unusual, but it was not unique. An October 1903
telegram mentions a healer named Juana Pérez. Her home compound in Arroyo
Blanco, Bayamo, included fourteen ‘ranchos’. APS, Fondo GP, Materia: Espiritismo,
leg. 576, no. 7.
°2 For two penetrating accounts of the construction of brujería, see Palmié, Wizards
and Scientists, 201-259, and Bronfman, Measures of Equality, 37-66.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA 127

that Mustelier had beaten him after exclaiming “You is wizard’, or “Tu
son brujo’. If true, this suggests that brweria as a category had found
a measure of acceptance beyond the legal code, the writings of intel-
lectuals and the pronouncements of the Church. Secondly, such usage
indicates that man-gods proposed their own solutions to witchcraft
without relying on the state’s procedures.
A handful of surveillance reports support the notion that Mustelier’s
followers saw themselves as enemies of witches and wizards. In
September and October 1908, a rural guardsman from Palma Soriano
investigated meetings that Juan Rivery, Domingo Duvalón, head of the
Centro Espiritual Público in Dos Caminos, and an unidentified ‘relative
of the new god that was around Songo’ conducted in a coffee estate
named La Fe. The guardsman concluded that the meeting dealt only
with Spiritism and noted that a Cristino Carrion was expelled “because
those gathered there regarded him a wizard’.””
The nature of Mustelier’s therapeutics and the inspiration behind what
practitioners called ‘San Hilarion’s temple’ would have remained elusive
if it were not for some fifteen witness accounts gathered in the course
of Mustelier’s second trial. It is from these documents, which included
transcripts of Mustelier’s depositions, that one can establish that the
healer and his followers were indeed esfuntistas; that Mustelier’s alleged
deification was far from clear-cut; and that the temple was connected to
a registered Spiritist society. Of the three findings, only the last one can
be called a surprise. That Mustelier should have been associated with
an organization that began operating with legal authority after the first
charges were brought against him challenges the assumption that heal-
ing Spiritism was less formalized than its salon counterpart, and indeed
complicates the distinction between the two.”* It also indicates that, even
when repressive, the political logic of governmentality demanded that
rejected knowledges and practices be tolerated if presented under con-
ditions that safeguarded the distinction between the rational and hence
legal and the primitive and hence illegal.
Rather than impugning a specific act, in the second trial the pros-
ecution charged Mustelier with usurpación de funciones, a crime involving
the illegal practice of a profession requiring a degree or a license. ‘The

33 APS, Fondo GP, Materia: Espiritismo, leg. 576, no. 9.

5 The Fraternal's application for registration as an association was granted on 22
November 1901. Accompanying records identify Mustelier as director. APS, Fondo GP,
Materia: Sociedades Espintistas, leg. 2490, no. 2.
128 REINALDO L. ROMAN

indictment 6 September 1902 maintained that Mustelier had violated

articles 339 and 340 of the Penal Code and had ‘attributed himself
the title of professor of medicine and had practiced....acts appropri-
ate to that profession without legal title’. Moreover, he was accused of
“usurping the character of a religious minister”. Under the new regime,
secular as 1t was, pastoral duties were reserved for experts recognized
as such by their respective churches and the state.
The prosecutor’s efforts to show that Mustelier issued prescriptions
for medicines or other concoctions, and that he charged for his services,
ran into multiple obstacles. Witnesses denied such contentions unani-
mously. The second count also proved difficult to substantiate. The
prosecution was unable to determine which religion Mustelier meant
to usurp and was forced to drop the charge in an amended indictment.
Ironically, the very ‘admixtures’ that had made Spiritism contemptible
in the eyes of the authorities also made it difficult to criminalize. The
prosecutor had been inclined to believe that the practices in question
were distortions of Catholicism because the ‘improvised’ altar in the
temple was ‘composed of images of the Catholic cult’. Mustelier,
however, healed by means of magnetic ‘passes’, the recitation of
what the lawyers called “made-up prayers’, and the administration of
‘unknown medications’, none of which had precedents in Catholic
liturgy. Other objects found in the temple remained inscrutable as
far as the authorities were concerned. A large table had been located
inside. On this surface, there were a wooden cross adorned with flowers
and several images depicting Christ’s and Mary’s Sacred Hearts, the
Mystery of the Trinity and the Crucifixion. But a sign reading “Gloria
a San Hilarión” also hung over the “Catholic” objects. In addition, the
authorities confiscated a standard bearing an inscription in golden let-
tering: “La Concepción de Liguaní, E E y C. Gloria a nuestro padre
San Hilarión'.*
Given the fate of many other practitioners of suspect religions, it 1s
remarkable that Mustelier was never given the defamatory and poten-
tially deadly name of bruwjo. Indeed, this appears particularly surprising
if one considers that only two years later, in the wake of the violent
persecution that followed the nina Zoila case, a number of newspapers

5 ANC, Audiencia de Santiago de Cuba, leg. 13, no. 1.

°° This appears to be an acronym for “Fe, Esperanza, y Caridad”, or “Faith, Hope,
and Charity”, a Spiritist maxim.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA 129

condemned the whole of Spintism as nothing more than poorly dis-

guised witchcraft.” Mustelier’s relative good fortune in avoiding that
pernicious label may well have been connected to the inventory of
confiscated items. ‘The absence of the ritual accoutrements of what the
authorities called witchcraft is notable; there were no drums, ‘idols’ or
vessels with decomposing offerings. As Bronfman has shown, republi-
can authorities relied on such artifacts to circumvent article 26 of the
constitution, which guaranteed freedom of worship. Prosecutors and
police collected decaying matter as evidence of violations of the sanitary
code, which became an important instrument for the criminalization
of witchcraft. Following confiscation, these artifacts were dispatched on
a nomadic journey that took them from courts to a newly established
museum at the University of Havana. Once there, the practitioners
of anthropological and criminological science put them to use in the
construction of evolutionary racial differences, a knowledge that limited
the prospects for full Afro-Cuban citizenship.”
These complications not withstanding, Mustelier’s prosecutors forged
ahead. Much of the questioning in the case was directed precisely at
establishing whether Mustelier had presented himself as a divinity, or
had led others to believe that he held religious office. Ultimately, the
point was to remove the hyphen from the man-god dyad in order to
condemn Mustelier as a false god.
The most damning testimony was the defendant’s own. Indeed,
Mustelier appeared to flaunt his transgressions. During his first inter-
view, he asserted ‘that he practiced as physician in the temple that
he has in his residence and that he [was] authorized to do so by the
title that he presented before the court’. Mustelier even presented the
court with a licensing document in support of his claims.” He also
admitted that he prescribed and supplied medicines to his patients,
and conceded that he accepted payments, which contradicted earlier
statements. During a second appearance before the court, Mustelier
added that he employed the fees in providing lighting for the temple.
In response to questions, he replied with some bravado that he had
received no university training, since ‘his healing science [came] from

37 See, for instance, La Lucha (Havana) 14 December 1904.

8 Bronfman, Measures of Equality, 17-36.
°° The surviving records do not include any licensing documents.
130 REINALDO L. ROMAN

above’. He then observed that his cures were ‘so miraculous that he
was known as San Hilarión Dios Nuevo”.
From a legal standpoint, Mustelier's statements were highly compro-
mising. Yet, rather than suggesting a self-destructive will, Mustelier’s
remarks hinted that the logic of the man-god was incommensura-
ble with reasons of state. Certainly when considered in light of the
information provided by other witnesses, a less incriminating picture
emerges. Narciso Palacios, a tavern-keeper who resided in El Quemado,
revealed that the medications of which the healer spoke were ‘invisible
medicines’ rather than material substances. His testimony also showed
that Mustelier’s manipulations were not beatings but pases, the hand
motions that Spiritists everywhere employed to activate and direct the
universal fluid. According to the witnesses, the temple was a Spiritist
center, where ‘the spiritual religion was professed’. A Spiritist society
called Fraternal San Hilarión met there regularly and some of the
members, who also had healing talents, assisted Mustelier with his
work.” It was this organization that provided the funds for the support
of the complex.
The by-laws described the Fraternal as a ‘society for psychological
studies”. Like all so-called ‘scientific’ Spiritist organizations, its given
purpose was ‘to study all phenomena related to communication between
Spirits, between spirits and men, and the laws that regulate these mani-
festations and our moral, physical, historical and psychological beliefs’.
Except for its name nothing in the document suggested a connection
to the defendant or any other healer.*!
Given that neither medicines nor payments were involved, and that
no proof of religious misrepresentation was forthcoming, the court
determined that ‘the acts of charlatanism’ that the defendant had
committed ‘were not particular to any profession, nor of the sort that
could be practiced with an official title’. Because of its invisibility and
because of its disconnection from the official economy, the knowledge
of the man-god lay outside the spheres of professional expertise. Once
more, the prosecution was unable to secure a conviction. Mustelier
was released again in late October 1902. In its sentencing document,
the court manifested its frustration, regretting that ‘not all actions that
[were] repugnant to culture and [could lend] stimulus to superstition’

60 APS, Fondo GP, Materia: Sociedades Espiritistas, leg. 2490 no. 1.

®' ANC, Audiencia de Santiago de Cuba, leg. 13, no. 1.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA 131

were ‘sanctioned by the Penal Code’. These failures expose the distance
that separated the state’s will to regulate from its incapacity to define
all acts of malfeasance in a manner consistent with a hegemonic vision
of progress that required both the banishment of the primitive and
religious freedom. The same legal code that protected and defined
expert competence and in whose name the state acted also enshrined a
principle of tolerance that applied to Protestantism, a modern religion
for modern citizens, as well as to less respectable faiths.”
Nevertheless, the prosecution’s efforts against Mustelier must not be
counted as total failures. Medicine provided a temporary corrective. And
prosecution did force the man-god’s followers to regularize their status
before the law. Registration as a society offered members some protec-
tions, but it also exposed them to official scrutiny. The registration of
Fraternal San Hilarion gave the authorities a means for overcoming the
stonewalling of the witnesses. ‘The society’s by-laws allowed the court to
identify participants who may have remained anonymous otherwise.
Identification of society members, however, gave the court no hold
on the hundreds of anonymous pilgrims and cure-seekers who visited
the temple or those who made their homes within the compound.”
In its closing statement, the court contented itself with the notion that
Mustelier’s followers were mostly ‘peasants from the vicinity’, presum-
ably black, ‘who grew in number thanks to all of those who because
of ignorance, superstition or simple curiosity, found it desirable to
appear before the defendant.’ But soon there were other man-gods who
impugned the court’s assertions and robbed authorities of whatever
comfort they had derived from the belief that man-gods were a thing
of the past restricted to the backward countryside.

Juan Manso, man-god and media cynosure

After months of itinerant preaching and healing throughout eastern

Cuba, Juan Manso arrived in Havana in the summer of 1905. His grow-
ing popularity, manifest in the size of the crowds gathering wherever he

02 Pérez has argued that Protestantism offered Cubans ‘a way to cope in the new order
of things’. Protestantism ‘suggested modernity and progress’. Pérez, Essays on Cuban
History, 54, 56.
% The authorities identified a thirty-seven year-old woman named Cristina Lao Mar-
rero as a cure-seeker who had taken up residence in a room adjacent to the temple.
ANG, Audiencia de Santiago de Cuba, leg. 13, no. 1.
132 REINALDO L. ROMAN

appeared, had been punctuated by several arrests. In late June, shortly

before his arrival in the capital, Manso had served one month’s hard
labor in Matanzas for healing a woman. According to the Spiritist press
in Puerto Rico, which took a keen interest in Manso’s activities, Manso
was the victim of a provincial governor, whose interests he threatened.
The governor was said to own a drug store and his brother was report-
edly a physician. Earlier, Manso also had been incarcerated in Yaguajay
under an unspecified set of charges.”
Little in Manso’s experience hinted at the scale of his coming suc-
cess or at his transformation into the media’s cynosure. Nonetheless,
this rather ascetic healer soon attracted the attention of crowds, the
press and society figures alike. In July 1905 Manso met with a group
of Havana's “fat cats”. The gathering included people of such note as
the editor of El Mundo, Próspero Pichardo, Manuel Sobrado, a repre-
sentative to the Cámara de Delegados, María González, a well-known
theosophist, and Dr. Laime, a physician of renown. They, along with
reports crediting Manso with miraculous cures, helped put an end to
the legal troubles that had plagued the healer.” Indeed, by August
1905 thousands of people—reportedly of all classes and colors—were
‘congregating in La Loma de San Juan in the neighborhood of El Cerro
to listen to his speeches on Spintist doctrine and to receive prayers,
advice and ‘magnetized’ water. Not only did the authorities allow these
congregations to take place with minimal interference, but Manso was
also permitted to build a temple on land donated by two followers.”
Even the mainstream press—so adamant in its condemnation of
Mustelier—warmed up to the new man-god. La Lucha described
Manso as a ‘humble and kind Castilian farmer, who [had] carried out
some apparently amazing cures in the interior of the Republic’, which
in turn had moved a ‘credulous public’ to call him “Hombre-Dios”.
Manso, the daily noted, was surrounded by admirers now, but he had
been the victim of ‘judicial persecution’ in Matanzas even though
he did not prescribe any medications or charge for his services. In a
curious if unintentional echo of the Spinitist dictum, La Lucha’s writer
denied that anything supernatural was behind Manso’s talents and
concluded with an endorsement such as Mustelier never received. ‘In

Fl Ins de Paz (Mayagúez, Puerto Rico), 8 October 1904 and 25 June 1905.
65 El Ins de Paz, 5 August 1905.
© Fl Ins de Paz, 22 July and 19 August 1905, and La Lucha, 2 July 1906.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA 133

a free country’, the journalist editorialized, ‘where the President of the

Republic has received in [his] Palace the celebrated North-American
who calls himself the Prophet Elias, who aims at nothing less than
to found a new religion, it would be a true injustice to imprison the
harmless Juan Manso. LA LUCHA has investigated all actions of the
so-called Hombre-Dios and has confirmed many of his cures”.* On
this occasion, the republic and 1ts knowledge systems would be affirmed
in the assertion of religious freedom rather than in the prosecution of
fraud. Such largesse, of course, responded to the perception that this
particular man-god was ‘harmless’.
The journalists’ good will and commitment to the principle of reli-
gious freedom were tested days later, when a zealous agent concerned
with what he viewed as an affront to ‘the culture of any civilized
country”, arrested Manso for practicing medicine illegally.** La Lucha
derided the official as an ignorant gualdia—a play on the word guardia,
or guardsman, that suggested lack of instruction by mimicking ‘popu-
lar’ and ‘black’ speech patterns—and later publicized the news of the
dismissal of the charges against the Hombre Dios. El Mundo, for its
part, reacted by publishing an editorial and a series of letters detailing
Manso’s cures and defending him in the name of Cuba’s democratic
constitution.”
Even Manuel Marquez Sterling, the celebrated journalist who had
penned one of El Figaro’s damning articles on Mustelier, softened his
rhetoric when confronted with the new man-god, whose ministrations
he had observed. While Mustelier had been described as an enemy
of reason for violating the integrity of science, Marquez Sterling now
congratulated Manso precisely for ‘opening up’ the discipline. ‘The
“triumph”, he wrote, ‘of the poor and humble little soldier dressed like
Jesus lies in that...in order to study the recesses of his Paradise... critics
need to open up science, to seek its counsel, to listen to it with fixed
attention, and explain his successes, for he does have some, [whether]
real or produced through suggestion”.”
Manso’s eventual success 1n avoiding further prosecution 1n spite of
his high-profile activity, and his good relations with the press and some

°’ I have been unable to ascertain the identity of Prophet Elias. La Lucha, 7 July
1905.
68 El Iris de Paz, 22 July 1905.
2 La Lucha, 8 July 1905 and El Mundo (Havana), 5 July 1905.
” El Figaro, 30 July 1905.
134 REINALDO L. ROMAN

official sectors, pose a number of intriguing questions if one considers

Mustelier’s fate only three years earlier. Why was Manso less threatening
an interloper into the public sphere? Manso was tolerable because his
proposals, though ‘naive’, could be reconciled with scientific orthodoxy
and the political rationality of government. If the healer obfuscated
the boundaries of faith and science, he did so without challenging an
evolutionary scheme that made scientific reason the capstone of human
achievement. Moreover, Manso defused the menace implicit in every
man-god by appearing to reduce the title hombre dios to an unsolicited
honorific. Manso and those who spoke in his name emphasized that
his cures supplemented, rather than supplanted, professional medical
treatments. Manso, it was said, healed those whom doctors could not
treat, especially those who suffered from mental illness or ‘nervous’ dis-
orders.” Manso presented himself as a moral crusader and emphasized
that physical cures followed spiritual regeneration. He acknowledged
that faith was a crucial component of his therapeutics. For instance,
during his interview with Havana’s fat cats, one of those in attendance
asked Manso to cure his eyes. ‘The man-god replied that he was not
a curandero (healer), and added that if the will of the Father allowed
it, and the patient himself willed it, he would heal himself. ‘The most
important thing, Manso affirmed, was “to heal the spirit”.”*
Mustelier was never able to fend off the suspicion that he headed a
cult. Manso disavowed messianism explicitly. During a Sunday gather-
ing in October of 1905, two priests approached Manso and asked if
he was the messiah they awaited. Manso replied that God’s messenger
had come long ago and had not been recognized. He was nothing
more than a man.”
Race played a role in making the second man-god appear more
respectable and less ‘backward’ than the first. The fact that Manso
was white, a Spaniard born in Avila, conferred no special authority
on him, but it shielded him from the suspicions that fell on blacks and
their religious practices during this period. ‘The portrayal of Mustelier
as a charlatan or a self-deluded man was consistent with the view that
blacks were prone to fanaticism and other pathologies of ratiocination.
However, race alone does not explain why Mustelier was condemned

" La Lucha, 7 July 1905.

” El Ins de Paz, 5 August 1905.
13 El Iris de Paz, 14 October 1905.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA 135

or why Manso was spared. The authorities and the press had been
known to denounce whites who engaged in practices such as divination,
card-reading and brujería. 1f his proposal had been incompatible with
the teleology of progress, Manso could have been condemned as one
of those whites who had fallen victim to African-inspired superstitions.
It was ultmately Manso's willingness to abide by his place within the
institutionalized system of knowledge that made him tolerable.
In his speeches, Manso took care to distance himself from false
Spiritists and from brujos, a feat that Mustelier was never able to accom-
plish in spite of his anti-witchcraft treatments. Manso denounced those
Spiritists who, like Catholics, allowed pecuniary interests to enter their
practices. Moreover, he argued against the use of charms and other
protections as counterproductive. These declarations played well with
authorities and journalists. La Lucha, for instance, publicized Manso’s
tirades against mediums that took advantage of those ‘who had not
been initiated in the scientific theories of Spiritism’.’* In Manso’s lips,
such accusations served two functions: they condemned anew those
whom the courts had found lable for their practices, and they drove
home the differences between the scientifically inclined, involuntary
man-god and those who were rightfully prosecuted.
Ironically, Manso’s therapeutics replicated much of what had been
found objectionable in Mustelier’s healing repertory. He treated patients
by prescribing prayers, water magnetized by ‘passes’ and early morning
baths, all familiar techniques from the Spiritist medicine bag.” Indeed,
Manso’s regime derived directly from Mustelier’s techniques. During
an interview with a Puerto Rican reporter in Havana, Manso gave an
account of his initiation in 1903. According to the narrative, Manso’s
healing talent first manifested itself during a session at Mustelier’s com-
pound in El Quemado. It was there that he acquired the rudiments of
Spiritist doctrine. As Manso told it, he cured a feverish person after only
one treatment. ‘Afterwards’, he said, ‘and without my wanting to work

1% Tbid.
15 Manso is said to have seen as many as two hundred patients every morning.
Most were treated in Esteban Parodi’s guesthouse on #87 Prado St., where Manso
resided. By the time the healer moved to La Loma de San Juan, his services were in
such demand that only collective treatments were practicable. In December 1905,
when the ministry was already losing strength, eight buses traveled to El Cerro each
day to convey cure-seekers.
136 REINALDO L. ROMAN

as a curandero, many people were healed following my advice; and lately,

I have been unable to keep those crowds from coming to me’.”®
The connection between Mustelier and Manso was hardly common
knowledge in Cuba, and it is probable that, if it had been publicized,
Manso’s standing among Havana’s Spiritists, government officials and
journalists would have been compromised, for in the end they welcomed
Manso as a palatable alternative to the African influences and rural
ignorance that Mustelier was said to exemplify. ‘The finding is weighty
even today. Among other things, it suggests that an Afro-Cuban ancestry
lies hidden in the genealogy of Manso’s practices, which were declared
‘rational’ and presumed free of African-derived blemishes. ‘White’,
‘scientific’ Spiritism, however, was neither so white nor so scientific.
Manso’s rationality was constructed in a manner reminiscent of what
sociologist Angel G. Quintero Rivera, writing of Puerto Rico, has
characterized as a ‘marooned ethnicity’.’’ Not only do African orishas
masquerade as Catholic saints, as so many students of syncretism have
argued, but seemingly European spirits also ‘camouflage’ their hybridity
in a variety of guises.

Incarnations of the primitwe and the dwine

Irony and ambivalence enveloped the man-gods at nearly every turn.

The most profoundly ironical of these twists 1s revealed when one
considers the question of belief only to realize that it was state officials
and journalists who espoused the most literal-minded understanding
of the man-gods. Officials and journalists disdained Mustelier because
they regarded him as an atavism. The ‘new god’ was an embodied
manifestation of a primitive Cuban self who was feared capable of
overwhelming the rational citizen that the new political rationality
sought. Manso was tolerated, but not as a true man-god. Journalists
and official supporters stripped him of all ambiguity and sanctity; he
was a man-god in name alone. ‘To distinguish Manso from Mustelier,
journalists and government officials found it necessary to construct the
difference between true Spiritism and a superstitious, rural variety that
drew from a well polluted by Africanness.

18 Fl Ins de Paz, 22 July 1905.

17 Quintero Rivera, Vírgenes, magos y escapulanos, 81.
 THE STRUGGLE FOR PROGRESS IN REPUBLICAN CUBA 137

Those gathering around Mustelier and Manso were better prepared

to deal with tensions, uncertainty and pluralities of meaning. ‘To some
adherents, the Cuban man-gods were healers of commanding moral
authority. As such, they deserved honors but not adoration or ritual
invocation. ‘To others, however, the man-god designation surpassed
the confines of the titular. These practitioners charged Mustelier and
Manso with the heady burden of enacting the divine and gathering the
faithful under a new covenant. Whether holy men or men approaching
gods, they placed demands upon practitioners; they required what a
witness in Mustelier’s second trial called ‘fé inquebrantable’, their own
‘unbreakable faith’. Such a faith offered a bridge to the past without
reifying it. It evoked the memory of Catholic saints capable of interven-
ing here and now; alluded to and re-worked the mysterious mechanism
that permitted the incarnation of the godhead in Christ; and refracted
the orichas’ ride on their children’s backs, extending the divine’s transit
through human bodies. Rather than proposing a return to an idealized
past, man-gods offered an alternative to the state-sponsored vision of
the future. Unlike state officials, Mustelier and Manso did not assert
authority over expanding domains, nor did they recruit institutional
muscle in their cause. They claimed the power to heal, a claim that
was broader that it appeared, for it sufficed to short-circuit some of
the operations of the dominant regime of knowledge. In asserting their
healing power, man-gods challenged the state’s monopoly over the body,
questioned the very distinction between the physical, the spiritual and
the moral, and denied the professional’s monopoly on truth. They
gave notice that progress would not be built on a denudation of the
sacred, for the so-called primitives had a notion of a progress curbed
by divine measures.
In spite of the efforts of state officials, journalists and scholars, the
memory of the Cuban man-gods has proven largely self-governing
and independent of the history-making apparatus. ‘Today, this memory
appears to have eluded suppression to claim a place in Cuban Spiritism.
Manso, the media’s cynosure, has been forgotten. Mention of his
name is met with indifference and quizzical glances. In Santiago de
Cuba, however, Mustelier has survived and transformed anew into San
Hilarion, African santo and object of entreaties and prayers.’”? While
Mustelier, the man, is no longer remembered, San Hilarion is now

18 San Hilarién’s prayer is sold in typed sheets in Santiago de Cuba.

138 REINALDO L. ROMAN

regarded as a cornente (current or spiritual force).’” Santiago’s Spiritists

invoke his name at the opening of sessions so that he may ‘purify’
practitioners and prepare the way for spiritual labor. Appropriately,
health is San Hilarión's purview; even today he is known as “el médico
divino”, a title in use at the time of the arrests.
A tradition that ascribes to the Dios Nuevo an African origin in the
very distant past has resolved what modernization's supporters found
so intractable. Rather than reducing man-gods to manifestations of
irrationality or models of toothless piety, Spiritists seem to have for-
gotten Mustelier’s humanity. The man has vacated his body to make
way for the god.

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140 REINALDO L. ROMAN

Notes

Abbreviations

ANC—Archivo Nacional de la República de Cuba

APS—Archivo Provincial de Santiago de Cuba
GP—Gobierno Provincial
Leg.—legajo
No.—file number

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Stephan Palmié, Kevin Yelvington, and the JRA's

anonymous reviewers for their guidance and recommendations. I am
indebted to Jorge Giovannetti, Marial Iglesias, Marc McLeod and
Jalane Schmidt for their comments on several drafts of this essay and
their assistance with archival research.
 DIVINING THE PAST: THE LINGUISTIC
RECONSTRUCTION OF AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN
DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS

Kristina Wirtz

- Introduction

Itowele wele ita Ochún Ide werewere ni tosun

(Tiny pieces of brass are the mark of
Oshun)
Ocha kini gba ita Ochún Ojé gidigha ni todsa
(Very heavy beads are the mark of the
orisha)
Chekecheke ita Ochún itowele wele Sekeseke ni togun
Rough handcuffs are the mark of
Ogun
—from Cuban sacred song to —from Yoruba praise poem about
Ochin Waru!

The juxtaposition of the two texts above, one from a Cuban source
and the other from an African source, suggests a connection between
the two, but what kind of connection? As the story is usually told,
the Cuban text seems to derive from the Yoruba text because—dif-
ferent phonological and orthographic systems aside—in places they
sound similar. But are they the ‘same’ lines, such that the meaning of
the Yoruba lines tells us something about the meaning of the Cuban
lines? What of other Yoruba texts that bear resemblance to the Cuban
song?” On what basis would it be reasonable to suggest that the Cuban
religious song to the deity Ochun derives from the Yoruba praise poem
above, or from some other Yoruba text? In this article I examine the

' Sincere thanks to Dr. Yiwola Awoyale, Yoruba linguist and lexicographer at
Penn Linguistic Data Consortium, for noting the parallels between the Yoruba onki
and the Cuban song. In sessions extending over a year, he listened to and provided
lexical analyses of my Cuban field recordings.
* Amanda Vincent has brought to my attention two other Yoruba texts, a song
and another oriki, that the Yoruba religious experts she worked with linked to a
recording of this Cuban song. I thank her for the reminder that melodies also pro-
vide comparative information.
142 KRISTINA WIRTZ

interpretive work through which scholars and religious practitioners

recognize religious songs and ritual speech from the African diaspora
as ‘African.’ I ask: what does it mean for scholars to link words and
longer texts to some particular site or region in Africa, such that they
become an ancestral link conveyed more or less faithfully from an
African ancestral ‘homeland’ into the present? What epistemology and
what historical subjectivity underly the ‘recognition’ or ‘discovery’ of
such connections? In exploring how scholars approach African diasporic
linguistic materials (especially those related to African diasporic religions)
by seeking first and foremost to connect them to African sources and
give them African histories and meanings, I wish to suggest that the
interpretive process of forging such connections is key to the meaning
the ‘discovered’ connections have. ‘To make my case I will work against
the grain to use divinatory practices of Cuban religious practitioners
of Santeria (including those applied to ritual texts) to draw attention
to similar ‘divinatory’ practices by scholars. By comparing scholars’
and nonscholarly (that is, “local” recuperations of African diasporic
language history I seek to make explicit the chronotope underlying the
scholarly production of history. Specifically, I will look at the historicity
of African diasporic cultural forms like the song above and the ritual
registers used in Santeria and other African diasporic religions. This
comparison is meant to highlight how meaningful historical connec-
tions are forged (rather than ‘discovered’) by scholars in ways that are
never entirely separate from the efforts of the peoples of the Atlantic
World to make meaningful historical connections through techniques
of remembering.
This project, then, involves reflecting on the historical subjectivi-
ties of linguistic researchers in light of the historical subjectivites of
those whose speech they study. Its genesis was my own ethnographic
fieldwork among religious practitioners in the eastern Cuban city of
Santiago de Cuba (ongoing since 1997; primarily in 1999-2000).° My

> During my fieldwork on Santeria in Cuba, I attended ceremonies, conducted

interviews, elicited information on Lucumi, received formal tutoring and less formal
mentoring from a few key field consultants, and engaged in the long-term, often
low-key hanging around religious practitioners, listening, and chatting that constitute
so much of participant-observation. Wherever possible and permitted, I recorded
ceremonies and other interactions. Field research was supplemented with linguistic
and textual analyses of published and unpublished texts, especially religious notebooks
(hbretas) in which many santeros record their religious knowledge, including Lucumi
vocabulary lists, texts of prayers and songs, ritual procedures, and information per-
taining to divination signs.
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 143

primary interest was Santeria’s ritual register, Lucumi. Lucumi clearly

has a historical connection with Yoruba antecedents, but I slowly real-
ized that an understanding of the register based solely on etymologi-
cal correspondences to Yoruba (or any other African language) would
be a limited view indeed. Consider the two juxtaposed texts above:
each fragment is presented in isolation from its rich pragmatic and
performative context, leaving behind essential information about how
the longer texts are performed, by whom, and for what reasons. ‘The
lexical correspondences that remain are a narrow basis for reconstruct-
ing meaning in the Lucumi song. During the course of my research,
I came to appreciate that I could not focus on this sort of philologi-
cal reconstruction if I wanted to understand how and why religious
practitioners themselves were often so keen to do so and to enlist my
help in those efforts. I began to focus on their strategies for learning
and using Lucumi and on how these strategies generated interpretive
frames for Lucumi (Wirtz 2007a).
By interpretive frames I mean the explicit and implicit ways in which
religious practitioners and scholars assign meaning and social value to
Lucumi through their ways of talking about or using it—that is, the
metapragmatic effects of pragmatic activities like learning new words,
defining their meanings, performing them in rituals, or excavating their
etymologies (Silverstein 1993). Asif Agha (2003, 2005) uses the term
enregisterment to describe how a recognizable register of speech—an
accent, in his example—emerges out of the accumulation of discourse
events in which it is used. Agha’s notion of enregisterment suggests a
shift away from viewing Lucumi as an decayed version of Yoruba that is
a passive product of language obsolescence. Instead, Agha’s processual
view suggests a focus on how Lucumi as it appears in performances and
printed texts is a product of semiotic activity that recognizes it as such
and imbues it with sacred and historical value, for example, as a divine
language or a remnant of Yoruba. Rather than discard the etymological
approach out of hand, I have become interested in what metapragmatic
effects such efforts have on enregistering Lucumi. When I have been
struck by a passage or song fragment of Lucumi that readily lines up
with a modern Yoruba text, it 1s because such correspondences seem
pregnant with meaning. I suggest that this is so because scholars and
practitioners engage in interpretive activities to learn, use, and study
Lucumi, and their hermeneutics prioritize its African genealogy, albeit
sometimes for rather different reasons.
144 KRISTINA WIRTZ

There is a long history of scholar-practitioner dialogue (cf. Dianteill

and Swearingen 2003, Matory 2005) around African diasporic religions
like Santeria and Candomblé, one that continues to be evident in recent
scholarly production (Palmié 1995, 2005, Vincent 2006, Wirtz 2004).
Not only have scholars and practitioners been reading one another’s
work (as well as contributing to each other’s practices, whether as “infor-
mants’ or “experts”), but increasing numbers of scholars have become
practitioners and practitioners have become scholars. This can be seen
as a special case of a wider dynamic in studies of the African diaspora,
which always implicate the identity politics of ourselves as scholars
and as racialized and national subjects who negotiate our own histori-
cal consciousness in our research and in our lives more generally. It is
thus important, as Matory (2005) stresses, to consider the ‘translocal’
dialogues among those being studied, including dialogues that bridge
academic and ‘local’ discourse. My focus in this paper, however, 1s on
a more specific sort of parallel, or convergence, between scholars and
practitioners, albeit one that is undoubtedly related to the dialogues
and cross-overs among them.
I will show how scholars and practitioners engage in interpretive
strategies that I refer to as etymological reconstruction and divin-
ing meanings, but that their efforts are driven by somewhat different
language ideologies and have similar but not completely overlapping
effects. Guban religious practitioners are engaged in ‘divining’ hidden
meanings that relate to a sacred and transcendent Africa, based on
Lucumi’s status as an esoteric divine language and its capacity to store
and transmit deep religious knowledge without revealing it. Secular
scholars’ notions of a transcendent Africa are based on a scholarly
paradigm of Africanisms that, I argue, seeks to reveal a hidden or
forgotten past that is envisioned as locked into words themselves and
therefore recoverable through etymological analysis. Scholars, in their
own framing of their investigations, discover this past by recognizing
diasporic words as Yoruba or KiKongo or Fon, and then use these
etymologies as metonyms of more broadly envisioned cultural transfers
(i.e. that Santeria is Yoruba and should be understood as such). ‘That
is, the recovered etymological meanings are often used (by scholars
and practitioners) to illuminate what are posited to be the onginal and
therefore true meanings of contemporary texts in ways that claim to
supercede the rich pragmatic meanings texts such as the song to Ochún
already have for practitioners. I argue that the real semiotic work being
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 145

accomplished in both cases is not about the recognition of original (and

therefore true and authentic) meanings, but rather about processes of
enregisterment that imbue both diasporic religious texts and registers
and African ‘source languages’ with contrasting chronotopic value. That
1s, by lining up the African and the diasporic, implicit metapragmatic
work is accomplished that projects African ‘sources’ into a transcendent
and unchanging past at the same time that diasporic texts signify the
possibility of transcendence in the contemporary diaspora as well.

Imagining Africa in the diaspora: chronotopes of survival and transcendence

The emphasis on cultural transcendence over time and space, com-

mon to diasporic identities and to research on diasporic practices, has
a long intellectual history. Melville Herskovits promoted a paradigm of
African diasporic research in which linguistic and cultural correspon-
dences would link specific cultural forms (and the people who practice
them) in sites of the New World African diaspora to specific African
locales—usually broad culture areas (Apter 1991, Herskovits 1966).
Of course, the sort of ‘roots’ search emblemized by Herskovits’ tables
of ‘Africanisms’ and by my opening text samples has long since come
under criticism as relying upon a problematic chronotope of Africa, in
which Africa-past serves as Africa-eternal, a temporally transcendent
ancestral source that can still be accessed in contemporary African
practices, and that can explain African diasporic practices (Scott 1991,
Yelvington 2001)..As Scott (1991) describes, a strong humanist empathy
underlies the scholarly impulse to reinforce African diasporic identities
by authenticating the pasts that African diasporic groups claim as ‘what
really happened.’
Herskovits’s ‘African survivals’ approach has long been counterposed
to E. Franklin Frazier’s emphasis on the diaspora’s historical rupture
with Africa and a ‘shallower’ history of creativity of Africans and their
descendents in the diaspora (Frazier 1966, Herskovits 1966, Yelvington
2001). For both Herskovits and Frazier, however, Africa represented the
past to the diasporic present, but where Herskovits emphasized histon-
cal continuity between past and present, Frazier’s Africa was cut off in
an unreachable past. Slavery, in Frazier’s paradigm, was the cultural
crucible for Africans in the diaspora. In their important updating and
revision of Frazier’s paradigm, Mintz and Price (1992/1976) focus on
the present and near past of New World contexts, thereby displacing
146 KRISTINA WIRTZ

Africa further into a distant past, on the far side of the rupture called
the Middle Passage. They replace Herskovits’s Africanisms with much
deeper and more tacit continuities in cultural grammars.
Paul Gilroy’s (1993) recent notion of the ‘Black Atlantic’ relies instead
upon a chronotope characterized by contemporaneity or coevalness
across an oceanic basin that connects, rather than separating Africa,
Europe, and the New World. His approach decenters African sources
to instead focus on interconnections among diasporic sites, such as the
Caribbean and Britain. He particularly attends to the modernity or
alternative modernity of the Black Atlantic, and to how it develops
out of the forms of (double) consciousness that arose within diasporic
experiences of Africans and their descendents.
Recent work by Matory (2005) and Otero (2002) in particular applies
what Guroy (1993) punningly calls a ‘routes’ approach, opening up
from unidirectional flows from Africa to the New World, to more
complex routes of coeval influence and feedback. For example, Matory
re-examines Yoruba ethnogenesis as a ‘translocal’ phenomenon involv-
ing complex circuits between Brazil, Sierra Leone, and the regions of
modern-day Nigeria and Benin that are today known as Yorubaland.
He argues that ‘this story defies...also the old chronotope (Fabian 1983)
that homelands are to their diasporas as the past is to the present and
future. ‘The irony at the core of this story is that diasporas create their
homelands’ (Matory 2005: 3). ‘To extend Matory’s insight, scholarly
activities, too, can create homelands. I suggest that much of the schol-
arship that focuses on reconstructing African links to diasporic registers
hke Lucumi is drawing upon an outdated Herskovitsian chronotope of a
transcendent Africa-past that can be divined out of fragments and clues
in diasporic practices.* These divinatory processes can be elucidated by
comparison to the metapragmatic activities of Santeria’s practitioners,
who also strive to make sense of Lucumi.

* But see Amanda Vincent’s excellent dissertation (2006), which pursues such
transatlantic comparisons to make an argument against this chronotope of tran-
scendent Africa.
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 14/7

Interpretwe strategies and historical subjectwity 1n Cuban Santeria

Background on Santeria and Lucumi

Santeria, also known as La Regla de Ocha, is a widespread popular
religion in Cuba whose practitioners worship Yoruba deities known as
onchas. Santería is closely identified with Yoruba (also called Lucumi)
origins, although it is part of a broad complex of popular religions that
draw upon an array of African and European influences. For example,
Santería is often counterposed to the religion called Palo Monte (or
the Regla de Congo), which 1s closely associated with a western Central
African cultural area referred to in Cuba as Congo or Bantu (Fuentes
Guerra and Schwegler 2005, Palmié 2002). Although accurate statistics
are not available, some estimates suggest that perhaps eight percent of
Cubans have been initiated as santeros (priests), while a higher percent-
age of the population participates in ceremonies or seeks consultations
with initiated santeros (Arguelles Mederos and Hodge Limonta 1991,
CIPS 1998, Millet, Brea, and Ruiz Vila 1997, discussed in Wirtz 2003:
38-41). Those who seek deeper involvement in the religion choose a
godparent to guide their spiritual progress and may eventually be initi-
ated, joining the ritual lineage of their godparent. Although Santeria
is popularly conceived to be Afro-Cuban because of its historical roots
among enslaved Africans, its contemporary adherents span class, racial,
and regional distinctions in Cuba. As Palmié (2002) describes; the
relationship between ‘Afro-Cuban’ religions and ‘Afro-Cuban’ people
is by no means simple or transparent; nor are the African origins of
particular ritual practices always clear or uncontested (see also Brown
2003). One aspect of Santeria that is strongly identified with its specifi-
cally Yoruba origins 1s its ritual register, Lucumi.
Santeros describe Lucumi as a divine language, calling it the ‘tongue
of the oricha’ (/a lengua de los oricha) to highlight its tremendous impor-
tance in maintaining ritual channels of communication with the orichas.
Lucumi texts such as songs and invocations are widely known among
santeros, who can expertly perform them in rituals, whether or not they
profess any understanding of a text’s referential content. Indeed, only
a few santeros feel able to offer translations or detailed explanations of
even a few Lucumi texts, despite the fact that most santeros control a
lexicon from a few dozen to hundreds of Lucumi words and phrases.
Santeros thus display a bifurcated and very partial linguistic competence
in Lucumi, in which they control a set of individual Lucumi words and
148 KRISTINA WIRTZ

phrases that have denotational (semantic) meaning and a set of phrases

and longer texts that have primarily pragmatic and connotative mean-
ings and often cannot even be segmented into individual words and
translated. ‘his state of affairs came about through particular modes
of language learning and religious socialization, incorporating both
literacy practices and more embodied learning through participation in
ritual performances (see Wirtz 2007a). One important and longstanding
literate practice among santeros are their personal religious notebooks
(ibretas) in which many santeros record their religious knowledge,
including Lucumi vocabulary lists, texts of prayers and songs, ritual
procedures, and information pertaining to divination signs. A number
of published manuals of Santeria contain similar information and,
fact serve as both templates and fonts of information for private efforts
(Angarica n.d.-a, Angarica n.d.-b, Arango 1998).

Recuperatwe strategies of santeros

Having perused the ubiquitous Lucumi glossaries that now appear in
virtually every book on Santeria, whether written by a practitioner or
not, and having studied modern Yoruba in preparation for my fieldwork,
I began with the naive assumption that my task would primarily involve
eliciting Lucumi words and texts or listening for them in rituals, then
inquiring about their meanings and drawing upon my knowledge of
Yoruba to learn Lucumi meanings. Several santeros and babalawos in
Santiago were happy to oblige by sharing their Lucumi vocabulary lists
with me, and two in particular also patiently shared the texts of songs
and prayers with me. Indeed, many santeros, especially of the younger
generation, shared both my desire to learn Lucumi and my assumption
that learning Yoruba was key to understanding Lucumi. When they
were discussing isolated Lucumi words or phrases, the santeros I worked
with would almost always provide a gloss in Spanish. For example, omi
meant ‘water,’ ofii meant ‘honey,’ and obim1 meant ‘woman.’ However,
for some expressions they would instead give me pragmatic accounts
of performative value or proper context of use, rather than a semantic
definition. For example, one santero, Emilio, explained what the fre-
quently used expression majerefun meant by providing examples of its
use, even as I persisted in trying to pin down a simple gloss:°
—

> Throughout this article, I write Lucumí words according to the slightly modified
Spanish orthography used by my Cuban field consultants. The choice of orthographic
representation, as I discuss below, is never neutral (Schieffelin and Doucet 1994).
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 149

E: Majferefun. Eso quiere decir con el permiso. Maferefun Chango Abicold,

Changó Abicolá Reynerio Pérez. Con el permiso de Changó Abrcolá, que
era el santo que tenía hecho Reyneno Pérez.
Maferefun. That means to say with the permission, Maferefun
Changó Abicolá Changó Abicola Reynerio Pérez. With the permis-
sion of Changó Abicolá, who was the saint that Reynerio Pérez
had made.
Kristina: Entonces, es-
So, 1t is—
E: Que era el mayor santero de Cuba, de aquí de la parte Onental.
Who was the senior santero of Cuba, of here in the eastern
part.
K: Entonces-
So
De ahí él fue diciendo todos los demás santeros.
From there he went along saying all the other santeros
K: Hmm. Entonces “maferefun de? es decir “danos permiso”, o “denos per-
maso”.
Hmm. So maferefun de means give (familiar) us permission, or
give (formal) us permission.
E: Maferefun cuando se dice Maferefun tyalodde’, con el permiso de esa santa,
hm (palmada) es permiso. Maferefun Changó, o sea que ese es, quiere decir
que por delante de de cualquier cosa está Changó”. Por delante de cualquier
cosa está Ochún, por delante de cualquier cosa está Olofi. ¿Entiende? Ese
es el sentido global que se le quiere dar a la palabra.
Maferefun when one says Maferefun walodde, with the permission
of that saint, hm (clap) it is permission. Maferefun Changó, or
that is that that is, it means to say that before anything there is
Chango. Before anything there is Ochun, before anything there
is Olofi. Do you understand? That is the global sense that the
word conveys.

Emilio resists my attempts to pin down a simple translation for maferefun

like ‘give us permission.’ He elaborates by trying to explain the ‘global
sense’ of the word through examples of how it gets used in context,
where it is usually directed to a particular oricha. He responds similarly
when I next ask what the word mofonbale means, first relating the word
to a particular oricha, then singing a line of a song to that oricha that
includes the word:
E: Maferefun es permiso. Mofonbale es una palabra que utiliza Changó.
Maferefun is permission. Mofonbale is a word that Chango uses.
Ah
(singing) Mofonbale mi Changó, Oba eré
¿Y qué significa?
And what does it mean?
150 KRISTINA WIRTZ

Es moforibale es como tener un poder.

It is mofonbale is like to have a power.
Y entonces es manera de de pedir por él o solo es-
And so it is a way of of asking for him or 1s it only—
Es una manera de elogiar.
It 1s a way of praising.
Anya.
Uh-hmm
Yo digo mofonbale Changó, es un elogio que le estoy dando. Que poderoso
eres. ¿Entiendes? Y cuando digo maf- maferefun ryalodde, permiso a esa
santa, eh, primero esa santa. O sea, que es el sentido que se le quiere dar
a esas dos palabras.
I say moforibale Changó, 1t 15 a eulogy that I am giving him. How
powerful you are. Do you understand? And when I say maf
maferefun tyalodde, permission from this saint, ah, first that saint.
That is, that it is the sense that one means to convey with those
two words.°
His reluctance to commit to one clear gloss of either word, despite my
insistence and despite many hours of providing me with glossary-style
Lucumi word lists, illustrates how santeros tend to focus on the per-
formative and pragmatic values of many Lucumí expressions, rather
than relying on purely denotational meanings, which they may not
be sure of. In many cases, santeros responded to my questions about
what Lucumi words meant by similarly giving me examples of usage, a
tendency that also is evident in the two most comprehensive and widely
admired published Lucumi glossaries, by Cuban folklonst Lydia Cabrera
(1986) and santero Nicolas Angarica (n.d.-a). Cabrera gives four entries
for maferefun: first, ma fe re fún, ‘para siempre sea concedido lo que se
implora. (Es formula que se repite al comienzo de un odu...)’. ‘That
is: ‘may what is implored be granted forever (It is a formula that is
repeated at the beginning of a divination sign ...).’ ‘The next two entries
are Mafere fin Olof, ‘I commend myself to Olof’; and maferefiin Yemayá
(u Obatalá o Changó, etc.), “Thank you, may you be blessed or praised'
(p. 205). Finally, for the alternate spelling mo /é ré fun Obatald she gives the
translation, “I adore you and I pray to you, Obatala’ (p. 212). Here too
there are several glosses and information about usage, and all revolve
around a particular kind of performative utterance, one that can be
characterized as invoking a deity’s goodwill. Mofonbale, in turn, appears

* Recorded conversation with Emilio (Tape 2), October 11, 1999, Santiago de
Cuba.
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIG RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 151

in entries for two phrases that also salute and invoke a deity—Changó,
in one case. Á meaning for mofonbale that resembles its putative Yoruba
origin phrase (Mo fi ori bal/ée/, ‘I bow my head to the ground’) appears
only at the end of the second entry: ‘I prostrate before you’ (p. 212).’
Angarica’s glossary in Lucumt al alcance de todo (Angarica n.d.-a) follows
the same pattern, providing more contextual and usage information
than semantic definition for these two words.
The similarities across Cabrera’s (and Angarica’s) and my consultant’s
explanations suggest a broader pattern of understanding some Lucumi
words contextually and functionally, rather than strictly denotationally.
Across half a century from Cabrera’s consultants to mine, there is
evident stability in how the terms are to be used along with impre-
ciseness (or call it flexibility) in their denotation. But Cabrera and I
shared the goal of eliciting clear Spanish translations for the Lucumi
we heard and recording the actual words our consultants gave. It may
well be our elicitation strategy that conveys the sense that there is some
insufficiency in how santeros understand Lucumi, which reinforces the
scholarly conception of Lucumi as simply degenerated, ossified, and
almost obsolescent Yoruba. My evidence suggests that santeros are
sometimes, but not always, concerned with the denotational content
of Lucumi words, and even when they are, they do not always cleave
to notions that each word must have a single, decontextualizable gloss.
As I realized during the course of my fieldwork, the pragmatics of
knowing how and when to use a word or phrase usually trump knowing
its purely semantic content, which in fact can shift to fit the context.
Indeed, in interviews, it often happened that a santero would fumble
over a Lucumi word or phrase, then apologize by explaining that it was
difficult to remember the words outside of a ritual context.
When santeros shared longer Lucumi texts such as songs and prayers
with me, their focus on pragmatic rather than denotational meanings
was even more striking. Most were unwilling or unable to tell me what
songs meant in a strictly semantic sense, although they could tell me
how the song should be used and which orichas the song concerned.
While older santeros, in particular, sometimes relegated even Lucumi
words to the realm of secret religious knowledge, and thus were reti-
cent to discuss such matters with a non-initiate, most santeros I talked

? Yoruba backtranslations are courtesy of Dr. Yiwola Awoyale, Penn Linguistic

Data Consortium, but I take responsibility for any errors.
152 KRISTINA WIRTZ

to were eager to demonstrate their religious expertise and willingly

recited vocabulary, songs, prayers, and invocations for me. They would
often give examples of when a text might be used and even launch
into full performance of a song or invocation. Their unwillingness to
go ‘on record’ with a direct translation, then, suggests that they were
not withholding ‘secret’ information from an outsider but rather were
truly unable to give semantic glosses for longer texts.
When I persisted in asking what the words of a Lucumi song meant,
the typical response I received from santeros and specialist ntual sing-
ers was to identify a few familiar words in the text and provide a gloss
based on those words and on their contextual knowledge of usage. For
example, one young singer who performed in religious rituals as well
as in a folkloric ensemble responded to my repeated questions about
what the songs meant by singing me a line he often incorporated into
a tratado (specialized song sequence) to the oricha Yemaya:
(sings) Ago Yemayd ago, ago ile, o ile laumo
(speaks) Allí está Yemayd, bailando, pero estd fuera de la casa. Entonces, ‘ago
Yemayá” esto es diciendo “permiso, Yemayá.? ‘Tlé’ que es ‘en la casa,’ y ‘umo’ es que
venga, que entra en la fiesta.
(speaks) ‘There is Yemaya, dancing, but she is outside the house. So, ‘ago
Yemayd,’ this is saying ‘permission, Yemaya.’ ‘//é which is ‘in the house,’
and “umo” 1s that she come, that she enter into the party [ceremony].
(sings) Ago Yemayd ago, ago ile, o ile laumo
(speaks) Temayá, venga para la casa.”
(speaks) “Yemayá, come into the house.*
The singer’s performance and explanation of the song reference a spe-
cific ritual context in which someone has been possessed by Yemaya and
is dancing outside of the house where the ceremony is being held. He
demonstrates how the song can be used to coax the possessed person
back inside. He identifies and glosses the individual words of the song:
ago 1s ‘permission,’ 2/é 1s “house,” and umo is “come.” Without any refer-
ence to syntax, he strings these translated words together into a gloss
for the entire phrase, to produce a respectful sung request to the oricha:
“come into the house.” His method of interpreting the song's mean-
ing, a widespread strategy among santeros, relates to his more general
approach to learning Lucumi: on the one hand, he learns by attending

8 Recorded conversation with Rey (Tape 46), March 25, 2000, Santiago de
Cuba.
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 153

closely to the performances of more experienced and knowledgeable

singers in ritual contexts, settings in which no one will stop to explain
what they are doing or why. This singer, like other new santeros, learns
by attending to contextual clues—what drum rhythms are playing, what
oricha is being sung to, and what effect a particular line has on the
audience or oricha. He also admitted, chuckling, to carrying a pencil
and paper so that he could dash out of a ceremony and surreptitiously
write down what he had heard, an inscription process that reinforces
the secrecy and potency of the information and that may be quite
widespread among santeros (Stephan Palmié, personal communication;
see also Johnson (2002) on ‘secretism’). His other method for learning
Lucumi has been to seek out and study Lucumi or Yoruba glossaries;
in fact, he told me that he had located a Yoruba dictionary in the
library of a local cultural research institute in which he would look up
the meaning of Lucumi words. Younger, often well-educated santeros
seamlessly combine knowledge gained from ritual practice and from
books, further blurring the lines between scholarly and ‘local’ religious
expertise. Another young, up-and-coming ritual singer, when I asked
him about how he learned what a song meant, brought out a couple
of books on Santeria to show me how he looked up words he encoun-
tered in their glossaries. Their interpretive strategies, thus, combine a
search for etymological clues in the few words they may recognize with
pragmatic knowledge about how the songs are used.
In this two-pronged approach to interpreting Lucumi, younger
santeros are largely imitating the performances of the most experienced
and venerated santeros, who may or may not profess much interest in
books and glossaries, but who nonetheless draw upon their knowledge
of individual Lucumi words and can weave these together with longer,
more formulaic texts like songs, such that they contextualize one another.
In the following example, a highly regarded senior santero, Arturo (a
pseudonym), had agreed to allow me to interview him about his knowl-
edge of Lucumi, and had answered my first question by telling a series
of legends about the orichas called patakines, which are usually associated
with divination. Each divination sign has one or more patakines that the
diviner may choose to share with the client in order to give context to
the problem identified in the divination. Each pataki conveys a moral that
should shape the client’s response to the problem, as well as conveying
a wealth of religious information that justifies the course of action and
the proper offerings to be given to one or another oricha or nituals to
154 KRISTINA WIRTZ

be undertaken. Arturo told the following story and several others during
the course of our interview, as we sat in his living room surrounded by
his godchildren, who were assembling to take part in a ceremony later
in the afternoon. Each time, he would dramatically perform the story,
incorporating substantial Lucumi vocabulary and even songs connected
to the story’s events. In this particular story, which is well-known, the
masculine oricha Chango encounters his mother Yemaya but does
not recognize her. He gravely insults her by ‘touching her,’ as Arturo
delicately puts it, and is almost drowned as a result. Duly chastened
about his behavior toward women, he learns how to properly call on
and sacrifice to Yemayá. Lucumí is in bold type.
And Shango, he himself is a very vain saint, a very proud saint who...
presumed that all women had to render him moforibale. And so it was
when, on the Spice Coast, walking, he met Yemayá, whom he did not
remember, because Yemayá did not give birth to him, but raised him.
And so he [had] left Yemayá and made his life. And so when he then
saw Yemayá he was king, coming from war, lie was a vain king and full
of himself. And so he asked Yemayá, he said to her, “Kinche?”, which
means, ah, “Who, who are you?”
“Kinche?” ‘Who are you?’
And so Yemaya said to him, ‘Emi ni Yemaya’
He said, ‘Kilonche?’ ‘Ko loku ani su ile?” “Where do you live?”
She said, ‘Emi en olodumare’ ‘me, in the ocean,’
And ‘Kilonche bobo teniyen?’ ‘What did she eat?’
Yemayá said, “Emi abbo,” which is sheep, ayakua, turtle, akuekue,
duck, akiko, rooster.
Shango said, Shango looks like this, surprised. He said, ‘what did she
eat?” or that is “Bobo teniyen?” They liked all the same things, that she
ate what he ate. Then Yemayá said to him that 1f he wanted she would
demonstrate her boat, if he wants to go to her house, to her ile. That
is how it is called in the religion. He is house. So he said to her that he
knew nothing to give her so that she would demonstrate the boat. But in
the boat Shango tried to to touch her, I don’t know, that which I know,
the [?]. And Yemaya pushed him with the violence of the boat, and
Shango fell into the water. And then he begins to plead, ‘Afiedenu,’
which means fiedenu, fiedenu, fiedenu, fiedenu. And so when
Obatala Yembo came out of the clouds, he said, ‘Fiedenu Yemaya,
olufina son tomode.’ Shango is not drowning, but he looks like this,
so that he began to see Yemaya.
She says, ‘Kilonche, de kinche laroya. Son loya de obini, son
loya of four women and of my own mother.’
Then Yembo says, ‘I brought you into the world, and Yemaya raised
you.’
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 155

Then Shango says ‘Fiedenu iya mi, fiedenu iya mi. Iya mi, emi
did not know that you were my own iya. Forgive me, my mother, because
I did not know that you were my mother also.’
And then Yemaya said to him, ‘Demi make you ona, so that you will
always know that when there is an obini in ara, that it is necessary to
respect her. Demi says to you that Laye is a little rascal so that you
know that in the world, in the land whenever there is a woman she must
be respected.’ That not all [women] were the same. And then Yemaya
would come to make trouble for him. She said, ‘Ok when you want me,
you call me in a, by an echo.’
So when Shango wanted to see his mother, he stopped. He went to
a, it looks like a cart, he put down plantains, fruits, ah, the animals, and
oul and everything. He says that word was bad, he said:
(sings) Yemaya le so owo
Yemaya ye ile aloto
Akere ya aluma
Oite niwe olo kota la kueleseo
Yale omi yale, iya mi o
(speaks) Listen my mother, mistress and lady of the ocean
Between the solidity of rock, of the foam,
Fresh water and white water
Yeinle listen to me
That here is your child, who brings you a gift
(sings) Olo yenao omisaide awa omi
(speaks) The entire world I bring to you, my mother
And then Yemaya begins to make in the, in the whirlpool for her child,
and calls, she returned to hide again, and says:
(sings) Yeinle aluma omo, sawade olu
Sawade Olodumare
Lawa lawa lawa
(speaks) ‘The sound of the ocean, the transformation, so that einle
olodo.?

° Recorded conversation with Arturo (Tapes 45-46), March 23, 2000, Santiago de
Cuba. Original Spanish: Y Changó, él mismo es un santo muy vanidoso, un santo
muy orgulloso que...presumió que todas las mujeres tenían que rendirle moforibale.
Y entonces fue cuando el conoció en la Costa Aromática, paseando, conocía a
Yemayá, que no se acordaba, porque Yemayá no lo parió pero lo crió. Y entonces
se le fue de Yemayá y hizo su vida. Y entonces cuando ya vió a Yemayá era rey
de la guerra, era rey vanidoso y lleno de todo. Y entonces le pregunta a Yemayá,
le dice “Kinché” que quiere decir, eh “¿Quien, quien es?”
“¿Kinché?” “¿Quien eres tú?”
Y entonces Yemayá lo dice “Emi mi Yemayá”
Dice “¿Kilonché?” “¿Ko loku ani su ile?” “¿Donde Ud. vive?”
Dice ‘Emi en Olodumare’ ‘Yo en el mar.’
Y “¿Kilonché bobo teniyen?” “¿Que comía?”
Dice Yemayá, “Emi abbo”, que es carnero, ayakua, jicotea, akuekue, el pato,
akiko, gallo.
156 KRISTINA WIRTZ

Arturo’s performance relies upon his strategic use of fluid Lucumi

speech and glosses of it to convey his extensive religious knowledge. He
authoritatively incorporates Lucumi utterances to serve as quoted speech
of the orichas in the story, in each case providing a gloss of the Lucumi
words for the audience’s benefit. His performance thus reinforces sante-
ros’ characterization of Lucumi as a divine language. An analysis of the
Lucumi he uses elaborates on patterns in earlier examples: he incor-
porates well-known Lucumi words and short formulaic phrases while

Dice Changó, Changó mira asi sorprendido. Dice,’ iqué comia?’ o sea se ‘bobo teni-
yen.’ Todo lo que le gustaba que era lo mismo, que comia ella como comia él.
Entonces Yemaya le dice que si queria demuestre su bote, que como si quiere
ir a su casa, a su 1lé, que es como se llama en la religión. Mé es casa. Entonces le
dijo que no sabía nada darle para que.demuestra en bote. Pero en el bote Changó
intentó de de tocarle, no sé, lo qué sé yo, lo [?], y Yemayá lo puso para la violencia
del bote, y Changó cayó en el agua. Y entonces empieza a pedir, 'Afiedemu, que
quiere decir fiedenu, fiedenu, fiedenu, fiedenu. Y entonces cuando salió Obatalá
Yembo de las nubes, dice, “Fieddenu Yemayá. Olufina son tomodé.” Changó
no se está ahogando, pero mira para si bien él iba a ver a Yemayá.
Ella dice, “Kilonché, de kinché laroyá. Son loya de obini, son loya de
cuatro mujeres y de la madre mía.”
Entonces, Yembo dice, “Yo te traje al mundo, y Yemayá te crió.”
Entonces, Changó dice, ‘Fiedenu iya mi, fiedenu iya mi. Iya mi, emi no
sabía que era iya mia. Perdóname madre mia, que yo no sabía que Ud. era mi
madre también.”
Y entonces Yemayá le dijo, Demi te hace ona, para que sepa siempre que hay
un Obini en ara, que hay que respetarla. Demi te dice que laye es el pillico para
que supiera que en el mundo en la tierra siempre que hay una mujer que hay que
respetar. Que todos no eran igual.” Y entonces Yemayá se vaya a hacer pato con
él, dice, “Bueno cuando tú me quieras, tú me llamas en, por eco.”
Entonces, cuando Changó quería ver a su madre, se para, iba un, parece una
carreta, le ponía plátanos, frutas, ah los animales, y aceite y todo. Dice esa palabra
era mala decía él:
(canta) Yemayá le so owo
Yemayá ye ile aloto
Akere ya aluma
Oite niwe olo kota, la kueleseo
Yale omi yale, iya mi o
(habla) Oiga madre mía, dueña y señora del mar, entre la solidez de la piedra,
de la espuma, agua dulce y agua blanca, Yeinle oígame, que aquí su hijo, le trae
un regalo.
(canta) Olo yenao omisaide awa omi
(habla) El mundo entero te lo traigo, madre mía. Y entonces Yemayá empece
a hacer en la, en la el remolino para su hijo, y convoca, se volvía a esconder de
nuevo, y dice:
(canta) Yeiínle aluma omo, sawade olu
Sawade Olodumare
Lawa lawa lawa
(habla) El sonido del mar, la transtendencia, ya que einle olodo.
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 157

telling the story. These are inserted into a Spanish matrix to convey a
certain chronotopic flavor that reinforces his placement of the story in
a distant, mythic past in Africa (specifically, the “Spice Coast’). Some
of the phrases, and in particular the question sequence that structures
the first part of the story, utilize Lucumi constructions whose meanings
are ambiguous. Expressions like kinché and kilonché are used in rituals as
all-purpose question-markers among santeros, so that the same term can
be used to ask ‘who?’ ‘what?’ ‘where?’ ‘how?’ or ‘why?’ as the situation
requires. Resorting to a Yoruba backtranslation (to Ai ni se, meaning
‘why?’ and ki ni 6 n se, meaning ‘what is s/he doing?’ or perhaps ki m
o m se, meaning ‘what are you doing?’ or more generally ‘what 1s hap-
pening?’) does nothing to capture the polysemy and ambiguity that are
so important to how Lucumi is used in Cuba.
Arturo’s story culminates with a song of praise to Yemaya, which
the story contextualizes as Changó's appeasement of his mother after
gravely insulting her. He intersperses sung lines with spoken glosses of
the song that at first glance appear to be a precise line-by-line transla-
tion, but that in fact are at most a very loose and broad interpretation,
albeit one that intimately relates to the story he has told and to people’s
common knowledge about the orichas. For example, Arturo glosses the
song to Yemaya as calling out to ‘my mother, mistress, and lady of the
ocean.” While the phrase zyé mi ‘my mother,’ does appear in the final
line of the song, it appears that he is generalizing from this term of respect
and from Yemaya’s association with the ocean rather than translating
a precise Lucumi equivalent for ‘mother, mistress, and lady of the ocean.’
In the final sung line, he seems to use the name Olodumare, which sante-
ros in Santiago usually associate with an oricha of the rainbow or sky,
to mean ‘ocean,’ an idiosyncratic, almost punning use of this word that
makes sense only because the Spanish word for ocean, mar, seems to
echo in the Lucumi word (although this accidental sound coincidence
is unrelated to Olodumare’s accepted meaning and associations). These
interpretive moves rely upon occasional words or even sounds to serve
as keys for highly elaborated and polished ‘translations.’ While sante-
ros are impressed by authoritative performances like Arturo’s, they do
not regard such translations and exegeses as the only possible ones
for a given text, nor do they seem troubled by inconsistencies, gaps,
or, to my ears, somewhat ad hoc glosses (such as associating mar
‘ocean’ with Olodumare). What makes a particular interpretation of a
Lucumi text good, in santeros’ eyes, 1s not necessarily its etymological
158 KRISTINA WIRTZ

soundness (which most would have no tools to investigate) but its abil-
ity to reveal previously hidden knowledge and make it relevant to the
situation, just as santeros do when interpreting divination messages.
Table 1 lists the Lucumi words Arturo used, lined up with any gloss
he gave. The words and phrases from the spoken part of the story,
especially in the first part of the story, neatly line up with their ‘mean-
ing,’ although some phrases go untranslated. ‘Addo’ is sheep, ‘kinché’ 1s
‘who are you,’ and so forth. ‘The Lucumi songs he sings at the end also
receive glosses that are correspondingly more elaborate, but that also
come across as if they were as precise as “lé 1s house.” Table | looks
like the beginning of a glossary, with the pairings of Lucumi expression
and gloss neatly excised from their context and ready to be reinserted
to produce or translate new Lucumi utterances. ‘Table 1 would also
lend itself to a comparison to modern Yoruba, and I am hardly the
only person, whether scholar or practitioner, to try looking up Lucumi
words in Yoruba dictionaries. Doing so would result in a great deal of
success for individual words: Lucumi emi, ayakua, and ilé clearly corre-
spond to Yoruba émi ‘I,’ aapa ‘turtle,’ and 1/é “house,” and some longer
phrases, like mofonbale above, can be segmented into Yoruba with ease.
However, many longer phrases and lines of songs are much less readily
segmented, un-garbled, and converted into a single definitive Yoruba
‘original’ (see Wirtz 2005).’°

Authontatwe performance and invented tradition

More to my point, to extract only this kind of decontextualized lexical
information from Arturo’s performance is to ignore most of what such
performances accomplish, which is to creatively regenerate Lucumi as
a dynamic register of speech that conveys a particular kind of reli-
gious authority based on knowledge of ‘tradition.’ My scare quotes
around ‘tradition’ serve as a reminder that tradition is defined (1.e.,
‘invented’) precisely through the metapragmatic effects of activites such
as claiming religious authority and revealing occult knowledge locked
in esoteric texts. Palmié (1995), in his comparison of Cuban versus
African American notions of authentic Yoruba ‘tradition’ in Santeria

'2 Although melody and associated rhythms can help make Lucumi songs recogniz-
able to Yoruba speakers (Amanda Vincent, personal communication).
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 159

Table 1: Lucumi words and glosses given in Arturo’s performance

Lucumi Arturo’s gloss (my translation)
Moforibale
Kinche? who are you?
emi ni
Kilonche? Ko loku ani su ile? where do you live?
Emi en olodumare me, in the ocean
Kilonche bobo teniyen? What did she eat?
abbo sheep
ayakua turtle
akuekue duck
akiko rooster
Bobo teniyen? what did she eat?
lle house
afiedenu, fiedenu fiedenu
olufina son tomode
Kilonche, de kinche laroya
son loya de obini, son loya of four women
demi
ona
obini
ara
Yemaya le so owo Listen my mother, mistress
Yemaya ye ile aloto and lady of the ocean
Akere ya aluma Between the solidity of rock, of the
Oite niwe olo kota la kueleseo foam,
Yale omi yale, iya mio fresh water and white water
Yeinle listen to me, that here is your
child, who brings you a gift
Olo yenao omisaide awa omi The entire world I bring to you, my
mother
Yeinle aluma omo, sawade olu The sound of the ocean, the transfor-
Sawade Olodumare, lawa lawa mation, so that einle olodo
lawa

and North American Orisha-Vodou, makes the related point that des-
ignating certain practices or beliefs as traditional requires a particular
kind of semiotic reflexiveness, one that usually arises in reaction to
or tandem with outside objectifications, including those produced by
scholars. In Arturo’s case, my presence triggered a performance that
highlights santeros’ conceptions of /a tradicién as ‘an original body of
sacred [African] knowledge,’ exemplified by patakines, sacred songs,
divination texts, and the esoteric language in which these ideally appear
160 KRISTINA WIRTZ

(Palmié 1995: 86). Santeros’ widely held sense that this transcendent,
sacred knowledge is slowly eroding and in constant danger of being
forgotten creates a productive tension between their urge to secrecy
and a certain necessity to preserve what is left and probe it for hidden
and half-forgotten esoterica.
Overall, Arturo’s use of Lucumi illustrates the strategies with which
santeros learn, perform, and interpret Lucumi and the ways in which
these strategies actively shape Lucumi as a register. Santeros deal with
the ambiguities and polysemies of Lucumi words and texts (and, in
fact, reinforce these characteristics) by treating them as multilayered
and highly contextual in their meanings, as well as potent in their
performative effects. Performances like Arturo’s emphasize these quali-
ties and convey the sense that deep religious meanings are coded by
Lucumi, not least because the orichas themselves are depicted as the
originators of Lucumi utterances that santeros merely seem to quote.
Arturo’s performance combines story and song so as to divine deeper
meanings out of their connections, meanings that may come into play
during possession rituals (as when the song might be used to provoke
Chango or Yemaya to possess someone precisely because it refers to this
unflattering story involving both of them) and divinations (as when the
story might apply to a client’s own situation, perhaps directly in how
the client treats women, or perhaps in some deeper, more metaphorical
way). That is, the telling of legends of the orichas, whether in divina-
tions or in performances like Arturo's, serves to link past with present
in a way that shows the relevance of past events for understanding and
solving current problems.
Arturo’s use of Lucumi activates connections between the mythic past
and the present by putting Lucumi into the mouths of the orichas in
his story. By associating particular utterances—songs in particular—to
particular events and personae, and by more generally reinforcing the
notion of Lucumi as a divine language, such performances charge the
register with this chronotopic value. ‘That is, Lucumi conveys a particular
configuration of space-time-subjectivity (Bakhtin 1981), in which, like
ancient Sanskrit or Church Latin in other contexts, its utterance imbues
ritual proceedings with gravity and sacredness, although in the case of
Lucumi, the sacred has a distinctly esoteric and African flavor. When
Arturo and other santeros then use Lucumí in rituals, they in effect
telescope the mythic past and the sacred plane into the present, ritual
moment. T'hey communicate with the deities in the divine language
and in doing so attract the deities to the ritual. During rituals, orichas
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 161

manifest themselves as co-participants, whether through divinations

in which they speak through the oracles or in possessing the body of
a ritual participant to take tangible human form. Santeros speak and
sing in Lucumi to trigger both kinds of co-presence and in turn expect
Lucumi to be produced by the orichas, such that Lucumi serves as a
conduit of divine-human communication and a marker of the ritual
immanence of the sacred and mythic.

Parallels with divination

I would like to argue that the interpretive strategies santeros apply

to Lucumí texts parallel ritual interpretation practices: in divinations,
santeros rely upon a few clues produced by the throwing of the cowry
shells and encapsulated into a divination sign or letra (Luc. odú) to tap
into a repository of knowledge about the associations of that sign."
Each sign is associated with particular onchas and with a vast corpus
of legends, proverbs, ailments, body parts, conflicts, personality types,
medicinal plants, and other information associated with each divination
sion, much of which circulates in Spanish orally and through hbretas,
or private notebooks of religious information that many santeros keep,
although there are also many written texts on the odunes. Their final
interpretive step is to then to investigate the sign and selectively apply
that general knowledge to the specific situation of their client so as to
provide relevant advice to identify and solve their problem. To illustrate,
consider a cowry shell divination I received from a santero I had just
met and asked to interview. Alberto invited me to his home, where he
instead offered me a divination consultation.’ He began by throwing
the sixteen cowries a few times, and counting how many landed ‘mouth
up,’ as santeros say. The first throw of the cowries land with six mouths
up, and the second with eight, producing the reading 6-8, which 1s

'! There are three divination systems associated with Santeria, which are, in order
of increasing elaboration: throwing coconut shell pieces, throwing sixteen cowries, or
divining Ifa, with either a chain or with tkin (palm nuts). Despite their considerable
differences, all of these methods follow a similar logic that requires priests to apply
a finite set of timeless, transcendent signs to the myriad situations in which divine
messages are sought. Cowry shell divination and Ifa divination also both utilize
corpora of texts, with particular texts linked to each divination sign. While the two
corpora are historically related and have some overlap, they remain distinct. See
Brown (2003) for more information.
'2 Recorded consultation with Alberto (Tape 40), March 4, 2000, Santiago de
Cuba.
162 KRISTINA WIRTZ

called Obara Unle in Lucumi. He then threw the cowries a number of

additional times to further elaborate my sign. As we proceeded, I had
to hide different pairs of objects called 166 (in this case including a
pebble, shell, and a bone) in my hands, one of which would be revealed
when I opened the hand (left or right) indicated by the cowry throw.
At each step, Alberto’s wife, who was assisting him, wrote down the
result in a notebook:
Knstina Wirtz
6-8
Obara Unle
4, 7-6, 11-7, 5-6
con Iré ankú yale
The second series of numbers determined the Lucumi summary in
the final line, which means that my sign, Obara Unle, came with good
fortune (/ré) from the dead (anku yale). Although not recorded in the
notebook, each of the second string of numbers also has a Lucumi
name, so that the numbers 4, 7-6, 11-7, 5-6 could be read as J/roso,
Oddí-Obara, Ojuani-Oddí, Oche-Obara. Indeed, the santero used these
Lucumi names in his interpretation. After completing the sign, the
santero then looked up at me and began a lengthy interpretation, of
which I provide only the first portion here (See complete analysis in
Wirtz 2003: 165-177).
Eleggua says that (he) brings i7é with Jroso, and anki he brings with Oddi
Obara, and moyare Ojuam Oddi. Eleggua says that you were born to be the
head. That you were born to be an intellectual, an intelligent person, a
person capable of deepening whatever knowledge, or desires for knowl-
edge, isn’t it true?

Alberto first gives the Lucumi names of the divination numbers that
produced my result. He specifies which oricha is speaking to me
(Eleggua) and paraphrases a proverb associated with my sign: ‘born
to be the head,’ whose meaning he then elaborates on.'’ Although we
had only met once before, he knew that I was in Cuba doing research
on Santeria, which undoubtedly affected how he interpreted ‘born to
be the head.’ He continued elaborating his interpretation for several
more minutes, giving me more and more specific information, advice,

'3 In other contexts, including divinations for other people, I have heard santeros
discuss the proverb’s meaning as referring more to leadership or ambition than to
intellect.
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 163

and warnings that culminated in the suggestion that the knowledge I was
gaining would prepare me well to be a santera and to realize financial
success by bringing other foreigners from my country to Cuba to learn
about Santeria. As in every other divination I witnessed, the santero
applied his often considerable knowledge of the signs by building his
interpretation around a few lexical and contextual cues. I have argued
that santeros apply these same interpretive practices of using associative
meanings, contextual knowledge, and a few clues from recognizable
Lucumi words to find meaning in other types of Lucumi texts, as well.
That is, there are more than coincidental parallels between the interpre-
tive strategy Alberto used to move from the cowry shell patterns to his
general knowledge of the sign, and then to my specific situation as he
saw it and Arturo’s interpretation of Lucumi passages in his storytelling
performance. Just as they do in divinations, santeros use denotational
clues (and the rich associated knowledge they trigger), plus whatever
contextual information they can glean, to produce interpretations of
what Lucumi texts like songs mean.
Three major points emerge out of my discussion of santeros’ prac-
tices for imbuing their ritual register with meaning, Each of these has
repercussions for the activities of linguists and other scholars who wish
to study diasporic linguistic phenomena like Lucumi. First, the interpre-
tive activities of santeros shape the register itself through processes of
enregisterment. As Agha (2003: 232) points out, “cultural value 1s not a
static property of things or people, but a precipitate of sociohistorically
locatable practices.’ Lucumi’s historicity—its location in space-time—1s
one important product of enregisterment. I have suggested that santeros
handle Lucumi in ways that charge it—and all their ntual practices—
with a transcendent mythic chronotope. Santeros recognize, and even
emphasize, Lucumi’s African origins, but the Africa” they refer to is on
a sacred plane that continues to intersect with the present. ‘Their uses
of Lucumi show both its divineness and its ongoing relevance as the
preferred mode of communication with the divine. That is, they use
Lucumí utterances and songs to temporally telescope the sacred and
mythic into the ritual moment. In the next section 1 will explore how
scholars, too, treat diasporic registers like Lucumí in ways that allow
temporal telescoping between Africa-past and the diaspora.
My second major point is that, despite seeing Lucumí texts as tran-
scendent, santeros treat those texts in ways that give them fluid and
open-ended meanings. They reconcile Lucumi’s timelessness on the
one hand and adaptability on the other by emphasizing that Lucumi
164 KRISTINA WIRTZ

has ever-deeper layers of occult meaning. Its very esotericness conceals

religious secrets and deep knowledge. Third, I have suggested that we
should see the ever-deeper levels of meaning not as simply inherent
in Lucumi words, but rather as a product of an interpretive strategy
I have likened to divination. Lucumi’s fundamental ambiguity and
fluidity—and the ways in which santeros’ strategies of divining mean-
ing produce these characteristics—are easily lost when scholars focus
too much on etymological reconstruction. Ironically, when we (and I
include myself in this criticism) focus too much on the African origins
of Lucumi words and texts, our practices take on the same kind of
divinatory logic that I have described for santeros. That is, scholars
ourselves engage in an interpretive process of using a few clues to
excavate ever-deeper meanings that I call ‘divining history.’ We, too,
in our eagerness to establish authoritative African origins, are engaged
in inventing tradition.

Divining the past through linguistic reconstruction

In this section I will suggest that Cuban religious practitioners’ efforts

to recuperate and activate the mythic past through their use of Lucumi
can illuminate the efforts of linguists and other scholars of the African
diaspora, who are also often engaged in ‘divining’ the past to ‘discover’
the African roots of African diasporic speech practices. ‘These practices
include recovering ‘lost’ or hidden histories and meanings and applying
modes of ‘temporal telescoping’ to show the relevance of those histories
in the present. Doing so involves setting up contrasting chronotopes
of a transcendent ‘Africa-past’ alongside a tumultuous ‘New World-
present’ and then, in ways reminiscent of divination and possession
trance rituals, creating chronotopic alignments that telescope the past
into the present, such that the past ‘possesses’ certain speech genres
and allows them—the Lucumi songs and other distinctive speech in
African diasporic religions—to serve as signs of a particular, embodied
historical consciousness (See Wirtz 2007b).
Recall my earlier account of my rather humble attempts to make
sense of the Lucumi I learned in Cuba by resorting to Yoruba sources.
I was not alone in thinking that if I could just find the etymological
connections that allowed me to decipher them, the Lucumi utterances
would transparently reveal their meanings to me. Scholar and santero
John Mason has taken this kind of project the furthest for Cuban
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 1695

Lucumi, and for overtly religious (and political) reasons. He describes

the inspiration for his project as follows: ‘For twenty-five years I have
followed Orisa and for all of that ttme I have been intrigued by the
fact that Cubans, Afro-Americans, and Puerto Ricans were moved to
dance and sing by hundreds of songs they had memorized but didn’t
understand the words to. A culture that has been deprived of its lan-
guage or made to feel that it 1s inconsequential, in the end must look
to other cultures’ languages to identify and expound on those sacred
truths that are particular and important to it” (Mason 1992: 111). His
goals of cultural reclamation are aligned with the presumably secular-
humanist impulses of scholars since Herskovits to tell a redemptive and
affirmative ‘narrative of continuities’ about African diasporic history
(Scott 1991: 262). But as Scott goes on to point out, when such narra-
tives focus on authenticating particular historical visions, they reinscribe
the sense that African diasporic historical visions require verification (or
correction) of a certain sort, even as they run the risk of essentializing
African and diasporic identities. Verificationist research—establishing
the particular linguistic ‘roots’ and transcendent ‘original’ meanings of
diasporic speech, in my example—also misses any number of interest-
ing questions about the role of tradition and narratives of continuity
in ‘the local [and broader] network of power and knowledge in which
they are employed, and the kinds of identities they serve to fashion’
(Scott 1991: 280).**
Mason explains that he recorded the songs he presents exactly as
given to him by religious practitioners in Matanzas, Cuba. However, he
presents the songs in an approximation of modern Yoruba orthography,
with English translations for everything, and with little comment about
how he and his Yoruba language consultants handled ambiguities and
multiple possibilities that arose in transliterating Lucumí utterances into
Yoruba. He justifies his interpretations by pointing out that the Yoruba
themselves engage in word play and use words with homonyms or near-
homonyms that add flavor to their connotations, concluding: ‘Since we
do not have the original authors of these songs to confer with, there is
every possibility that we have not translated their words true to their
initial aims. But we are reassured by the improvisational and ambiguous
nature of Yoruba poetry that the apple (our translation) hasn’t fallen

't See Palmié (1995) for an example of the approach Scott advocates.
166 KRISTINA WIRTZ

far from the tree” (Mason 1992: 41-42). This statement presupposes a
deep aesthetic continuity between Yoruba poetry and Cuban Lucumi,
and it exemplifies how he moves between Cuban and Yoruba sources
in ways that blur the differences. He does say that others are free to be
dissatisfied and write their own volumes. That said, the virtuosic and
seemingly fluent Yoruba transliterations he provides would be hard for
most santeros (or, indeed, anyone without considerable Yoruba linguistic
chops) to challenge, especially if they accept the premise that etymologi-
cal analysis is the key to deep and transcendent meaning.”
To illustrate his approach, we can examine his treatment of a song
to the oricha Ochún that 1 often heard during my field research. In
Table 2 below, the first column presents the chorus of the song as my
field consultant had me write it, the second column presents Mason's
version (Mason 1992: 337, 340), and the third column gives the version
in a book of oricha song translations into Spanish by Cuban santero
Lazaro Pedroso (1995: 46-47). When I asked the santero who wrote
down this song for me what the song said, he identified six Lucumí words
he recognized, although he was not sure precisely how they syntactically
combined in the song’s lines. He would only go as far as saying that
the song referred to Ochtn as the mistress of the river and called her
‘mother’ to show respect for her power. Mason goes so far as to provide
two versions of this chorus in Yoruba, based on alternative translitera-
tions of sound variations like odo versus oro in line 1, and sala versus sara
and wo versus wo in line 3. Pedroso provides a Spanish translation of
his version of the song that differs substantially from either of Mason’s
versions, even when (as in lines | and 2) they largely agree on the words
themselves. For example, Mason’s song is about Ochun, but Pedroso’s
song is directed to Ochun, reflecting santeros’ pragmatic understanding
that these songs are sung to get the attention of the oricha. Keeping
in mind that these sorts of efforts at translation are enthusiastically
consumed by santeros, I propose that, instead of asking which version
is most correct on the basis of etymological reconstruction, we instead
focus on why these santero-scholars resort to such efforts at translation

'> Although considerable problems with Mason’s Yoruba, in particular diacritics,

have been pointed out to me, I choose to let his orthography stand, as the author-
ity of even imperfectly fluent Yoruba has the same effect on all but linguists and
fluent Yoruba speakers. Indeed, the unintelligibility of the “Yoruba” and its English
translation heightens the sense of esoteric mystery.
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 167

Table 2: Three versions of a Lucumí song to Ochún and its interpretation

KW consultant John Mason Lázaro Pedroso

1 fya mi tlé odo Lyá m 1lé odo Lyá mi 1lé odo

Iya mi = my mother My mother’s house is the My mother, your house
llé = house river is the river
Odo = river Lyá mí ilé oro
My Mother, house of
tradition
2 Odo aché Gbogbo dse Gbogbo ashe 1she
Aché = power All Powerful, You have all the grace
to work
3 Teye mi saramauó e Obí m sála máa wo e Iyá onsha alá 1wó e
Yeye mi = my Women that flee for Holy mother, cover me
mother safety habitually visit her with your shawl
Íse mi sárád máa wo ' €
My deeds of charity
habitually pull you

and transliterations to make sense of the songs. I suggest that they are
motivated by notions about the deep and esoteric meanings hidden in
religious texts like songs, and that excavating those meanings is a way
of demonstrating one’s religious authority. Where the santero Arturo
gave a virtuostic oral performance of Lucumi in his story-telling, Mason
and Pedroso are virtuosic in providing translations that, in the absence
of evidence about their analytical processes, cannot be challenged by
other santeros.
Mason’s interpretive strategy, in particular, relies upon a particular
chronotopic vision of Yoruba as a transcendent language, in which
modern, standardized Yoruba (a relatively recent product of early-20th
century ethnogenesis and state consolidation that postdated Lucumi’s
presumed transplantation to Cuba) is collapsed with its archaic pre-
cursors, such that the imaginative act of translation into Yoruba from
Lucumi comes to seem like etymological reconstruction, or recovery
of onginal meanings. In effect, Mason’s Yoruba song reconstructions
parallel ritual forms of temporal telescoping through which the past
becomes transcendent and mythic and therefore highly relevant to the
present. Where diviners employ Lucumi utterances attributable to divine
speakers and Spanish-language patakines recognized as ancient wisdom,
Mason almost magically converts largely unintelligible, unsegmentable,
168 KRISTINA WIRTZ

and highly variable Cuban songs that are learned as formulae into
fully realized, semantically transparent (if otherwise highly problem-
atic) Yoruba texts. In doing so, Mason is in fact creating a broad,
transcendent notion of a pan-Yoruba world that encompasses sites in
Africa and the Americas. The tradition to which he is appealing (and
which he is contributing to the creation of) closely conforms to Guban
santeros’ notions of a transcendent, sacred font of knowledge, especially
as embodied in Lucumi and divination texts that are simultaneously
ancestral and ever-relevant.
Although completely secular scholarship on Lucumi and other African
diasporic ritual registers has a different agenda than the scholarship of
religious practitioners like Mason and Pedroso, some of these projects
too can be read as achieving similar kinds of temporal telescoping
between African ‘source’ languages and African diasporic derivatives
whose true meaning can be revealed through etymological analysis.
To accomplish this, scholars turn to living speakers or dictionanes of
modern African languages to seek out possible cognates of diasporic
forms, even though these modern sources represent how the languages
have been standardized and codified during the past century. In doing
so, the modern languages are often collapsed with their precolonial
and colonial-era precursors as timeless icons of African ‘traditions’ (the
salient ones in Cuba are grouped as Lucumi/Yoruba, Congo/Bantu/
KiKongo, Calabari/Efik/Ibibio, Arara/Fon/Ewe). ‘That 1s, in their
role as etymological sources, these modern African languages stand for
ancestral origins of diasporic word-forms, which in turn are metonyms
for entire cultural ‘survivals.’ The meanings of African words identi-
fied as etymological roots are projected forward so as to also carry
broad and weighty semantic fields that supposedly tell us (and the
locals) what their traditions and practices really mean. In a sense, then,
this temporal telescoping via a chronotope of timeless, transcendent
‘Africa-past’ creates the weight of ‘tradition’ in the African diasporic
culture being studied.
Consider the similarities between Mason’s religiously-motivated
translations and the otherwise much more properly scholarly work by
Maureen Warner-Lewis on Yoruba in ‘Trinidad (Warner-Lewis 1984,
1990): like him, she describes a process of collecting oral texts from
Caribbean sources (elderly ‘Trinidadians of Yoruba descent), then
working with Yoruba scholars to submit those texts to a process of
transliteration into modern Yoruba that permits a clear and poetic
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 169

English translation to reveal the song’s meaning (which may not always
be known by the Trinidadian singers). Where ambiguities or alternate
translations exist, she, like Mason, appeals to the poetics and punning
of Yoruba oral literature, thereby making an implicit claim about a
second-order ‘survival’ of an African aesthetic (once again in keeping
with Mintz and Price’s (1992/1976: 5) call for attention to deep ‘gram-
matical principles’). While many of her examples are songs that pertain
to the Onisha religion, she also analyzes songs from other spheres of
life, such as this lament (one of three versions) (Warner-Lewis 1984:
144-145):
Mo gbédere I have come to understand the language of
strangers ,
Mo gbé are o I live in exile
Agbe ló láró, ló láró (Just as) the agbe bird wears indigo, wears
indigo
Álúko ló kósún, ló kósún (And) the aluko bird gathers camwood
Baba, yinbó ló kó awáo Father, the Europeans captured us and brought
us here
olo “run oke ló ní wa o (But) it is God above who owns us

Her description of the song’s poetics—for example, in the association

of the blue-feathered agbe with indigo and the magenta-feather aluko
with glistening camwood and in double entendres such as aró meaning
“indigo” and aró meaning ‘sorrow—1is compelling, but what do they
mean to the elderly singers, who in many cases, it seems, have learned
the songs by rote? Warner-Lewis’s choice to provide these texts only
in Yoruba orthography helps us understand what her goals are: she
explains that she made this choice to best meet the needs of those
literate in Yoruba, which fits with the project’s overall motivation to
present oral texts collected in Trinidad as oral literature that is part
of a greater corpus of (transcendent) Yoruba culture: “This is the first
published collection of Yoruba poems, folksongs, and sacred chants
from the island of ‘Irinidad...and also the first time that an attempt
has been made to translate these texts and to examine their references
and their literary quality’ (p. 1). It seems that she and Mason share
a desire to recover and authenticate African diasporic traditions by
verifying the ancestral sources and literary quality of their Caribbean
consultants’ songs. In doing so, they rely upon a language ideology of
a transcendent source language that is always relevant. It is certainly
telling that her most recent book, a virtual catalog of comparative work
170 KRISTINA WIRTZ

on Central African cultural forms in the Caribbean and across Central

Africa in the style of Herskovits, refers to cultural transcendence in
its subtitle: “Iranscending time, transforming culture’ (Warner-Lewis
2003).
It bears repeating that there is historical and linguistic value in ident-
fying the etymologies of ‘African’ words used in African diasporic ritual
registers and songs. Such data can contribute to our understanding of
particular time periods and our historical linguistic understanding of
language change, especially in situations of language contact, which
is a point Warner-Lewis (1990) compellingly argues. ‘The best of such
work (e.g. Vincent 2006) can even challenge the assumptions of debates
over authenticity (such as that the most archaic forms are always to
be found in Africa) and the tendency to isolate texts from musical and
performance contexts, in particular. Of course etymological research
requires careful methodologies and has its pitfalls: given the number
of variants, interregional interactions, and other ambiguities on both
sides of the Atlantic and the degree of dialectal variation, borrowing,
and divergence among closely related African languages, it is not always
possible to trace a specific etymology to a particular language or dialect
with certainty, let alone to identify a single point-source text. In addition,
I suggest that unwarranted burdens are being placed on the meaning
of findings that connect, say, particular lexical items from Cuban Palo
Monte or Santeria ritual practice to particular putative source-words
in KiKongo or Yoruba.
An additional example will illustrate how problematic it can be when
etymological analyses are fed back into revealing something about a
word or text’s current meaning in its diasporic context. Recent collabo-
ration between Jesus Fuentes and Armin Schwegler has resulted in a
useful book on Cuban Palo Monte Mayombe, in which (among other
things) they investigate the origins of the names of a number of this
religion’s deities (Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler 2005). Their overall
thesis is that the linguistic origins of the names—and indeed the entire
ritual register—are KiKongo, although sometimes a name can be seg-
mented more than one way, producing more than one possible KiKongo
‘original.’ For example, they provide three alternate etymologies for
the deity Pungo Dibudr, based on whether the second part is segmented
as di+budi or dibu+di and whether the ‘b’ of Spanish phonology 1s
assimilated to KiKongo /b/ or /v/ (pp. 181-184):
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 171

1) KIK. Mptngu ‘supreme, all-powerful’ + KIK. d ‘genitive prefix’+

KIK. Mbuud: ‘fetish for curing stomach problems’
2) KIK. Mpúngu ‘supreme, all-powerful’ + KIK. dibu ‘small bell for
hunting dogs’ + KIK. di: ‘genitive prefix’ + (mbwd ‘dogs’)
3) KIK. Mpingu ‘supreme, all-powerful’ + KIK. d& ‘genitive prefix’ +
KIK. vudu or vudidi ‘gluttony and lasciviousness’

So the etymological derivation is either ‘all powerful fetish against

stomach problems,’ ‘all powerful fetish of hunting bells for dogs,’ or ‘all
powerful fetish of gluttony and lasciviousness.’ Fuentes and Schwegler
discuss the merits of each possibility primarily by seeking additional
clues in Pungo Dibudi’s association with the oricha Ogun of Santeria.
Ogun, they tell us, has a divination sign that warns of stomach ail-
ments, and he is also the deity of metal, including the metal of surgical
instruments, which would justify etymology (1). He 1s also associated
with dogs and hunting (although they point out that these are domains
of other orichas as well), which could confirm etymology (2). Finally,
Ogun is well known for his rapacious appetites, which would fit with
etymology (3). Whatever the merits of these proposed etymnologies, note
that Fuentes and Schwegler utilize clues to excavate deeper meanings
according to the same divinatory logic shown above—a logic that reli-
gious practitioners largely accept as a method for elucidating hidden
knowledge and deeper levels of truth. Such clues are open-ended, even
taking the sleuths across the divide Cubans usually envision between
Congo and Yoruba traditions.
In another typical entry, Fuentes and Schwegler suggest that the
deity name Mama Kengue may derive from the KiKongo words maama
(an honorific title meaning *mother”) plus the verb kangá (“to tie, bind”)
in its preterite form of kéngé. ‘They explain the name as a reference
to an important ritual form of power in which the practitioner can
magically “bind” or ‘tie’ someone up, which leads them to investigate
whether this deity lives up to her name’s newfound meaning as ‘the
Mother that has magically tied.’ Most of their palero field consultants
agreed that she does have this capacity, although at least one disagreed,
saying that this deity does not have the secret component called ‘Four
Winds’ that would give her this power (Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler
2005: 147-149). Their discussion raises the question of what 1s being
claimed when an ‘original’ meaning hidden in a name’s etymology is
‘revealed.’ Are some practitioners now demonstrably correct in claiming
magical binding powers for Mama Kengue, while others are wrong? ‘The
172 KRISTINA WIRTZ

notion of a trancendent Kongo culture, encapsulated and transmitted

in words of KiKongo origin, here allows the scholars to make claims
about authoritative religious knowledge, claims that will almost certainly
be taken up by practitioners themselves to authenticate or delegitimize
their own and others’ practices (cf. Palmié 1995).
Not only would I caution against reading etymological derivations
as evidence to support or refute current practices, I would also suggest
that such derivations are not a robust basis for working backward, met-
onymically, from a word (or even an entire lexicon) to a general cultural
tradition (as in the simplistic if oft-repeated assertions that Santeria is
Yoruba and Palo Monte is Kongo). Ultimately, Fuentes and Schwegler’s
etymological analyses, even taken at face value, tell us precious little
about the origins of the Palo deity Mama Kengue or who, in African
ethnic terms, is responsible for her creation and transmission. Nor
do etymologies make a clear case for Herskovitsian versus Frazierian
judgments about how ‘purely’ Bantu or how ‘syncretized and invented’
Palo Monte is. The etymology posits a linguistic lineage connecting a
proper name in Palo Monte and two modern KiKongo words to some
common (likely Congo) antecedents, whether recent or remote, but it
cannot tell us how or why or by whose efforts those lexical items came
into their current circulation in contemporary Cuba.
Instead, such etymological detective work tells us a great deal about
the collaborative work of religious meaning-making in the dialogue
between scholars and practitioners, in which each consume the oth-
ers’ texts and put them to use to further their own interpretations. Not
only is the line between academic and religious research blurred (wit-
ness the legions of scholar-practitioners and practitioner-scholars and
the borrowings across camps), but there are also convergences in the
kinds of interpretive strategies used. Historical linguists and religious
practitioners are engaged in meaning-making through a divinatory
process of using clues to ‘reveal’ deep, hidden meanings that collapse
past and present into a transcendent ‘tradition’ that 1s always relevant
in the present moment, and that can therefore stake out precedence
over other, competing interpretations and practices unsanctioned by
etymological claims.
Both scholars’ and practitioners’ interpretive strategies are based on,
and thus presuppose, language ideologies involving some notion of a
transcendent language. However, the language ideologies differ in other
important respects. I have described how religious practitioners employ
notions of religious language as existing on and tapping into a timeless,
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 173

sacred plane—Africa as the transcendent realm of the gods, by analogy

to the ancient Greeks’ Mount Olympus, and Lucumi/Yoruba as their
divine language. Their ways of creating meaning through etymological
and other divinatory analyses are intimately tied to the ways in which
they make a transcendent sacred Africa ritually immanent and therefore
continually relevant to the present. In contrast, scholars using etymo-
logical analyses to seek connections between African and its diaspora
are relying upon an ideology of linguistic and cultural transcendence
that, rather than mobilizing notions of the transformative power of
the sacred, imprisons Africa in a shell of unchanging pastness at the
same time that it blinds them to the ways 1n which they are creating
(rather than discovering) history. Rather than revealing connections,
I suggest that such analyses actively create connections and in doing
so, their most important contribution is to reproduce a particular and
distinctive historical subjectivity.

Conclusion

Insofar as I have focused on deconstructing the interpretive activities

of my respected academic colleagues and expert field consultants, I am
conscious of how my analysis, too, is implicated in what Charles Briggs
(1996) calls the ‘politics of discursive authority.’ Briggs describes the
ways in which research ‘exposing’ the inventedness of tradition does
violence to local perspectivcs and political agendas, especially when
the group being exposed is already marginalized. In his meta-analysis
of his own fieldwork situation among Warao people in Venezuela, he
explores how differently positioned social actors, including privileged
first-world researchers, their colleagues who are based in nations with
less socioeconomic clout, local ‘cultural brokers,’ and their neighbors and
compatriots who have even less access to the international information
economy, engage in metadiscursive (what I have called ‘interpretive’)
practices to bridge the ‘intertextual gaps’ between past and present. All
of these social categories and some intermediate ones have also been
relevant in my analysis.
What is novel about the state of affairs in what I have loosely
referred to as studies of African diasporic ntual speech is that people
positioned along the entire spectrum of social categories, from local
cultural brokers and those who would be local cultural brokers among
religious practitioners, to international researchers, are engaged in
174 KRISTINA WIRTZ

remarkably similar ways of ‘divining’ a transcendent African past and

‘telescoping’ it into the present. This is true despite otherwise differ-
ent (if sometimes converging) agendas among these actors. Whereas
Afro-Cuban practitioners and Cuban scholars are variously engaged in
constructing Afro-Cuban (or thoroughly hybridized ‘Cuban’) presents
and futures, whether religious or not, international researchers are
more consciously engaged in constructing diasporic sensibilities. While
Cubans have remained somewhat outside the current trends toward
pan-Yorubaism and other manifestations of diasporic subjectivites
(despite considerable transnational dialogue and movement of religious
practitioners and scholars), there may be greater accord between the
visions of the scholars and other actors in the Imnidad-Yoruba con-
nections explored by Warner-Lewss. In these cases, diasporic desires to
pinpoint an African homeland and heritage seem to converge between
scholars and practitioners.
Whatever the underlying motivations and ideologies of the parties
involved, all contribute to the interpretive strategies through which a
few linguistic and contextual clues permit transatlantic connections
to be discovered and deep, forgotten meanings to be revealed. In my
examples of this sort of etymological reconstruction I have discussed the
difficulties and emphasized the transformative work that is accomplished
through ‘discovery’ of a diasporic text’s ‘original’ African language and
‘revelation’ of its (original and transcendent) meaning In any event, the
‘discovery’ of specific African sources for Cuban Palo or Trinidadian
Yoruba words and songs, or the ‘reconstruction’ of ‘original’ Yoruba
meanings for Cuban Santeria songs, because they metapragmatically
frame the diasporic cultural forms as (usually eroded or partly forgotten)
copies of a timeless African original, make certain claims on what the
meanings of the diasporic cultural forms should be. The etymologies
may intended to be exclusively correct (as in the secular reconstructions)
or not (as in the religious reconstructions, like Mason's). In either case,
they are implicated in claims and counterclaims to religious authority
among practitioners and lineages, and for current efforts at codifying
and institutionalizing religious forms, especially among santeros.
In this way, too, emblematically ‘African’ words and songs becomes
metonyms for entire cultural lineages, as if Palo can be explained in
whole or in part through its KiKongo origins or Santería through its
Yoruba heritage. That 1s, an entire diasporic history through which these
modern religious entities emerged risks being collapsed into a single,
unbroken chain from transcendent Africa-of-the-past to the diasporic
 ‘AFRICAN’ ROOTS IN DIASPORIC RITUAL REGISTERS AND SONGS 175

present. ‘To the extent that practitioners themselves accept the author-
ity of such scholary revisions, scholars risk transforming local practices
and notions of tradition without even being aware of the dynamics of
tradition and authority and the modes of historical consciousness among
those they study. We thus run the nsk of overlooking significant data
about the ways in which the African diaspora is a product of memory
and historical subjectivity—in which memories, through the divinatory
efforts of linguistic sleuths, are never truly lost, but only hidden.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Stephan Palmié for the invitation and much help-
ful feedback along the way. Thanks also to Amanda Vincent, Armin
Schwegler, and an anonymous reviewer for encouragement and stimu-
lating critique on this paper and the larger project, and to many other
supportive colleagues at Western Michigan University and beyond.
Yiwola Awoyale’s Yoruba linguistic expertise was invaluable. As always,
my deepest thanks go to my field consultants in Cuba, without whose
patience and support none of my work would be possible. ‘This research
was funded by a Brody-Foley Grant for fieldwork, an International
Pre-Dissertation ‘Training Fellowship from the Social Science Research
Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, with funds
provided by the Ford Foundation, and several Foreign Language and
Area Studies Fellowships.

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 ECUF'S ATLANTIC: AN ESSAY IN METHODOLOGY

Stephan Palmié

Introduction

My contribution to this volume derives from a larger project concerned

with issues of continuity and disjunction in Atlantic cultural history. I
aim to explore here a number of questions to do with whether, and
under what conditions, Africanist and African-Americanist forms of
knowledge might become subject to epistemologically sound forms of
integration. Originally conceived almost ten years ago,' this essay per-
haps ought to be read as a companion piece to my exploration of the
growth of both Afro-Cuban traditions and western forms of modernity
out of a single structural and discursive formation of ‘Atlantic’ scope
(Palmié 2002). But it also forms an historiographical counterpart to
Kenneth Routon’s (2005) and my own (Palmié 2006a) more recent
ethnographically focused attempts to delineate the contours of forms
of historical consciousness characteristic of a male secret society known
as abakud in western Cuba. In the latter contributions, both Routon
and I mainly concern ourselves with how contemporary members
of this association reproduce their particular form of consociation
by ritually recalling, into Cuban time and space, a complex series of
actions that—in their understanding—once unfolded at a conceptually
distant site of origin called Usagaré, Bekura Mendo or Enllenisén. Indexing
notions of graded spatial inclusivity in contemporary abakud parlance
and ritual practice (such that Usagaré is considered part of Bekura
Mendó which, in turn is part of Enllenisón), these terms have long been
taken to encode ‘memories’ of potentially identifiable African place
names that slaves from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigena
and southwestern Cameroon carried to Cuba, and there passed on to
their descendants. The most recent, as well as most literal-minded,

' Its earliest version was presented at a conference on “The Atlantic Slave Trade
in African and African American Memory’ held at the University of Chicago, May
24-25, 1997. It has gone through its own set of historical changes since then.
180 STEPHAN PALMIE

version of this argument has been presented by Miller (2005) who

argues that etymological research, combined with ethnographically
elicited approval of word-by-word translations by exiled Cuban mem-
bers of abakud and native Efik-speakers (whom he has brought together
on several occasions in New York and Nigeria), and additional glosses
authorized by trained linguists can unambiguously disclose and authen-
ticate the objectively true history of a transatlantic historical relationship.
The result, or so Miller believes, is not only that, thanks to his assist-
ance, contemporary members of a Nigerian secret society known as
ekpe and Cuban abakud can now ‘perceive themselves in the other’s
language and ritual practice’ (Miller 2005:26). It is also that ritual
signifiers such as Usagaré, Bekura Mendó and Enllemsón, according to
him, acquire secular transparency as geographic and/or ethnic indi-
cators—so that the first term really refers to a place in southwestern
Cameroon known as Usak Edet or Usaghade, the second to a Balondo
village to its east named Bekura, and the third to ethnically Efik ‘sons
of the soil” (1.e. free-born inhabitant of Old Calabar in present-day
Nigeria).
Miller's work falls squarely into a longstanding tradition in African-
Americanist research, established in the United States since the time of
Melville Herskovits’s first efforts, in the 1930s, to demolish the reigning
consensus that slavery had stripped black Americans of any vestiges of
their ancestral African cultures (cf. Jackson 1986, Apter 1991, Yelvington
2001, 2006). It belongs to a genre of anthropological inquiry aiming
to identify and authenticate historical continuities between African
and New World cultural forms that has always been driven not just
by explicitly announced theoretical concerns, but by political ones as
well (Scott 1991, 1999). In that regard, neither Routon nor I question
Miller's commitment to a good cause—such as helping Nigerian Efik
and Cuban members of abakud establish ‘a common history [that] is
an international connection that gives both groups new status as repre-
sentatives of valuable and ancient cultural traditions’ (Miller 2005:36).
However, not only are such historical rescue missions politically far from
unambiguous (given that, as Routon [2005:37] puts it, they ‘inevitably,
if unwittingly lend legitimacy to the authority claims of some [local]
groups while denying it to others’ and, perhaps even more troubling,
allocate the authority to arbitrate such claims to us); rather, once
regarded as an end in itself, the search for the ‘African origins’ of New
World practices and identities also forecloses an important analytical
 ECUE’S ATLANTIC 181

dimension: what if, for example, the terminology on which Miller’

tends to focus indexes localities that exist on a plane that simply has no
fixed, or even only concretizable geographic equivalent in the world as
non-members of abakud know it? What if (irrespective of the ongin of
these words) Usagaré, Bekura Mendé or Enllemsén designated assumable
positions or states of being, established by chronotopic illocutionary
devices that localize specific forms of agency and subjectivity in an
‘epochal’ (Wagner 1986) ritual frame of interpretation?’ If so, what
would be gained by calling such locations or positionalities ‘Africa’ in
any other than a figurative way?
Like Routon and Wirtz (this issue), I have previously argued that
terms such as, for example, Enllenisón (generally taken to mean “Africa”
do not so much index (principally verifiable) topographic data as impose
sacred value on specific situations or utterances. If this is so, even only
in principle, we may be ill-served by rashly literalizing the deictical
referents of abakud speech and ritual in order to assimilate them to
an ‘Africa’ delineated in geographic and ethnological categories of our
making. What is at issue here is not just that the latter categories do
not, at least at this point in time, have much salience for members of
contemporary Cuban members of abakuá (though they may well come
to do so in the future).* Rather, it is that, in naively engineering align-
ments between topography and tropology, we are, in a methodological
sense, attempting to commensurate incommensurables. Why this is so
is a question I would like to dwell on in what follows—not, however,
by further going down the analytical road of ethnographic criticism of
etymological pathways to history. What I intend to do here instead is

* As well as self-consciously ‘New Revisionist’ historians aiming to refocus scholarly

debate on the question of ‘African ongins’. On such tendencies see below, as well
as my more specific critique in Palmié (2005).
* What Wagner has in mind here are not the extended, internally discontinuous
“events” (like “The French Revolution’) that Danto (1965) calls ‘temporal structures’,
nor a Bergsonian notion of phenomenological ‘duration’ (Bergson 1912). For Wagner,
‘epoch’ designates a unit of experienced ‘figurative time that belongs to a flow of
analogy—a “now” that remembers or imagines itself into (or out of) other “nows””
(Wagner 1986:90), and so creates a unitary ‘presence’ beyond chronological measure-
ment, and scalar resolution. As I tried to show earlier (Palmié 2006a), Usagaré, Bekura
Mend6, or Enllenisén might be considered as designations of such ‘nows’.
* In the long run, Miller’s efforts might well result in the creation of what Johnson
(this issue) might call a novel ‘diasporic horizon’ for Cuban abakud. If so, it would
be fascinating to document this ethnographically.
182 STEPHAN PALMIE

return to a set of basic, but nowadays seemingly all but forgotten, ques-
tions concerning the analytical viability of the transatlantic comparisons
on which endeavors such as Muiller’s must necessarily rest. While I will
not suggest any easily operationalizable solution to conceptualizing the
historical relations between ‘African’ and ‘African-American’ cultural
formations, I hope to shed light on some of the metatheoretical ques-
tions with which any attempt to transcend the current terms of debate
would necessarily have to engage.

Galton rides again

As in my previous contributions to this debate, I take my departure

from David Scott’s (1991, 1999) observations about what he calls the
‘verificationist epistemology’, which, to this day, has tended to dominate
historical and anthropological studies of African-American cultures.
Scott 1s concerned with a tradition of inquiry that defines the central
task of African-Americanist research as providing answers to question
such as
whether or not or to what extent Caribbean culture [or other African-
American cultures, for that matter] 1s authentically African; and whether
or not or to what extent Caribbean peoples have retained an authentic
memory of their past, in particular a memory of slavery. (Scott 1999:
108)
In Scott’s view, the primary reason for why we should critically revisit
this agenda is that it ultimately arises from an ‘ideological desire to
supply a foundational past’. Yet this is not the only problem. For
verificationist approaches also obscure a whole range of epistemologi-
cal issues. They do so by suggesting that such a past 1s, in principle,
transparent, and that its ‘recovery’ is, therefore, merely a question of
empirically engineering, to use Scott’s (1991) earlier formulation, a
plausible match between ‘that event’ and ‘this memory’—the former
(properly evidenced ‘historical facts’) presumably enjoying a verifiable
prediscursive objectivity that adds critical corroborative weight to what
might otherwise remain the contestable product of the undisciplined
collective imagination.
Leaving aside the numerous problems connected with operational-
izing the concept of ‘memory’ on a supra-individual level (cf, e.g.,
Klein 2000, Lambek and Antze 1996), it is the idea of the feasibility
of engineering methodologically defensible and theoretically sound
 ECUE’S ATLANTIC 183

transcontinental analytical correlations—or Juxtapositions, depending

upon perspectives—between documentary records on past forms of
sociality and eventuation (‘history’) and ethnographic data concern-
ing contemporary local constructions of ‘the past’ (“memory’) that I
intend to call into question in the following. My point of departure
lies in a simple issue to do with time, space and units of analysis in
African-American anthropology. If traditional narratives of ‘universal
history’ have fractured under the destabilizing impact of non-western
histories (Feierman 1993), the opposite effect seems to be observable
in anthropology, where the notion of ‘the local’ is in rapidly increas-
ing disarray (cf. Fardon 1990, Appadurai 1995, Gupta and Ferguson
1997). Today we know that many, perhaps most, classical ethnographies
presented us with artificial constructions of spatially overdetermined,
while temporally underdetermined, units of analysis. ‘This is no longer
so. Gone are the discrete and seemingly pelagic ‘villages’ and ‘tribes’ of
yore, moored as they were in a kind of analytical Sargasso Sea known
as the ‘ethnographic present’. In their stead, we have become increas-
ingly aware of an expanding heunistic frontier defined by a bedazzling
multitude of supra-local linkages extending across considerably vast
stretches of time. The price we paid for this historicization and global-
ization of anthropology was that the clean and empirically manageable
unit of analysis went out with the murky bathwater. We cannot simply
go somewhere, stay there for a ttme, and come home with a monograph
based merely on a circumstantial moment of observation.
If this is true for anthropologists working in ‘classical’ ethnographic
localities today, African-Americanists have faced such problems all along.
From its inception at the turn of the twentieth century in the work of
pioneers like the Brazilian medical examiner Raimundo Nina Rodrigues
or the Cuban lawyer Fernando Ortiz, the central problematic of this
field of inquiry was defined in terms that transcended, and thereby
bound, vast geographical.and temporal expanses. What they initially
set out to explain was the existence, within their own societies, of
modes of thought and behavior that appeared too alien, too obviously
tied into a history of forced transatlantic mass migration to be written
off as locally bred forms of deviance from the cultural norms of the

’ Or simply read as such out of behaviors whose ‘pastfulness’ is not discursively

available to the actors themselves (cf. Shaw 2002, Argenti 2006).
184 STEPHAN PALMIE

respective postcolonial elites.° It eventually was the North American

anthropologist Melville Herskovits who would systematize such early
glances across the Atlantic into a coherent, though theoretically and
methodologically naive, research agenda. He did so by fusing a con-
cept of culture areas (which Herskovits himself had helped to pioneer)
with the historicism of its philological precursor theories that had long
depended on the notion of clearly separable units of analysis, thereby
imparting toAfrican-American anthropology a set of assumptions the
problematic nature of which has still to be fully acknowledged (cf. Apter
1991, Scott 1999, Bennett 2000, Yelvington 2001, 2006).*
This cannot be the place for a sustained examination of theory-
building in this field of inquiry. Still, 1t needs to be noted that most
anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century who eschewed
popular racist interpretations of African-American cultures as biologi-
cally determined phenomena ran headlong into a peculiarly inverted
version of what is known as Galton’s problem. This phrase or term
refers to a methodological conundrum particularly pertinent to a
nowadays (perhaps fortunately) defunct form of cross-cultural statistical
comparison (cf. Narroll 1970, Jorgenson 1979).® The substantive issue,

© Tronically, the fact that both initially cast their endeavors in the mold of Lombrosian
criminal anthropology (with its emphasis on biologistically conceived—1.e. context-inde-
pendent—determinants of behavior) may have steered them towards a transcontinental
view, albeit for the wrong reasons. At least Ortiz, however, had clearly transcended
these earlier ‘racialist’ views by 1930 and embarked on an ethnographic and historical
quest which produced some of the finest African-Americanist research to this date (cf.
Coronil 1995, Palmié 1998, 2002, Palmié and Pérez 2005, Diaz 2005).
” Herskovits’s program for African-American studies remained crucially indebted to
the maxim his teacher Franz Boas had laid out in terms of linguistic reconstruction:
“Comparison of related forms throws light upon the history of their differentiation’ (Boas
1938:2). What may, indeed, have made African-America such an attractive field for a
student of Boas was the fact that in this particular case—as Herskovits never tired of
pointing out—historical relationships did not have to be inferred (e.g. in the form of
hypothetical migrations) from modern evidence, but seemed to be on record.
® It takes its origin from a famous debate between Sir Edward Burnett Tylor and
Darwin’s cousin, the eminent statistician Sir Francis Galton. Galton is mostly remem-
bered today as the founder of Eugenics—a rather infamous outgrowth of nineteenth
century scientism. But in the case at hand he authored an important intervention in
the complacent social evolutionism of contemporary armchair anthropologists. At a
meeting of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1889, Tylor presented the results
of an ambitious inquiry aiming to derive universal laws of the evolution of human
systems of marriage and descent from the comparison of a sample of 350 cultures
culled from the ethnographic record available to him. To Tylor’s dismay, Galton stood
up and asked him about the independence of his sampling units: how could Tylor
guarantee that what he called ‘adhesions’ (i.e. correlations) between variables (such as
e.g. modes of reckoning descent, incest-barriers, residence rules, or forms of kin-avoid-
 ECUE’S ATLANTIC 185

however, was clearly involved in the famous debate between Herskovits

and E. Franklin Frazier about how to weigh transatlantic continuities
against the impact of independent local factors (1.e., the crushing impact
of New World slavery) in the development of African-American cultures.
Stated in most simplistic terms, the question was (and, in many ways,
still 1s): given that both similarities and differences between African and
African-American cultural forms cannot well be fortuitous, do we pri-
marily look to Africa or the Americas for an explanation? Each option
gives us a different choice of which factors to regard as more significant
for the cultural history of African-American societies: those relating to
transatlantic diffusion of African forms, or to those productive of New
World functional ‘adhesions’ (as Tylor would have put it). Is it, in other
words, movement or structure that we need to focus on?
By the mid-1970s, a rather elegant solution to this African-Americanist
version of Galton’s problem was offered by Mintz and Price (1992). For
several cogently argued reasons, these authors advocated an analytic
shift from comparing seemingly free-floating units of cultural form to
units of historically contextualized social enactment. Problematizing the
historical conditions of social re-aggregation among enslaved Africans
in the New World, they directed attention not only to processually
induced discontinuities in cultural transmission, but to the theoreti-
cal importance of assuming cultural creativity and large-scale ad hoc
syntheses to have precipitated the institutional crystallization of such
cultural forms as were observable in the Americas. Though careful not
to deny the importance of Old World resources in African-American
societalization and culture building, their re-statement of the problem
nevertheless placed the explanatory onus squarely on the shoulders of
those arguing for immediate and ethnically specific African continu-
ities. If Herskovits’s approach had implied an imagery of erosion and
fragmentation of transplanted African units, theirs emphasized the
fusion of fragments into essentially new cultural entities. What came
into view, thus, were processes of ‘creolization’, informed both by Old
World cultural resources and the exigencies of the particular New World
‘social arenas’ in which they were put to use.

ance) reflected universal patterns of social evolution if he could not rule out the mutual
contamination of his sample units through historically contingent processes of cultural
diffusion? Tylor could not answer the question, and neither has anybody after him ever
solved the problem of how to infer presumably universally valid ‘laws’ of human social
development from historical, and therefore necessarily contingent, data.
186 STEPHAN PALMIE

Despite its theoretical sophistication and methodological soundness,

however, the ‘rapid early synthesis’ model suggested by Mintz and Price
fell short of stimulating a thorough historicization of African-American
anthropology. Shifting, as it did, the explanatory premium onto the
American side (and, therefore, into the realm of history rather than
the search for origins), Mintz and Price’s book rather seems to have
encouraged, quite contrary to these authors’ intentions, hypostatizing
the concept of creolization to a degree where it allows glossing over
history in a manner much reminiscent of an earlier inflationary use of
the (historically quite vacuous) concept of ‘acculturation’.’ This tendency
might be viewed as fairly inconsequential in cases where the documen-
tary record is simply too thin to allow more than educated guesses
about the particulars of process. Yet it not only trivializes the question
of how exactly ‘creole’ syntheses were achieved, but also obscures the
formidable problems presented by cases where covariational ‘adhesions’
might plausibly be attributed to Atlantic transfer—not necessarily of
concrete forms, but of organizational models (Palmié 1993). More
importantly for my present concerns, it evades the issue of systemic
articulations that may—at least in some cases—reveal single observa-
tional units (on whichever side of the Atlantic) to be part and parcel
of larger, encompassing historical constellations shaped by processes
operating on a scale that cannot adequately be described (let alone
analyzed) within a cis- or transatlantic frame of reference.

On the leopard's trail

In order to illustrate this point, let me begin by reiterating a story that

has become a kind of myth of origin, not only among the people directly

2 There are additional theoretical problems bound up with the creolization concept
which is recently enjoying a remarkable renaissance. Scholars from various walks of
theory have foisted upon its potential for signifying states of ‘hybridity’ as an antidote
against diverse forms of ‘foundational thought’. Since most of them seem to derive
the concept from linguistics, the historical usage of the term ‘criollo’ as a designa-
tion of an Old World species grown indigenous in the New World has virtually been
obliterated. ‘This is ironical, for all fanciful talk about ‘hybridity’ notwithstanding, the
roots of the creolization-metaphor lie in a discourse on breeding—hardly the genre
in which postmodern critics like to express themselves. An ingenuous use of the term
close to its historical origins is evident in Breen (1984). Both Mintz (1996) and Price
(2001) have recently independently clarified their points of view in respect to some
of the unintended consequences of their intervention. For other issues involved in
operationalizing the ‘creolizaton’ metaphor see Palmié (2006b).
 ECUE’S ATLANTIC 187

involved, but among scholars concerned with championing what one

might call an ‘Africanistic’ view. It pertains to the Afro-Cuban secret
society of abakud, also known as the fidiiigos,'° an all-male sodality that
probably emerged in Cuba in the first third of the nineteenth century
and continues to exist to this very day. Here is how the probable codi-
fier of this narrative, the Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz (1986:14), put
it some 80 years ago:
Due to a quirk of fate, one day there were brought to Havana a group of
black slaves of Efik origin, who had been caught there [in Africa] by the
slave traders and transported jointly to the Cuban coast 1n order to be sold
in the barracoons of the slave market of [the town of] Regla. And those
of that group who pertained to the secret and defensive society which
was and still is called ekpe or ekpon there [in Africa], reorganized it here
to augment their collective power, Just as it had functioned there in the
estuaries of Calabar.
So far Ortiz’s opinion on the subject which has, more recently, been
restated with but minor alterations by, for example, Enrique Sosa (Sosa
Rodrigues 1982:118f.), Robert F. Thompson (1983:228), Jorge and Isabel
Castellanos (1992:211-213), Ivor Miller (2000:164, 2005), and Brown
(2003). On face value, it is a pretty good story, since it is not based on an
unduly large amount of guesswork. ‘Thanks to the attention the Cuban
police paid to this secret society, we have some fairly straightforward
information on the events surrounding the inception of what came
to be known as abakud. Summarizing the evidence, we can piece the
events together as follows. In 1836, a group of creole slaves from
Havana’s well-to-do ‘barrio’ of Belén traveled across the bay to
Regla. Their destination was a house owned by an officially accredited
association of first-generation Africans known as the ‘cabildo de la
nación carabalí bncamo apapa eft’. ‘There they acquired, by payment of
a considerable amount of money, a body of secret knowledge which
enabled them to form an independent sodality named Efik Butón. We
do not know how the transaction proceeded, but the institution it
engendered—presumably an association comparable to modern abakud

'° Particularly in nineteenth century sources the association is typically referred to

as los ñámgos. Today, members of abakud regard the term as derogatory and offensive,
and prefer to call themselves and each other ocobvos (i.e. ‘brothers’) or ecoria ñene abakuá
(‘men born over the drum skin’—1.e. into abakud).
188 STEPHAN PALMIE

chapters (known as ‘potencias’, ‘juegos’ or ‘tierras’)—proved an instan-

taneous and lasting success."!
By 1839 a police raid on the house of the free ‘morena’ Dominga
Cardenas in Havana’s barrio Jesus Maria yielded information that led
to the subsequent arrest of the 25-year-old creole cook and dockworker
Margarito Blanco. In his home the Cuban authorities found written
invitations addressed to the ‘ocongos’ of “Obane, Ososo and Efo’, thus
indicating the likelihood that at least three other such associations were
already in existence. For Blanco had not only signed these letters with
his name but had included his title of “ocongo de Ultan’ and a peculiar
graphic sign of which we know that it represented the equivalent of
the ‘signature’ (‘firma’) of the mocongo-title holder of modern abakud."
Blanco’s abortive attempt to organize a chapter of abakud in Jesus Maria
terminated with his deportation to Spain. Yet other such ventures fol-
lowed in rapid succession. Despite the massive wave of repression in
the aftermath of the so-called “La Escalera’ conspiracy of 1844, the
growth of abakud continued virtually unchecked. By 1850, some 40
independent chapters were in operation in Havana and Regla, concen-
trating mostly in harbor-near barrios, but increasingly branching out
into other neighborhoods (and towns such as Guanabacoa) where they
repeatedly engaged the Cuban police force in pitched battles over the
control of single barrios.'? A mere ten years later abakuá had reached the
important port city of Matanzas (1862), and finally penetrated the city
of Cárdenas in 1927—the last Cuban urban environment to become
a lasting stronghold of abakud.'* Time and again, violence flared up
throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and despite,
repeated mass arrests, the growth of abakud seemed beyond control.

'' See Archivo Nacional de Cuba (hencewith ANC) Asuntos Politicos, leg. 76 #56,
‘Trujillo y Monagas (1882:364), Roche Monteagudo (1925:4), Deschamps Chapeaux
(1964:97).
'2 See ANC Comisión Militar leg 23 #1, Deschamps Chapeaux (1964:98, 101). Abakud
has a complex system of titles. Each chapter or ‘potencia’ consists of 13 holders of
mayor ranked titles, up to 12 titled minor functionaries, and an unspecified number of
untitled members. The four highest ranking functionaries are bear the titles of /llamba,
Mocongo, [sué and Isunecué.
'3 In 1853 one such clash in the barrio of Jesús María resulted in the death of
police inspector José Esquivel, and a series of shoot-outs between ñáñigos and the police
during the carnival season of 1865 sparked a period of urban warfare that lasted until
September 1866 (Roche Monteagudo 1925:52).
'* See ANC Asuntos Políticos leg 76 +56, Trujillo y Monagas (1882: 365), Moliner
Castañeda (1988:14), Sosa Rodriguez (1982: 131), Abascal Lopez (1985:60), and Dávila
Nodarse (1981:2f.).
 ECUE’S ATLANTIC 189

That this mysterious, aggressive brotherhood somehow ‘came’ from

Africa appears to have been a commonplace among nineteenth-century
observers, and speculations about its origin and nature of this ostensibly
African secret organization repeatedly occupied the popular press. What
added to the mixture of revulsion and curiosity that abakuá inspired
in the public imagination were the colorful ntual processions which
its members periodically performed: guided by drummers and bearers
of sacred staffs and ensigns, the so-called “diablitos’ or fremes—dancers
entirely covered by a tight-fitting checkered costume with a conical
headpiece—would emerge from the meeting houses of single ‘poten-
clas” to perform in the streets what contemporaries described as an
outlandish pantomime.’ Yet it was not until the 1920s that Fernando
Ortiz finally pinned down the /ons et ongo of abakud.'° Judging from the
names of some ‘potencias’ and the fact that a group of Africans who
chose to refer to themselves as ‘carabalt’? had been implicated in the
founding of the first such sodality, Ortiz concluded that abakud was
nothing but a transplanted version of a localizable African institution:
the so-called ‘leopard societies’ of Old Calabar known indigenously as
ekpe or ngbe. By the time of Ortiz's writing, ekpe had acquired enough
notoriety among missionaries and colonial administrators in south-
eastern Nigeria and the British part of the Cameroons to have left a
prominent imprint in the early Africanist literature. Since at least the
1850s, the Efik of Old Calabar were known to the Victorian world as
the leading African experts in secret-society building.’’ Following the

15 See e.g. Barras y Prado (1925:123f.) for an account dating to 1852. The paintings
of the visiting Basque artist Landaluze (1881), reprinted e.g. in Ortiz (1981), ‘Thompson
(1983) or Brown (2003) provide intriguing pictorial evidence for costume and comport-
ment of these masked dancers at mid-nineteenth century. Castellanos (1928) describes
the ireme body masks (‘saco’, afoireme) in detail, though his interpretation is wildly off
the mark.
'© The pertinent publications include Ortiz (1950), (1951), (1952-55), (1975), and
especially the series of articles on the ‘negros curros’ published between 1926 and
1928 in Archivos del Folklore Cubano, and posthumously edited by Diana Iznaga (Ortiz
1986). Ortiz seems to have reached the conclusion that the ‘negros efi y carabalí son los
mismos’ upon reading Samuel Crowthers Journal of an Expedition on the Niger and ‘Tshadde
Rwers (1856) in 1916 (see Ortiz 1975:46).
'?7 “The most uncivilized part of Africa ever I was in was Old Calabar’, the explorer
MacGregor Laird stated in 1833, adding that ‘[t]he Calabar River has been so long
frequented by British vessels that a description of it would now be superfluous’ (McFarlan
1957:2f). The operation of ekpe received rather extensive coverage in the writings
of the Scottish Presbyterian missionaries stationed there since the 1850s (e.g. Waddell
1863). Towards the end of the century, Mary Kingsley thus chose to subtitle chapter
four of her Travels in West Afnca with the ironic suggestion that the ‘the general reader
190 STEPHAN PALMIE

Brazilian Nina Rodngues’s example of ransacking such literature for

ethnographic analogies, Ortiz had begun to systematically assemble a
library of precisely such writings. Hence his ‘once upon a time a group
of enslaved Efik’ story.
And, indeed, scores of formal characteristics of this association
appear far too specific to be written off into a narrative of New World
creation. An origin myth replete with references to African toponymy
and ethnic designations, linguistic features of abakud’s ritual idiom, the
use of an ideographic script clearly related to the nsibidi signs of the
Efik,'® a ceremonial complex pertaining to the sounding of an esoteric
friction drum (ecué),'? dancers in multicolored body masks, and several
other features ostensibly conspire to render abakud/ekpe/ngbe a prime
example for direct Atlantic transfer, coast to coast, unit to unit so to
speak.” The timing of diffusion is late, but it occurred under slavery,
and precisely at the moment when Cuban slavery was entering its most
brutalizing phase. Have we then, finally, found an instance of Africa
transplanted intact that we could hold up to what some historians nowa-

may omit [it] as the voyager gives herein no details of Old Calabar or of other things
of general interest’ (Kingsley 1897:73).
'8 Often described (e.g. by Thompson 1983) as a prime example (along with the
so-called Vai script) for the existence of indigenously African wmiting systems.
'9 Obviously an adaptation of the Efik term ekpe to Hispanic phonology.
20 See e.g. Ortiz (1952-55, IV: 1-85, V:203-261), 1981), Cabrera (1969), Sosa Rodriguez
(1982), Thompson (1983), Ottenberg and Knudsen (1985) and Nicklin (1991). The one
aspect that has most consistently worried investigators interpreting abakud along such
lines are some strangely inconsistent permutations in the central mythological charter
of abakuá and its ritual reenactment. African versions of ekpe mtual seem to center
around the idea of accessing ‘outside forces’ associated with the ‘leopard’s voice’ pro-
duced by sounding an esoteric friction drum (see e.g. Talbot 1912 chapter 4, Simmons
1956:16ff,, Ruel 1969:246ff,, Thompson 1974:182ff, Leib and Romano 1984, Ottenberg
and Knudsen 1985, Nicklin 1991). In Guba, however, we find an elaborate mythology
centering on the capture by a woman named Sikan of a sacred fish which produces
the mysterious voice. Having heard the voice of the mystery, Sikan is subsequently
put to death and a friction drum (ecue) is constructed from her (and/or a goat's) skin
and that of the fish. This drum is held to objectify the secret power, and its sound
is instrumental to attracting and coercing the forces or beings personified by the treme
dancers (see Ortiz 1950, Cabrera 1969 and Sosa Rodriguez 1982 chapters 6 and 9).
The conspicuous absence of leopard-imagery in abakud, and the apparent substitu-
tion of the prime Afncan ‘royal animal’ by a fish has given rise to considerable, and
usually quite strained, speculation. See Thompson (1983:241ff) and Sosa Rodriguez
(1982:289ff.) for hypotheses about how the leopard turned into a fish, or whether there
may be a (male) symbolic leopard /idden in the (female) fish. The problem is, of course,
compounded by the fact that (excepting an even more incongruous myth recorded by
Talbot (1912:46ff.) we simply do not know the mythological background to the African
institution (if a single such mythology exists at all).
 ECUE’S ATLANTIC 19]

days claim is a league of ‘creolizers’ sailing in the wake of Mintz and

Price?*' I do not think so, and, as I will argue in the following, if this
case might teach us a lesson, it is that we will have to recalibrate our
units of analysis towards conceptions that enable us to accommodate
data pertaining to both Africa and the New World within explanatory
frameworks capable of articulating them in a historically meaningful
way.

An onomastic conundrum

Interpreting Cuban abakud in light of the so-called ‘new revisionism’ (to

use Lovejoy’s [1997] phrase) as an ‘essentially’ African institution merely
transplanted to another continent is, therefore, not so much wrong as
ultimately misleading. For such a conception generates a spurious sense
of clarity in a situation where some of our most basic conceptual tools
are far from adequately operationalized. One of the first red herrings
one encounters when probing into the standard narrative, thus, concerns
what M.G. Smith (1957, 1965) called the problem of specific ascription.
Can we pin down—in time and space—a concrete African antecedent?
In logical terms, this question boils down to:
is carabalt : Efik :: abakuá : ekpe?
Already the first part of this statement presents thorny problems. Surely,
the people congregating in the “cabildo de la nación carabalí bricamó
apapa efi? may well have thought of themselves as ‘carabalt’. But what
does that mean in terms that relate to African—instead of Cuban—cat-
egories of (ethnic) space and (historical) time? Baldly stated, the answer
is: not very much—or, at least, not necessarily so (cf. Northrup 2000).
For neither ‘Calabar’ nor ‘carabalf are terms whose referents are dia-
chronically stable or even only synchronically unambiguous. In fact, as
I shall argue, the Cuban term ‘carabalf simply has no spatio-temporally

21 Since the early 1990s, Mintz and Price’s formulation has come under harsh
critique—mainly by Africanist historians who argue (incorrectly) that Mintz and Price
simply ruled out the significance of Africa for New World history and culture. ‘The
most prominent exponents of this Neo-Herskovitsian ‘new revisionism’ in African-
American cultural history, John Thornton (1992) and Paul Lovejoy, not only insist on
writing African history ‘forward’ into the Diaspora (e.g. Lovejoy 1997), but on what
Lovejoy (2000) has recently, and quite confusingly, called an ‘Afro-centric’ approach
to African-American history. For a powerfully argued theoretical critique see Scott
(1999), for an ethnographically focused one see Palmié (2006a).
192 STEPHAN PALMIE

localizable African referent. This may sound trite to anyone fambar with
the extreme volatility of the trade names employed in the international
marketing of human chattel, but, in view of the heightened emphasis
given in recent years to questions of whether ‘African’ forms of ethnic
identification were maintained or reasserted themselves in New World
settings, it nevertheless merits brief attention.”
In the course of the seventeenth century the (European) toponym
‘Calabar’ traveled from the Rio Real area to the Cross River estuary
and, therefore, across what even then must have been a dividing line
between the Kwa and Benue-Congo language groups (Simmons 1956:4,
Jones 1963:33-48, Hair 1967:262 f.).?? As a result, the terminology used
on the American end of the slave trade eventually came to include what
must have been speakers not only of Igbo, but Ibibio and even Bantu
languages. Thus, although slaves’ known by the trade name ‘carabali’
may very well have been present in Cuba since at least the end of
the sixteenth century,”* in terms of their African ethnic origins they
probably had little in common with the nineteenth-century founders
of abakud: for, different from the record on the former area (known to
Europeans as “New Calabar’), that for the latter (Old Calabar’) does
not offer evidence for a commencement of the slave trade on more than
a modest scale prior to 1672,” and for mass exportations not before
the 1730s (Latham 1973:17 f., Gurtin 1969:150, Northrup 1978:50—54,
Lovejoy and Richardson 1999). ‘This situation is likely to have changed
during the first half of the eighteenth century, which saw the nse to
prominence of Old Calabar as one of the most important supphers for

22 See e.g. Thornton (1992), Midlo Hall (1992), Lovejoy (1994, 1997, 2000), Chambers
(1997, 2000) and the cnticism by Palmié (1993, 1994), Morgan (1997), Eltis and
Richardson (1997), Caron (1997) and Northrup (2000).
*3 While an Ijaw-group in the Rio Real area today identifies with the ethnonym
‘Kalabari’, its use in the Cross River region was and still is restricted to topography.
4 Ortiz (1975:44) notes the documented presence in Havana since 1568 of slaves
designated as ‘bras’ (Brass) whom he (given the then current terminology probably
correctly) identified as ‘carabalies’.
* The evidence most usually cited is a piece of Royal African Company correspondence
published by Elisabeth Donnan (1930-35, 1:93). There it was said that ‘many ships are
sent to New and Old Calabar for slaves and teeth, which are there to be had in plenty’.
In other words: different from the overall pattern in the eighteenth century, it seems as
if the region’s export economy was still ‘mixed’ instead of wholly slave-based. On the
other hand, in 1678 Barbot recorded the presence in Old Calabar of an English vessel
with 300 slaves and gave a detailled account of the trade modalities in 1698 (Ardener
1970:109). Nevertheless, the most recent treatment of the issue concurs that the trade
at Old Calabar ‘remained relatively small unt! Bnstol ships became active in the slave
trade early in the [eighteenth] century’ (Lovejoy and Richardson 1999:338).
 ECUE'S ATLANTIC 193

the British slave trade. Because of the lack of a sufficiently developed

plantation sector, Guban slave imports during that time still remained
at a low level,”’ yet we have some indications for assuming a marked
increase of the inflow of human merchandise marketed under the label
“carabalí”. In Moreno Fraginals's analysis of Cuban plantation records
between 1760 and 1769, slaves designated as 'carabalí? made up 25
percent of his total sample of slaves working in sugar mills, rendering
them the second largest contingent. While remaining stable percentually
in relation to other ‘provenance groups’ (to employ Carvalho Soares’s
[2001] useful term), by the decade between 1800 and 1810 they had
risen to the position of the numerically largest aggregate in Moreno’s
sample (Moreno Fraginals 1977).
Such records obviously tell us little about how slaves so designated
might have construed their own identity. Sull, the records on the so-
called 'cabildos de nación” provide us with crucial data on the forma-
tion and collective management of Afro-Cuban identities: representing
colonial transformations of the Sevillan institution of legally recognized
councils (‘cabildos’) of resident aliens to urban New World environ-
ments (Ortiz 1921), these officially condoned voluntary organizations
of Africans were not just social aggregates arbitranly created by the
colonial state. Instead, and very obviously so, the “cabildos” represented
intentional communities based not on ascriptions of origin, but on
autonomous constructions of collective identity and allegiance (Palmié
1993). Viewed in this light, the existence of ‘cabildos’ of any one

“6 Conceding the limited value of data from which to compute possible numbers
of slaves exported from this region, Latham (1973:22 f.) estimates the total exports for
the period between 1710 and 1810 as lying somewhere between 133,600 and 250.000.
Drawing upon the Harvard Slave Trade Database, Lovejoy and Richardson (1999:337)
present vastly higher figures (over one million) for the slave exports from the Bight of
Biafra in the period between 1701 and 1810, but fail to disaggregate Old Calabar
exports from the overall regional picture.
27 Palmer (1981:106) cites the (official) figure of 6387 slave imports into Havana
(the port officially privileged for international trade) in the period between 1715 and
1738. Given the chronic lack of capital in Cuba pnor to the Bourbonic reforms (cf.
Le Riverend 1974:73 ff.), the contraband trade could not very likely have hiked the
total figure up to more than double this number.
8 By mid-century we find an official of the Real Compafiia de Comercio of Havana
complaining that the English kept the best slaves for their own islands while only sell-
ing those pertaining to such unwanted, useless or dangerous ‘nations’ as ‘congo’ and
‘carabali’ (Marrero 1972-78, VI:36). Assuming this complaint to be based on some
measure of fact, one might surmise that the massive slave imports the English undertook
during their short, but economically crucial occupation of Havana in 1763 might have
derived from similar sources.
194 STEPHAN PALMIE

named Afro-Cuban ‘nacién’ becomes an indicator less of the mere

numerical strength of particular African population segments in the
Cuban diaspora, than of the capacity of groupings of Africans (however
constituted) to forge common patterns of identification under certain
New World conditions—whether the resulting collective identities were
based on factual Old World ethnic commonalities, or on New World
allegiances translated into an ethnic idiom.
An inventory of Havana’s black “cabildos de nación”, compiled in
1755 by Bishop Morell de Santa Cruz, thus provides us with what may
be taken as an ‘inside view’ of Afro-Cuban ‘carabali ethnicity’ and
its internal differentiation: Morell listed five different “carabali cabil-
dos’—more than any other Afro-Cuban ‘naci6n’ could boast of at that
time (Marrero 1972-78: VIII:160).2? Whatever the African origins of
the members of these associations might have been, they had chosen to
identify with a terminology that—taxonomically speaking—no longer
referred to African, but essentially Cuban social units.*” Quite obviously,
the Cuban ‘carabali naciones’ were not transplanted fragments torn
from preexisting African ‘tribes’. However their members may have
defined their collective identities—on various levels of particularity
or inclusiveness—there simply was no concrete African antecedent to
these nascent New World African ethnic units.
Yet even though this provides us with insights on which to base
speculations about the emergence of that one crucial unit under
study—the ‘cabildo de los carabalí bricamo apapa efi*'—it is of little

22 This list seems especially valuable, since bishop Morell claimed to have recorded
only those ‘cabildos’ he had personally visited in order to inquire about their conformity
to Christian standards. Judging from the (for him devastating) results of his inquiry, we
may presume that he, indeed, had first-hand knowledge of these associations.
30 In other words: one might say that such ‘New World African identities’ as those
marked by the autonomous use of terms like ‘carabali’? had undergone (and necessarily
so!) a process of creolization (in the historical sense of becoming peculiar to the New
World despite Old World origins) even before they could be passed on to people who
were ‘creoles’ by birth. At the same time, these ‘New World carabali’ represented
not one, but several intentional communities which—although differentiating among
themselves—collectively set themselves apart from such ‘generic’ collectivities as ‘con-
gos’, ‘araras’, ‘mandingas’, etc., whose different “cabildos’ also appear on Morell's list.
31 One could, e.g., argue that the name itself already indicates the origin of this
association from of a deliberate fusion of ethnically heterogeneous ‘African’ person-
nel into a new, and essentially ‘Cuban’, social entity. Of course, considerable caution
is warranted in the use of onomastics for historical reconstruction. Yet the following
conclusions do not seem entirely implausible: ‘efi? may be taken as a reference to Efik,
and ‘apapa’ as either a corruption of the indigenous name of Duke Town (Atakpa) or
 ECUE’S ATLANTIC 195

help in explaining why this particular grouping should have provided

the context for the re-creation of ekpe/ngbe on Cuban soul. For such
considerations still leave us with several vexing questions related to
the sociology of knowledge about ekpe/ngbe in the Cuban diaspora. If
Afro-Cubans who called themselves ‘carabali’ after about 1750 could
have possessed the necessary knowledge, why did they wait until 1836
to put it to use? There could still have been a majority of Ijaw from
New Calabar among the Cuban ‘carabali’—which would explain the
fact that an ekpe-like institution did not emerge in Cuba for another
three generations, for secret societies of this type are unknown in that
region of the Niger delta. But this is not very likely. The more compel-
ling hypothesis—corroborated as I think it is by Africanist findings—is
that ekpe, the African antecedent to Cuban abakud, had simply not yet
assumed the shape and functions, or had not yet risen to the kind of
prominence, that mid-nineteenth-century British observers committed

of the Qua-group (Ejagham-Ekoi) settled in its vicinity whom the Efik called Abakpa
(Goldie 1964:353, Baikie 1966:351). “Bricamo” might conceivably be interpreted as
relating to Mbarakom, a name pointing to a part of the Cameroon graslands close
to a trade route from Old Calabar to Mamfe (Jones 1984, I11:503). Baikie (1966:351)
thus writes that ‘[p]eople from a tribe named Mbrikim come to E’fik occasionally to
trade. ‘They pass through the Kwa country, and the journey from their own land [...]
occupies from two to three months’. Hutchinson (1856:138) states that the ‘Mbnkum
or Mbudikum race [...] are [sic] located between Kalabar and Cameroons, and com-
prises many tribes’. Listing some of these, he mentions ‘a people or country, or both,
far on the other side of Qua (.e. S.E. of Duketown) called Mbafum, some of whom
are brought occasionally as slaves to Old Kalabar. [...] They are by some persons
styled Mbafong, or Eko’ (ibid.). But ‘Mbarakom’ also seems to have been used in
reference to the Ambo-lineage of Creek Town (Ikot Itunko) in the nineteenth century
(Ardener 1970:110, Nair 1972:79). Ardener (ibid.) surmises—not at all improbably—that
the ‘Ambo’, though obviously thoroughly ‘Eficized’ by the nineteenth century, might
have originiated in the Cameroons. Regla’s nineteenth century community of ‘cara-
bali bricam6 apapa efi’ thus, might have consisted of a.) Efik or ‘Eficized’ Eyagham
from Duke town and its vicinity, and/or b.) members of the ‘Ambo’-ward/lineage of
Creek town, and/or c.) originally Bantu-speaking, but perhaps bilingual people from
the Cameroons who accepted the Efik designation ‘mbarakom’ and/or d.) entirely
different people who took over such an identity because of perceived advantages in a
New World environment. But does that really tell us anything about the provenience
of the actual cultural forms that might have integrated such a community? And why
would the founders of abakud choose to use yet another African toponym—Obutong
(i.e. the name of the Efik settkement known to Europeans as ‘Old Town’)—in naming
the first Cuban “potencia” Efik Butón? Could this have been the place/port of origin
of the mysterious “Belenistas”? (cf. Sosa Rodrigues 1982:50-54 for a similar problem
concerning a “carabalí cabildo” named “suama 1steque de oro” which Sosa qualifies as a
“multi-tribal association”.
196 STEPHAN PALMIE

to the pages that Ortiz, eventually, was to read, and which allowed him
to identify Cuban abakuá as a Cross River-type secret sodality.

Whence ekpe?

Limitations of space will not allow me to fully rehearse the available

evidence, but, from what we know today, ekpe/ngbe was by no means a
time-hallowed institution in Old Calabar. It was an innovation on both
cultural and social-economic levels, befitting the ideological and political
needs of fishing villages turned multi-ethnic city states—part and parcel
of an Atlantic world built around the exchange of trade goods for com-
modified people. This esoteric cult association recruited its members
not on the basis of lineage afhliation and descent. It rather revolved
around the economic power to buy the sacred knowledge and initiatory
grades necessary to be privy to the sounding of a mystical leopard’s
voice and partake of its juridical powers. In a very crucial sense, the
body of secret knowledge, as well as the titles, cult agencies and powers
that comprised ekpe, were objects of commercial exchange circulating
in increasingly wider networks of mercantile transactions.”
Modern Efik traditions maintain that ekpe was originally sold to one
of the first Efik settlers at Creek ‘Town (Ikot Itunko) by an Ejagham/
Ekoi from Usak Edet (Bakasi) on the Cameroon side of the Cross
River estuary (Waddell 1863:313, Nair 1972:14 f, Latham 1973:36,
Nicklin 1991:13). There is little doubt that on a functional level this
tradition represents a charter defining an exchange-sphere for what
became a flourishing commerce in ekpe-related esoteric knowledge. Yet
both Eyjagham/Ekoi and Afro-Cuban traditions seem to corroborate an
Ejagham/Ekoi to Efik diffusion (Talbot 1969, 111:779 f., Jones 1956:16,
Ruel 1969: 250, Sosa Rodriguez 1982:282 f., Roschenthaler 2000,
2006).*° The Efik, indeed, claim to have possessed an indigenous secret

32 African accounts of the origin of ekpe/ngbe among specific regional populations

are usually phrased in an idiom of economic transaction: the coming of the leopards
voice and the secret of its temporal domestication revolved around payment. While
Cuban traditions center around the theme of encountering and tapping mystical forces
that reveal themselves to man, with the exception of a myth published by Talbot
(1912:46 ff) no traditions of sacred origin seem to have been recorded in Africa.
33 Members of abakuá locate the first revelation of the secret to mankind in a place
called “Usagaré” (cf. Ortiz (1952-55, V:242). Ortiz surmises—quite plausibly—that it
relates to the locality Goldie (1964:361) called “Usahadet, Bakasy” (1.e. Usak Edet) and
described as ‘a tribe and district on the east side of the estuary of the Calabar river.
 ECUE’S ATLANTIC 197

society prior to the introduction of ekpe (Latham 1973:35). Different

from this indigenous precursor sodality, however, ekpe seems to have
provided the Efik with a unique medium of ideological and political
arbitrage facilitating the conversion of sacred knowledge into wealth
and social power and vice versa.** And it was the secret of this mode of
transvaluation that allowed them to engineer their society into a pivotal
nexus within a commercial exchange system of Atlantic proportions.
Ekpe may well have had other functions in the past, about which
we have very little knowledge. By the turn of the nineteenth century,
however, it clearly served the goal of organizing—and articulating the
interests of—a rising commercial elite of ethnically highly heteroge-
neous origin. More so: ekpe itself had, in a way, become a commodity
circulating within an expanding commercial orbit.*° It was the sale and
resale of ekpe’s secrets—in fact, their very integration within an exchange

It is divided into two distrcts, Bakasy and Qua Bakasy. The country has connected
itself with Calabar as a dependence, and Adon, v., Orén, Amotung and Efut-Ifwaf
are towns where the Calabar people procure canoes, oil, and fish’ (ibid.). Nicklin
(1991, and personal communication) thinks he discovered the location referred to in
Afro-Cuban mythology as “Usagaré” among Oroko-speaking people in the vicinity of
Isangale (on the Cameroon side of the present international border). Nicklin’s infor-
mants in Isangale refer to themselves as Balondo, and claim to have sold the secret
to a group of Efik from Duke Town (Atakpa). Upon less than clear evidence, Lovejoy
and Richardson (1999) assert that ekpe initially was controlled by the Old Town
(Obutong) ward, became increasingly contested with the founding of Duke Town after
about 1748, and eventually passed there after the massacre of 1767 when Duke Town
merchants attacked Old Town with the help of British ship captains, killing hundreds
of its residents, and selhng many of them (including members of the ruling elite) into
slavery. An interesting suggestion for reconciling divergences in Cuban and African
traditions about the source from which the Efik may have derived ekpe is ventured
by Leib and Romano (1984:94n8).
** Contemporary members of abakud with whom I worked in Regla are aware that
there existed ‘deities’ who were worshipped in ‘terra de ¢6 y efi” (the land of efó and
efi—the two main groups figuring in the origin myth) before the sacred fish tanze rev-
eled the secret of ecue’s voice to mankind.
35 Thus, far from being a mere reaction to the inclusion of a few villages of immi-
grants on the banks of the Cross River in the emergent capitalist world system, ekpe
itself must be credited with creating the conditions crucial to the transformation of
Old Calabar into a machine for the production of human commodities for transatlantic
consumption. By about 1760 the so-called ‘trust-system’ had become established as
the principal modality of commercial interaction between the supercargoes of slave
ships and their Efik-suppliers. Credit in the form of trade goods would be advanced
to the African merchants, who then organized up-river slaving expeditions, or—with
the increasing growth of a hinterland trade network—dispatched agents to collect the
human merchandise in the respective supplying areas (Holman 1840:393, 396, Jones
1956:142 ff, Northup 1978:36-38, 114-145, Lovejoy and Richardson 1999). This sys-
tem—noteworthy both for the extent of its operations and the enormous commercial
value of the goods advanced—hinged upon the universally recognized authority of ekpe
198 STEPHAN PALMIE

sphere including the sale of human merchandise—that facilitated the

building of a growing network of supra-local and trans-ethnic trad-
ing connections which, by the early twentieth century, extended as far
inland as the Cameroon Grassfields.*°
By the same token, ekpfe’s mystical voice rang out to the Atlantic as
well. Indeed, one might say that ekpe reached Liverpool before it even
reached Cuba. By 1828 the Bntish traveler Holman (1840:392) observed
that ‘Captain Burrell of the ship Heywood, of Liverpool, held the
rank of Yampai, which is of considerable importance [in fact, it was
the highest grade in Old Calabar at the time], and he found it exceed-
ingly to his advantage, as it enabled him to recover all debts due to
him by the natives.’ Burrell may have been among the first Europeans
to become privy to ekpe’s secret of how to moralize contractual ties.
But he certainly was not the last: just as the African hinterland suppli-
ers of human cargo succumbed to the lure of this spiritual broker of
economic power, about a score of European buyers documentably fell
under its charm as well.°’ The mystical leopard, it seems, beckoned

to invoke its sanctions against those who defaulted on their debts. ‘It was this power
to insist on the repayment of credit’, Latham (1973:38f:) notes,
which lay behind the spread of Ekpe societies among the other peoples further
inland up the Cross river, for by adopting Ekpe they made themselves credit-worthy
in the eyes of the Efik, and therefore could avail themselves of Efik credit.
In addition, as Ruel (1969:250) maintains, the adoption of ekfe by hinterland trading
societies not only added the prestige of association with the powerful merchant houses
of Old Calabar, but served to insure the safety and commercial interests of their own
traders, moving as they were through areas controlled by small autonomus groups who
might waylay a stranger unless bound by mutual tes to the jurisdiction of ekpe.
“© In the early nineteenth century ekpe had reached Arochukwu. From there it
spread not only to the proliferating Aro colonies and their Igbo-host populations, but
also to the Annang and northern Ibibio areas as far as the Ohaffia/Abam region in
the east and Isuama in the west. At about the same time, it returned to the Ejagham,
Ekoi, and other southeastern ‘semi-Bantu’ in considerably modified form and replaced
its indigenous precursor, ngbe (Ruel 1969:250, Noah 1980, Ottenberg and Knudson
1985, Nicklin 1991). Farther northward on the east side of the middle Cross river, ekpe
flourished among the Ekun, Ododop, Akunakuna, Yakó and Mbembe, and towards
the end of the nineteenth century it reached the Lower Banyang (Ruel 1969:217f.),
continuing along the trade route from Old Calabar to Mamfe and the escarpment.
‘There it was acquired by the Bangwa in the 1930s or 1940s. They, in turn, carried
it into the Grassfields where the Bamileke and Mambila eventually purchased what,
by then, were considerably modified versions clearly deriving from more than a single
source. For a sophisticated ethnographically based account of the diffusionary dynamics
of ekpe/ngbe see Roschenthaler (2006).
*” By 1859, the German traveller Adolf Bastian (1859:294) similarly observed that
captains of slave ships found it advantageous to join ekpe in order to pursue their—by
then illegal—business. Latham (1973:80) lists the names of 5 commanders of Bnitish
 ECUE'S ATLANTIC 199

to whoever could pay for its services—which consisted in facilitating

the transformation of economic assets into sacred authority, and vice
versa. Latham’s (1973:29 f.) characterization of ekpe as ‘an elementary
capitalist institution of entirely African origin’ may overstate the case.
Yet the numinous entity these associations worshiped may well have
been an African avatar of the spirit of capitalism: what ekpe offered
to a nsing African elite on the Cross River was an ideology capable
of domesticating the savage forces unleashed by seaborne European
merchant capital—by harnessing them to distinctly local goals.
But to return to the American side: even by the first quarter of the
nineteenth century, the Cuban version of ekpe—if it really was that—
could quite obviously have had a large number of points of origin.*
Ekpe/ngbe-related knowledge might have diffused to Cuba at any time
between say the 1750s and 1836, and probably did so several times
and from a wide variety of locations within the sphere of operation
of what Malcolm Ruel (1969) calls the 'ngbe-polity”,* before it finally
congealed in the process of recreating the institution on Cuban soil.
Likewise, the original ethnic and even social identity of its carriers seems
indeterminate, to say the least: not just scores of unredeemed pawns,
but the sons of the headmen of Old Town abducted 1n the course of
the 1767 massacre (Lovejoy and Richardson 1999:346), or the ‘sem1-
Bantu’ ‘Bakassey genllmen’ [sic] Antera Duke recounts having lured
on board a ship in August 1786 (Forde 1956:98) may have possessed
such knowledge. So may the ‘upwards of twenty’ Igbo victims of the
Arochukwu oracle who, according to Baikie’s informants (1966:313) had

comercial vessels who underwent initiation into this truly cosmopolitan association
between 1874 and 1880. And the German colonial administrator Mansfeld (1908:160)
likewise recounts that his joining a Banyang chapter of ekpe proved ‘mutually ben-
eficial’. Mansfeld thought the possibility of having colonial decrees promulgated and
enacted through ekpe would eliminate native resistance. But it seems clear that the
Banyang elders who initiated him had their own thoughts upon the matter: when
they announced their decision to admit Mansfeld, they demanded that the association
be extended to the seven other social units within the district Mansfeld administered,
thereby pressing the German colonial state in the service of the extension of ekpe's
sphere of operation (ibid.).
8 Cabrera’s (1969:63-76) Cuban informants were obviously aware of this fact, for
they distinguished between ‘carabali’ groups who came to Cuba with and without prior
possession of a version of ecue.
*9 What complicates matters is that since the growth of an ‘ekpe/ngbe polity’ must be
presumed to have largely paralleled the transatlantic diffusion of ekpe-related knowl-
edge, the later such ‘exports’ occurred, the higher not only the number of potential
exporting local ‘units’ became, but also the possibility of fusion of exports from dif-
ferent locales.
200 STEPHAN PALMIE

been shipped to Cuba via Old Calabar. Or take the slaves loaded onto
the Cuban schooner which Holman (1840:389) observed at the Duke
Town landing in 1828, and whom Duke Ephraim may have procured
from as far as the Cameroons, or from as close as Old Calabar and
its immediate vicinity.* All of them could have carried their ekpe-titles
and the respective bodies of sacred knowledge aboard the ships and
into the plantation barracoons, or urban black barrios that became
their destination. Ekpe, in other words, was a body of ‘local knowledge’
impossible to localize in space and time; a structure that moves and 1s
moved onward by the effects of the changes it wreaks upon the social
and economic relations within the field through which it passes.
Why, then did such an (ethnically entirely ambiguous) version of
ekpe/ngbe emerge in Cuba at the time it did? The answer I would like
to give in the following 1s ostensibly simple: it did so because both the
‘barrios’ of urban Cuba and the Cross River city states—small republics,
the missionary Waddell (1863:314) called them—by then formed part
of a single historical conjuncture. Though of encompassing, Atlantic
nature, 1t brought forth in both places conditions allowing for certain
patterns of what Sidney Mintz (1977) called ‘local initiative and local
response”. That ekpe/abakuá entered this transcontinental political-eco-
nomic constellation may have been accidental. ‘That it came to medi-
ate these patterns—producing as it did, pronounced similarities on a
surface level of form—was due not so much to the agency of a small
group of Cuban ‘carabali’ (whoever they may have been) who enacted
the first sale of the secret on Cuban soil.*' It was due to the fact that

*© Holman (1840:396) describes the Duke’s method of obtaining slaves ‘on trust’
from European slavers as follows:
He [...] sends his agents into the country with the goods to purchase slaves,
promising the Captains their cargoes, amounting to any given number, within
a stated time; in the meanwhile he employs other persons to collect in his own
town and neighborhood, and if he is very hard pressed, (for the Captains of
slavers are always very impatient), he obliges his great men to furnish him with
a certain number each. This is done by sending him every individual from the
neighboring villages, who have committed any crime or misdemeanor; and should
he still continue unable to make up the specified demand, they sell their own
servants to him.
See Jeffreys (1954) and Northrup (1978:65-80) for an overview of modes of slave
procuring.
*! Here it is apposite to call attention to a detail that has gone largely unnoticed in
the scholarly accounts of the rise of abakud. Abakud seems to have occupied the Cuban
authorities ever since that day in July 1839 when Blanco and several of his associates—a
group composed of young free creole workingmen—had been arrested. One of the
reasons for their heightened concern was the realization that the grouping whose head
 ECUE'S ATLANTIC 201

the institution to which they introduced another batch of creole Afro-

Cubans was already integral to that evolving historical space which we
may call the “Atlantic world”.

Watery solutions

So the question to which we should direct ourselves is: why did it catch
on? And why did it become endemic to merely a few port towns in
western Cuba? The British sold slaves from Old Calabar to virtually
all the Antillean colonies and even the North American mainland at
just about the same time. Why not there? Let us pursue an old line
of inquiry first, one laid out, again, by Fernando Ortiz. Abakud, Ortiz
reasoned, emerged not just in port towns, but in harbor-near barrios,
and this for quite specific reasons: casting a glance across the Atlantic
tells us that these sodalities originated in an riverine environment, and
that aquatic symbolism also features prominently in their ritual life. So it
does—and, in fact, apparently even more so—in their New World ver-
sion where important parts of abakud’s elaborate founding myth center
on the aquatic origins of the mystery, and its initial transaction across a
body of water. In keeping with the fact that abakud seemed to condense
African toponymy into what Ortiz’s sister in law Lydia Cabrera (1969)
would later call a ‘geography by way of remembrance’, and Enrique
Sosa (Sosa Rodriguez 1982:17) a ‘geography of sacred memory’, Ortiz
thus anticipated contemporary theories of “lieux de mémoire’ (to use
Pierre Nora’s [1989] well-known phrase) in postulating a sort of mystical

and treasurer Blanco claimed to have been represented an essentially novel form of
association. This is remarkable, for as in other parts of Spanish America, voluntary
association of Africans—the “cabildos de nación"—were a part of institutional social
life in urban Cuba. Since at least the seventeenth century such “cabildos” had been
condoned as a means to solve the administrative problems created by the urban masses
of free blacks and intractable slaves by allowing them to organize into ethnically dif-
ferentiated corporations chartered by, and answerable to, the local government. Blanco’s
group, however, was a different matter. As the governmental functionaries involved in
their case put it, what set them apart from such ‘traditional’ associations was these
young creoles apparently tried to ‘imitate the manners and customs of the Afncans’
(Deschamps Chapeaux 1964:101). Despite the Cuban authonities’ consistent efforts to
drive a wedge between the Afncan and creole segments of the black population, what
they seemed to be facing was a creole group that had chosen to integrate itself by
adopting an ostensibly African organizational model.
202 STEPHAN PALMIE

grid which abakuá had, for ritual reasons, superimposed upon the actual
topography of Cuba.” ‘In the beginning’, he writes (Ortiz 1986:15),
various potencias settled near the piers of Regla and its shores; then
they scattered in the maritime barrios of the city, such as Jesus Maria,
Carraguao, Luz, Atarés, etc. Even when they diffused to the barrios of
San Lazaro, Colon and others, they always maintained the tradition that
the juego was supposed to be at the anchorage of a marina, 1.e. a barno
close to the sea or a river like the Almendares. [...] This territorialization
which resulted in the division of Havana into independent and rivalling
areas, perpetuated, here in the Americas, the legendary insular and local-
ist spirit which, in Africa, was characteristic of the different chapters of
the fearsome Ekpe.
Ortiz was right—though, perhaps, for the wrong reasons. ‘Io this day,
abakuá lodges—known as “Juegos”, “potencias” or “tierras —1ndeed map
out their territories of operation in line with coordinates, both sacred
and secular, of their own making. ‘The term ‘juego’, thus, refers not
just to the notion of a ‘set’ of obones or plazas-(i.e. titleholders), but to
their ritual agency in afhrming and extending power (‘potencia’) over
a specific territory (‘tierra’)—whether this be a mythical homeland in
Enllensén (a term only insufficiently glossed as Africa) or a ‘barnio’ of Jha
Nuncue (Havana), [tia Ororó Kande (Regla), Itía Mororó (Guanabacoa), Itía
Fondoga (Matanzas), or [ta Canimansene (Cardenas), as the four principal
strongholds of abakud in Cuba are known today in ritual language.
Such assimilation of diasporic space into the categories of an imag-
ined Africa, perhaps, need not surprise us. If, in the early nineteenth-
century European mercantile imagination, the Niger Delta had become
an inland extension of the Atlantic ocean, ‘a highway into the heart of
Central Africa’ and toward its commercial possibilities (Dike 1956:18),
so had the Efik river gentlemen—who routinely apprenticed their sons
on British vessels, amassed vast collections of Victorian bric-a-brac, and
even mail-ordered cast-iron palaces from Liverpool—built a Europe

*2 Ortiz never seems to have seen fit to theoretically elaborate this important insight,
choosing to analogize abakud-ritual to ancient Greek mystery religions instead (e.g. Ortiz
1981:486-523). Nevertheless, 1t may be quite indicative of a lack of institutional memory
in the social sciences that the current ‘History and Memory’-vogue has largely bypassed
Roger Bastide’s (1978 [1960]) highly original, though by no means unproblematic
attempt to harness Maurice Halbwachs’ (1942) theories about sites of sacred memory
to an African-American case (cf. Capone, this volume).
 ECUE'S ATLANTIC 203

of the African merchant imagination into what Edwin Ardener (1989)

might have called their essentially Atlantic ‘world structure.** Surely,
given what we know about the repeated enslavement of members of
the Old Calabar merchant elite, there is little a priori reason not to
entertain the hypothesis that these same waters which united actors
in Bristol and Old Calabar in the Atlantic pursuit of (however cultur-
ally divergent) fantasies of wealth and power might have acquired an
analogous transcontinental significance in the Cuban diaspora: a link-
age—though of symbolic nature—between the piers and dockyards of
urban Cuba and the landings and beaches of far away Old Calabar.
Central parts of abakud ritual, thus, reenact the initial discovery of the
mystical voice of ecué and the founding of the association in Enllemsén—a
term for a landscape distant in space and time that we might be inclined
to back-translate into a chronotopic rendering of abakud’s ‘African past’.
During a plante or baroko (ceremony), the title holders of a ‘potencia’
are considered to act as, and speak with the voices of, the original

*8 Thriving on European credit of truly fantastic proportions, these native mer-

chant princes regularly entertained the captains of trading vessels in their ‘English
houses’—two story wooden, or even cast iron constructions they had ‘mail-ordered’ in
Liverpool—where they served meals accompanied by a choice of native palm wine
and reportedly excellent champagne (Holman 1840:362, 364, Waddell 1863:243 f.).
Crow’s description of the intenor of Duke Ephraim’s iron palace gives a vivid impres-
sion of the setting in which such Atlantic’ encounters would take place: “This house
or palace is stocked with numerous clocks, watches, and other articles of mechanism,
sofas, tables, pictures, beds, porcelain cabinets &c. of European manufacture; most of
which are huddled together, in confusion, amongst numerous fetiches, and in a state
of decay, from disuse, carelessness, and want of cleaning’ (Crow 1830 in Simmons
1956a:9). Several of the notables Hope Waddell encountered in the 1850s—includ-
ing ‘King’ Eyo Honesty IJ—had not only been to sea, but had travelled to England
and the Canbbean as well (Nair 1977:246 f.). Just hke Bonny’s Bill Peppel was fond
of inquiring about his ‘brother George (meaning the king of England) when in the
company of Europeans (Adams 1966:135), we find Duke Ephraim of Old Calabar
expressing ‘great regret at not being able to read the newspapers [since they were not
handwnitten!], of the contents of which, although he had seen many, he still remained
ignorant.’ (Holman 1840:399). A few decades later, one of his successor who signed his
letters as Eyamba V., King of all black men’ would express to consul Hutchinson ‘his
desire to see Wellington and Napoleon, that he might show his pre-eminence over them’
(Hutchinson 1856:118). Yet at the same time, and in good keeping with the European
stereotype of the savagery of African rulers, these sophisticated nver gentlemen casu-
ally engaged in outdoing each other in massacring scores of slaves in the course of
funeral ceremonies, and penodically decimated their own ranks by a poison ordeal in
order to stem the tide of witchcraft felt to be rising in their midst.
204 STEPHAN PALMIE

founders of the association transacting the secret of ecué.™ In fact, once

the ‘power’ of a ‘potencia’ is activated and displayed in ritual drama,
there is no distinction between Enllenisén (conceived as an ‘African past’)
and the Cuban present: both space and time collapse as the voice of
the holder of the Ecueñón-title rings out from the doorstep of a meeting
house to announce the exoteric sequence of a ceremony in the early
hours of the morning, and the roaring ‘voice’ of ecué’s sacred friction
drum emerges from the ‘cuarto fambd’ (initiatory chamber) of an abakud
meetinghouse. At that moment any street or alleyway in contemporary
Havana can transform into the stage for primordial transactions on the
banks of the mythical river Oldan where a woman named Sikan once
discovered the secret and was put to death, where the sorcerer Nasako
first fashioned the sacred drum transmitting ecué’s voice, and where the
obones of the ‘tierra efi’ came across the water to purchase the secret
from the ‘terra efd’.
In sum, there is little doubt that water was a key to the spread of
ekpe/abakud. Its importance, however, lies both in its symbolic functions,
and in its economic ones as well. It thus is in the maritime exchanges
that historically articulated the landings of Old Calabar with the bay
of Havana that we ought to look for an answer to the question of
how ekpe not only managed to reassert itself in the New World, but
became lastingly ensconced in a few port towns of western Cuba. For,
regardless of the continuing capacity of the cultural forms deployed
by contemporary adherents of abakud to ntually merge American space
and twenty-first century tme with the event-structure of an African
mythical charter, the history of such forms les elsewhere—viz. in the
conditions which rendered the harnessing of ekpe-related knowledge to
concrete social goals a contextually successful pattern of ‘local initiative
and local response’.
What is at issue, then, 1s not only how the changing structure
of opportunity and constraint given in nineteenth-century Havana
allowed the leopard’s voice to first rng out on Cuban soil in 1836. The
analytical challenge rather lies in bridging the distance between this
(New World) event, and those contemporary practices by which ecué's
Cuban adepts nowadays commemorate the mystery’s African origins,

* Cf. Cabrera (1969, 1983:209, 286), Ortiz (1950), Sosa Rodríguez (1982:189-250).
In fact, given that the Cuban government has lifted its restriction of party member-
ship for religious practitioners in 1991, today individuals socially classified as “militante
comunistas” can—and do—ritually embody ancestral African presences.
 ECUE'S ATLANTIC 205

real or imagined. How, to phrase the matter in less abstract terms, did
ekpe-related knowledge and practice—including the entire structure of
African sacred memory it appears to revolve around—become subject
to continuous social reproduction in Cuba?
“The first part of this question is relatively easy to answer. Havana’s
urban growth had always been related to its strategic position on the
eastern rim of the Spanish seaborne empire. With Spain’s turn to free
trade and the onset of Cuba’s sugar boom in the 1790s, however, the
bay of Havana turned into a hub for legal as well as illegal Atlantic
exchanges. ‘he volume of merchandise, capital and slaves, channeled
through Havana’s harbor virtually exploded.* So did its urban popula-
tion which more than doubled from c. 50.000 in 1791 (Scott 1986:28)
to 112,023 in 1828 (Deschamps Chapeaux 1971:17), spilling over
from the city itself into sprawling *barrios extramuros” that grew from
shantytowns into teeming black neighborhoods. By then, Afro-Cubans
made up over 60 percent of the city’s population of 112,000, and only
a minority of them were slaves.*® Concurrently, a wide variety of licit
as well as illicit economic venues opened within the bustling world of
docks, warehouses, and foundnes centered around the bay. Both on
account of the scarcity of white labor and the inability or unwillingness
of the government to control the flow of merchandise into the channels
of an informal and partly illegal market system, enterprising Afro-
Cubans came to monopolize strategic positions within an increasingly

* Of course, economic growth did not occur in an even, linear fashion, but was
punctuated by the crises in international trade caused by e.g. the Napoleonic wars, the
British-American war of 1812-1815, or the Latin American wars of independence, as
well as by periodic price depressions on the sugar market. Yet although aggregate data
must, accordingly, be viewed as problematic, they do evidence a truly phenomenal pat-
tern of absolute growth. In the period between 1800 and 1827 the amount of sugar
exported through Havana’s harbor doubled (Le Riverend 1974:196). Between 1830 and
1864 Cuban sugar production evidenced an increase of 400%. In the same period
the average value of total Cuban imports rose from 16.3 to 44.3 million pesos, while
that of Cuban exports increased from 13.2 to 57 million pesos (Knight 1970:44). In
1852 the value of imports unloaded in Havana alone had reached the startling figure
of 22.1 million pesos (Knight 1977:247). That year Havana’s harbor registered 1594
incoming and 1140 outgoing commercial vessels, accounting for 44°%% and 34.8% of all
Cuban seaborne trade (Knight 1977:245 f.). Knight (1977) and Thomas (1971:136-167)
give a vivid impression of the careers a new entrepreneurial class and the ostentatious
consumption patterns developed by the nsing planter and merchant segment.
* Out of those 112.023 inhabitants cited by Deschamps Chapeaux (ibid.) merely
46.621 were counted as white.
206 STEPHAN PALMIE

complex and truly ‘Atlantic’ structure of economic opportunity.*’ One

such nodal position was that of the ‘capataz del muelle’ or dockside
labor contractor. And it was around this particular node that abakud
appears to have initially begun to crystallize.
These organizers of the appropriation of Afro-Cuban labor by
increasingly international trading companies, 1n a sense, rode the
current of transatlantic economic conjunctures. For they secured the
supply of manpower at the point where the streams of Cuban sugar
and other export articles intersected the incoming flow of trade goods,
slaves and capital. By the same token, however, their position rose and
fell with their ability to draw on, and manipulate to their profit, the
local labor-resources of the harbor-near barrios. It was this interme-
diate position between international merchant capital and the com-
moditized black labor 1t sought after that may have drawn such rising

* Up until 1829, when the new Codigo Comercial went into effect, the outlets for
both imported and locally produced consumer goods (‘pulperias’) had been subject to
highly restrictive legal reglementation (Le Riverend 1974:222 ff). Given the noton-
ous corruption of the Cuban colonial authorities (cf. Knight 1970:102 ff), however,
smuggling and other sorts of illicit trade fourished. It is quite probable that the
black market the very restrictions imposed by Spain had helped to create, provided
an important distributive economic niche for small-scale traders fencing contraband
goods, and the ubiquitous itinerant vendors whose supply undoubtedly denved from
both legitimate and illegal sources. Although Í am, in the following, mainly concerned
with this economy of subversion, it should not be forgotten that free Afro-Cubans
also monopolized a wide vanety of licit trades and, in fact, formed what Deschamps
Chapeaux aptly called a ‘pequefia burguesia de color’ (cf. Deschamps Chapeaux 1971
and Klein 1967:202-227).
** By 1763 a set of orders issued by the Conde de Ricla had given rise to a peculiar
form of organizing dockside labor. By assigning control over longshore labor gangs
(‘cuadnilas’) to former members of the ‘batalliones de pardos y morenos leales” (black
militia), these orders opened up a new career path for enterpnsing Afro-Cubans; and
with the advent of free trade, the black ‘capataces del muelle’-—some of whom occupied
their prestigious positions for several decades (Deschamps Chapeaux 1971:90 ff.)—began
to reap the profits their position as brokers between Atlantic buyers and local sellers of
manpower promised. Like other Afro-Cubans who, in the first half of the nineteenth
century, monopolized numerous lucrative trades shunned by those white creoles who
could afford to dissociate themselves from the sigma of manual labor, these dockyard
‘captains’ sometimes amassed considerable fortunes: José Oñoro, e.g., a born African
who continued to identify himself as a ‘carabali’, was able to sign over four houses and
elght 'coartados” (1.e. slaves towards whose freedom he had willed parts of his estate)
to his heirs (Deschamps Chapeaux 1971:94). Yet men like Oñoro not only stand as
vivid exceptions to the general assumption about the marginal position of free blacks
in the slave societies of the Americas. Their careers also give us a clue as to why this
expanding maritime world of seamen, dockyard workers, porters, hucksters, tavern keep-
ers, entertainers, prostitutes, petty criminals, entrepreneurs and self-styled organizers of
the appropriation of Afro-Cuban labor by increasingly international trading companies
might have given rise to abakud.
 ECUE’S ATLANTIC 207

entrepreneurs—some of whose careers are well documented*”—towards

the secrets of abakud. And just as ekpe galvanized a slave trading elite
in the Niger delta, its organizational model once more allowed these
Afro-Cuban labor-brokers to convert economic assets into sacred power
and social control.
Partly this was because Havana’s Afro-Cuban barrios represented
residential and, to a certain extent, economic units whose members
evidenced strongly differentiated patterns of local identification and
solidarity. The structural analogy—suggested by Enrique Sosa (1982:
143)—with the towns, wards and quarters of Old Calabar may not be
overdrawn, but is certainly beyond empirical corroboration, given what
little we know about both places before the second half of the nine-
teenth century. Nevertheless, it is sufficiently clear that once a ‘potencia’
of abakud moved into one such neighborhood, it began to build up a
centralized political structure hinging upon the economic assets accruing
from membership, and the sanctioning power single chapters held over
their constituency.”” By maneuvering religious title-holders into gate-

* Deschamps Chapeaux (1971:93 ff.) lists several cases of fortunes acquired by

‘capataces del muelle’. At least one of them, José Agustin Ceballos, surpassing all that
José Onoro could ever have dreamed of: By 1833 Ceballos employed 160 dockworkers
whose collective wages ran up to 1,000 pesos per week. Calculating the income Ceballos
received from renting out several houses, his dockyard business and the profits he received
from hinng out his slaves, Deschamps Chapeaux (1971:100) estimates that, at the height
of his career, Ceballos may have earned as much as 10,000 pesos a year.
°° Comparing the modern Banyang situation with the historical record on Old
Calabar at the middle of the nineteenth century, Ruel (1969:256) thus wnites:
Each lodge [of ekpe/ngbe] has separate access to its own formal Ngbe sanctions; in
accord with the basic political principle of autonomous rule, these sanctions can
be applied only wztun the residential group associated with the lodge, or with the
agreement of that group’s representatives; if the representatives of a number of
residential groups (usually hamlets of a village, but it may be villages of village
group, and it can be a wide series of ad hoc groupings) agree to common polit-
cal action (usually the enactment of a law), such action can still be promulgated
through Ngbe, despite the fact that different lodges are involved.
Some of this clearly holds true for Cuba as well. “The written reglements of Akanarán
Efó published by Pérez Beato (El Cunoso Amencano volume 1, number 3, pp. 35-38,
volume 1 number 4, pp. 56-58; partly reprinted in Sosa Rodríguez [1982:381-390]) give
a vivid impression of the complex forensic apparatus that existed within this ‘potencia’
in 1882, and the sanctioning power it arrogated for itself: upon receipt of complaints
about the behavior of a member, ritual hearings would be held in front of the highest
ranking title holders in order to establish the truth of the accusation and determine the
gravity of the offense. According to the verdict of the ‘jefatura’, the accused could be
fined, or subjected to corporeal punishment meted out by an íreme personifying a force
of retributive justice. In cases of grave offences, he could be temporarily or permanently
suspended from membership, or even sentenced to ‘muerte en vida’, in which case, the
208 STEPHAN PALMIE

keeping positions on the local labor market or, alternatively, attracting

holders of such positions into their fold (cf. Martínez Bordón 1971:38),
abakuá “potencias” eftectively controlled access to employment within
their ‘barrios’ of operation.
By the time the Spanish government finally moved to outlaw the
association in 1876, some 80 ‘potencias’”' had superimposed upon
the economic geography of Havana and the industrial zone and
warehousing districts of Regla and Guanabacoa the conceptual grid
of a ‘geography of sacred memory’, thus transforming sites of capi-
talist production and exchange into what one might call sites for the
reproduction of an ‘African past’. More crucially, however, they had
simultaneously established a tight network of religiously structured rela-
tions between members occupying crucial positions in terms of access
to labor, the circulation of petty merchandize and contraband goods,
and the flow of cash, credit and services throughout the social fields
comprised by single ‘barrios’ or sections thereof. At the same time,
they had begun to monopolize access to employment at those outly-
ing industrial or commercial complexes—tabaquerias, slaughterhouses,
markets, warehouses and dockyards—which they increasingly infiltrated,
and whose vast demand in physical labor they satisfied by channeling
workers from their own neighborhoods onto the payroll of these large
scale enterprises. ‘Already prior to the War of 1895’, writes the labor
historian José Rivero Muniz,
The tabaqueros had been accused of pertaining to the said ‘potencias’,
and if not all of them, so especially those living in the neigborhoods
of El Pilar, Los Sitios, Jesus Maria and El Horcon, for it was known
that there were tabaquerias in which those who were not nanigos did
not receive employment, given that the foremen themselves were sworn
in and, therefore, obliged to give preferential treatment to their fellow
members. It has also been said—and according to our judgment, on

‘potencia’ performed funeral ntes signalizing the offender’s social death. In the latter
cases, the ‘potencia’ involved would send messages—oftentmes in the form of written
notices (known today as ‘oficios’}—to other chapters of abakud obliging them to respect
the sanctions it had passed, in a manner much reminiscent of nineteenth descriptions
of how the pronouncement of ekpe-sanctions by one local chapter in the lower Cross
River region bound other chapters to mutual enforcement. Whether or not abakud really
‘killed’ capital offenders (as has been alleged), it could effectively wreck a person’s life
by ordering the culpnt to be economically ostracized and socially isolated not only
from the rest of his neighborhood, but from other ‘barrios’ as well.
1 Six years after the official prohibition, Rodriguez Arias cited the names of 83
“potencias” still in existence in 1881 (ANC Asuntos Politicos leg. 76 # 56).
 ECUE'S ATLANTIC 209

good grounds—that among the meat-packers and workers on the public

markets there also abounded the nanigos, whose associations—about
which so many falsehoods have been written—were in reality nothing
but societies for mutual assistance...(Rivero Mufiiz 1961:167).°?

The same held true for the harborside labor market where, as the popu-
lar saying went, abakud determined ‘who would eat and who would not’
(Martinez Bordon 1971:38). Indeed, as Rivero Muniz (ibid.) surmises,
part of the repeated violent skirmishes different ‘potencias’ fought out
on Havana’s streets in the last quarter of the nineteenth century may
well have been struggles over access to sources of employment and
economic power. Such rivalries obviously were the product of a highly
differentiated structure of economic opportunity, which, for Havana’s
working population, translated not just into spatial, but social proximity
to sources of employment. But the resulting conflicts were nevertheless
structured by cultural precepts laid out by ecué itself. There did exist
venues of securing amicable relations with or tolerance of an alien
“potencia* on one's native turf. Yet although each “potencia” was in
possession of the secret that facilitated the crucial transmutation of
economic assets into political as well as sacred power, ecué apparently
would not accept tampering with its very sources of strength: just as the
rank and file membership rose and fell with the ability of a “potencia”
to provide steady labor in an economic environment subject to extreme
fluctuations, so the ‘plazas’ or ‘obones’ were loath to relinquish their
monopoly over employment options at those key points where Havana’s
internal distributive system intersected with the world market.

If the (highly clientelistic) organization of labor at Havana’s centralized market (in

existence since 1921—see Borroto Mora [1966]) is any guide to the situations obtain-
ing prior to that, abakuá would have found a fertile field among the hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of cartmen, porters, ‘tarimeros’ (stall-holders), ‘macheteros’ (vendors of rotting
goods), and watchmen trying to earn a living there, oftentimes on a day-to-day basis.
23 An elaborate code of ‘foreign relations’ is evident in the ‘reglamentos’ of Akanarán
Efo published by Pérez Beato (reprinted in Sosa Rodríguez [1982:381-392]). Cabrera
(1975) explicitly mentions rituals of ‘crossing itones’ (i.e. the sacred batons of the four
principal titleholders) by which rivalling ‘potencias’ concluded peaceful agreements.
But there were other mechanisms: in cases where ‘potencias’ branched out through
sale of secrets and sponsorship of ‘daughter cells-—whose relation were sometimes
expressed by adding quantifiers like faiba (or ‘segundo’), eroba (or ‘tercero’) etc. to the
name of the junior ‘potencia’—such lines of ‘kinship’ frequently seem to have crossed
the established territorial (and, perhaps also, economic) boundaries of single ‘barrios’.
This, indeed (rather than merely the mythological ‘charter’ of an initial sale of the
secret across a body of water) may have been one reason why the “Belenistas” jour-
neyed to Regla in 1836!
210 STEPHAN PALMIE

By the turn of the twentieth century, abakud-mediated economic

linkages between single ‘barrios’ and the dockside nexuses of trans-
atlantic commercial exchange had solidified to a degree where it had
become a commonplace to refer to a maritime terminal or shipping
line as ‘belonging’ to this or that neighborhood (López Valdés 1966:
14), and, by extension, to such and such a “potencia”. According to
López Valdés” data (based on research in the early 1960s), the holders
of the /llamba-title of the Belén-based “potencias” Bakokó and Kanfioró
had risen to the rank of exclusive labor contractors (‘contratistas’) at
the docks of the American owned Ward-line, uneasily sharing the labor
market of the former with Enlleguellé Efó, a powerful and highly prolific
“potencia* from Regla which, under its formidable /llamba Manuel de
Jesús “Chuchu* Capaz (1881-1962), would, by the early twentieth cen-
tury, maneuver itself into the position of “dueno del embarcadero’ (lord
of the embankment) of the Regla warehousing district and maritime
terminal across the bay.” Unanabón of the ‘barrio’ of Colon and Beténgo
of Pueblo Nuevo dominated the Havana Dock terminal. Regla's Otán
Efó ruled at the docks of the United Fruit Company's Flota Blanca line
through the offices of its //lamba-cum-contratista Blas “Blasito’ Pérez
Rojas. Equereguá Momí and Unapapé of Jesus Maria together held sway
at the embankments of the Harry Brother line and monopolized two
other docks in the southwestern harbor sections of Vaccaro, Atarés and
Tallapiedra (Lopez Valdés 1966:14 ff.).
What emerged, then, was a triply coded system of spatial relations
between “barrios”, abakuá “potencias” and those economic complexes
that—whether by producing trade goods for the world market, or dis-
tributing the inflowing merchandise—generated large-scale employment
and a few privileged venues for social mobility; venues open to those
who managed to combine organizational skill with social capital and
hard cash: the former prerequisite to open the doors of the ‘cuarto
jamb@ (secret initiatory chamber) of a ‘potencia’, and the second neces-
sary to buy a title of strategic import.” As for the merchant princes of

** As Ortiz estimated in 1927 (FO uncatalogued folder entited Negros-Cabildos),

Enlleguellé (with some 400 members) was clearly the largest potencia in the eastern bay,
surpassed only by Marianao’s potencias Usagaré and Focondo Ndibo (about 500 members
each), and the powerful Betongo, based in Pueblo Nuevo (and therefore probably target-
ting Havana’s inner-city tobacco industry as well as the harborside) which, by then, had
become Havana’s largest potencia, boasting around a thousand members.
°° This is speculation, but it seems reasonable to assume that rank and file members
rose to positions of prominence not only because of their good standing within a chapter
 ECUES ATLANTIC 211

the Niger Delta, ecué to them became a transforming power: one that
transforms both those-who harness its mysteries to their own goals, and
the very world their agency impinges upon.

Ecué unbound

By then, however, abakud had long crossed the most deeply entrenched
“social barrier existing in Cuba: in 1857 Andrés Facundo de los Dolores
Petit, the famous J/sue of the ‘potencia’ Bakoké Ef6, and himself a ‘light
skinned mulatto of Haitian origin’ (Ortiz 1952-55, 1V:68),% sold the
secrets of ecué to a group of young white Cubans. On Christmas Eve
of 1863, thirteen whites were sworn in as the odones (titleholders) of
the first white ‘potencia’ of abakud (Roche Monteagudo 1925:137),
appropriately named Okobio Macararé (Ortiz 1952-55, IV:69) or
Ecobio Efó Mucarará (Sosa Rodriguez 1982:142)—translatable either as
‘white brothers’ or “white brothers of Efó”.”” Large as it looms in
the annals of Cuban abakud, this event has variously been recounted
as involving the payment of 1,000 gold ounces (17,000 pesos) with
which Bakoké Efó bought the freedom of numerous slaves; 500 ‘cen-
tenes’ (2,650 pesos) plus the promise to free certain important members
elicited from the whites who were the progeny of elite families; and
finally the symbolical sum of 30 ounces, strongly resonating with bib-
hcal connotations of treason and deceit (Ortiz 1952-55, VI:69). Yet
whatever the concrete amount was, whatever use Petit and his fellow
ocobios put the money to,” and whatever violent conflicts the transaction

of the association, or their command of ntual particulars, but not the least on account
of their economic position (whether in terms of personal liquidity or occupation of
key positions within certain enterprises).
°° Cabrera (1969: plate facing page 26) reproduces a photograph of Petit which is
nowadays found in the cult houses of several efó potencias in Havana and Regla.
57 ‘Makara’ is the Efik designation for Europeans (cf: Waddell 1863:253, 256). It is
this ‘potencia’ which served as the proximate source for all ‘potencias’ of the ‘rama
efo existing in Regla today (cf. Palmié 2006a).
38 The practice of emancipation through gradual compensation of the owner for a
slave’s commercial value (‘coartaci6n’) had been institutionalized in Cuba since early on
(Aimes 1906). In that way, many gainfully employed urban slaves bought their freedom,
but the cabildos are also known to have collected money for buying the freedom of
their members. To this end they often engaged in the widespread informal lottery sys-
tems (see Bremer 1968:339 for a contemporary report on such practices). That abakud
‘potencias’ may have used the revenues from the sale of esoteric knowledge and cult
agencies in a similar manner is very likely. Since free blacks were legally entitled to own
slaves themselves (cf: Deschamps Chapeaux 1971:47-57 et passim), we might, however,
212 STEPHAN PALMIE

engendered,”’ as Ortiz succinctly put it, the exchange of knowledge

around which it revolved finally and irrevocably transformed abakud
from a ‘cosa de negros’ into a ‘cosa de Cuba” (Ortiz 1952-55, IV:71):%
not only would the memory of the foundational events on the banks
of the nver Oldan now be carried onward in time by socially white
Cubans; the spirits of the primordial transactants of ecué’s secret would
incarnate in their bodies as well.
The paradox, however, is more apparent than real: far from sever-
ing what might be perceived as the last ties uniting an African-derived
institution with its transatlantic origins, Petit’s had acted in accordance
with the mechanisms of reproduction by which ekpe had generated
a vast network of commercial and political relations in the Bight of
Biafra and its hinterland. It is not only that European slavers had been
documentably integrated into ekpe's network of sacred allegiance and
commercial reciprocity on the African side long before Petit availed
himself of an opportunity—generated, in the last instance, by a larger
Atlantic system—which may have brought the mterests of the first white
indtsime (candidates for initiation) in alignment with those of their black
ocobios (i.e. brothers in ecué).°' Rather, from its very origin athwart the

speculate about whether the the slaves bought by a given ‘potencia’ were ‘free’ in any
other than a mere legal sense. Could it be that although they were ‘coartados’ in the
eyes of the law, the respective ‘potencia’ or some of its individual members had nghts
to their person and/or services that simply went unrecognized by the Cuban authon-
ties? Access to the papers—deeds, wills etc.—of known ttle holders of abakud might
help to solve this question.
2 Ortiz reports that two members of Bakokó Efó were killed by rival black “potencias”
in revenge for ‘Petit’s treason’. Some versions of oral tradition maintain that the demise
of Bakokó Efor, due to a police raid in the course of which their sacred drums were
confiscated, was the result of “divine vengeance’ (Ortiz 1952-55, IV:69).
°° As an octogenarian informant of Ortiz (1952-55, VI:70) put it: ‘thanks to Petit,
the nanigos continue to persist in Cuba’ (Gracias a Petit, siguen en Cuba los nanigos).
Ortiz qualifies this statement as follows: “This belief is exaggerated, for the endurance
of these religions is due to complex causes and not the talents of a single personage;
yet the reforms Petit introduced into ñáñigoismo and mayombería [Petit also was a
priest of a Bantu-Cuban religion] definitively linked the Africans with the creoles, and
the blacks with the mulattoes and the whites’ (ibid.).
9! Oral history has it that the first white ocobios (members of abakud) subsequently
participated in the struggle against Spanish domination which would, in 1868, lead to
the first Cuban war of independence. Though adequate documentation about this event
has still to be uncovered, it is likely that members of abakud were involved in attempting
to rescue the famous habanero medical students from the fusilade following their protest
against Spanish domination in 1871 (cf: Davila Nodarse 1981:23 who cites documents
corroborating this event, but provides only incomplete archival references).
 ECUE'S ATLANTIC 213

African riverine highways along which knowledge about the law-giving

voice of the leopard was sold from one slave-trading local unit to the
other, ekpe’s success had been pegged to its nature as a sacred com-
modity circulating against other carriers of values: more than anything
else, it was this characteristic that imbued it with a unique capacity to
break through, and reproduce itself across, deeply entrenched ethnic
barriers. And just as ekpe managed to build up proliferating networks of
trade and cooperation among diverse African populations—eventually
incorporating an array of hinterland societies reaching as far as the
Cameroon grasslands into what Ruel (1969) has, perhaps not inappro-
priately, called an ‘ngbe-polity—so did Cuban ocobios reproduce the
secret and its political-economic functions by strategically widening its
sphere of circulation.
For even though the inception of the first white ‘potencia’ initially
seems to have incited violent reactions, abakud eventually became the
first Cuban institution integrating individuals of African and European
descent into a common pattern of identification and solidarity. Paradoxi-
cal as 1t may seem, by the 1860s, we might say, ecué had achieved what
José Marti’s visionary anti-racist program of Cuban nation-building
would (rather less than successfully) posit some three decades later
(Helg 1995, Ferrer 1999). ‘The difference was that in this case white
Cubans did not grudgingly consent to Afro-Cuban participation in an
American national project, but eagerly paid for their own inclusion in
a black secret society of African ongin.
Hence whether or not Petit’s agency was salient within the symbolic
universe of African ekpe/ngbe may not be the most appropriate ques-
tion. For its historical significance rather lies in transforming Cuban
abakuá into an enduring part of a transcontinentally dispersed, indeed
virtually rhizomatic, system of knowledge and ritual practice capable
of rendering the forces of global capitalism locally coextensive with an
awesome African power. Like the mythical founders of the association
in a Niger Delta of the Cuban imagination, the ‘Africans who founded
in 1836 the secret society of Abakua’—as one can read today on a
plaque erected under Cuban government auspices near the embankment
of Regla—capitalized on local structures of opportunity generated,
ultimately, by the heaving and swelling of larger political-economic
tides. And no less than their historical contemporaries in Africa, the
members of the ‘cabildo carabali apapa eft? in Regla, the mysterious
creole Belenistas to whom they sold the secret, and Andrés Petit who
214 STEPHAN PALMIE

engineered yet another expansion of its New World sphere of exchange,

built a lasting system of commercial transactions in esoteric knowledge
into the local conjunctural structure of such Atlantic circulations.
In the end, it seems that in the Bay of Havana, local and global
political-economic constellations meshed to a degree where interna-
tional capitalism and an African-derived secret society lastingly became
mutually constitutive. If so, however, what do we make of all this? Was
it, after all, nothing but the result of the accidental opening up of a
diffusionary path from here to there? A bunch of initiates, onginating
who knows where, being shuttled from Calabar to Cuba by the energy
generated through the operation of what Philip Curtin (1955) called the
South Atlantic system? An ‘obscure miracle of connection’ as David
Scott (1999) puts it in harnessing Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic
phrase to the charactenzation of a history both too evident and too
elusive to be captured by simple empiricist procedures? ‘To be sure, the
movement of ekpe to Cuba occurred along a trajectory defined by the
historical conjunction of two disparate localities. Call it an accident,
if you will. Sull, once removed from African soil, ekpe turned into a
body of knowledge that had yet to be re-transformed into a system
of practice capable of reproduction on Cuban soil. What made for
the striking success of ekpe in Cuba was that the ideology it provided
seems to have matched the social situation it encountered there to an
astonishing degree.
As a result, Cubans of various socio-racial identities today ritually
enact ecué’s initial discovery and sale across Afncan ethnic boundaries.
They map sacred memories of an Africa of their collective imagina-
tion upon the New World social spaces in which they live and act. And
they compete with each other in accumulating ritualistic knowledge
about a myth of African origins and the meaning of 1ts New World
re-enactment, thereby building up social and cultural capital within
their communities which—to this day—not only is transactable into
masculine reputation, but economic options as well. Yet whether such
‘African origins’ ever existed or not (and the question really should be
moot by now)——a valid explanation for why this is so cannot be found
on one single side of those waters which, for a time, brought the bay
of Havana into intimate alignment with the landings and beaches of
the Cross River and its slave-supplying hinterland.
In the final analysis then, ekpe itself, in a sense, was an ‘Atlantic’-—
‘creole’, 1f you will—institution before it even arrived in Cuba. More
paradoxically even, in a surprising reversal of received notions about
 ECUE’S ATLANTIC 215

directionality in the Afro-Atlantic space-time continuum, abakud eventu-

ally became an ‘African’ phenomenon. In 1912 the Bntish colonial agent
and prolific amateur ethnographer B. Amaury Talbot published the
first photograph of an ekpe body mask taken in southeastern Nigeria
(Talbot 1912 plate facing page 42). What Talbot did not know was that
the long-time resident Spanish genre painter Victor Patricio Landaluze
had documented such masks nearly two generations earlier in Cuba
(e.g., Landaluze 1881). More astonishing, the first photographic images
of Cross-River-style body masks taken on the African continent had
been published a little over a decade before Talbot’s, and ‘Talbot
could not have known about them either because these photographs
had been taken in no less unlikely a place than the prison of Monte
Achó in the North-African Spanish penal colony of Ceuta (Salillas
1901). For in yet another series of Atlantic movements, of which we
know only the barest outlines, Cuban ocobios deported to the Spanish
presidios of Santa Isabel de Fernando Poo and Ceuta since the late
1850s recreated the sodality there. Here we could begin to ask how
Spanish counterinsurgent policy—more that 600 supposed ñáñigos were
exiled during the last Cuban war of independence alone’*—might be
linked to wider economic and ideological conjunctures and concerns,
and what factors made for the transformation of abakud into a British
Caribbean-style Christmas mummery on Fernando Poo (Moreno
Moreno 1948), whereas it retained or even augmented its political
functions in Cuba where—despite massive persecution—by the 1920s
it played an increasing role in electoral politics. But this must be the
subject of another publication.

®2 See the lists of deportees in Archivo Histórico Nacional de España, Ministerio de

Gobernación leg. 597 # 2-4, and Ultramar leg. 5007 # 832. On Ceuta as a destination
for Cuban deportees during the wars of independence compare Serrano (1985). Other
destinations for supposed members of abakuá included presidios in Cadiz, Santander, and
Chafarinas (which tends to be remembered most by contemporary ocobws in Regla).
6 By the 1920s, the populist Liberal government of Regla headed by Dr. Antonio
Bosch not only erected the first monument to labor” in the Americas, and dedicated
a public park to the memory of Lenin. It also printed election placards in the ritual
language of abakud. Chuchu Capaz eventually came to serve on Regla’s city council
until the fall of the Machado dictatorship forced him out of office in 1933.
216 STEPHAN PALMIE

In leu of a conclusion

The more important question for now may be the following one: do
we even want to continue to speak about ekpe and abakud as institu-
tions—patterned arrangements of social relations and practices that can
be, as it were, monitored in their trajectories, like an object hurled from
one side of the Atlantic to the other, and, by analogy recalled into New
World history from African remembrance? The question is far from
trivial, for such a view 1s what any attempt at the comparatwe elucidation
of a historical relation between ekpe and abakuá must realistically be
based on. But how can we establish such a relation 1f we cannot be
sure of the separate existence of the entities we aim to relate? Might we
not rather think of both ekpe and abakud as part of a single processual
constellation—something akin to a meteorological formation, perhaps;
a weather system that moves across time and space, circulating against
other airmasses within larger formations, and producing as it articulates
with regional micro-climates, the specific ‘historical’ effects which enter
the local record. The analogy may not be as whimsical as it would
appear.“ To suggest two examples: Fernand Braudel’s conception of
hierarchically layered, but interacting strata of historical tme each with
their proper set of spatial parameters of historical eventuation represents
one such model, though Braudel's own profound lack of interest in his-
torical subjectivity seems to have pre-empted a good deal of its impact.
So did—despite its pitiful neglect of human agency, monstrous Jargon,
and eventual dissipation into the utterly stenle ‘modes of production
controversy’ (cf. Foster Garter 1978)—the Marxist theory of structural
articulation with its inherent tendency to problematize conceptions of
‘the local’ and the conditions of its emergence and reproduction.
J am not arguing for a return to or emulation of such endeavors, stnctu
sensu. Nor would I want this entire essay to be understood as anything
but a methodological note of caution that—or so I would hope—might
come to inform further ethnographic and archival scholarship. But I do
think that the case of abakud presents sufficient evidence for the need

°* David Scott’s phrase ‘an obscure miracle of connection’ derives precisely from
the context of Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic distillation of a history of tragic
displacement from the winter winds that envelop West Africa in clouds of Saharan
dust, and once heralded not just the advent of dry weather, but the impending arrival
of slave ships in the Caribbean.
% But see Tomich (2004) for a cogently argued attempt to salvage some of their
insights.
 ECUE’S ATLANTIC 217

to recalibrate our intellectual tool-kit if we want to keep concepts like

that of an ‘Atlantic World’ from degenerating into fashionable meta-
phors for what everybody has been doing all along anyway. Clearly, in
the case at hand, both space and time are deceptive, for they exist on
ontological as well as discursive levels—neither of which easily or even
only unproblematically reduces to the other. Given this fact, we might
be well advised to treat concepts such as ‘Africa’, ‘Cuba’, history’ and
‘memory’ as heuristic metaphors, lest we feel prepared to once more
wrestle with the ghosts of Tylor and Galton, Frazier and Herskovits.
In the end, perhaps the question worth asking is not whether there is
an Africa in the Americas and how we can find it, but rather what is
the conceptual frame within which we might phrase useful questions
about both places at one and the same time.

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 DONA PRETAS TREK TO CACHOEIRA!

Brian Brazeal

Dona Preta is a priestess of an Afro-Brazilian religion herself, but she

needed another priestess to put the spint of her dead mde de santo, (or
ritual mother) to rest. She had already tried, using the precepts of
her own backlands religious repertoire. By her own account she had
failed. She believed Cachoeira to be her last, best hope. Dona Preta
left Bahia’s desert interior and went to the famed city of Cachoeira, in
the Recéncavo region near the coast. She wanted to meet a priestess
(or mae de santo) of Gandomblé, Bahia’s paramount Afro-Brazilian
religion. She believed that she would only find someone whose ritual
knowledge surpassed her own in the city of Cachoeira. After many
tribulations she found Maria, the scion of one of Cachoeira’s oldest
Candomble lineages. ‘The two priestesses had a long conversation over
Maria’s divining table. They tried to assess each other’s ritual training
and abilities. ‘Their conversation brought the differences between their
cults to light. In the end, these differences proved too great for Maria
to work her spirits on Preta’s behalf. Preta returned to her home and
temple to face the hand of the dead máe de santo alone.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, Northeast Brazil has been
a primary site for an anthropology dedicated to the ethnographic
verification of the African roots of contemporary African-American
religious practices. In the last decades of the twentieth century the
spell turned against the sorcerer.* Anthropologists in Brazil now write
the ethnography of verificationist anthropology. ‘They show how their

' ‘This essay is excerpted and edited from a larger work forthcoming from the Uni-
versity of Virginia Press. It is based on fieldwork conducted in Bahia from 2000-2005.
I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Fulbnght-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation
Research Grant and the University of Virginia, Carter G. Woodson Institute Pre-
Doctoral Fellowship. I would hke to thank Elina Hartikainen and Stephan Palmié for
their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this paper as well as Cory Korkow and
Lance Blanchard for their careful editing.
2 O feitigo virou contra o feiticerro. Anthropologists in Brazil have often been interpolated
into ritual families as ‘sorcerer’s apprentices.’ Their publicly circulated reifications of
the ritual practices that were their objects of study have now become objects of study
in themselves.
224 BRIAN BRAZEAL

predecessors were complicit in a host of ideologically and epistemo-

logically troubling projects, ranging from constructing facist national
mythologies (Ramos 1940, Cole 2003) to celebrating heteronormative
misandry as the centerpiece of Brazil's African religious legacy (Landes
1947, Matory 2005). In the contemporary dissection of Afro-Brazilian
anthropology’s construction of Africanity, some accuse mid-twentieth
century ethnographers of turning their informant-mentors into mere
pawns of their own political projects (Gois-Dantas 1988). Others hold
that the anthropologists themselves were duped by wily informants
with personal political and economic agendas (Matory 2005). This
controversy continues to provoke fruitful if occasionally acrimonious
debate. However, one wonders if it leaves adequate room for ethno-
graphic exploration of the ideas, beliefs and values of contemporary
priests and practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions. Some of these ritual
specialists may take an active interest in social-scientific deliberations
on the role of African origins in their ritual lives (e.g. Santos 1993),
many more do not.
In this essay, I take a skeptical view of what, if anything, Africa
has to do with the local construction of the authenticity of adepts
of Afro-Brazilian religions and the efficacy of the services that they
provide. The great houses of Salvador have become the benchmark
against which such Africanity is measured. They have been objects of
anthropological fascination for so long that their own definitions of
authenticity are inextricably intertwined with the trajectory of Afro-
Brazilian anthropology. In order to move beyond debates over Nagó
purity and re-Africanization, I look beyond the social-scientifically self-
conscious ¢erreiros of Bahia’s capital. An historically-situated ethnography
of ritual exchanges among practitioners, priests and their clients reveals
the endogenous Brazilian categories of ritual efficacy and good faith.
These local categories of faith and efficacy are far more important to
the lives of those who practice these religions than the African ortho-
doxy that may be imputed or denied to them.
My focus 1s on the city of Cachoeira, a hinterland hub of Candombleé
practice, and on the arid backlands (known as the sertdo) which have long
looked to Cachoeira for religious succor. My intention is not to assess
the African orthodoxy of backland religious adepts, but to examine the
construction of ritual efficacy, the ever-present possibility of ritual failure
and the local category of faith which can determine the outcome of
any ritual enterprise. "The promise of ritual success and the threat of
failure mark the religious lives of practitioners of all of the multifarious
 DONA PRETA’S TREK TO CACHOEIRA 225

permutations of Afro-Brazilian religion both at the core and on the

peripheries of publicly sanctioned centers of orthodoxy.”
My analysis of Dona Preta’s trek to Cachoeira aims to unravel a
local sociology of religious knowledge and power in the arid backlands
of Northeast Brazil. Within this scheme, practitioners of Candomblé
from the colonial city of Cachoeira are held to be the wisest, the stron-
gest and the most dangerous ritual specialists in the Bahian interior.
Candomblé is only one of many Afro-Brazilian religious traditions
that exist side-by-side in Bahia and throughout Brazil. But it is the one
that has attracted the greatest reputation for earthly power in Bahia,
as well as the most scholarly attention in Brazil and beyond. While
Candomble exists throughout the country, Cachoeira is especially
well-known as a center for its practice. Adepts of the Afro-Brazilian
religions of Bahia’s western desert (or sertao) travel to the city to solve
their worldly problems or to learn new techniques to incorporate into
their own ritual inventories.* Practitioners from Cachoeira travel the
same routes to the sertao performing nitual services and seeking new
initiates to their cult-houses.
Cachoeira’s reputation is compromised by the widely-recognized exis-
tence of charlatans who come from the city and claim its power. These
supposedly scurrilous religious practitioners earn their money by taking
advantage of the credulity of rural clients. The looming figure of the
charlatan infuses potential clients with the fear of deception. However,
the charlatan is indispensable to the construction of authenticity since
his fakery underwrites the legitimacy of the true practitioner. ‘The line
between ritual legitimacy and legerdemain is not hard and fast. Claims
to power are shifting and contested. Practitioners of Afro-Brazilian
religions tend to regard each other with suspicion. Clients themselves
often doubt the legitimacy of the priests and priestesses whose services
they contract. Their mistrust is accentuated by the large amounts of
money that change hands when ritual services are performed.
This essay explores the tenuous relationship between Cachoeira’s
Candomblé adepts and their backland clients. A regional mystical

3 The Federation of Afro-Brazilian Cults, of which we shall see more below, is the
successor to an organization founded by anthropologists in collaboration with religious
elites. It is strong in the backland and powerful in discourses of ritual legitimacy but
its imprimatur is insufficient to guarantee the efficacy or the rituals performed by its
members.
* I choose the word adepts to signal initiates’ mastery of the practical arts of Afro-
Brazilian religions.
226 BRIAN BRAZEAL

economy encompasses the Afro-Brazilian ntual variants of Cachoeira

and those of the desert interior.’ The services of adepts from Cachoeira,
if they are deemed legitimate, command much higher prices than those
of their sertanejo colleagues. The relationship between Cachoeira and
the sertao was forged in the long history of religious and commercial
exchanges. Gommodified transactions of religious knowledge and ritual
service link practitioners into complex webs of mutual interdependence
where the validity of individuals’ ritual knowledge and power are
always in play.

The fame of Cachoewra in hstoncal perspective

Priests and priestesses of Gandomblé from Cachoeira have traveled to

Bahia’s western desert for generations. People from the sertao seeking
spiritual succor, ritual power or assassination by sorcery have likewise
traveled to Cachoeira, searching for practitioners of Afro-Brazilian
religions. ‘This traffic in religious knowledge followed the paths worn
by mundane commerce during the colonial period and after inde-
pendence in the nineteenth century, when the city was an important
regional trading center. ‘The unceasing ebb and flow of ceremonial and
quotidian goods and services gave Cachoeira its fame in the backlands.
As a result of these transactions, the city became the locus classicus and
point of reference for the practice of Afro-Brazilian religions in the
Bahian interior. To this day Cachoeira is often referred to as the Cidade
da Macumba, the city of witchcraft.® It is this practical magic and not
any explicit claims to an African heritage that have given Cachoeira
its fame.
That said, the historical relationships among Cachoeira’s contempo-
rary Candomble and nineteenth century African religious traditions are
undeniable. Its liturgical vocabulary bears clear philological relationships
to Kwa and—Gbe languages of West Africa and Bantu languages of
central and southern Africa (Megenny 1978, Pares 2006). Its musi-
cal repertoire is recognized by contemporary scholars and adepts of
Yoruba traditional religions as a cognate of their own (Elbein 1986).

° It also includes the folk-Catholic cult of the saints, prayer healers, herbalists and
other ritual specialists.
* The word Macumba has many meanings. It can denigrate all varieties of Afro-
Brazilian religion as sorcery for profit or it can serve as a term of in-group solidarity
for practitioners. See for an extended discussion Hayes (2004) or Brazeal (2007).
 DONA PRETA’S TREK TO CACHOEIRA 227

Its altars and initiation ceremonies closely resemble the consecration of

Onsa and Vodun in the heads and homes of their devotees in Nigeria,
Benin and ‘Togo (Verger 2000 [1957]). Vast numbers of Africans came
to Cachoeira and many of their descendants remained there.
Sertango pilgrims to Cachoeira invoke a different history. Rather than
tracing the routes that linked Brazil to the African continent, they follow
the paths that join the Bahian coast to the western desert. Cachoeira
was one of the first cities of colonial Brazil. It sits on the banks of the
Paraguassú River, in the heart of the Recóncavo region, 24 kilometers
from the Bay of All Saints from which Bahia takes its name. It was at the
center of the slave economies of sugar and tobacco in the seventeenth
through the nineteenth centuries (Lugar 1977, Barickman 1998). It was
also the transshipment point through which all goods coming into and
out of the sertao had to pass (Mattoso 1992). ‘The sertáo carried on a
thriving commerce in cattle, gold, precious stones, lumber, cotton and
gunpowder (Zorzo 2001, Lemos 1995). All of these products passed
through Cachoeira and its fluvial port on their ways to Salvador, the
Brazilian coast and the Atlantic world.
In its nineteenth century heyday, Cachoeira was a great commercial
city. As Bahian slavery slunk toward abolition in 1888, the city became a
home to large free African and Afro-Brazilian communities (Wimberley
1988). Cachoeira's Candomblé was born in the black communities of
its urban periphery (Pares 2006). Candomblé's ritual leaders looked to
backland clients for the resources that would sustain their worship of
the Orixás. Practitioners of Candomblé traced the trade routes estab-
lished by their commercial predecessors in search of clients for their
ceremonial services in the sertao. They initiated new members into
their ritual families. ‘These backcountry representatives of Cachoeira's
cult-houses opened temples of their own and spread the city’s fame
far and wide in the desert.
But the sertao had ritual traditions of its own. Backland religious
variants were (and continue to be) rooted in folk Catholicism, local
pharmacopoeiae, African, European and indigenous systems of devo-
tion, healing and witchcraft. Candomblé transformed when it came to
the sertao and it transformed the traditions of the backlands. ‘Today,
the orthodox Candomblé of Cachoeira (or Candomblé de Nagao) looks
very different from most of the religious traditions practiced in the
sertao. I will highlight differences in initiation practice, the relationships
among the pantheons of divinities and the mortuary ceremonies that
link living practitioners to their deceased forbearers.
228 BRIAN BRAZEAL

Life and death in Cachoetra and the Sertáo

Candomblé is a spirit-possession religion whose devotions focus on the

pantheon of Orixas. ‘These high gods descend into the bodies of the
devotees in public parties (called _/estas) and in private ceremonies called
obrigagées. The Orixas’ earthly work is done by their slaves, the occasion-
ally diabolical Exus. Most adepts also worship Caboclos, hard-drinking
and hard-working spirits of backland cowboys and Indians. Devotees of
Candomblé maintain rigorous spatial and temporal separation among
the pantheons and their deities.
Initiation, called _fetura or making, distinguishes adepts of Candomblé
from mere clients (cf. Reis 2001). Gandomblé’s unique initiation practice
involves a long period of ritual sequestration and shaving and cutting
the catechumen’s head and body (see Lima 1977 (1), Johnson 2002).
These ceremonies create a tutelary relationship between an Orixa and
an intiate. Initiation is also a ceremonial rebirth which binds followers
to ritual families with strict hierarchies and deep genealogies stretch-
ing back to the days of Gandombleé’s founding. Gandombleé’s initiation
practice distinguishes it from the religious variants of the sertao. It
imposes a measure of orthodoxy, consistency, genealogical continuity
and hierarchical distinction on religious adepts.
The most feared entities of Gandombleé’s spiritual universe are spirits
of the dead (or Eguns).’ These wandering spirits can bring sickness,
persistent ill-luck and even death. The most dangerous Eguns are
those of initiated practitioners of Candomblé. Just as initiation makes
devotees more powerful in life, it makes them vastly more powerful
and dangerous after their death. The death of an initiate, especially
a priest or priestess, occasions a series of rites called ebós and carregos
which culminate in the Axexé mortuary ceremony. This ritual placates,
propitiates and domesticates the dead family member.
Until they are domesticated, the ties of affection that bind the family
dead to the living make them dangerous to their survivors. No one wants
the proximity of a dead relative, no matter how much they may have
loved them in life. Mortuary nites give the living a measure of control
over the deceased members of their ritual lineage. These family Eguns
(or Eguns da casa) help the living members of a temple expunge spirits
of the road (or Eguns da rua) from the homes, businesses and bodies of

” Singular: Egum.
 DONA PRETA’S TREK TO CACHOEIRA 229

their clients and followers. As we will see, the religious adepts of the
sertao have very different means of dealing with their dead.
Generations of nitual ties bind the cult-houses of the sertao to those
of Cachoeira, but few backland temples exhibit the level of hierarchical
organization and hagiographic complexity of Cachoeira’s candombleés.®
The religions of the rural interior do not enforce such strict divisions
between followers and clients. Neither do they maintain rigid separa-
tions among the pantheons. Catholic saints descend into the bodies
of their backcountry followers along with Orixas, Caboclos and Exús
in spirit-possession parties. Claims to ritual power are not founded on
initiatic consecration and the fulfillment of periodic ceremonial obliga-
tions as they are in Cachoeira. Instead, they derive from the personal
charisma and healing gifts of individual cult-house leaders.’ These
backland healers accumulate an eclectic store of ritual knowledge
and techniques through a process of bricolage incorporating popular
Catholicism, Candomblé and the multiple religious traditions of the
sertao. They may be considered more powerful if they can claim ties
to Cachoeira. However, the ultimate proof of their legitimacy lies not
in their initiatic connections but in their ability to effectively cure their
clients or bewitch their enemies.
The Afro-Brazilian religious variants of the sertáo may be called
Pyt, Ké de Abemecé, faré, Umbanda or a host of other names. However,
practitioners often eschew these labels and simply call themselves
rezadeiras, benzedetras and gente que trabalha, (pray-ers, blessers and people
that work). Their charisma is often ephemeral. Temples in the sertao
rarely last more than a single generation. Dead adepts are recognized
as dangerous but not cultivated to heal the living.
In Cachoeira, the dead of one’s own ritual lineage are treated with
circumspection and no small measure of fear. But they are cultivated
for their power. Spirits of the dead are an essential part of the conge-
ries of supernatural entities that serve and are served by practitioners
of Gandomblé. Adepts of the Afro-Brazilian traditions of the sertao
know that spirits of the dead can afflict the living. ‘They may use them
in healing and witchcraft. But there 1s little sense of lineage, nor of

8 I capitalize Candomble to refer to the religion as a whole. Lower-case candomblé

refers to individual temples or cult-houses.
° This is akin to the Weberian distinction between personal charisma and the cha-
risma of office. On the notion of the gift (don) see Sansi-Roca (2003).
230 BRIAN BRAZEAL

maintaining the traditions of a specific house, family or nation.'? When

a client approaches a sertanga ritual specialist with a problem that the
she believes derives from the proximity of a dead soul, the priestess will
do her best to cast that soul away, or to catch it and bind it so that it
will not return to afflict another. She will not mobilize her own family
dead to counteract it.
Two distinct but interdependent religious systems function in
Cachoeira and in the sertáo. Cachoeira depends on the desert interior
to furnish the never-ending stream of clients who purchase the ritual
services of 1ts máes and pats de santo (male and female ritual leaders) and
fund their lavish and expensive devotions to the Orixas. The sertao
depends on Cachoeira to provide solutions for intractable spiritual
problems, as a place to contract deadly witchcraft and as a font of
power for its own practitioners of: Afro-Brazilian religions. Backland
curadores often stake their claims to be able to work the spirits on their
ties to the famous cidade da macumba. However, ritual efficacy does not
inhere in people or their practices. ‘The power of healing ceremonies
depends on faith. Faith is constructed through a series of negotiations
between the adept and her client. ‘The stakes in these negotiations are
high. The problems that clients bring to priestesses may be questions
of life and death.
Candombleé’s services are vastly expensive by the standards of the
Bahian interior. Cachoeira’s fame is not enough to guarantee the
authenticity of its religious adepts or their ability to solve their clients’
problems. They must instill faith in their clients for themselves, their
houses and the gods they serve. This is not controversial. It is consis-
tently proclaimed by Afro-Brazilian religious adepts of all stripes. ‘We
work by faith.’ “You must have faith.’ ‘If you don’t have faith, don’t
waste your money.”' The faith in the power of the true practitioner is
underwritten by the knowledge of the existence of the charlatan. The
line between them is not always clear.
While pecuniary motivation is the hallmark of the charlatan, it 1s
only by selling ritual services that today’s maes de santo can sustain the
temples that they have founded or inherited. ‘The services of esteemed

'° The nation or nagáo is a variety of Candomblé ritual practice, see Lima (1974).
'! An interesting exception to this principle are the victims of witchcraft. They need
not believe, or even be aware of the evil being perpetrated against them for it to take
effect. For an alternate view of Gandombleé’s efficacy in which belief is unimportant
see Johnson (2002).
 DONA PRETA’S TREK TO CACHOEIRA 231

priestesses command high prices. "The amount of money that clients pay
measures their belief in the efficacy of the rituals that they contract.
Still, faith in the power of ritual services stands in an uneasy relation-
ship to the commodified nature of these services. Since Candomblé's
efficacy is not always subject to verification, the door to chicanery is
always open.
Legitimacy is constructed and negotiated between practitioners and
chents. In the pages that follow we will see how tenuous and conditional
legitimacy and efficacy really are.
Dona Preta, a priestess from the sertáo, travelled to Cachoeira, look-
ing for a Candomblé priestess to help her lay the spirit of her own
deceased máe de santo to rest. She met Maria, a Candomblé adept
who is particularly skilled in divination and dealings with the unquiet
dead. ‘The two women embarked on a sens of negotiations to define
Preta’s problem and discover what ritual measures would be necessary
to solve it. Along the way, the differences among the religious traditions
of Cachoeira and the sertao were thrown into sharp relief. This is the
story of Preta’s attempt to remove the hand of the dead.

Dona Preta and the Santos

Preta’s story mirrors the religious lives of many priests and priestesses in
the sertao and reveals the bases on which she stakes her own claims to
power. Preta began her involvement with the Afro-Brazilian religions of
the backlands around nineteen years before. She was a young woman
and she was sick unto death. Before her illness she had weighed 155
pounds, she went down to 73. She had never liked doctors or tradi-
tional healers, but she consulted with both. No one was able to help
her. Finally, she came to the house of the woman who would become
her mae de santo.
This benezedeira did not rezar (bless or pray over) Preta, nor did she
prescribe baths, teas or incense. Her guia (guide or tutelary Caboclo)
descended and told Preta that there was nothing that the priestess
or anyone else could do for her.'* The only way that she would ever
get better would be to begin teaching remedies to the people.'* Preta

'2 Guia is a term preferred by practitioners of Umbanda for their tutelary spirits.
'3 Ensinando remédios ao povo, or teaching remedies to the people, is a euphemism for
the practice of healing in Afro-Brazilian religions.
232 BRIAN BRAZEAL

protested that she was no herb-doctor. She didn’t know any more
about the local pharmacopoeia than anyone else. She had no contact
with Orixás or Caboclos. She was Catholic and had no desire to be
anything more. The rezadeira was adamant. Fither she would work
for the sick or she would die.
Soon enough, a man appeared at her door asking Preta to cure his
dying infant son. She apologized but told him firmly that she was no
curadeira.‘* The man insisted and she chased him away from her door.
Then things went dark and she remembers nothing more of the inci-
dent. A few days later the man came back and asked her to zezar him.
She asked him what he was doing there? Why had he come back?
Hadn’t he figured out that she was not a curadetra?
He said that the remedies that she had given him for his son had
saved the child’s life and now he wanted her to help him too. Preta
did not know what he meant. It was only later that she came to under-
stand that her blackout was in fact a divine manifestation in her body.
A god had come down and taught a remedy to the man for his child,
independent of her will or control. ‘The child was cured.
In retrospect, Preta realized that this was the first appearance of her
Caboclo Ogum and the first evidence of the healing gift that would
become the foundation of her practice.'? Ogum worked through her,
in spite of her objections, for several years. He did not charge his
clients for the services he rendered while occupying Preta’s body. Preta
wanted no part of it, but could not help her growing reputation. She
moved around the backcountry, living in several cities before settling
in Genipapo. There, she bought her fields and built her house. She
also built her centro, finally professionalizing her religious practice.'® She
modeled her cult after that of her mae de santo. Her Caboclos are the
focus of her public ceremonies. Her congregation consists of the clients
and neighbors whom she has cured. They have ties of affection and
obedience to her temple. Her drummers are her sons by birth and her
daughters accompany her Caboclos’ songs in beautiful harmony.
It was only after many long conversations that Preta acknowledged
working with Exús at all. Although she is reticent about her relation-

14 Curadeira is the feminine form of curador, or curer. This popular term has a more
ironic, negative connotation than benzedeira.
15 The line between Orixás and Caboclos is not so firmly drawn in the sertáo. While
Ogum is usually an Orixá in Candomblé, Preta?s Ogum is a Caboclo.
16 Centro, or center is Umbanda’s equivalent of terrearo and refers to the cult-house.
 DONA PRETA’S TREK TO CACHOEIRA 233

ship with these quasi-diabolical entities, their presence is everywhere.

They are manifest in a piece of iron rebar behind the gate and a black
candle surrounded by chalk drawings burning on the floor of the public
area of the temple during a private ceremony."
They are also present in her body. One Exu, named Tranca Ruas
(Locks Roads), takes over Preta’s body as a boisterous deity who curses
with obscene brio. He drinks cachaga (cane liquor) and when he dances
he twirls spectators around until they collapse. Another Ext possesses her
in the guise of an exigent gypsy. She demands campani and jewelry from
those who would seek her’help and utters veiled threats against those
who would disrespect her centro. In talking about her cult, Preta refers
to Sete Lancas (Seven Spears) and Gira Mundo (Travels the World),
two Exús of the road who receive her homage at the crossroads. She
counts on them to protect her from others” Macumba and to return
others’ wicked intentions with interest.
In Preta’s centro, as in most backland temples, it is Preta herself and
not her initiatic daughters who incarnates the deities in spirit-possession
ceremonies. The Santos who speak through her are the source of her
knowledge and her power and she rarely has recourse to other forms
of divination.'® Preta has not undergone formal initiation at someone
else’s hands, nor did she undergo a rite of accession to temple headship.
Hosts of Saints, Orixás, Caboclos, Exús and Marujos come and go, one
after another from Preta’s body in public ceremonies. I have seen her
incarnate Ogum, Oxossi, Boiadeiro, Janaina, Cabocla Jurema, Sultao
das Matas, Tupinamba, Marujo, a Preto Velho, Cigana, ‘Tranca Ruas
and Pombagira. When clients come to Preta for consultations, Ogum
descends into her body and offers the necessary advice and prescrip-
tions. She performs her ritual work with the help of the members of
her blood family and her Caboclo. She does not work with Eguns. |
have never even heard her utter the word.
If a sertaneja priestess has left ritual descendants after her death, one
of them will usually gather all of the objects pertaining to the dead
priestess’ cult and throw them into a river. If her children and clients
feel that they are being afflicted by the spint of their deceased mae

'7 Gates and doors are associated with Exús. Priestesses plant them there to attract
clients and ward away witchcraft. Chalk drawings called pontos riscados are devices used
in Umbanda to summon the power of Exus, as are black candles.
18 Santos can refer to Catholic saints, the Orixas or it may be used as a cover term
for all of the deities of Afro-Brazilian religions.
234 BRIAN BRAZEAL

de santo, they might transfer their allegiance to another house. ‘There,

a new máe de santo will tirar máo de morto (or remove the hand of the
dead priestess) from the bodies of her survivors. The children of the
deceased priestess will join the temple. The temple of the deceased
will fall into dereliction.
But Dona Preta defied this sertanejo tradition. When her mae de
santo died, she could not bear to throw her saints in the river. She
had knelt before her altar too many times to watch its ritual objects
be carried away by the current. She gathered up the belongings of
the woman who had introduced her to the practice of Afro-Brazilian
religions and recreated her altar in the congd, (or sanctuary) of her own
centro in Genipapo.*” The altar, like her own, consisted of an assemblage
of painted plaster statuettes and chromolithographs glued to wooden
frames. ‘They depicted saints, mermaids, cowboys, Indians, Jesus and
Mary. ‘hese were the objects of her devotion and the objectifications
of the entities who would possess her body.
Preta asked her sons to build her a new altar opposite the one
where she had worked for nearly two decades. She rebuilt her mae
de santo’s altar with the statues and images that she had collected.
Soon afterwards she began to feel ill. Her own religious work was not
proceeding as it should. She wondered if her problems were a result
of bringing the altar of a dead priestess into her own home. She had
tried to appropriate the power of her mae de santo for herself, but she
lacked the ritual means to do so safely. Now her choice was coming
back to haunt her.
Preta is relatively successful. She is looked upon as a leader in her
small community. People seek her out for advice and the ritual works
that she offers. All of this was threatened by her troubles in the wake
of her mae de santo’s death. One day she was unexpectedly possessed
by her mae de santo’s Caboclo. Although the priestess had died, this
god whom she served in life lived on. He took over Preta’s body and
left a message for Preta with her daughters. He told them to tell her

'2 Preta considers herself to be a practitioner of Umbanda. But her practice bears
little resemblance to the doctrinaire, bureaucratized Umbanda of Rio de Janeiro and
Sao Paulo with its system of section chiefs and phalanges, descnbed by Ortiz (1978)
and Brown (1986). It also bears little resemblance to the traditions that she would
encounter in Cachoeira.
20 This is a common means of communication between the spirits and their earthly
servants. Preta, possessed by the Caboclo would have no control over her behavior
 DONA PRETA’S TREK TO CACHOEIRA 235

that Preta was in danger from the dead priestess's spirit. In order to
placate the woman’s soul, she would have to go to Cachoeira.

Ké of the Goat and Lu of the Onxds

In spite of the Caboclo’s injunction, Preta was suspicious of the town.

She had been there once, years before and was immediately picked out
as a sertaneja seeking spiritual services by a tout at the bus station. He
brought Preta to the house of a man named Zé do Bode (or Zé of the
Goat) on Sao Felix’s infamous Rua de Dendé.”’ The Rua de Dendé
extends from Sao Félix’s train station to its cemetery. It has long been
the home to priests and priestesses who look more to sertanejo clients
than Cachoeira’s devotional communities. It is often the first stop for
sertanejos hoping to contract malicious witchcraft. Zé do Bode 1s a sor-
cerer of this ilk. He does not perform initiations or offer public parties
and he is better known in the sertao than in Cachoeira. He advertises
his evil proclivities with a big Exu statue by his front door.”
Preta arrived at his temple and asked Zé how much he would charge
to rezar (or pray over her). Preta's own practice consists mostly in utter-
ing powerful prayers and offering herbal baths to undo the afflictions of
her clients. She had hoped that she would find someone with especially
powerful prayers in Cachoeira. But Zé do Bode told her that he didn’t
pray for anybody. His work was with demons. Preta has close working
relationships with several Exús, but a self-avowed demon-worshipper
was not what she was looking for. She left Cachoeira unsatisfied. Zé
do Bode was the only person she knew in Cachoeira, but she would
not seek him out to help the spimt of the woman whom she had loved
in life.
When Preta made her second trip, she did not know where she
would go when she reached the Cidade da Macumba. As it turned

and no recollection of the things he said. He left a message for her, to be delivered
when she woke up. .
*! Sao Félix is Cachoeira's sister city across the river Paraguassú. It shares Cachoeira's
reputation for witchcraft. Goats are persistently associated with the most malicious
offerings to Exu. Dendé or red palm oil is also a crucial ingredient in Exú sacrifices.
The Rua de Dendé takes its popular name from the number of cult-houses there and
the frequent sacrifices to Exú that they perform.
“2 Most of Cachoeira's terreiros keep their Exús hidden away in locked shacks in
the yard behind the temple.
236 BRIAN BRAZEAL

out, she did not even make that far. ‘There is no direct bus service from
Jacobina to Cachoeira. In order to get there, she had to go through
Feira de Santana. Some of Feira de Santana’s cult-houses capitalize
on Cachoeira’s fame by sending their own touts to wait by the ticket
counter of the agency that runs buses to that city. They picked her out
as a sertaneja going to seek the help of Cachoeira’s Candomblé and
convinced her that she need not go any further.
Preta was taken to the house of a priestess named Lu dos Orixas.
That terreiro, Preta claimed, was more of a slaughterhouse than a
temple. They sacrificed a bull every day.” Preta talks about Lu dos
Orixas with a mix of awe and disdain. She was impressed by the rich-
ness of the house and the volume of clients passing through it, but she
found no solace there and she spent more money than she likes to recall.
She underwent ritual treatment at Lú's hands, but the more ceremonies
that were performed on her behalf, the worse Preta felt.
Preta’s Ogum came to her rescue. He descended into her body while
she was staying at the temple and left a message for Preta with a fam-
ily member who was accompanying her. Ogum said that Preta should
leave. She didn’t need anyone else to take care of her Orixás. She was
wasting time and money and things were getting worse, not better. She
should go home and take care of herself using her own methods.
Lu of the Orixás and Zé of the Goat both failed to convince Preta
that they could solve her problems. In Zé's case 1t was because of his
frank devotion to evil. Zé do Bode carries on a venerable Cachoeira tra-
dition of performing sorcery for clients from the sertáo and the capital,
but he does so from outside of Cachoeira's ritual lineage system. Preta
was not looking to kill anyone or to settle any dispute but to solve a
personal problem. Zé was clearly not the man for the job. Those who
devote themselves exclusively to evil can be efficacious in their practice
but they will not be good healers. Healing requires relationships with
the Orixás, the Exus who are their slaves and Eguns from the healer’s
own ritual lineage. Zé had none of these.
Lu dos Orixas’ ritual works must have achieved their ends for many
people since she had such a large flow of wealthy clients. But she was

23 Feira de Santana is a large city in the sertáo that has usurped Cachoeira’s role
as a regional trading entrepót.
** Most Orixas do not normally eat cattle. The bulls in question may have been for
Caboclos but were most likely for Exus. This suggests that Lu dos Orixas may have
done most of her work on Candomblé's dark side.
 DONA PRETA’S TREK TO CACHOEIRA 237

unable to convince Preta of the efficacy of her cures. Perhaps it was the
high prices that she charged that made Preta suspect that Lú's motiva-
tions were more financial than devotional. Perhaps it was the fact that
Preta had been brought there by a tout clearly in the pay of the máe
de santo. Perhaps Preta saw indications that Lú's practice was devoted
more to Exús than to her eponymous Onixás. The negotiation of ritual
legitimacy and efficacy is conditional and changeable. Neither Zé do
Bode nor Lu dos Orixas would be designated a charlatan by the bulk
of their clients. While both were able to convince many people of the
efficacy of their magic, neither was able to convince Preta.
So Preta left Feira de Santana and returned to Genipapo with an
unquiet heart. She was still troubled by the hand of her dead máe de
santo. She still refused to throw the old woman's saints in the river. She
knew perfectly well how to tirar máo de morto. She did it for the clients
who came to her. But she did not know how to do it for herself. ‘The
problem was that she did not want to sever ties with the priestess but
she lacked the ritual means to maintain them safely. Her defiance of
tradition put her in a risky position. Whenever anything went wrong,
she wondered if it was caused by the spirit of her late mae de santo.

Candomblé and curadores in facobina and its hinterland

Dona Preta began making the rounds of the houses of the people who
work the spirits in Jacobina and its rural districts to see if any of them
could help her. First she visited an old and respected healer in a remote
area called Caatinga do Moura. He opened a divination session and
told Preta that she was the victim of someone else’s Macumba. ‘This,
he said, was evidenced by the moths and bugs that infested her house.
Preta had no faith in his diagnosis. She does not believe that anyone’s
witchcraft can touch her. She is convinced that the power of her own
Orixás, Caboclos and Exús will protect her from other people’s mal-
ice. Moths and bugs are common enough in the farm houses of the
sertao and had always been in her house. Preta knew in her heart that
her troubles were from her dead -mae de santo. When the sertanejo
diviner failed to discover this, he was discredited in Preta’s eyes. Preta
regarded him as a deluded (and perhaps doting) old man at best and
at worst, a fraud.
Next she went to visit a man who aspired to lead a Candomblé temple
in urban Jacobina. Orthodox Candomble, (or Candomblé de Nagao) only
238 BRIAN BRAZEAL

came to Jacobina around thirty years ago, but it has gained a foothold
in the city’s urban center. Jacobina’s Gandomblé priests look more
to Salvador than to Cachoeira for the roots of their practice. Some
self-consciously infuse their ritual speech with references to Africa,
after the fashion of the famous cult-houses of the capital. Some turn
to the academic literature on Gandomblé to inspire and authenticate
their beliefs and practices. Another source of authentication is the
FENACAB, (the National Federation of Afro-Brazilian Cults).” This
quasi-governmental organization diffuses its own brand of Africanity
through the backlands and confers its own brand of ritual legitimacy
through the official diplomas and licenses to practice that it can grant
or withhold.
But the young priest with his diploma and his African-inflected
ritual was not able to help Preta either. He opened his divination
session and told her that she was the victim of the witchcraft of her
husband’s jealous lover. Again Preta was skeptical. She asked him if she
had relationships with any Caboclos or Orixas. He told her that she
did not. She laughed at him and told him that she was a daughter of
Ogum. Her own temple had been open for many years. Furthermore,
her husband had no lover. Even if he did, Preta would have nothing
to fear from her. The pai de santo was taken aback. He said that she
had no faith and had only come to his temple to mock his religion.
She left in disgust. Evocations of Africa, the Federation’s bureaucracy
and the mysteries of the Bahian capital were not enough to win her
confidence.
Preta then sought out the oldest Gandomblé temple in Jacobina.
Its leader is the regional delegate of the federation, a fully initiated
Candomblé priest and a powerful and respected man in the city. He
opened up a divination ceremony and told her that she should undergo
initiation at his house. Her initiatic sacrifices would take care of any
problems she might have with the spirits of her forbearers. Candomblé
initiation could have proved advantageous for Preta. Membership in this
well-known temple probably would have resulted in recognition by the
Federation and would offer a new source of power and legitimacy for
Preta with her own backlands clientele. But she refused his offer. The
priest seemed more interested in augmenting his own position by add-

25 Federagáo Nacional dos Cultos Afro-Brastleiros.

 DONA PRETA’S TREK TO CACHOEIRA 239

ing a working priestess to his flock of rmtual children than in tending to

Preta’s problem. She did not know where else to turn. ‘There was no one
among Jacobina’s adepts whom she considered capable of performing
ritual services on her behalf. The best of them may be her equals, but
she had been working the spirits for eighteen years and did not like the
idea of subordinating herself to another priest or priestess.
The roots of her problems, her colleagues divinations had suggested,
were common causes for sertanejos spiritual troubles: malicious neigh-
bors and romantic rivals casting spells on one another. But Preta does
not believe herself to be susceptible to the attacks of amateurs. Her
unwillingness to undergo treatment at the hands of the locals speaks
to her professional pride. She could get no help from the charismatic
traditional healers of the rural backlands, nor from the neo-Africanist
Candombleé priests of urban Jacobina. Her attempts to find help in the
famous Cidade da Macumba were also frustrated. Preta had begun to
despair of finding peace for her mae de santo’s spirit and the restora-
tion of her own peace of mind and religious practice.

A drunken sailor, a car accident and an old ass in a skirt

On January 31, 2004, I went to Preta’s temple to record some footage

for an ethnographic documentary. I had known Preta for years and she
was anxious to participate in the project. I intended to interview Preta
and record some music with her sons and daughters. The call of the
drums, however, proved too much for her Caboclos to withstand. They
arrived in Preta’s body one after another and they were all thirsty. After
shooting three hours of tape and dnnking three liters of brandy with
Preta’s Santos and her family, I had hoped to slp away.
Preta was no longer Preta but Marujo incarnate. Marujo is a drunken
sailor. He straddles the lines between Caboclo, Ext: and Egum. He is
a powerful and fun-loving, but occasionally vindictive, spirit. He told
us that if we left, he would use his power to flip our car over on the
highway and kill me and the rest of the film crew. I stayed to see what
he had to say.
Marujo explained that Preta needed a favor but she was ashamed
to ask. He was not ashamed and he would ask on her behalf. I knew
Cachoeira, he said, and all of the people who worked with the Orixas
there. Preta needed their help. ‘Things were not as they should be in
the terreiro. ‘The mdo de morto was on Preta’s head and someone needed
240 BRIAN BRAZEAL

to remove it. Could I help her find someone in Cachoeira who was
honest and able to help?
I knew just who she should see, I said, and gave a brief description
of the lineage and practice of Maria, a mae de santo who was my
close friend and neighbor.
Marujo said Preta needed an “ass in a skirt not legs in pants.”
I told him, yes, Maria was a woman. He asked how old she was.
I told him that she had just turned fifty-four. He said Preta needed
someone between fifty and seventy.
“Does she throw búzios?” He asked.”
‘She does.’ I replied.
‘How much does she charge?’
‘Fifty reais’ I said, ‘and the consulta goes on for as long as the client
needs.
If Maria could not solve her problem, 1 pointed out, there were
plenty of maes de santo in Cachoeira. I knew most of them and we
would find one who could put her ritual mother to rest.
Preta awoke as herself a short while later. We talked over the things
that I had discussed with Marujo. He had told me that she wanted
me to take her to Cachoeira. I would be glad to. I knew a trustworthy
woman of the nght age who threw buzios and would charge fifty reais
for the consultation. I also told her that the cost of tirando máo de morto
would go far beyond the price of the buzio divination. She would have
to pay for animals and supplies and she would have to pay Maria and
her flock for whatever services they would perform. It could take a
long time. In the end, if Maria removed the máo do morto, Preta would
become Maria's ritual daughter. When a máe de santo in Cachoeira
removes the hand of the dead, she puts her own in its place.
Preta told me that she knew she could find someone in Cachoeira
to solve her problem. She did not like the custom of throwing people’s
altars in the river. In Cachoeira, things must be different than they
were in the sertao. There are houses in Cachoeira that are 450 years

7° He meant a woman, not a man. The possessing spirits of Candomblé often

use circumlocutions to refer to common objects. Exus’ speech tends towards sexual
allusions.
27 Buzios are the cowry shells used in Candomblé divination ceremonies.
28 This was about 16 US dollars in early 2004. Some diviners charge by the question
or only offer a short amount of time for their consultas.
 DONA PRETA’S TREK TO CACHOEIRA 241

old, she said.* Did they have the same máe de santo for 450 years?
‘They must have a way of removing the hand of the dead so that the
house could live on. They do, I replied, but inheriting a casa de santo in
Cachoeira was a complicated business. She should not underestimate
the time, difficulty and expenditure involved. However, if she wanted
to come to Cachoeira I would love to host her and I would take her
to people she could trust.
Preta and Marujo’s concerns about her trip to Cachoeira reveal a
consciousness of the religious differences between Cachoeira and the
sertao. Within her own conception of the geography of Afro-Brazilian
religions, Gachoeira was a place of unique power, but it was also a place
of danger deriving from the prevalence of sorcerers and charlatans.
Marujo’s questions also demonstrate the importance of age and gen-
der in the ethnosociology of religious legitimacy. Preta’s archetypical
image of a Candomblé leader in Cachoeira was a woman in her late
middle-age. A woman over fifty could be presumed to have experience
working the spirits that surpassed her own. A younger woman might
be a novice relative to Preta. A woman older than seventy might have
entered her dotage, her powers over the spirits declining with those of
her mind. The people whom she had consulted in Jacobina were all
men and they had all failed to help her.
The question of cost was equally important. Preta charges ten veavs
for a consultation with her Caboclo. Anyone in Cachoeira who charged
such a low fee probably would not have the powers necessary to solve
her problem. Candomblé, she knew, does not come cheap. Conversely,
an exorbitant fee would cast doubt on the practitioner’s legitimacy.
Those who practice Gandomblé for the love of money can be effica-
cious sorcerers but they rarely make good healers. Preta enjoys success
as a farmer and a priestess but she is by no means wealthy. In addi-
tion to the motivations of the priestess she had her own pocketbook
to consider.
Perhaps most important of all was the question of trust. She knew
that Cachoeira had a wide gamut of ritual specialists and that some of
these were frauds. ‘The guidance of strangers had failed her. Preta had
no family connection to the city. She turned to me. Preta and I had

9 Preta overestimated here. The oldest continuously operating Candomblés in

Cachoeira are around 150 years old. Four hundred and fifty years ago the European
and African settlement of Cachoeira was only beginning. Her point about the persis-
tence of ritual lineages stands.
242 BRIAN BRAZEAL

worked the spirits together, I had been a fixture at Maria’s house for
years. Even this connection was not enough. The differences between
her cult and Maria’s almost proved too much for them to reach a
common understanding.

Dona Preta’s trek

Dona Preta made her way to Cachoeira on June 2, 2004. She caught a
cab at the bus stop and told the driver to take her to the casa do gringo.
She arrived at my door with her husband and two frends in tow. It
was obvious how they had been picked out as sertanejos on a quest
for Gandomble on their previous trips. ‘They had the distinctive look
of farmers who had dressed up to come to a party in town, but they
looked unsure and apprehensive.
I brought them to Maria’s house and introduced the two priestesses
to each other. Maria told Preta and her companions to sit down and
cool off before they got down to the business of consulting. There was
no hurry, she said. ‘That night we would sing prayers for Saint Anthony
in the church.* "Then there would be a brief Candomblé ceremony for
Ogum. There were plenty of beds in the terreiro. They should spend
the night. There was plenty of water. They should wash off the dust
of the road before Preta’s consultation began.
Preta was anxious to get started. She did not want to spend any time
in small talk before the consultation. She did not want to give away
her problems to Mania. She hoped to test Maria’s divinatory abilities
by seeing whether her búzios would discover the root of her problem.
Based on the perspicacity of Maria's divination, Preta would decide
whether or not to trust Maria to perform any rituals on her behalf.
She was brusque and nervous. But people who come for consultations
often are. Maria was unperturbed. She asked her to sit down and have
a glass of water while she got ready.
The two priestesses entered the quarto de santo (or altar room) together
and sat at the divining table. Preta’s companions and I sat near the
open door, straining to hear what the two women said. Maria chanted
in the ritual language of Nagó Candomblé as she rubbed the búzios

3% The reza de Santo Antonio is a Recóncavo tradition. The devout join to sing for Saint
Anthony for the first 13 days of June in the evenings. The Catholic chapel across from
Maria’s temple is a focus of the community’s devotions.
 DONA PRETA’S TREK TO CACHOEIRA 243

between her hands. She threw them on the table, pushed the shells
around and hesitated. She asked Preta who her Orixa was. ‘This seemed
strange. Maria usually discovers a person’s tutelary Orxa by throwing
her búzios. She tells the client who their Orixa is herself. She does
not typically ask them anything about the Orixas. Maria begins her
consultas by asking clients about their problems based on what she sees
in her first throw of the shells. By asking Preta about her Orixá, Maria
immediately raised the other priestess’s doubts.
Preta demurred from telling Maria anything about her Santos. She
was there to have her questions answered, not to answer Maria’s. She
remained suspicious after her previous visits to Gachoeira and refused
to divulge anything. Maria was puzzled by what she saw in the buzios.
She started asking her about Exú. Did Preta work with Exú? Did she
incarnate an Exú? Preta said that she did.
Maria knew that Preta was from the sertáo and had identified her
as a practitioner of Umbanda. Preta makes this identification herself,
but she and Mania have different understandings of what Umbanda
means. Maria has seen some Umbanda in her travels to Sao Paulo.
There, Umbanda’s Exus take on a particularly devilish guise when
they incarnate themselves in their followers. Maria disapproves. She
regards possession by Ext as unfortunate at best and at worst as an
emergency requiring immediate ritual attention.*' She told Preta that
her own house, like all houses of Candomblé, cultivates Ext. But Ext
works and eats outside of the house and does not come inside to sing
and dance in the bodies of her children.
This was the first in a series of misunderstandings between the two
priestesses. Preta 1s a practitioner of Umbanda. As such, she does
become possessed by Exu. ‘his is an essential part of her practice. She
does not consider this to be evil. On the contrary, for Preta, being a
practitioner of Umbanda is a moral claim. Umbanda, as Ortiz (1978)
has pointed out, is understood by its practitioners to be white magic. It
is defined by its opposite, Quimbanda or black magic. Umbanda works
with Ext but supposedly only for good, while Quimbanda works for
evil.** When Maria identified Preta as an Umbandista, at the fore of
her mind was work with Exú in his most diabolical aspect. To Preta,

31 For responses to Umbanda Exús in Candomblé see Capone (2004).

22 Of course good and evil are interwoven in most practitioners’ ritual repertoires
but few people identify themselves as Quimbandistas.
244 BRIAN BRAZEAL

Umbanda meant the repudiation of this sort of devilish practice. Preta,

like most adepts of Afro-Brazilian religions in the sertao, is reluctant
to talk about her work with Ext to anyone. Her hackles were begin-
ning to rise.
She responded to Maria’s questions, albeit warily. Her Ext is Tranca
Ruas, she said. But the owner of her head, her tutelary Caboclo, is
Ogum.
Maria went back to the buzios. This Ogum, she said, must be Ogum
Xoroké. Ogum Xoroké, in Cachoeira' Candomblé, is half Orixá and
half Exú.* Maria explained this to Preta and she bridled again. It was
tantamount to telling her that her own head was governed by an Exú;
that her beloved Ogum who had helped so many people was disguis-
ing his true nature, even from Preta herself. She understood Maria to
suggest that she had no relationship with the Orixás at all and only
worked for evil.
Preta may have been right in her interpretation of Maria's ideas
about her cult. Maria believes that Afro-Brazilian religious specialists in
the sertao often render unwitting homage to Exus and Eguns disguising
themselves as Orixas, with deleterious consequences for themselves and
their clients. Just as sertanejos are suspicious of Cachoeira, Cachoei-
ranos suspect the validity of the power and knowledge claimed by the
people of the sertao.
Mania noticed Preta’s chagrin and took a different tack. If it was
an Ext that was causing Preta’s troubles, perhaps this Exu came from
someone else. She threw her shells again and asked Preta if her prob-
lems were related to an inheritance. Preta said that they were. She
began to open up a bit at this sign of the accuracy of Maria's búzios.
Maria asked if someone in her family had died recently and if this
person had worked with the Santos. Yes, Preta replied, she had. The
inheritance that Preta had in mind was the altar and the late relative
was her máe de santo.
Maria asked what Preta does in her nation (nagdo) to dispatch the
spirits of the dead. This occasioned yet another misunderstanding. The
verb despachar has many meanings (cf. Sansi-Roca 2003). In Cachoeira’s
Candomblé, despachar means to send a potentially dangerous spirit
away from a house or from a person's body, as in a sacrifice for healing
or propitiation. But in the religious language of the sertáo and most

2 For a fascinating discussion of Ogum Xoroké in Cachoeira see Pares (2006).

 DONA PRETA’S TREK TO CACHOEIRA 245

of Brazil the noun despacho carries a heavy connotation of witchcraft

and malicious works with Exu. Adepts in the sertao, when speaking to
their prospective clients, often deny that they make despachos (whether
truthfully or not). ‘They claim that they only work with prayers and
incense.
When Mania suggested that Preta’s deceased mae de santo had an
Exu that was troubling her and then used the word despachar, she
seemed to suggest that Preta’s ritual mother worked with malignant
sorcery and that this was the root of Preta’s problems. Preta bridled
again. Maria seemed to be-suggesting that her practice and the prac-
tice of her máe de santo had been devoted exclusively to Exús and
witchcraft.
Preta snapped back, ‘I don’t do despachos for anyone. When I have
to perform an obligation to Onxas or Caboclos I do it in an appropriate
place, in flowing waters or the virgin forest.’ She avoided mentioning the
highways and crossroads where she fulfills her obligations to Exus.
Maria explained what she meant. What does someone of Preta’s
nation do to appease the spirits of the dead and keep them from
afflicting the living? Is it a question of incense, candles, leaves and
prayers or what?
Preta still did not answer. Months later she told me that she does tirar
máo de morto for other people using the materials Maria had mentioned.
But she had come to Cachoeira precisely because her own methods
were not working. Maria, for her part, was trying to help Preta find a
solution within her own ritual repertoire. She knew that to free Preta
from the spirit of her dead máe de santo according to the precepts of
Candomblé would be hard and costly. It would involve a long series
of sacrifices to Orixas, Exts and Eguns and would require that Preta
become Maria" filha de santo, or ritual daughter. All of this went unspo-
ken and misunderstood as the two priestesses faced each other across
the divining table.
By this point Maria was getting frustrated with Preta’s prickly unco-
operation. She had already thrown the bizios at least half-a-dozen times
and consulted her Jfé to confirm which Orixa owned Preta’s head.
Consulting the shells is exhausting work for Maria and the divining

+ Ifá in Cachoeira means something very different than it does in Yoruba and
Cuban divinations by Babalawos (Bascom 1969). It is a device made of bamboo slats
woven together with string which opens or closes in the hand of the diviner and thus
answers yes or no questions posed to the Orixá.
246 BRIAN BRAZEAL

faculties of the buzios themselves can be spent if they are consulted

too often without adequate compensation. It seemed to her that Preta
was not putting much stock in her answers anyway.
Preta, on the other hand, felt that she was being condescended to
and perhaps taken advantage of. Preta is a powerful priestess in her
own community and she expected to be treated as an equal, even
though she had come to Maria with a problem. She was still uncon-
vinced of Maria’s divinatory abilities. Maria’s buzio’s had hinted at
the root of her problem but had not discovered it outright. ‘The two
priestesses were near an impasse when Maria asked the question that
she usually uses to conclude a divination session, “Do you have any
other questions?”
Preta understood in spite of her misgvings that if she did not
explain her troubles to Maria that this would become another long and
expensive trip to Cachoeira in vain. Her best chance to remove the
hand of her dead mae de santo from her own head might be lost. She
swallowed some of her pride and opened up. She had an inheritance,
she said. The inheritance was a centro de Umbanda.” It came from her
mae de santo who had died five months ago. Now things were going
wrong in the temple.
Mania threw the shells once more. ‘Then she asked if there was a
Yansan that Preta worked with and that she might have inherited from
her mae de santo. Preta responded that there was. Maria told her that
her that this Yansan might be an Egum.
Yansan is the Ornxa most closely associated with death in Candom-
blé. Maria believes that Eguns incarnate themselves in the bodies of
sertanejos claiming to be Santos and Caboclos so that they will be fed
with the blood of sacrifice. She thought that this might be the root
of Preta's troubles. She was being possessed by an Egum disguised as
the Orixá who is Eguns” constant companion. She asked again, what
Preta would do about Eguns in her own nation? Sull hoping that Maria
would discover the exact cause of her problem and its solution, Preta
gave no answer.
Finally Preta decided to tell Maria why she had come in explicit
terms. She explained that she had brought the saints of a dead priest-

*° This referred to the saints from her mae de santo’s altar, not the building itself.
For Preta the Santos were the essence of the centro.
 DONA PRETA’S TREK TO CACHOEIRA 247

ess into her home and things were going wrong. She had come to
Cachoeira to see if she could find someone to tirar máo do morto of
the woman who had taught her to cultivate the Santos and thereby
set things nght.
Mania heaved a sigh and threw the buzios once more. Nodding with
resignation, she began to explain the series of rituals that would be
necessary for Preta to purge herself of the lingering influence of her
deceased priestess. Preta would have to do a carrego, a sacrifice used
to mollify and domesticate the spirit of a person who has worked with
the Santos. The carrego would be performed at Maria’s house using
some of Preta’s mae de santo’s personal effects. It would be combined
with a cleansing ceremony to be performed on Preta’s own body. Next,
Maria would have to return to Genipapo in the sertao, with Preta and
a complement of assistants from Cachoeira, to clean the Eguns out
of Preta’s house and temple. While she was there, she would perform
yet another carrego for the dead priestess. Preta would then return to
Cachoeira, where Maria would construct and consecrate shrines for
Preta’s Orixas. These earthly seats for Preta’s Santos would remain
in Maria’s altar room, making Preta effectively into one of Maria’s
spiritual daughters.
The buzios told Maria that Preta’s tutelary deities in Gandomblé
were Oxum and Oxala and not Ogum at all. Preta and Maria would
render the elaborate sacrifices called obrigagoes for both Oxum and
Oxala in Cachoeira. Then they would perform another obrigacao for
the Yansan of her deceased mae de santo. This final ceremony would
appease the Egum and relieve Preta of its presence. Preta would be
incorporated into the ritual family of the Maria's terreiro and her mae
de santo into its private pantheon of Eguns.
This is how Maria would go about tirando máo de morto. Maria told
Preta that just because she had thrown the buzios for her did not
mean she was obliged to perform the service at her house. She should
feel free to visit other candomblés in Cachoeira. She might hear other
prescriptions from other priestesses, but this was the sequence of rituals
that Maria would prescribe. If Preta had a solution within her own
tradition, she should pursue it. If she decided to have Maria perform
the ceremonies for her, it would not necessarily mean that she would
have to change her own mode of worship in the sertao. She could
continue to cultivate the Santos as she always had at home, but she
would have to return to Cachoeira periodically for the rest of her life
248 BRIAN BRAZEAL

to give obrigacoes to the Orixas who had been seated in the traditions
of Candomblé.
Preta should take time to think 1t over. Maria reiterated her invita-
tion for her and her family to spend the night at the temple and see
a little of how she worships the Orixás and the Santos herself. When
the night's prayers for Saint Anthony were finished, she would call her
drummers to play the dorozán, a cycle of songs for the Orixás, in honor
of Ogum. The gods of her temple would come to earth and dance.
Preta put fifty reais for the consulta on the divining table. They
emerged together from Maria’s quarto de santo, half-reconciled, but
still mutually wary. Preta would return to the divining table twice more
before the day was over to figure out the price and the details of the
services to be performed. When night fell, we all sang the prayers to
Saint Anthony along with the women and children of the neighbor-
hood who filled Maria’s small Catholic chapel. Then we crossed the
street to the terreiro to sing for the Orixás.
When it was over Maria closed up her temple. She asked one of her
daughters to make up beds for Preta and her family and brought some
very cold beers over from the bar next door. The two priestesses and
I stayed up late drinking and talking with conviviality born of mutual
exhaustion. Maria and Preta compared notes on their respective cults
of the Onxas. They looked for common ground and found it. ‘They
pointed out differences with interest. They spoke as equals. Preta had
stormed out of all of her consultations in Jacobina, but now she and
Maria were trying to smooth out the differences that had come up in
their hours of divination. In the end, Preta told Maria that she could
not undertake the series of rituals that Maria had described. The price
was too high. She promised to think it over and to come back to her
house in Cachoeira see a full blown festa for the Orixás. We said our
goodbyes. Preta and her family would return to the sertao at dawn.

Preta in Genipapo

Two months later I returned to Genipapo and went to Preta’s house.

She was harvesting castor beans. I wanted to show her the finished
ethnographic documentary video in which she and her Exus played
prominent part. We talked for a while about rain, crops, her daughter’s
impending marriage and everything except her trip to Cachoeira. We
each wondered if we owed the other an apology.
 DONA PRETA’S TREK TO CACHOEIRA 249

She broached the subject. She liked Maria. She felt respected and
well-treated in her home. She believed everything that her búzios had
said, but she could not do what Maria had prescribed. One reason was
the price. Maria had asked for 3,700 reais.% Preta is a farmer with a
big family. She earns a little more money doing consultations and ritual
services for people in her area but she does not have that kind of cash
to spare, net even for her dead mae de santo. She 1s accustomed to
giving the best she has for her cult and her admission of her inability
to pay Maria was tinged with resentment. She told me that she can
trar máo de morto for about seventy reais. This price includes all of the
necessary supplies as well as her own payment. She guarantees that
the dead will not come back.
I agreed with her. Maria’s price was high. We talked about the
rituals that it would purchase. ‘They would involve weeks of labor for
as many as eight or ten people. All of these people would have to fulfill
resguardos for weeks afterwards which would prohibit them from travel-
ing, drinking, eating certain foods and having sex after the sacrifices
were complete.*’
The sacrifices themselves would be considerable. Most of the money
would probably be spent on animals and supplies. I did not know exactly
what Maria would require. At the very least, there would have to be
multiple chickens for the Eguns and roosters for the Exts just for the
ebós and carregos that would precede the obrigacoes. One obrigacao
would have to be performed for each of three different Orixas: her
own Oxum and Oxala and her mae de santo’s Yansan. Each obrigacao
might require as much as a goat and four chickens, a dove, a duck and
guinea hen. It could require as many as three more goats and twelve
more roosters to seat the Exus who would be the slaves of these Orixas.
Beyond all of this would be the vegetables, dry foods, fluids, alcohol
and cigarettes and the ritual payment that must accompany any animal
sacrifice. The obrigacóes would go on for more than a week and would
involve one or two public festas. Maria’s flock would have to congregate
at dawn to perform the sacrifices. She would have to bring a crew of

36 This was worth 1,183 US dollars on June 2, 2004 and was equivalent to just under
twelve months salary at the Brazilian minimum wage at that time.
37 These resguardos or ritual prohibitions attend all ceremonies for Orixás and Eguns
in Cachoeira's Candomblé and are among the most onerous obligations incurred upon
membership in its ritual families.
250 BRIAN BRAZEAL

at least eight people to Preta’s house to clean out any lingering Eguns,
otherwise the work would all be in vain.
Preta told me that she can tirar máo de morto with one packet of big
candles, three packets of small candles, a cartridge of gunpowder and
a meter of white cotton cloth. As long as the person respected her
centro, attended its festas and renounced eating papaya and cilantro
for the rest of their lives, they would never be troubled by the hand
of the dead again. The size of her flock and the attendance at her
festivals was testimony to the efficacy of Preta’s cures.
The differences in price corresponded to the different varieties of
Afro-Brazilian religions that Maria and Preta practice. Preta does
Umbanda. Maria does Gandomble. A rezadeira in the sertao might
be able to resolve someone’s problems with a leafy branch and some
mumbled prayers. A Protestant pastor might be able to exorcise spirits
of the dead by donning a black suit and shouting at the Devil. But she
had gone to Cachoeira because it is famous for Candomblé. Mania is
honest but the prices for Candomblé services are high.
Preta reiterated her admiration for Maria, but she told me that even
if she had the money, she probably would not go through with it. She
had worked her Santos and her Caboclos her way, in Umbanda, for
more than twenty years. She would keep her mae de santos’ altar and
look for a solution within her own ritual repertoire.
Mania thinks that she is nght.

Conclusion: death, initiation, charisma and faith

Maria and Preta come from opposite ends of Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian

religious spectrum. Maria is the scion of a centenary ritual lineage
stretching back to Cachoeira’s oldest Nagé houses and beyond to the
famous Gantois temple in Salvador. She preserves the complex tradi-
tions of both. She presides over a large ritual family. She orchestrates
lavish rituals public and private that cost thousands of reais. ‘The cult
of Eguns is an integral part of her operation. It anchors her terreiro
to an historic tradition. It unites the living family members under the
aegis of the benevolent and powerful dead. It also provides an impor-
tant source of earthly power to counteract the harmful effects of the
undeparted and uncontrolled deceased.
Preta is the charismatic leader of a religious community in the
parched desert backlands of Jacobina. She is a powerful priestess and
 DONA PRETA’S TREK TO CACHOEIRA 251

a respected leader of her community in Genipapo. She has a wide

network of people who consider themselves to be her ritual children.
These far-flung devotees fund the festas that she offers every year. A
much smaller local group unites in her temple to pray and sing on a
more regular basis. The people of the farming communities in the
surrounding areas seek her out for her prayers and herbal medicines.
She learned her practice from the revelations of her own Caboclos,
though she owes a debt of gratitude to the woman who told her that
she must serve these gods. She makes use of some of Candomblé’s
ritual vocabulary and paraphernalia but she claims no association to
the nations of Candomblé. Her powers come from the gods whom she
worships and who possess her body to dance, to divine or to heal. ‘The
dead have no place in her cult. When people afflicted by mortos come
to her house she casts them away with a circle of light and gunpowder
explosions.
When Preta consciously contravened the traditions of backland
rezadeiras by retaining the cult-objects of a deceased priestess, it
occasioned a crisis. There was no means in her tradition by which she
could appropriate the dead woman's powers for herself. Like many
sertanejo adepts before her, she believed that she could find a solution
in Cachoeira. She had faith in the power of Cachoeira’s practitioners
of Candomblé, founded on the city’s fame in the sertáo. She knew that
the terreiros of Candomblé in Cachoeira were very old and reasoned
that they must have some mechanism by which a religious legacy could
pass from one generation to the next. But her faith was thrown into
doubt by her previous experiences in Cachoeira and by the specter of
the charlatan. She had already encountered religious adepts who seemed
more motivated by financial gain than by devotion to the Orixás.
The legitimacy and efficacy of an Afro-Brazilian religious special-
ist must be negotiated and authenticated in an unending series of
interactions between the adept and her clients. These are a necessary
complement to the unending series of exchanges between humans
and the gods on which their power is founded. Preta believed that she
had been fooled before and was determined not to be fooled again.
Academics have a long history as arbiters of the legitimacy of practi-
tioners of Candomblé. I unwittingly fell into this role myself when I
recommended Maria to Preta and brought her to her temple.
As the two women sat across from each other at the divining table,
the differences between their cults came into view. Preta was concerned
that Maria might be another sharper, like the adepts she had met on
252 BRIAN BRAZEAL

her previous trips. As their consultation continued she perceived slights,

allegations and slanders in Maria’s questions about the gods that she
served. Did Maria take Preta to be a wicked sorceress or just a country
rube? Preta wondered and grew angrier and angrier. She was nght to
wonder whether Maria respected her religious authenticity and ritual
efacy. Maria for her part, suspected that Preta might have brought
her problems on herself by trying to enlist the powers of the gods of
Afro-Brazilian religion without the proper initiatic training. The gods
themselves might be duping her into feeding malevolent Exus and Eguns
disguised as benificient Orixas and Caboclos. ‘These implicit disputes
underscore the differences between sertanejo religions and Cachoeira’s
Candomble. In the sertao, claims to power are founded on charisma
and healing gifts rather than on initiation. The boundaries among
Orixás, Saints, Caboclos and Exus are more fluid.
But Maria and Preta’s gradual reconciliation demonstrates the fun-
damental unity of backland and Recdéncavo cults. Maria and Preta ply
the same trade. They are healers and mothers and sorceresses when
need be. They worship the same gods, if not always in the same ways.
Cachoeira and the sertao depend on each other. Preta had traced a
well-worn path on her trek to Cachoeira. If Maria had gone to Geni-
papo, 1t would not be the first time that she had traveled to the sertáo
to placate an Egum and come back with a new filha de santo. If Preta
had joined her religious practice to Maria’s, she would have been fol-
lowing a time-honored tradition of sertaneja priestesses sipping from
the font of Cachoeira's power. In the end, Preta resolved to rely on her
own abilities. Her third tnp to Cachoeira was, in this sense, a failure.
But she returned to the sertao with her faith in Maria’s power and her
own intact. Her temple remains successful to this day.

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 TRANSATLANTIC DIALOGUE:
ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN
AMERICAN RELIGIONS*

Stefania Capone

Introduction

Roger Bastide was one of the scholars who have most influenced the
development of studies on religions and cultures of African origin in
Brazil. Upon his arrival in Sao Paulo in the late 1930s, he initiated
an intense dialogue with Brazilian scholars of black cultures. He took
up interpretative schemes that were already in use at the time while
elaborating a singular vision of syncretic processes in Brazilian society.'
Following the example of his predecessors, Bastide’s work aimed to
account for African cultural influences within formerly slaveholding
American societies. The problem of acculturation thus became a recur-
ring theme in his work, which, through notions like ‘syncretism’ and
‘reinterpretation’, attempted to grasp the processes that enabled the
formation of African-American cultures. In its multiple manifestations,
Afro-Brazilian culture was thus the ‘sociological laboratory’ in which
Bastide tested his theories on cultural contact.
But Bastide’s work 1s also particularly important because it helps us think
of American societies’ relationship to Africa. The emergence of stud-
ies on ‘African civilizations’ in the Americas coincided in a significant
manner with the abolition of slavery at the very same time when blacks
were given citizenship. The issue then was to find out whether or not
blacks would be integrated into the nation: could they be assimilated or
were they instead bearers of a foreign ‘culture’, of modes of thought
that would prevent their integration into western society? For a long
time, an idea prevalent in African American studies was that blacks,
when they had managed to preserve African traditions, belonged to

* Translated from the French by Adeline Masquelier, Tulane University, New

Orleans, USA.
' The metaphor of the dialogue has been extensively used in anthropological studies
on ‘African diaspora’ (cf. Gilroy 1987 and 1993; Yelvington 2006). A discussion of this
issue 1s beyond the purview of this article (cf. Capone 2006).
256 STEFANIA CAPONE

another world and remained ‘impermeable’ (to use Bastide’s word) to

‘modern ideas’. It was as if the perpetuation of an African memory
and the commitment to one’s origins enabled the societies which Bastide
called ‘African societies’ to escape history whereas ‘Negro societies’, on
the other hand, were permeable to history and change. The formation
of a domain of African Americanist knowledge was thus marked from
the beginning by an unease: an unease in regard to the very idea of
physical and cultural mixing and the inevitable degeneration that would
ensue, as well as an unease concerning the severance from the original
culture and the impossibility of convincingly retracing one’s cultural
origins. The development of an African Americanist domain has thus
been motivated by an obsessive quest: that of African origins, of a direct
link with a territory —Africa—and with an original culture. ‘The Afncan
past thus becomes both a temporal and a spatial metaphor that helps
generate the idea of a field —the African American field —whose main
classificatory concept 1s undoubtedly Africa. As we shall see, nevertheless,
this Africa is no longer a real Africa; it is no longer a continent inhab-
ited by men and women, a place from where the ancestors of African
Americans were snatched, and to where African Americans now wish to
return. It is instead a ‘mythical’ Africa, a symbol that must be reactivated on
American soil, and a source of legitimation for those who have been initiated
into African American religions. In the discourse of the social actors and
practitioners of these religions, the ink with Africa and the rupture
brought about by slavery are constant points of reference. ‘The African
Americanist domain thus develops around the tension between continu-
ity and discontinuity, between commitment to and betrayal of ongins,
between ‘purity’ and ‘degeneration’.
Nevertheless, despite his reliance on prior works, it is Bastide’s
interpretation of syncretism in religious phenomena and, in particular,
his famous ‘principle of compartmentalization” that have left their
imprint on Afro-Brazilian studies. In this article, I will show how
Bastide’s theory of syncretism is the product of an intense dialogue
with Brazilian modernists (such as Mario de Andrade), with folklorists,

* The notion of ‘principe de coupure’ was translated in the American edition of Bastide’s
work Afncan Religions of Brazil (1978 [1960]) as ‘principle of compartmentalization’,
while in the American edition of his African Cuihzations in the New World (1971 [1967])
it had been translated as ‘principle of dissociation’ (ibid.: 25). We chose to use the
first translation as being closer to the original meaning. In what follows, we have re-
translated a few quotations from the onginal French texts, since the published English
translations at times come close to distorting Bastide’s thought.
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 257

psychiatrists and physicians who studied Afro-Brazilian religions in the

1930s and 1940s (Edison Carneiro and Arthur Ramos in particular),
as well as with scholars of African American cultures (such as Mel-
ville J. Herskovits in the U.S. and Fernando Ortiz in Cuba). Contrary
to what one might think at first glance, Brazil did more than simply
provide a terrain for a French sociologist arrived from Europe with his
ideas and his interpretations of social facts (faits sociaux). In reality, the
dialogue with Brazilian scholars was extremely important and Bastide
was undoubtedly indebted to his Brazilian colleagues for the analyses
of Brazilian reality they had elaborated.
In Brazil, the debate on Afro-Brazilian culture revolved around
notions such as ‘syncretism’ and ‘reinterpretation’ until the end of the
1950s when Pierre Verger’s work inaugurated a new phase in Afro-
Brazilian studies that highlighted the links with African cultures. Afro-
Brazilian studies thus became the hunting ground of ‘Africanists’, a
new generation of Brazilian anthropologists who, inspired by Verger’s
work, would look to Africa for evidence of the continuity of African
tradition in certain Afro-Brazilian religious practices. At a time when
UNESCO-sponsored research on racial relations marked the beginning
of a sociological phase in Afro-Brazilian studies in the Brazilian Sudeste
(southeastern region), there was in the Nordeste (northestern region) a
return to a culturalist approach aimed at emphasizing the continuity
rather than the rupture with African cultures. Today, this foundational
tension between the quest for African cultural roots and the sociological
study of black populations continues to shape Afro-Brazilian studies and
Verger’s influence is still strong in Brazil among religious practitioners
and anthropologists in search of Africa.
Ever since the emergence of African American studies, it has been
a matter of finding Africa in America: the methods and results var-
ied, but the foundational tension between these two poles was always
there. Thus for Arthur Ramos (1979 [1937]: vxiu) who wrote the first
book on black cultures in the New World in 1937, it was necessary
to preserve the method of the school of Raymundo Nina Rodrigues
(the precursor of Afro-Brazilian studies) by studying “African cultures
to better understand blacks in the New World”. Roger Bastide (1971
[1967]: 8) on the other hand wrote, thirty years later, that ‘the best
method of investigating African American social groups 1s not to start
in Africa, and see how much of what we find here survives across the
Atlantic, but rather to study African American cultural patterns as they
exist today, and then work gradually back from them towards Africa.’
258 STEFANIA CAPONE

From Africa to America and vice-versa, one cannot apparently make

sense without the other.
This has led, among blacks of the New World, to the identification of
cultural paradigms that generated what might be called ‘a geography of
African cultures’, in which each culture has set the tone for one—and
only one—region of America (Bastide ibid.: 11). In the British colo-
nies, the dominant African culture was supposedly Fanti-Ashant, while
Spanish and Portuguese colonies were allegedly influenced by Yoruba
culture and French colonies by Dahomean culture.’ But the quest for
cultural origins is not simply the concern of anthropologists. The dis-
course on origins is ubiquitous among practitioners of African American
religions. If there is a ‘verificationist epistemology’ (Scott 1991) in this
domain, it is already present at an embryonic though significant stage
in the discourse of ritual actors. This convergence of discourses—one
indigenous, the other scholarly—runs across the entirety of the African
American field (cf. Capone 1999; Palmié 2002).
In order to show the range of this ‘transatlantic dialogue’ between
the Brazilian ‘Africanists’ and the French ‘Brazilianists’ in which Africa
occupied a central place, I will analyze two types of paradigm used by
Roger Bastide when he considered the logic of syncretism: the ‘principle
of compartmentalization’ (principe de coupure) and the opposition between
material acculturation and formal acculturation. My analysis will shed
light on two extremely important elements of Bastidian theory: the
negation—with the principle of compartmentalization—of syncretism
as a form of mixing and the reaction to the theory of the marginal man,
torn between two universes and personified by the African American
in general and the Afro-Brazilian in particular. We shall see that, for
Bastide, there is a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ syncretism: the former retains
classificatory distinctions while the latter irredeemably dissolves them.
In the first case, Africa is preserved; in the second, it 1s dissolved in a

* There have been multiple criticisms of this approach. During the International
Congress of Americanists held in Paris in 1976, William Bascom (1976: 592) asserted
in reference to the predominance of studies on African survivals in the New World
that Afro-American cultures should be studied ‘regardless of any questions of origins
or of how much of African culture they have retained’. In his opinion, the study of
Africanisms was nevertheless required to show the cultural contribution from blacks, to
North American society in particular, and thus to counter racial prejudices that denied
the existence of an Afro-American culture. More recently, Stephan Palmié (2002: 160)
also criticized the tendency to attnbute an African ethnic origin (that can rarely be
justified by historical evidence) to certain ‘features’ of Afro-American cultures by using
the metaphor of the ‘theme park approach’.
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 259

new reality characterized by cultural discontinuity. In Bastide’s thought,

these two syncretisms set the stage for the tension between ‘africanitude’
and ‘négritude’, where Africa finds all its significance in relation to the
African American present.
With the principle of compartmentalization, Bastide opened the
way to the process of re-Africanization, or what we could call the
purification and legitimization of religious traditions: The principle
of compartmentalization and the notion of ‘cultural encystment’
(enkystement culturel), which leads one to accept the unreality of syn-
cretism, established the theoretical bases of current struggles against
syncretism and of re-Africanization movements (Capone 1999). If
there was an accommodation to the dominant civilization, it was in
fact “counter-acculturative’ because accommodation was nothing but
a simulacrum to better preserve African cultures and traditions. The
notion of syncretism was thus transformed into another notion that
presently enjoys widespread currency in Brazil and the United States:
the notion of ‘resistant accommodation’. Once having originated out
of a transatlantic dialogue between Europe and Latin America, it is
from the United States that such theories of syncretism are nowadays
re-emerging under different guises. I will show how two types of syn-
cretism are operating within the African American religious universe:
an ‘Afro-African’ syncretism from which the belief in a basic unity of
‘African culture’ originated and an ‘Afro-western’ syncretism that must
be eliminated. The notion of ‘ntual panafricanism’, which I propose
to account for this ‘positive’ syncretism between two ‘sister religions’,
re-enacts the Afro-Brazilian dream of ‘unity in diversity’ that 1s largely
inspired by Bastidian theories.

Roger Bastide, or the mirror of the other

Roger Bastide was born on 1 April 1898 in Nimes, south of France,

the son of teachers. He was raised as a Protestant and worked as a
teacher of philosophy in several secondary schools in France. Having
long been fascinated by the Other, he embarked in 1930 on his first
sociological research on a group of immigrants in France and produced
Les Armémens a Valence, a study that appeared in the Revue Internationale de
Sociologie in 1931. As Ravelet (1993) noted, this first study on accultura-
tion brings to mind the opening of his most famous work, Les rehgions
afncames au Brésil (1960), by raising issues that are at the heart of the
260 STEFANIA CAPONE

Bastidian analysis of Afro-Brazilian cultures and religions: the exile

from the native soil, the memory embedded in the hearts and minds
of immigrants (Bastide would later speak of corporeal imprinting of
collective memory) and the re-inscription of this memory in a new
territory. As he wrote: ‘A native land is above all about the soul; when
this soil is taken away from you, can you build an artficial territory?
Armenians...thought that they could keep Armenia alive by carrying
in their hearts and minds images of the distant land’ (in Ravelet 1993).
One already detects in this 1931 text the preoccupation with processes
of acculturation that would underlie the entirety of Bastide’s work until
his death in 1974.
In 1938, Bastide was invited to Brazil to take up the chair of sociol-
ogy at the University of Sao Paulo vacated by Claude Lévi-Strauss. The
contract he signed with the university specified that he was to teach
Durkheimian sociology and, in reaction to Lévi-Strauss’s resignation to
conduct research among the Nambikwara and the Bororo, obliged him
to confine his research to the vacation periods of the academic year.
This arrangement accounts for his limited fieldwork. In Le Candomblé de
Bama (1958: 14), Bastide admits that he did not spend more than nine
months in total in the field. A maximum of five months were spent in
Salvador de Bahia, spread over seven consecutive years from 1944 to
1951. His work thus took place through ongoing contacts with ‘local
experts’ rather than as an extended observation of the rituals he studied:
*,.. this meant that I could get to know well a [house of] Candomblé
during the three vacation months. The rituals that took place during
the time when there were no vacations, I could not learn about them’
(in Cardoso 1994: 72).
Early in his stay in Brazil, Bastide focused on his teaching and his
intense work as a critic in several Brazilian publications. ‘The years from
1939 to 1945 were the most prolific of his career with four books, 81
reviews and 217 articles, an output that translates into almost an article
a week (Ravelet 1993). Bastide started reading the work of Brazilian
sociologists and kept company with a number of intellectuals includ-
ing Gilberto Freyre, Sergio Milliet and Paulo Duarte. But it is above
all Bastide’s affinities with the modernist group of Sao Paulo, and
especially with Mario de Andrade, that shaped his first steps in Brazil.
Fernanda A. Peixoto (1988) suggests that, in his discovery of Brazil,
Bastide conducted himself as a ‘tourist apprentice’ like his privileged
interlocutor, Mario de Andrade (1996), who coined the phrase. It is in
his debate with the modernists that the French sociologist refined his
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 261

gaze as the foreigner searching for the ‘Brazilian soul’. This intensive
dialogue emerges in Bastide’s writings on Brazilian art, and especially
in his musings on the baroque and the work of Aleyjadinho, the famous
mulatto sculptor of baroque religious imagery during the eighteenth-
century gold rush in Minas Gerais. In his early writings, one already
finds Bastide’s questioning the authenticity and onginality of Brazilian
culture and his particular concern for syncretism without which it is not
possible to understand Brazilian reality. Yet the analysis which Bastide
put forward around what he called ‘aesthetic métssage’ already carries
within it its counterweight: an ‘aesthetic resistance’ to the work not
only in plastic arts but also in music, in songs and in Afro-Brazilian
rituals (Peixoto 1988: 16).
It was not until early 1944 that Bastide made his first trip in the
Nordeste, from 19 January to 29 February. During this trip, in which he
visited Recife, Joao Pessoa and Salvador de Bahia, he met the novelist
Jorge Amado, who would become his cicerone in the world of Bahian
Candomblé. Conversations with Candombleé initiates thereafter took
place through the great Bahian writer as an intermediary, or through
rather precarious linguistic exchanges where, according to Amado,
‘French and Nago’ were intermixed since, despite having spent six years
in Brazil, Bastide did not speak Portuguese fluently (Luhning 2002:
10).* During the remainder of his stay in Brazil, Bastide would return
to Salvador only in January 1949 and August 1951. After returning
to France, he would make two other short trips, a week-long trip in
September 1962 and another one in August 1973, accompanied by his
former student, Renato Ortiz (Ravelet 1993). During his second trip
to Salvador in 1949, his good friend Pierre Verger was in Africa and
could not accompany him on his visits to Gandomblé houses (Verger
1994). It was apparently during this trip that Bastide participated in
his first divination session at the house of the pai-de-santo Vidal in the
Brotas quarter and was told of his mythical bond with the onxd Xang6é
Ogodo.” In 1951 during his third trip, in the famous ¢erreiro (cult house)

* A book based on this trip was published in Brazil in 1945. In it, there are many
noticeable errors in the terminology of Candomblé and in the transcription of onxás
(divinities) names. As well, the famous pat-de-santo (chief priest) Joaozinho da Goméia,
Bastide’s primary informant at the tme, becomes Joao da Gavea (Bastide 1995: 63).
Moreover, this book was not published in France until after Bastide’s death, with the
consent of his widow.
7 The Brazilian word onxdé (Candombleé divinity) corresponds to the Cuban word
oricha and to the Yoruba word órisa. In the United States, the English spelling of the
262 STEFANIA CAPONE

of the Axé Opo Afonja, Bastide carried out the ceremony of conse-
cration of necklaces, called ‘lavagem de contas’ (cleansing of the beads),
through which a minimal commitment is established between a person
and his protective divinity. At that time, Verger had already become
his principal interlocutor; he was a kind of local representative of the
world of Candomblé and a translator of the religious universe for his
fellow countryman.
Upon his arrival in Brazil in 1946, after a long journey across Latin
America, Verger had met Bastide in Sáo Paulo. The latter advised him
to go to Bahia to find the imprints of Africa, which Verger already
knew because he had worked there as a photographer. Verger arrived
in Salvador on 5 August 1946. After falling under the spell of the city
and its religious traditions, he decided to settle there.’ As Bastide (1958)
puts it, Verger was looking to highlight black Bahians’ loyalty to Africa
through a comparison between Africa and Bahia. As the spiritual son
of the mde-de-santo (chief priestess) of the Axé Opó Afonjá, Senhora
d'Oxum, who had succeeded the famous máe'Aninha who had died
in 1938, Verger was not very interested in anthropology; during his
successive trips to Africa, he took notes only to ‘fulfill his role as a
messenger’ and to be able to ‘talk about Africa’ to his Bahian friends
(Métraux and Verger 1994: 62). In 1952, he left for Porto Novo (Benin)
from where he made some brief forays into Nigeria. It is during one
of these short trips that he obtained a letter from the king of Oshogbo
for Senhora (ibid.: 158).*
But the greatest token of recognition which Verger brought back
from Africa for his Bahian máe-de-santo was a letter from the Aláafin
(king) of Oyo to Senhora in which she was addressed as lya Naso: this
was the oyé (honorific title) of the priestess in charge of the worship of
Shangó in Oyo, the former capital of the Yoruba empire, as well as

word orisha is used but the pronunciation is the same as that of its corresponding
Yoruba and Brazilian words.
* With Verger, Bastide initiated the valorization of this Candomblé terreiro beyond
Brazilian borders, becoming the defender of the model of ‘African’ tradition perpetu-
ated within the religious group which he considered himself part of (cf. Capone 1999).
Regarding the ceremony of the ‘cleansing of the beads’ see Bastide 1953.
” For more on Pierre Verger’s itinerary between Brazil and Africa, see Métraux
and Verger 1994.
® In his 1982 book of photographs, Verger writes: ‘Ataoja, king of Oshogbo, whose
dynasty was related to the worship of Oshun, was delighted to know that this divinity
was worshiped fervently in Brazil and through me, he sent Senhora copper bracelets
and river pebbles that came from Oshun’s altar’. (Verger 1982: 258)
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 263

the name of the founder of Engenho Velho, the first Candomblé ter-
reiro 1n Salvador de Bahia. Senhora's son, Deoscóredes M. Dos Santos,
remembers this event:
In August of 1952, Pierre Verger arrived from Africa with a xeré and an
edu ara Xangó that had been entrusted to him by the Ona Mogba (priest of
Xangó) on orders from the Oba Adeniran Adeyemi, Alafin of Oyo, so
that they could be delivered to Maria Bibiana do Espirito Santo, Senhora.
These gifts were accompanied by a letter that granted her the ttle of
Iya Nass6, something that was confirmed in the ¢erreiro of the Axé Opó
Afonja on August 9, 1953, in the presence of all the ‘sons’ [initiates]
of the house, the representatives of several terreiros, intellectuals, friends
of the sect [sic], writers, journalists, etc. “This event marks the renewal of
former religious relations between Africa and Bahia, relations which later
intensified because Máe Senhora maintained a permanent exchange of
gifts and messages with kings and other personalities of the sect in Africa
(Santos 1988: 18-19).?
The symbolic value of this missive, which the direct descendant of
the god Shangó in Africa'” was addressing to Senhora, was crucial
to the assertion of her authority for she was mde-de-santo of a terretro of
which Xang6 was the protective onxd. Moreover, with this title, Senhora
became the legitimate heir to the ‘real’ Nagó (Yoruba) tradition: ‘By
abolishing the past thanks to this distinction, Senhora became spiritually
the founder of the Candomblé family of the Ketu [ Yoruba sub-group]
“nation” in Bahia, all of whom originated from Barroquinha (Engenho
Velho cult house)’ (Verger 1981: 30). Verger spent many years dividing
his time between Brazil and Africa, where in 1953, he had been initi-
ated into the Ifá cult and become a babalawo (diviner) under the ritual
name of Fatumbi: “Ifá brought me back into the world.” Through his
comings and goings, he facilitated a flow of information that symboli-
cally connected Brazil to Africa."

9 The xeré and the edu ara brought back from Nigeria are attributes of the Yoruba
god Shango (or Xango according to Brazilian orthography). The former is the ritual
bell and the latter the consecrated stone used in worship.
'0 The Alaafin of Oyo is seen as the descendant of Shangó. According to oral tradi-
tion, Shangó was the third king (Oba) of this town who had thereafter transformed himself
into an orisha. The worship of Xango in Brazil reflects the worship of the ancestor of
the royal dynasty of Oyo. The close relation between the Alaafin (king of Oyo) and
the Iya Naso (the priestess of Shango) is underscored by the obligation to carry out
a series of ritual killings, among them that of the Iya Naso, at the death of the king
(Johnson 1921; Abraham 1958: 19).
'! Early on in his career, Verger felt no calling for anthropological work as he himself
declared: ‘I was doing this research for myself and my fnends from Bahia. The idea
264 STEFANIA CAPONE

Bastide’s privileged relationship with Verger, maintained through an

intense correspondence between Sao Paulo and Salvador, eventually
led him to make his first research trip to Africa, from 13 July to 22
September 1958. During the trip, Verger played the role of cicerone, as
Amado had done in Salvador in 1944.** It was a research trip carried
out under the auspices of the /nstitut Frangars d'Afmque Norre for the pur-
pose of ‘finding [in Africa] the sources of Brazilian religions’ (Ravelet
1993). Thus, if Bastide helped Verger discover ‘Africa in Brazil’ during
their 1946 encounter, it was Verger who, twelve years later, showed him
the ‘influence of Brazil in Dahomey and Nigeria’ (Verger 2002: 39).
During this trip, Bastide was wearing his consecrated necklace like a
‘passport’ that would open the doors of communities of initiates of
the Shangó cult to him. Bastide was welcomed like a “brother” by those
initiates and received from them the name Aroselo malogbo which Verger
(ibid.: 47) translates as ‘the one who owns an ose (a double-edged axe,
symbol of Shangó) will never grow old.”
The trip took place shortly after the defense of his Doctorat d’Etat
in 1957, and before Roger Bastide was offered the chair of social and
religious anthropology at the Sorbonne in Paris. Bastide had returned
temporarily to France in 1952, teaching in Paris from November to
June and in Sao Paulo from June to November before returning to his
native country for good in 1954 (Ravelet 1993). In 1952, he participated
in the UNESCO Project on race relations in Brazil. Initiated thanks
to his friendship with Alfred Métraux whom he met in Sao Paulo in
1951, this first collaboration would lead to new research on African
students in France. The African journey among Yoruba marked the end
of his Afro-Brazilian fieldwork. From then on, Bastide would devote
his research to social psychology. In 1959, he created the Center for

of publishing the results for a wider public had not occurred to me. It was Monod
who pushed me to write’ (Verger 1982: 257). ‘Théodore Monod, who in the 1950s
was director of IFAN (Institut Frangaiss d'Afmque Norre), had invited Verger to publish a
study on religions in Brazil and Africa. The book, which was published in 1957, had
the ‘effect of a bomb’ according to Bastide (1996a): in a milieu where all the experts
focused on questions of ‘acculturation’, ‘syncretism’, and social and cultural ‘change’,
Candomblé was becoming an African’ religion at last. Verger became a member of the
CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in 1962 and was made directeur de recherches
(senior scientist) in 1972. From 1963 to 1966, he worked as an associate researcher at
the Institute of African Studies of the University of Ibadan (Nigeria).
'? Bastide had already traveled to Africa, but only to attend colloquia or conferences
during which he made far more contacts with Africanists than with Africans (Verger
2002: 39). On the 1958 trip, see Bastide’s writings published in Luhning (2002).
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 265

Social Psychiatry, and, following the death of Georges Gurvitch in 1965,

became director of the Center for the Sociology of Knowledge.'* In
1968, Bastide retired but this did not prevent him from continuing his
activities at the Center for Social Psychiatry in Paris. Before his death,
Bastide managed to return briefly to Brazil and made a last visit to
Salvador in 1973. His “adventure with the Other” finally ended on 10
April 1974.

The ‘principle of compartmentahization’, or the negation

g of marginal
gl man

The Bastidian vision of Afro-Brazilian religions and of Bahian

Candomblé in particular 1s strongly influenced by the work previously
undertaken by Brazilian ‘Africanists’.'* In his writings, one finds a dual-
istic vision of Brazilian society that had already attained dominance in
the studies of black cultures at the time of Bastide’s arrival in Brazil.
This vision was already present in the turn-of-the-century writings of
Raymundo Nina Rodrigues (1900) who distinguished African blacks
(former slaves born in Africa), for whom conversion was nothing but a
‘juxtaposition of exteriorities’, from Creole blacks (‘the Negroes’) who
were responsible for the degeneration of African religious practices and
their subsequent mixing.’ Roger Bastide repeated those distinctions

'3 Bastide maintained a very close relationship with Gurvitch ever since the latter
spent a year in Sao Paulo in 1947. It was also Gurvitch who pushed him to complete
his Doctorat d’Etat after his return to France. Gurvitch left his mark on Bastide’s work,
in his theory on syncretism and on ‘Negro-Afncan collective memory’ in particular.
'* It is interesting to note that, after Bastide arrived in Brazil, he became not only
the first French ‘Brazilianist’—since Lévi-Strauss never wanted to become a scholar
of Brazilian society—but also an ‘Africanist’, a term used by his Brazilian colleagues
to designate specialists of Afro-Brazilian cultures and religions (cf. Oliveira 1976). He
was an ‘Africanist’ who until 1958 did not know Africa, a situation which could have
generated tension with his French Afncanist colleagues. Like Nina Rodrigues who did
not know Africa except through the books of Colonel Ellis (Ramos 1950), Bastide
learned about Africa through the mediation of Pierre Verger.
'? While Nina Rodrigues never uses the term ‘syncretism’, he often utilizes equivalent
expressions such as “duality of beliefs’, ‘juxtaposition of religious ideas’, ‘association’,
‘equivalence of divinities’ and ‘illusion of catechesis’ to designate Afro-Brazilian prac-
tices. It is among mestizos and Creole blacks that Nina Rodrigues finds a loss of ‘purity’
and a ‘bastardization’ of religious practices with the reinterpretation of Catholic beliefs
from an ‘African’ and ‘fetishist’ perspective: “With the creole black and the mestizo, who
have not been directly influenced by the education of African parents from whom they
have distanced themselves because they do not speak the language and have grown
closer to other members of the mixed and heterogeneous population of the State [of
Bahia], fetishist practices and African mythology are starting to degenerate from their
266 STEFANIA CAPONE

while formulating a theory of syncretism based on this essential differ-

ence between blacks who were members of ‘traditional’ Candomblé and
blacks who were members of ‘syncretic’ cults. For the former, syncretism
was but an illusion, for the latter, it led to the loss of African tradition
and the fusion of distinct cultural contributions.
The keystone of the Bastidian theory of syncretism is undoubt-
edly the ‘principle of compartmentalization’ (principe de coupure) which
allows for the alternation or cohabitation, in a single individual or
within a single group, of logics or categories that are supposedly
otherwise incompatible and irreducible (cf. Mary 2000). According to
Bastide, the principle of compartmentalization should enable one to
live simultaneously in two distinct and contradictory worlds: one can
thus be a good Catholic while being at the same time a Candomblé
adept. ‘he western world and the African world can thereby coexist
without mixing. The principle of compartmentalization also implies
the existence of two types of thought: western thought, ‘modern and
rational’, and African thought, ‘traditional and mystical’. ‘This difference
underlies the principle of compartmentalization: only when a serious
change of mentality occurs, thanks to what Bastide (1970a) calls ‘formal
acculturation’, can these two types of thought merge. The evolution
of this concept from the 1950s to the time of Bastide’s death is not
without contradictions and unexpected reversals. With the principle of
compartmentalization, Bastide tned to reconcile Lévy-Bruhl’s law of
mystical participations and Durkheim’s law of classifications, bringing
together two theoretical positions that were hardly compatible. The
principle of compartmentalization aimed to demonstrate that, rather
than being generalized as Lévy-Bruhl claimed, mystical participation
followed a very precise logic. Nevertheless, Bastide was caught in the
same trap as Lévy-Bruhl (who assumed the existence of a pnmitive
mentality that differed from that of the west) when he claimed that
primitive classifications do not form classes that fit into each other ‘like
in our western thought’ because ‘they do not permit the formal or
concrete functioning of operational mechanisms’ (Bastide 1954: 494).
The notion of incompatibility between these two mentalities was to be
further developed in the 1958 text where Bastide wondered about the

original state of purity. They are gradually forgotten and bastardized while the fetish-
ist adoration that was once directed at the onxds is now transferred to Catholic saints’
(Nina Rodrigues 1935: 170).
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 267

limitations of the principle of compartmentalization. If compartmen-

talization were complete, it would make action and thought impossible.
It was necessary, therefore, to identify a ‘will to ink the compartments
of the real’ through the creation of a ‘dialectic of the cosmos’ (Bas-
tide 1958: 241). Exu, the divine trickster who enables communication
between the world of gods and the world of humans, thus becomes
this dialectical element, that is, the divinity that permits the ‘commu-
nicability of classificatory concepts’.
The principle of compartmentalization can thus shed light on
the problem of syncretism because, on the one hand, it enables a
‘duality without marginality’ (Bastide 1954: 499) while, on the other,
it negates mixing: “The term “syncretism” is proper but, without
explanation, it can lead to confusion. It is not about mixing, it 1s
about role substitution as in role playing, depending on whether one
belongs to one compartment of the real or the other’ (ibid.: 500). ‘This
introduces two extremely important concepts of Bastidian theory:
the negation of syncretism as mixing and the answer to the theory
of marginal man, torn between two universes. ‘This marginality is resolved
by what A. Mary (2000: 186) nghtly calls ‘the magic of the principle of
compartmentalization’.'®
The theory of marginal man had been central to the debates on
the processes of acculturation, in particular in the work of Park (1928)
and Stonequist (1937). This debate on acculturation was taken up in
Brazil by Arthur Ramos who, in 1937, published a final chapter on
‘black acculturation’ in his study of black cultures in the New World.
In this book, he cited the Commission for the Study of Acculturation,
formed by Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton and Melville J. Herskovits,
which had defined processes of acculturation as ‘phenomena resulting
from direct and continuous contact between groups of individuals from
distinct cultures and that provoke changes in original cultural models
from one or several of the groups in question’ (Herskovits 1938). ‘These
processes of cultural and social change also provoke the disorganiza-

'6 A reflection on the wrenching experience of black people who are forced to live in
two incompatible worlds was already present in the wntings of W.E.B. DuBois, in par-
ticular in his theory of ‘the Veil’ that marks the frontier between Afro-American culture
and white culture (DuBois 1903). The notion of ‘double consciousness’ and the use, in
DuBois’s work, of psychological concepts to capture the duality of the Afro-American
experience resonate with the Bastidian principle of compartmentalization. However, the
only reference to W.E.B. DuBois's work (so well known in the US) in Bastide's writings
alludes to his role in the ‘Niagara Movement’ (Bastide 1971 [1967]: 215).
268 STEFANIA CAPONE

tion and reorganization of individual personalities. R. Park (1928) used

the expression ‘marginal man’ to designate the member of a cultural
group who, after coming into contact with another group, lost his
characteristics without becoming integrated into the dominant group.
He thus becomes ‘marginal’ since he is at the margins of two cultures:
the culture that he lost and the other that he has not yet assimilated
(Ramos 1979: 244). According to these theories, cultural syncretism
also apparently leads to a ‘psychic syncretism’. Bastide’s principle of
compartmentalization was designed to challenge this link by showing
that it is possible to live between two distinct and incompatible worlds
without experiencing any tension.
In his analysis of syncretic processes, however, Bastide was indebted
not only to North American theories on acculturation—with which he
would interact until the end—but also to analyses produced by Brazil-
1an scholars, in particular Arthur Ramos who, at the time of Bastide's
arrival in Brazil, was the leading authority on Afro-Brazilian cultures
and religions.'’ Without a doubt, Ramos had a great influence on the
future evolution of Bastide's thought, in particular his interest in social
psychology, central as 1t was to theories of acculturation, which pos-
ited that reaction against assimilation to a new culture could result in
‘counter-acculturative’ movements.’® In such contexts, cultures of origin
would keep their ‘psychological strength’ to compensate for feelings of
inferiority as well as through the ‘prestige bestowed upon individuals
when a reversion to former pre-acculturative situation occurs’ (Ramos
1979 [1937]: 245). We shall see that these ideas would be taken up
by Bastide when he tackled the problem of *Negro-African collective
memory” and the movement of “return to Africa”.
In reality, these exchanges with Ramos were but one facet of a more
complex dialogue in which two other specialists on black cultures in
the New World intervened as well: the North American Melville J.

'7 Arthur Ramos was the first Brazilian author to analyze syncretism from a culturalist
perspective. According to him, the phenomenon of cultural juxtaposition among so-called
‘African’ blacks and the cultural fusion among Creoles or mulattos were two steps of
the acculturation process, that is, two levels of syncretism. For Ramos (1942), syncretism
was the ‘harmonious result’ of any contact between cultures—a ‘cultural mosaic without
conflict’. Where there was reaction to contact, there was also counter-acculturation,
something which would allow for the maintenance of original cultural traits in their
‘relatively pure’ form (Ramos 1979 [1937]). ‘The use of the term syncretism in the
writings of Ramos also influenced Herskovits’s writings (1958: xxxvi).
' Before Bastide's arrival, Arthur Ramos had already published an Introduction to
Social Psychology in 1936.
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 269

Herskovits and the Cuban Fernando Ortiz. While Herskovits became,

as we Shall see, Bastide’s main interlocutor when Bastide tried to differ-
entiate his work from the acculturation theories elaborated by his great
American rival, Fernando Ortiz was one of the few Latin American
researchers to make an original contnbution to the discourse on accul-
turation processes. Fernando Ortiz knew the work of Nina Rodrigues,
whom he cited repeatedly in his own writings (Ortiz 1939: 86) and with
whom he shared an interest in the theories of Italian criminologists
Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Ferri. Like Arthur Ramos and his mas-
ter, Nina Rodrigues, Fernando Ortiz thought that 1t was necessary to
study African cultures in order to understand the ‘survivals’ of these
cultures in America. To do that, however, one should first study Afn-
can American cultures and then retrace their African origins (Iznaga
1989: 6). Like Arthur Ramos, who had published Guerra e Relagées de
Raga in 1943 in order to challenge the notion of race by positioning
himself against the racist theories of Nazism, Fernando Ortiz wrote El
Engaño de las Razas, first published in 1946, in which he demonstrated
the impossibility of studying Latin American cultures in terms of race.
Only syncretism and mixing could account for Latin American realhi-
ties. Ortiz (1940: 136-137) has been the only one to elaborate a new
concept to descnbe the encounter between cultures: transculturación.
This Spanish neologism permitted a certain freedom from a value
system based on a set of normative concepts tightly linked to the term
‘acculturation’ as Malinowski (1940) nghtly noted in his introduction to
Ortiz's study, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. "Iransculturation
referred to “extremely complex transmutations” (Ortiz 1940: 137) that
give birth to a new culture, in which the elements in contact come to
fuse, an idea that calls to mind the ‘sociology of interpenetration of
civilizations’ that Bastide set out to develop in his study on Les religions
africaines au Brésil (1960).

Syncretism refuted

Elsewhere (Capone 2001), I have shown how, far from offering a pos-
sible interpretation of the processes of syncretism, Bastide’s principle
of compartmentalization appears instead to adopt prejudices—dear to
a certain anthropological tradition—that equate mixing with a sign of
degeneration from an original state of cultural purity. The principle
of compartmentalization is certainly not about ‘mestizo logic’. Indeed,
270 STEFANIA CAPONE

according to Bastide, in addition to the classical opposition between

magical syncretism and religious syncretism, there was another opposi-
tion between what he called ‘mosaic syncretism’ (within which the prin-
ciple of compartmentalization can function) and the fusional syncretism,
which was instead condemned to mixing. In the ‘mosaic syncretism’,
which characterizes the Nago cult houses, there is a separation rather
than a fusion between the different rituals (Bastide 1971 [1967]). As in
the case of the principle of compartmentalization, one finds here the
idea that there are different compartments of the real that form classes
that do not fit with each other (Bastide 1954). ‘The separation between
different rituals generates what Bastide called a ‘mosaic development’
which he saw as characterizing Africa. Such a concept allowed for the
maintenance of African traditions without the possibility of mixing and
degradation as was the case in Maroon societies: “hus the marrons had
an Afncan model available which would allow them to establish ethni-
cally distinct cults—e.g. the Kromanti wint and the Ewe vodous—on
a basis of co-existence. This they did by setting them up as separate
fraternities, with different music, dances and languages for their chants’
(Bastide 1971 [1967]: 69). The process of mosaic formation thus does
not imply a fusion of cultural features and rituals from different peoples.
What we have here is a syncretism without mixing.
Yet when Bastide talks about ‘Bantu’ blacks or ‘Negro societies’,
whom he sees as having lost their connection with their onginal culture
and an African collective memory, we are dealing with another type
of syncretism: it 1s the fusional syncretism in which the constituent
elements cannot be identified. An example of fusional syncretism 1s
provided by Macumba, another Afro-Brazilian religion which rep-
resents for Bastide ‘a civilisation [sic] which is the result of cultural
fusion—and one where the constituent elements have so far coalesced
into a single whole that they are no longer individually recognisable’
(1ibid.: 82-83). On the other hand, the Caboclo Candomblé, which is
supposedly less traditional than the Nagó Candomblé, has managed to
preserve an essentially African structure by maintaining a separation
of ritual spaces: ‘In the temple we find a sharp distinction between the
“territory” allotted to the Indian spirits, and the African sanctuary, or
pégi, while during ceremonies the vodous or onsha are invoked in African
languages, the caboclos in Portuguese’ (Bastide 1996c: 89).'°

'3 In reality, Bastide concedes that it is difficult to make a clear distinction between
the Candomblé de Caboclo, Macumba and Umbanda: ‘What in fact distinguishes these
various religious manifestations one from the other, we might argue, is the relative extent
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 271

Mosaic syncretism preserves the separation of classes while fusional

syncretism confounds them. For Bastide, these two types of syncretism
correspond to two types of African American society (one ‘African’,
the other ‘Negro’) and two types of more or less traditional black (the
Yoruba and the Bantu). Among the ‘Bantu’, there is no longer a prin-
ciple of compartmentalization at work because syncretism has brought
about a significant change of mentality.
Despite the fluidity of Bastide’s thought, one finds here again the
dualistic structure that opposes two types of black and two types of
response to acculturation: the notion of compartmentalization for “tra-
ditional’ blacks, a process which does not lead to a change of mentality;
and ‘formal acculturation’ for ‘modern’ blacks, which leads to psychic
transformations and the interpenetration of structures of feeling (_formes
de sentir). We have seen that this dualistic vision of Brazilian society was
already present in the writings of Nina Rodrigues who opposed ‘African’
blacks and the Creole blacks (‘the Negroes’) who were responsible for
the degradation of religious practices. Bastide takes up this distinction
that had been reafhrmed in the works of Edison Carneiro and Arthur
Ramos. ‘Thus, despite the influence of theories on acculturation that
underscored the impossibility of a complete cultural transfer, an essential
difference was posited in Afro-Brazilian studies between blacks with a
differing degree of attachment to tradition (cf. Gapone 1999, 2000).
Arthur Ramos (2005: 15) had already written in 1934 that African
cultures had not been transplanted in their original purity, but that
they had been ‘mixed and transformed in a process that we now call
acculturation’. The Brazilian school of Nina Rodrigues was, in his
opinion, characterized by ‘the study of the transformation of these
cultures and in particular of religious syncretism’. In Nina Rodrigues’s
book, L’animisme fétichiste des Negres bahianars, one finds constant references
to ‘hybrid associations’ and ‘mixed beliefs’ that resulted from contact
between African religions and Catholicism, founding what he called ‘the
illusion of catechesis’. Yet this notion, which is behind the Bastidian
theory of the mask, operates only among a certain category of blacks,
the ‘African’ blacks who have learned to preserve their traditions in the
face of acculturative pressures. _

and development among them of syncretism. Generally speaking, in the first of the
three we find a clear division between African and Indian ritual, with each enjoying
complete autonomy; whereas in the latter two they tend to coalesce—though by no
means always in the same manner, it is true’ (ibid.: 86).
 272 STEFANIA CAPONE

Bastide’s entire work is thus structured around an unending play

between two opposite poles resulting from this dualistic vision of Bra-
zilian society. Bastide progressively replaces the ‘Africans’/‘Negroes’
dichotomy of Nina Rodrigues (taken up by Bastide in 1967 when he
analyses the different models of social organization in Les Aménques norres)
with another internal dichotomy, ‘Nago blacks’/“Bantu blacks’ which
generates an avalanche set of oppositions:

. mosaic syncretism/fusional syncretism

AWN SH

. purity/degradation
. religion/magic
. resistance/adaptation
tradition/modernity
CONAN

African religious civilization/class ideology

African society/ Negro society
continuity/discontinuity
material acculturation/formal acculturation.”

This opposition between mosaic syncretism and fusional syncre-

tism calls to mind another opposition—developed in Bastide’s 1960
study—between religious syncretism and magical syncretism. According
to Bastide, religion must be distinguished from magic when we start
dealing with the domain of collective representations: “The law of
religious thought 1s the law of symbolism, based on mystic analogies or
correspondences; the law of magic thought is the law of accumulation,
intensification, and addition’ (1978 [1960]: 277). Religious syncretism
thus operates through correspondence whereas magical syncretism works
through addition. In the first case, the principle of compartmentaliza-
tion can be activated, whereas in the second case, mixing prevents any
symbolic order.
Yet for Bastide, Brazilian blacks were characterized by differing
relationships to religion and magic. In his 1960 text, he writes that
‘the Bantu assign a more important place to magic in the activi-
ties of the Candomblé than do the Yoruba” (ibid.: 280). Among the
Bantu, syncretism brings about a true change in mentality (ibid.). The
dichotomy between mosaic syncretism and fusional syncretism thus
recovers another dichotomy: between a culture that keeps its strength

20 See also Fry (1984) and Capone (2000).

 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 273

thanks to the principle of compartmentalization (Nagó” in Brazil or

“Lucumí? in Cuba) and one that is characterized by “its assimilative
powers, its propensity toward syncretism and the fusion of civilizations’
(the ‘Bantu’ culture).?!
This idea is reafirmed in his 1967 essay on ‘black Americas’ when
Bastide refers to the laws of syncretism in Catholic America, among
them ‘the ethnic law’. According to this law, syncretism is more pro-
nounced ‘when we turn from the Dahomeans to the Yoruba, and from
them to the Bantu’ considered as ‘the most susceptible of all to external
influences’ (Bastide 1971 [1967]: 154). The different elements of the
belief systems of the most conservative ethnic groups, within which
one finds mosaic syncretism, constitute for Bastide objects of ‘solid,
unalterable nature’ (des sohdes indéformables) (ibid.) that do not lead to
identification and are even less likely to produce fusion. Thus, in con-
trast to what he was writing in 1954 on the subject of Afro-Catholic
syncretism in which the sincerity of Gandomblé initiates, who were
also fervent Catholics, could not be questioned, in 1967 Bastide wrote:
‘Even today, the priests and priestesses of Brazil recognise that syncre-
tism is simply a white mask superimposed upon black gods’ (Bastide
1996c [1967]: 161). Where the mosaic syncretism is at work, there 1s
therefore no confusion, and no mixing.
Bastide also distinguishes two environments in which African Ameri-
can cultures were born: the Catholic milieu and the Protestant milieu.
In the latter, mixing has not taken a syncretic form but instead the
form of a process which Herskovits called ‘reinterpretation’.” The slave
thus created ‘a Negro (rather than an African) brand of Christianity’

21 Roberto Motta (1994: 170) provocatively asserts that Bastide was ‘above all a
unifying force and an organizer. His works on Afro-Brazilian religions are essentially
based on secondary sources, that is, on the work of his predecessors, most of them
Brazilian’. While this is partly true, given Bastide’s limited fieldwork experience and his
obvious debt to the studies of Brazilian ‘Africanists’, one cannot limit these influences,
as Motta (ibid.: 174) does, to the work of Gilberto Freyre, René Ribeiro and Edison
Carneiro. As a matter of fact, Roger Bastide took much further the interpretation of
religious phenomena of African ongin (already prevalent when he arrived in Brazil)
that opposed ‘traditional’ blacks to ‘syncretized’ blacks. No Brazilian author brought
such complexity to their analyses of syncretism and acculturation processes.
“2 The phenomenon of reinterpretation is present also in Nina Rodrigues’s analysis
but there it refers to the Africanization of European elements, in particular the adapta-
tion of Catholicism to ‘fetishistic’ beliefs. In his study of formal acculturation, Bastide
(1970a: 138) wrote that Nina Rodrigues’s illusion of catechesis had been the ‘prelude
to the theory of reinterpretation’ formulated by Herskovits.
274 STEFANIA CAPONE

in which the principle of compartmentalization no longer operated.

On the other hand, in Catholic America, one can observe the laws
governing the formation of syncretism (Bastide 1971 [1967]: 153). We
have seen that, for Bastide, syncretism is ‘ethnically speaking’ more
pronounced depending on whether one moves from the Dahomeans
to the Yoruba and the Bantu, the latter being considered as ‘more
responsive than most to foreign influences’ (ibid.: 106). But from this
perspective there are also different syncretisms depending on the level
examined: one goes from the ‘morphological plane’ (mosaic syncretism
which excludes mixing) to the ‘institutional’ (among other things, the
system of correspondences between African gods and Catholic saints),
and thence to the ‘plane of events dependent on collective awareness
[conscience collective] (the facts of reinterpretation)’ (ibid.: 154). One
finds here again the idea of classes that fit together and allow for the
coexistence of different elements without leading to fusion or mixing:
‘Spatial syncretism has one highly characteristic feature. On account
of the solid, unalterable nature of those objects which come within
its orbit, it cannot achieve true fusion, but remains on the plane of
coexistence between disparate objects. ‘This is what I earlier described
as “mosaic syncretism”, and it is just as likely to be found in a broad
context as in a restricted one’ (ibid.: 154—55).
From this idea of syncretism without mixing, Bastide develops his
theory of the mask which will turn out to be central to the claim of
ritual ‘purity’ made by ‘guardians of African traditions’. ‘The mosaic
formation makes possible a reconsideration of Afro-Catholic syncretism:
“Moments in time, like objects in space, can form solid, clearly delimited
points, unchanging in the nature of their syncretism. The Chnstian
moment remains Christian, the African moment African; they come
into juxtaposition solely as masses in space’ (ibid.: 159).

Between Africanitude and Négritude

A few years later, Bastide would devote a part of his book Le prochain et
le lointain (1970a) to the analysis of formal acculturation and material
acculturation. In this analysis, one finds echoes of his orginal distinction
between two types of syncretism—a distinction that is now rethought
in accordance with the psychology of the form. For Bastide, material
acculturation is about the diffusion of a cultural feature, the change of
a ritual, the propagation of a myth. Formal acculturation, on the other
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 275

hand, is the acculturation of intellect and affect, the ‘acculturation of

the psyche’ all the way to ‘the transformations or the metamorphoses
of sentiment and conscious apprehension’ (ibid.: 139).
Formal acculturation allowed Bastide to replace the term reinterpreta-
tion used by his North American colleague, Melville J. Herskovits: “The
term reinterpretation can be taken to mean two things; one can think
of the reinterpretation of African realities in western terms but one can
just as well think of the reinterpretation of western realities in African
terms’ (ibid.). According to Bastide, Herskovits was only interested in
this second aspect when he analyzed the ‘double households’ (double
ménage) as the reinterpretation of African polygamy (ibid.):
Why this predilection? One might think that this man, however resolutely
antiracist, seems to unconsciously perpetuate a white ideology ascribing to
black people an inability to think like Westerners; he would thus perpetu-
ate Nina Rodrigues by adding to the illusion of catechesis the illusion of
assimilation; this is what would explain why Herskovits’s opponents are
found mostly among black sociologists, who, like Frazier, denounce in The
Myth of the Negro Past a contemporary form of white prejudice’ (ibid.).

Bastide’s critique of the notion of reinterpretation was aimed straight at

North American cultural theories and at Herskovits's work.% But Bastide
falls back into the culturalist trap when he starts valorizing not culture
in general or ‘cultural traits’ in particular, but religion in relation to
global society. One finds in his writings the idea, previously elaborated
by DuBois (1903) and Herskovits (1941), of religion as the African
‘cultural core’. This ongoing confrontation with his great rival at the
time led Bastide to accuse Herskovits of perpetuating a white ideology
according to which blacks were incapable of thinking like westerners.
Yet, who more than Bastide has insisted on the difference of mental
structures between blacks and whites, and particularly between blacks
of a ‘different nature’? And when he accuses Herskovits of believing
in the ‘double indissolubility’ (double indissolubihté) of mentalities, black
as well as western, 1s he not critiquing his own theory of the mask and
his principle of compartmentalization?”*

*3 Paradoxically, in 1960 Bastide called the concept of reinterpretation the most

important of the notions formulated by cultural anthropology ‘in the study of civili-
zational encounters’ without alluding at all to the work of Herskovits.
** Tn that same 1970 text, Bastide wrote: ‘I am a great admirer of African traditional
civilizations; but the praise I gave them in front of African students [in France] earned
me the following critique: ‘You are a colonialist, you do not want us to make progress,
on the contrary you want us to remain always at an infenor stage’ (1970a: 32).
276 STEFANIA CAPONE

To escape this ambiguity generated by his own use of the term

‘reinterpretation’, Bastide (1970a: 140) suggested the use of the term
‘formal acculturation’ which he thought was more neutral. The expres-
sion ‘formal acculturation’ had been conjured up by Bastide’s encounter
with future African administrators who had been trained in European
universities at the time of decolonization. In Bastide’s opinion, these
Africans had experienced profound transformations in their ‘percep-
tive, logical, and affective structures’. Bastide accused them of being
‘Europeanized intellectuals’ who celebrate an ‘exotic’ Africa, and above
all, a “white man’s Africa”. Speaking of Aimé Césaire, the Martinican
advocate of négniude, he underscores the divorce that is now finalized
between the real Africa and the image that remains of it in what he
calls ‘the myth of Négntude”: *...the poet's Africa inevitably emerged as
a product of imagination..., put together from books by ethnologists,
who do not, unfortunately, always give a very precise picture of the
facts. His négntude is thus more of a quasi-political manifestation than a
return to the only genuine Africa, so faithfully preserved by the African
American lower orders’ (1971 [1967]: 220).
The transformation of Africa from ‘a physical reality’ safeguarded
in America to a set of ambiguous, contradictory images, ‘ideologies
for the intellectuals, messianism for the masses, and more politics than
mysticism’ (ibid.: 222) is for Bastide the unavoidable consequence
of industrialization and modernity: *...(at least in the capital cities)
industrialization has intensified competition on the labor market, and
the Negro has been forced to abandon Africa and become a citizen-
at-large like anyone else’ (ibid.: 214). Thus, while the slavery system
led to marronage, the competitive system produces ‘its own ideological
version of marronage—the négntude myth’:
At the very moment when, faced by white refusal to accept him on an
equal footing, the Negro abandons Africa in order to achieve fuller integra-
tion, he finds himself driven back to the continent of his ancestors. But
since in culture there 1s no ‘collective unconscious’ [inconscient collectif| or
hereditary factor, but only what 1s inherited by apprenticeship, this Africa
can be no more than an imaginary concept floating in the void—unless,
that is (as we shall have occasions to observe) 1t becomes a subtle form
of betrayal (Bastide 1996c: 219).

Bastide thus sides with the ‘true’ négniude in opposition to this ideol-
ogy that serves as a vehicle for a “de-Africanized Africa”. The négntude
of African or African American intellectuals turns out to be nothing
more than an “awareness of Africa by de-Africanized sensibilities and
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 277

intellects’ and, if négritude failed, it is because it did not seek inspiration

from initiates of religions of African origin in America:
Which is what leads to a set of strange paradoxes, the Africa of négntude 15
an ‘exotic’ Africa and one that 1s not organically rooted in the soul of those
who celebrate it; it is a system of mystical participations, in the manner
in which Lévy-Bruhl described primitive mentality, to the point where I
would be tempted to define négritude in the following way: it agrees with
the vision which the West has of Africa, and marks it with a positive sign,
whereas the Westerner marks it with a negative sign; but there is only a
simple change of values, 1t remains a white man’s Africa. ... Which means
that négntude is the first arid most typical example that one can provide
to show what formal acculturation is (Bastide 1970a: 141).

The only blacks that are still ‘African’ are thus the adepts of traditional
religions preserved behind the mask of syncretism. ‘They, and they only,
can become the genuine leaders in the revival of African culture. This
is what Bastide (1971 [1967]: 218) calls ‘Afncamtude’ in opposition to
the term ‘Négritude’. Only initiates are really able to understand Afro-
Brazilian culture since it is they who manifest the true négritude, ‘not
that which is nothing but a political ideology’ but that which is a true
‘existential affirmation’:
...1t was obvious that, even by entering Candomblé as a ‘member’ rather
than as a simple observer, the law of secrecy which governs any initia-
tory religion still kept me too much as an outsider for me to be able to
provide anything but an introduction to a certain Negro vision of the
world. Only a priest occupying a high rank in the cult hierarchy could
have given us the work I expected. This shows how much importance
I attach to the work of Deoscoredes M. Dos Santos, West African Sacred
Art and Ritual in Brazil (1967) and to that of his wife, Juana Elbein dos
Santos, Le Nagé et la Mort (1972) or to their collaborative writings such as
Esu Bara Laroyé (Bastide 1996a: 18-19).”
Brazil, and especially the ‘black and traditional’ Brazil of Bahia, thus
becomes a true model for African elites, for there religion constitutes the
‘cultural core’ of African tradition. To re-Africanize the African elites
therefore requires a renewal of the spirituality that had been preserved
in the diaspora. Most paradoxically, colonialism ‘acculturates’ and
produces western mentalities in African bodies while slavery preserves

29 Juana Elbein dos Santos is an Argentine anthropologist, married to Deoscóredes

M. dos Santos, son of Mae Senhora and leading worshiper of Egungun (deified ances-
tors) in Brazil. She was a student of Bastide who supervised the doctoral thesis she
defended at the Sorbonne in Paris in the early 1970s.
278 STEFANIA CAPONE

African tradition within religious practices. Africans are thus forced to

find their traditions in religious communities that have preserved Africa
in Brazil thanks to a cultural and social encystment.

Cultural encystment, or the return to roots

With the principle of compartmentalization, Bastide paves the way for

the process of re-Africanization or what we could call the purification
and legitimization of traditions. The principle of compartmentaliza-
tion and the concept of cultural encystment, which leads one to accept
the unreality of syncretism and the theory of the mask, lay down
the theoretical bases of current struggles against syncretism and of
re-Africanization movements. “Iraditional’ Candomblé, that is, the
Candomblé Nagó of whom the Axé Op6 Afonja is the most prestigious
representative, constitutes for Bastide a closed society where there is
no desegregating influence from a “class society”. “Iraditional” terrerros
thus represent ‘axiological communities’ that reproduce the religious
values and norms of conduct associated with African tradition. And
it is around the maintenance of religious values, or what Bastide calls
the ‘restoration of African civilization’, that the differentiation between
sacrality and ideology is negotiated: the facts of acculturation and the
desegregating impact of modernity promote the distortion of sacred
values into ideologies. Put differently, they link these values to the
interests of differentiated groups.
Umbanda and Macumba embody that which Bastide defines as ideology.
On the other hand, ‘traditional’ Candomblé as community niche becomes
the symbol of cultural encystment in the face of a dominating society:
‘... the more closely integration adheres to the community type, or the
greater the social or cultural encystment within which it occurs, the
less profound the syncretism’ (1978 [1960]: 283). However, this cultural
encystment does not prevent the social integration of the members of
these ‘axiological communities’ because the principle of compartmen-
talization allows them to live ‘in two separate value systems without
being aware of their opposition and without having to make a choice’
(ibid.: 385-6).
Bastide had already taken up this notion—the principle of compart-
mentalization—to implement his interpretation of the ‘philosophy of
the cosmos’ of Candomblé Nagó (Bastide 1958: 237). Now, in his 1960
formulation, the principle of compartmentalization is not limited to
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 279

the organization of the ‘subtle metaphysics’ of Gandomblé, but relates

also to the relations that Candomblé entertains with the dominant
society. It becomes therefore an ‘instinctive and automatic reaction, a
defensive posture against anything that might disturb one’s peace of
mind’ (Bastide 1978 [1960]: 386). But this capacity to live in two worlds
without experiencing contradictions turns out to be the monopoly of
the great ‘traditional’ cult groups of the Candomble Nago, whereas,
in the southeast of Brazil, class struggles, the degradation of religious
practices and racism prevent the survival of what should be one of the
characteristics of African thought.
In reality, religious changes, determined by the need to adapt to new
contingencies, are at work in ‘traditional’ Gandomblé as much as in the
‘sects’ considered to be syncretic. But, according to Bastide, in those
cult houses that have managed to preserve African traditions, mutations
take place that follow rules of transformation within a certain Gestalt:
‘Changes that can affect religious systems are nothing... but processes
of adaptation and rebalancing in relation to a reality that is not religious
in nature. They are phenomena of “return”,996 “repercussion” or “chain
reaction within a Gestalt”’ (Bastide 1969: 9).
To justify the emergence of new elements that previously existed in
the Gestalt of ‘traditional’ religion, Bastide utilizes Maurice Halbwachs's
notion of collective memory, a memory that is inscribed in a deter-
mined space and linked to a particular social group. For Halbwachs, the
immemorial past cannot be revived in its totality by collective memory
because the present plays the role of a ‘memory filter’, letting through
only that which can adapt to new circumstances. ‘Tradition survives,
or is invoked, only insofar as it can take root in individual or group
praxis.”° But for memory to be preserved, it must be inscribed in mat-
ter, in space. Now, Bastide substantially modifies the idea of collective
memory inscribed in space because, from his perspective, Halbwachs
cannot part with the idea of an external collective conscience that
transcends individuals. For Bastide, collective memory is like the brain
when it is taken as a well-defined organization of cells and networks.

2° J. Lorand Matory (2005: 282) justifiably criticizes the absence of the notion of
agency in Bastide’s conception of ‘collective memory’. For him, cultural reproduction
must be understood as a ‘struggle for the possession of the sign’ rather than as a simple
form of ‘preservation’ since the commemoration of the past is always “strategic in its
selection, exclusions, and interpretations’ (ibid.: 283).
280 STEFANIA CAPONE

When one speaks of collective memory, what matters is not the group
as such but its organization, its structure, for the group is nothing but a
system of interpersonal relations. In Brazil, oblivion thus follows from
the impossibility of finding all the complementary actors in one single
place: in such contexts, collective memory becomes an interrelated
system of individual memories.
But the ‘holes (érous) in collective memory’ (Bastide 1970b) can always
be filled by drawing from the roots of African tradition. These ‘holes’
are for Bastide configurations that are at the same time empty and
full; they are empty because they can no longer be filled by collective
memory and full because they are not really an absence, but a “feel-
ing of loss’ (bid.: 95). By recreating bonds with an original culture, it
becomes possible to reconstitute the past. It is a matter of filling the
void left by the uprooting provoked by slavery and the structure of the
secret—that is at the base of African American religions—something
that is done by fighting against the progressive disappearance of African
collective memory.
Bastide translates this selection of ‘revived’ memories into another
opposition that distinguishes ‘traditional’ Candomblé from ‘syncre-
tized sects’. The latter chooses to purge, that is, to eliminate, from the
ancestral heritage, “whatever is too incompatible with modern society,
whatever shocks people by reminding them too brutally of barbarism’.
On the other hand, ‘traditional’ Gandomblé opts to purify, a process
that ‘necessarily takes the form of a return to the true original tradi-
tion behind these decadent forms—to the primal source’ (Bastide 1978
[1960]: 340). “This “return to Africa”, to use the expression of Couto
Ferraz, has been translated into action by uniting all the traditional sects
into one federation, which then excommunicates “syncretized” sects.
‘Today a movement is under way to purify the candomblés in reaction
against the debasement of the macumba and to deepen the religious
faith of their members’ (ibid.: 169).
This movement back to Africa, long present in Gandombleé and
which is also at work in North American orisha-voodoo (Capone 2005),
exemplifies the moment of a symbolic rather than actual re-enactment
of ‘pure’ tradition that must be reconstructed on American soil. ‘The
journey to the sources of tradition plays an ever more important role
in this strengthening of roots; it now takes the form of a search for
re-Africanization at all costs, a process that is accomplished in Brazil or
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 281

the United States through courses on Yoruba language and civilization,

or training in Ifa divinatory practices.

Afro-Afncan syncretism or ‘ntual panafricanism’

We have seen that, according to the theory of the mask, among ‘traditional’
blacks syncretism was never effective. ‘The accommodation to a dominant
culture was in reality a ‘counter-acculturative’ strategy to better pre-
serve African culture and traditions. The return to origins and the
re-Africanization movement are thus nothing but new facets of this
negated, artificial syncretism. At least for one category of black, those
‘traditional’ blacks of Bahia or the keepers of Afro-Cuban traditions,
there was never any mixing, which is what makes possible today this
return to a ‘purity’ of religious practices through a resistance against
syncretism. [his fake, “counter-acculturative’ syncretism belongs to the
domain of material acculturation: ‘As long as accumulation has not
penetrated the mentality, or as long as the principle of compartmental-
ization confines the change of mentality to the domains of politics and
economics and excludes it from the domain of religion, reinterpreta-
tion always occurs in terms of the African values, norms, and ideals’
(Bastide 1978 [1960]: 536). The principle of compartmentalization
thus carries within itself the possibility of the erasure of syncretism.
It shows the artificiality of the phenomenon, for syncretism 1s but a
mask which, to borrow A. Mary’s (2000) felicitous expression, has not
triumphed over the face.
This questioning of the reality of syncretism enables us to rethink
the basic unity of African culture in America. The movement of return
to origins which characterizes Brazilian Candomblé as much as North
American orisha-voodoo is a reactivation, more symbolic than actual,
of an ‘African’ tradition that must be reconstructed in the ‘diaspora’.
In both contexts, one finds the same tendency to identify two types of
syncretism that bear different connotations: an ‘Afro-African’ syncretism
which precedes slavery and out of which originated the belief in a basic
unity of African culture, and an ‘Afro-western’ syncretism that must be
resisted.”’ These two types of syncretism raise two visions of the past

27 Melville J. Herskovits was among the first to posit the existence of a ‘cultural
grammar’ that was shared by the different peoples of West Africa. According to Her-
282 STEFANIA CAPONE

and of African collective memory, one that refers to the continuity

between African and African American cultures, the other that marks
the discontinuity produced by slavery and by the loss of connections,
real or symbolic, with one’s native land. ‘Afro-African’ syncretism thus
represents ‘good’ syncretism that sets the stage for endogenous vaneties,
in opposition to ‘bad’ syncretism, the Afro-Catholic syncretism, that
is constituted by exogenous varieties. ‘Afro-African’ syncretism is the
only ‘positive’ syncretism, a true symbol of the unity between ‘sister
religions’.
This idea of a link between religious systems of African origins 1s
what led to the creation, in 1987, of the National Institute of Afro-
Brazilian Tradition and Culture (INTECAB) by a group of Bastide’s
disciples, most notably Juana Elbein dos Santos and Marco Aurélo Luz,
but also Deoscoredes M. Dos Santos, descendant of a long lineage of
Candomble initiates. ‘This institute, which has representatives in numer-
ous Brazilian states, aims to present the ‘different traditions that carry
on the heritage of African ancestors in the New World’ while preserving
‘the spiritual hentage of African ancestors that constitutes the heart
of Afro-Brazilian identity and existence’. According to INTECAB, this
identity is based on tradition ‘understood as a continuous and dynamic
renewal of the inaugural principles of the black civilizing process.’”
Now, to affirm the existence of a “black civilizing process’, one must
assume the basic unity of the black world as well as the continuity
between African and Afro-Brazilian religions. Marco Aurélio Luz thus
classifies black religions according to their ‘mission’ to concretize their
African origins in Brazil, thereby perpetuating the ‘black civilizing pro-
cess’. This mission can only be accomplished in religious communities
that have most strictly preserved the ‘symbolic and ntual systems that
they have inherited’, that is, the ‘traditional’ terreiros of Candomblé
Nagó in Bahia. As for other éerreiros, the closer they are to ‘traditional’
worship centers, the more the ‘complexity of the original religious

skovits, this ‘cultural grammar’ enabled the formation of an Afro-American culture

whose main references must be traced to Yoruba and Fon cultures. This idea of an
enduring African substratum in which religion played a central role is also present in
the ‘creolization’ model proposed by Mintz and Price (1976). See also Apter (2004).
28 All these citations are extracted from pamphlets edited by INTECAB. Except for
the obvious influence of Bastidian writings on the founding group of INTECAB, one
should not underestimate the impact of anthropological theories on practitioners of
Afro-Brazilian religions as has been demonstrated by René Ribeiro (1952) for Recife
and by Arthur Ramos (2001 [1934]) for Rio de Janeiro. See also Capone 1999.
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 283

system 1s preserved in its entirety: few gaps, and therefore little or no

symbolic or ritual variations that are exogenous to the original context’
(Luz 1983: 31). Traditional Nagó terreiros are thus the centers of excel-
lence where a new culture of resistance takes shape; as such, they are
true symbols of the construction of an ‘Afro’ identity and the locus of
Bastidian Afnicamtude.
Black people thus become once again the protagonists of their own
history, capable of setting in place the strategies that have enabled them
to ‘act within the interstices of the system’. Far from being a simple
cover for blacks under slavery, conversion to Catholicism becomes a
strategic means of playing with the system’s ambiguities: ‘Afro-Brazil-
ian culture emerged either from original structures, or from the void
created by the limits of the reigning ideology’ (Sodré 1988: 124). Or
else, to underscore the oppositional character of this apparent adapta-
tion: “Black originality means having lived a double structure, having
played with the ambiguities of power, and thereby having successfully
introduced parallel institutions’ (ibid.: 132).% Therefore if blacks have
succeeded in exploiting the system politically, syncretism must neces-
sarily change appearances: it becomes a ‘dialectical answer to a long
process of resistance-adaptation’ (Santos 1977: 23).
But to posit a continuity between African religion and Afro-Brazilian
religion, one must also emphasize the elements common to the different
religious practices of African origin in Brazil, that is, the ‘analogy of
their structural content and the continuity—with jumps and gaps—of a
system that has renewed the essential elements of an ancestral mystical
heritage’ (ibid.: 24). From this perspective, syncretisms are nothing but
‘mechanisms responding to variations’, expressions of the continuity and
expansion of the ‘black civilizing process’. Now, this process is focused
on religion which plays a ‘historic role’ in the creation of groups of
communitarian nature that constitute themselves as ‘organizing cen-
ters of cultural resistance’ (ibid.). Here one finds an echo of Bastide’s
theories according to which there are only two possible reactions to the
exploitation of one ‘race’ by another: rebellion or acceptance. In the

*9 This double structure clearly recalls Bastide’s principle of compartmentalization. It

is worth mentioning that Bastide trained an entire generation of intellectuals in Brazil,
among them Juana E. Dos Santos, the main ideologue of INTECAB. The claims of
a de-syncretization process, as well as of a hegemonic mission of Candomblé nagó,
are clearly inspired by the Bastidian theory of the separation of African and western
worlds, in the pockets of resistance of traditional Candomblé (cf. Capone 1999).
284 STEFANIA CAPONE

first case, resistance usually crystallized around ‘African priests’; in the

second case, there 1s an acceptance, at least on a level of appearances,
of Christianization (1978 [1960]: 396).
We have seen that for Bastide (1996a), true négntude implies an ‘exis-
tential affirmation” and the “expression of the black community’s ethos’.
The essential values of this négntude, concretized as they are in religion,
have survived all kinds of pressure thanks to the ‘dialectic process of
resistance-accommodation’ that has given rise to different forms of
worship. This is what Bastide (1996b) calls ‘discontinuity within cont-
nuity’. With that, even syncretism becomes a form of resistance for it
carnies within its diversity a basic unity of black culture. This idea of
‘discontinuity within continuity’ was developed by Bastide during a col-
loquium organized by the Committee on Afro-American Cultures and
Societies of the Social Science Research Council in 1970 in Jamaica.
With it, Bastide had taken up George Gurvitch’s notion of “discontinued
continuity’ or ‘continued discontinuity’:
But G. Gurvitch simply noted the existence of a double dialectical move-
ment between continuity and discontinuity; we would like to go further
and see if the African American example could not help us discover an
explanatory model (rather than simply a descriptive one) of this interpen-
etration of continuity in ruptures as well as of discontinuity within what
appears to be pure preservation of the past (Bastide 1996b: 77).
Even though Bastide stresses the ideological dimension of this ‘continu-
ity” and its nature as a cultural construction,” he asserts nonetheless the
existence of “cultural conservations’ (conserves culturelless;—the Candomblé
Nago cult houses—that preserve a cultural continuity in the face of
social discontinuity. Some twenty years later, this idea of ‘discontinuity

*0 “Indeed it is sometimes the case... that “continuity” does not really exist, that it is
but a simple ideology, either of the white class (aiming to better distinguish itself from
colored people) or of the black class (attempting to better assert its originality), whereas
what really exists, underneath, in the domain of facts, is on the contrary discontinuity—a
pure and simple rupture with tradition.... In any case, in every moment of rupture
and everywhere discontinuity surfaces in the facts, a compensatory ideology emerges
at the same time that valorizes rootedness in the past’ (Bastide 1996a: 78).
“! Tdeologies aimed at demonstrating the continuity that links today’s Afro-Ameri-
can culture to the Afro-American culture of the past only highhght ruptures and
discontinuities (Afro-American culture is a construction, not a “sequence” or a “con-
tinuity”, and as such, it goes as far as betrayal, thereby accentuating all the more, for
Africanists, the element of discontinuity which these ideologies reveal even as they aim
to conceal it)’ (ibid.: 85).
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 285

within continuity’ would be echoed in INTECAB’s motto: ‘Unity in

diversity’. Different Afro-Brazilian religions thus become simple varia-
tions on account of the ‘resistance-accommodation’ strategies of a ‘basic
cultural complex’. The difference between Candomblé and Umbanda 1s
thereby reduced to the variables that these religions have incorporated:
homogeneous variables that have spawned an ‘intertribal syncretism’
for Gandomblé; heterogeneous variables originating in other cultural
complexes for Umbanda. ‘To recover the “black civilizing process’ com-
mon to the different religious practices that claim an African origin,
religions like Umbanda must therefore re-Africanize their practices by
taking Candomblé Nagó as a model:
Umbanda cults profess a deep and true respect for the éerreiros that perpetu-
ate traditional forms of worship. Despite liturgical differences, variations
and elements coming from other cultural systems, by their structure and
their way of life, Umbanda cults fundamentally participate in and directly
derive from an African heritage (Santos and Santos 1993: 162-3).
Practices like Umbanda that are most distantly related to the ‘basic
cultural complex’ must align themselves with ‘more African’ practices in
order to ‘fortify themselves’. So even the syncretism between Umbanda
and Candombleé, designated by the deprecating term umbandomblé, is
transforming itself into a resistance strategy: ‘In this way, Umbanda
seeks to strengthen itself through the cosmogony of “sister religions”
that participate in the same Afro-Brazilian civilizing process in Brazil’
(Luz 1993: 106). If syncretism with Catholicism is nothing but the
expression of a mestizo ideology, and for this reason, must be denounced,
syncretism between ‘sister religions’ is the pathway to the rediscovery
of Africa in America.
A desire to revitalize African traditions and find a basic unity of Afri-
can culture is also what prompted the foundation of Oyotunji Village
in South Carolina (USA) and the creation by Oseijeman Adefunmi of a
new modality of religious practice, orisha-voodoo. It is Adefunmi who,
for the first ime in the US, stressed the heritage common to all modes
of worship of ‘African religion’, something which has spawned what I
have called a ‘ritual panafricanism’ (Capone 2005). Former militants
of North American black nationalism, Maluana Karenga, Medahochi
K.O. Zannu, and Oseijeman Adefunmi (the former “king of Yoruba
in the US’) were instrumental in generating this religious and cultural
panafricanism. In his book New Afnkan Vodun, Medahochi thus insists
that African Americans must find ‘unity in diversity’.
286 STEFANIA CAPONE

What exactly is the spiritual foundation of Afrikan people in the diaspora?

A people composed of at least 100 different ethnic groups stolen from the
motherland, are you going to tell me that ‘doing work’ strictly from one
Afrikan spiritual tradition is the only way to activate the healing, transfor-
mation, and ascension of the Afrikan-American spirit? ... There are certain
aspects of the traditions that must be protected, respected, and upheld
with the highest integrity. But there is room for creativity, expansion, and
evolution (http://members.tripod.com/~ Vodunsi/forstate.html).
According to Medahochi, tradition has always been parceled out: there
were always several ways of dealing with African reality and these are
all equally valid. The idea of a ‘New Afnkan’ cultural and religious
approach was born in 1968 during a meeting of black nationalists in
Detroit.*? The ‘New Afrikan’ approach acknowledged the importance
of all African systems of belief. African Americans had long ceased
to be organized on the basis of tribalism and this new interpretation
made it possible to integrate American experiences in ‘neo-African’
spirituality. But for this ‘ritual panafricanism’ to be operational, African
Americans must find ‘unity in diversity’, that ‘is to say, the points of
commonality that make it possible to bring together ritual practices
of different African belief systems, such as Yoruba, Kongo, Ewe/Fon
and Akan religions. “Neo-Africans’ must also venerate their ancestors,
their “genetic ancestry’, as well as West African divinities that ‘run in
the blood’ of African Americans. An African American who is initi-
ated in Akan religion will thus be able to worship the orisha without
being perceived as breaking with tradition (Guedj 2006). A plurality
of initiation thereby becomes the symbol of this cultural and religious
panafricanism that has produced African American society, a compel-
ling sign of the basic unity of the ‘African culture’.
The emergence of orisha-voodoo in the 1960s exemplifies clearly this
idea of ‘ritual panafricanism’. ‘The name itself symbolizes the intersec-
tion of different African religious practices since, to express the needs of
African Americans issued from different African ethnicities, one had to
mix elements from these various cultures while at the same time preserve
the Yoruba model that supposedly predominated in African American
religions. The unity of ‘Africans from Africa and the diaspora’ had

*2 Tt is at this meeting that the provisional Government of the Republic of New

Africa (RNA) was created, a government whose co-ministers of Culture were Maluana
Karenga, Oseijeman Adefunmi and LeRoi Jones who, at the time, had already changed
his name to Amini Baraka (Capone 2005: 200).
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 28/7

to be proved through the identification of a dominant cultural model

able to demonstrate the lost greatness of the African people. Since the
foundation of the Yoruba Temple in Harlem, Adefunmi (1962) was
thus reproducing Herskovits’s theses, which assumed a basic unity of
Yoruba and Dahomean cultures, expressed by a religious syncretism
prior to the slave trade.* "The members of Oyotunji Village, founded
in 1970, have thus ‘revitalized’ Yoruba customs as well as other Daho-
mean traditions since orisha-voodoo constitutes, in the opinion of its
founders, a ‘pan-African ritual system where all authentically African
divinities are equally recognized” (Capone 2005: 171). Without its ritual
panafricanism and its use of Yoruba symbols and identity as signs of a
re-conquered ‘Africanity’, orisha religion would not have experienced
the expansion it 1s currently experiencing among African Americans
(cf. Clarke 2004).
This ‘ritual panafricanism’ is not limited to exchanges between Afni-
can religions but involves also a quest for all the religious practices that
have been lost in African American religions. So repeated contacts with
traditional Bahian Candomblé cult houses contribute substantially to
the process of re-Africanization in the US by deploying the same logic
and the same strategies: on the one hand, the progressive condemna-
tion of any syncretic practice that sets the scene for “exogenous varieties’
such as Afro-Catholic syncretism; on the other hand, the emphasis on
an ‘ethnic’ supposedly ‘purer’, more ‘traditional’, origin, the Yoruba
origin. Salvador de Bahia, with its houses of Nagó Candomblé, is seen
as one of the main centers of preservation of African traditions in the
‘diaspora’ and as a possible source of legitimation for African Ameni-
cans who are initiated in orisha religion. But Brazil is also the locus of
a rediscovery of forgotten ritual practices.
Thanks to trips back and forth between the US and Brazil, some
Cuban American initiates have reintroduced the worship of divini-
ties that had disappeared in Cuba, such as Oxumaré and Lugunedé,
as well as the dort ceremony with the consecration of the 2b4 ort, the
material representation of the head (ori). Among these borrowings
between religions that claim Yoruba origins, the ceremonies held to
create individual Candomblé altars have been adapted to the practices

33 Herskovits’s influence on the constitution of Yoruba-centered practices in the

United States is obvious in Adefunm1’s writings. But one also finds Bastide’s influence
in books that are largely read by religious practitioners in the US, such as Joseph
Murphy’s (1988: 122) study of santeria.
288 STEFANIA CAPONE

of Lucumi religion (also known as Santeria or Regla de Ocha) initiates.

Brazilian orxás were lucumized” when they were submitted to lavatono
and paritorio rituals.** "The same holds for the preparation of dilogún
(cowries for divination that are present on every Lucumi altar). ‘These
innovations are currently responsible for the diffusion within the com-
munity of Afro-Cuban practitioners of ritual practices imported from
a “sister religion”: Candomblé.
In the last few years, these exchanges have not been limited to Sal-
vador but have included also the larger metropolises of southeastern
Brazil: Rio de Janeiro and Sáo Paulo. The influence of Cuban babalaos
(diviners) in Rio has already left its imprint on several Candomblé cult
houses that have adopted Afro-Cuban divination practices; Cuban
babalaos have replaced Nigerian babalawo who had reintroduced the
practices of odu divination in Brazil (cf. Capone 1999: 277-84). In
addition, World Conferences on Onsha Culture and ‘Tradition (COM-
TOC) carry the very idea of the basic unity of African religions across
the world (cf. Capone 2005: 283-97). Once a.-link is established that
underpins religions as different as Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Santería
or [Trinidadian Shangé—a link that is symbolized by their Yoruba
component—it becomes possible to work toward their unification.
Regardless of their real origins, these religions all become facets of
‘Yoruba religion’ and they can thus contribute to the creation of an
‘orisha religion’ that concretizes once again the former Brazilian dream
of ‘unity in diversity’.

Conclusion

In this search for “lost foundations”, a vision of syncretism reemerges

that is not necessarily negative. As in Roger Bastide’s theories, we are
confronted with a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ syncretism: the former makes it
possible to recreate a ritual and philosophical unity that was lost in
the Middle Passage, the latter undermines forever the foundations of
‘African culture’.

+ These two rituals are intended to ‘give birth’ to practitioners’ divinities. During
the davatono (cleansing), omiero (plants macerated in water to which are added certain
elements that are specific to each divinity) is prepared and different parts of the indi-
vidual altar are washed in it. The pantono (deliverance) ritual marks the filiation relation
between the onsha that ‘is born’ and the one who ‘engenders’ it.
 ROGER BASTIDE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIONS 289

The quest for roots which characterizes Gandomblé as much as North

American orisha-voodoo is thus the re-enactment, more symbolic than
real, of a ‘pure’ tradition that must be reconstructed in the ‘diaspora’.
In their discourse, Candomblé and Santeria practitioners have since
the beginning emphasized the preservation of a cultural and ritual
heritage. But this discourse cannot conceal the ongoing salvaging of
all that has been lost, a practice that inevitably produces the mutation
of that which should ideally remained unchanged. This tendency to
retain ancestral knowledge and to compensate for ritual loss is what
fuels African American religions. Any geographical displacement, any
travel to the centers of African traditions is thereafter perceived as a
temporal regression towards that which was lost, towards ‘true’ African
tradition. Fragments of this tradition have been preserved in Cuba,
Brazil and Nigeria, where ‘pockets of cultural resistance’ remain. ‘The
reconstitution of this lost unity, similar to what I have called ‘ritual
panafricanism” (Capone 2005), is not a corruption of traditional prac-
tices but an attempt to find a common past and a shared tradition,
both of which are indispensable to the creation of a community of
practitioners of onsha religion. ‘The dialectic of discontinued continuity
and continued discontinuity so dear to Bastide thus seems to reside at
the very center of the African American world. A rare case where, well
after his death, a scholar’s theories continue to live in the practices of
those he studied, in a never-ending dialogue linking different centers
of African tradition on American soil.

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 PEASANTS, MIGRANTS AND THE DISCOVERY OF
AFRICAN TRADITIONS: RITUAL AND SOCIAL
CHANGE IN LOWLAND HAITI

Karen E. Richman

Introduction

Veévé-l6 it is the ounsi who makes the gangan

Ounsi falls down; the gangan then gets up
Veéve-lo it is the ounsi who makes the gangan
Métraux (1972: 165).
In his renowned mid-twentieth-century study of Haitian religions, Alfred
Métraux wrote, “The little I was able to see of rural Vodou convinced
me that it was poor in its ritual compared to the Vodou of the capi-
tal... Vodou deserves to be studied not only as regards the survival of
Dahomean and Congolese beliefs and practices, but also as a religious
system born fairly recently from a fusion of many different elements’
(Métraux 1972: 61). Métraux further asserted that ‘the domestic cult
is losing importance daily to the profit of the small autonomous cult
groups which grow up around sanctuaries [and are] more numerous and
prosperous in Port-au-Prince’ (Métraux 1972: 60-61). The spectacular,
codified styles of worship that were displacing the modest, kin-based
practices of Haiti’s peasants were, Métraux suggested, urban innova-
tions, and they were recent. Métraux, unfortunately, did not develop his
intriguing observation about the relationship of Vodou to modernity.
Observers of Haitian popular religion have continued to interpret
Vodou as the authentic religion of Haitian peasants.
This paper takes up Métraux’s challenge to argue that the congrega-
tional forms and practices authorized as Vodou were not the authentic
African religion of the peasants (as if there ever were one), but rather
conventions of an evolving peri-urban institution. As the capital city
of Port-au-Prince swelled with displaced rural migrants, these temples
became anchors for their ritual practices. ‘The temples were owned
and managed by a new cadre of professional priests, whose source of
power derived from a lengthy and expensive initiation. The priest com-
manded a new congregational structure based on individual voluntary
294 KAREN E. RICHMAN

association unrelated to kinship (though kinship terms of address were

used), elaborate and expensive rituals carried out by female initiates and
a separation between the roles of performer and spectator. ‘This modern
style of temple organization and practice spread from Port-au-Prince
to the densely settled lowlands of Cul-de-Sac and Léogane as these
areas were undergoing massive economic and social upheaval, which
culminated in the transformation of the peasantry into producers of
migrant labor and consumers of migrant wage remittances. This paper
deals with the way in which these innovations were incorporated into
ritual practices and recast as authentic African traditions in a particular
hamlet in Léogane, called ‘Ti Rivyé (Little River).
In Ti Rivyé, the agents of diffusion of temple customs appear to have
been not only redundant peasants and neophyte proletarians circulating
between the capital city and the nearby plain, but also ethnologists who
moved between privileged sites of the Vodou laboratory. The scientific
valorization of the heroic slave religion was a centerpiece of the Haitian
ethnologists’ counter-narrative to European cultural hegemony and
North American colonialism. Though their approach to Vodou was part
of a counter-hegemonic, nationalist discourse, it nonetheless recapitulated
a modern view of tradition-bound primitives. ‘The ethnologists portrayed
Vodou as a coherent set of beliefs about universalistic, nature spirits
and the spectacular ritual practices to worship them. In the case of Th
Rivyé, the ethnologists’ study of Vodou seems to have encouraged the
encroachment of the very invented traditions they were documenting.
The dynamic interactions between performers and students of Vodou
and the effects of these (unequal) exchanges on local ritual practice seem
to have escaped the scrutiny even of Alfred Métraux, who was escorted
to ‘Ti Rivyé to observe a ceremony in the 1940s by a Haitian govern-
ment ethnologist. Despite Métraux’s provocative inference in Vodou en
Haiti regarding the relationship of modernity to Vodou, he singled out
his visit to the unnamed temple in Ti Rivyé as an example from the
countryside of the purer practices of the domestic cult.

Land and labor in early twentieth-century Léogane

When Métraux arrived in ‘Ti Rivyé in 1946, the local, kin-based ritual
practices of a free-holding peasantry, which he referred to as the
‘domestic cult’, were already losing out to the ‘profit’ of temples. The
peasantry had emerged from the slave revolution of 1791. Although
 RITUAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LOWLAND HAITI 295

the revolution was a massive and repeated rejection of coerced labor,

free people and their descendants continued to face obstacles to freedom
even after slavery was abolished. Political leaders, eager to revive the
plantation economy, attempted to force them back onto plantations to
labor as little better than slaves. Paradoxically, the practices of the still
weak state instead abetted the citizens’ access to land and, therefore, a
means to control their own production. Short of currency, the govern-
ment compensated military officers and civil servants in land and these
grantees in turn put their concessions up for sale. In addition, the state
turned to selling eminent domain to generate revenues. Through this
legal mechanism the masses moved swiftly to constitute themselves as
a smallholding peasantry and to resist pressures to force them to labor
on plantations in the name of reviving the national economy (Mintz
1974, Moral 1961 and Murray 1977).
The Ti Rivyé community, which I began studying almost forty years
after Métraux, occupies the northern, coastal margin of the eastern side
of the Plain of Léogane and is about 25 miles from Port-au-Prince.
Ti Rivyé was once part of a colonial sugar plantation founded by six
Dominican freres who came to Haiti in 1696 by way of the island of St
Croix. After 1804, the plantation reverted to state property under the
principle of eminent domain. It was granted to Charles-Mitan Marie,
a colonel from Archaie, but, according to my informant Camolien
Alexandre (see below), neither Marie nor most of his heirs wished to
maintain the estate, and 95% of it was sold to settlers who were the
apical ancestors of local descent groups, and known as ‘the first testa-
ments’ (prenmye téstaman yo).
The recollections of Gamolien and other village elders, archival
documents and the records of the landscape (cemeteries and remains
of dwellings) show that in the second half of the nineteenth century
the plantation was divided among smallholders whose estates aver-
aged less than ten carreaux.' However, within only a few decades, the
property map was transformed by Joseph Lacombe, a cosmpolitan
coffee-sugar magnate, by lawful racketeering of the judicial system and
manipulation of the discrepancies between the formal and the legal
codes. The myriad small estates of three, five or a dozen carreaux were
consolidated into vast, undivided plantations, with peasant habitations

' One carreau equals 3.14 acres or 1.49 hectares.

296 KAREN E. RICHMAN

scattered and squeezed among them and crowded especially into the
marginal lands by the shore.
Ti Rivyé’s peasants responded to the encroachment by becoming
sharecroppers on Lacombe’s vast holdings. They intercropped sugar
cane, whose harvest they split with Lacombe, with food crops, which they
kept for themselves to eat and to sell. Some local residents responded by
leaving for Port-au-Prince, where they pursued opportunities in servicing
the bourgeoisie (as cooks, maids, house boys, gardeners, dock workers),
learning trades hke tailoring, trading in the internal marketing of food
and wares, a mainly female occupation and, at the same time, school-
ing their children. ‘There were few schools in the rural areas. Worse-off
Ti Rivyé parents, feeling pressured to feed their children, sent them to
serve as domestic servants with slightly better-off relatives in the city in
exchange for room and board and, sometimes, schooling.
Port-au-Prince’s population grew from 26,000 in 1861 to 101,000
in 1906; one third of the residents came from Jacmel and Léogane
(Saint-Louis 1988: 117 and Moral 1959: 39). ‘The growth of the capital
epitomized the broad processes of centralization and corresponding
provincial decline that had been fostered by the increasing foreign
mercantilist domination. The United States Occupation, which began
in 1915 and displaced German and French business competitors,
intensified the processes of centralization and rural upheaval. In 1920,
the Haytian American Sugar Company (HASCO) took over the railroad
connecting the plains of Cul-de-Sac and Léogane to the Port-au-Prince
wharf and constructed a modern sugar mill on the north side of the
capital with easy access to the wharf. Thus was Léogane incorporated
into an expanding American sugar empire, an empire which designated
and structured Haitian labor generally as a cheap, mobile work force
in the Caribbean region.
Among the legislative actions of the Occupation to benefit American
capitalists was the imposition of changes in the Haitian constitution to allow
foreigners to purchase land and to gain rights to putatively vacant
areas of the national domain. HASCO purchased 2,600 carreaux in
the Cul-de-Sac, but it did not buy land in Léogane, with the exception
of sites for the railway and depots (Lebigre 1974: 90). Rather HASCO
gained direct access to Léogane’s sugar plantations by renting from the
biggest landowner in the Plain, Joseph Lacombe (West India Manage-
ment and Consultation Company 1916: 17). In 1920, HASCO took
out forty-year leases on all of Lacombe’s lands with the exception of
 RITUAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LOWLAND HAITI 297

the thirteen carreaux surrounding his mansion and the courtyard of

the seventeenth-century plantation’s chapel.
HASCO’s immediate offers of employment to dig irrigation canals,
cut trees and plant and cut cane initially drew many of the evicted
sharecroppers. Their enthusiasm waned, however, as they began to
realize that HASCO’s compensation of twenty cents a day was not a
living wage. Corrupt salaried employees worsened the workers’ plight
by skimming their wages in a ruthless system that dominated the
economy of Léogane for sixty years. ‘hus the arrival of American
sugar capital returned capitalized monocrop sugar production to the
Plain. Exploitation of local labor’s comparative advantage induced more
profound rural upheaval: monetization of labor, removal of land from
food production and internal and international migration.
Hence, around the turn of the last century, the peasants in the
Léogane Plain found themselves squarely in conflict with the processes
transforming the Haitian peasantry generally into a supplier of a
regional mobile labor force. Not long after winning their land revolution
and their economic autonomy, the peasants’ gains were recouped by
outsiders, members of the cosmopolitan elite descended from French
colonists, who commandeered their ancestors’ lands. ‘The expropriation
of these lands, the symbol and instrument of peasants’ hard-won libera-
tion, hastened the ultimate betrayal of the revolution. Descendants of
people who fought to free themselves from plantation labor returned
to the plantation as dependant wage laborers on the very lands their
ancestors purchased and left for them.
In the wake of these displacements, a transformed kinship/ritual
unit emerged: the ‘family’ (fanmz) or ‘inheritance (group)’ (entaj). While
Lacombe and HASCO were sitting on portions of the inherited lands
and offering wage labor at artificially depressed rates to the very people
who were its rightful owners, the descendants of the nineteenth-cen-
tury freeholders ‘Ionton Ogoun, Mme Andre and Michel Pé and their
affines were discovering their ‘authentic African’ (fran Ginen) corporate
character. The claim to African authenticity veiled and compensated
for the increasing monetization of labor, social stratification and dis-
location. The following section takes up the emergence and effects of
these invented traditions in Ti Rivye during the early to mid-twentieth
century.
298 KAREN E. RICHMAN

Peasants, hidden proletanans and the monetization of ntual

Although there is no documented history of religious change in Léogane,

there is an analysis of such change in the Cul-de-Sac Plain, whose his-
tory 1s intimately linked to Léogane’s. Gerald Murray’s (1977 and 1980)
description of the diffusion of modern religious practice there provides
a fruitful starting point for this discussion.” Murray suggests that a major
lever in the displacement of domestic ntual practice was the shift in
ritual roles from charismatic, clairvoyant shaman to professional priest,
known as a houngan or gangan, whose source of power derived from a
lengthy and expensive initiation. ‘The novice was (and is) said to “take
the ason’ (pran ason). ‘The ason is the sacred gourd rattle and bell used
to summon the spirits, who are called /wa or sen (saint). Through their
exclusive use of the ason, the professional gangan created a monopoly on
new forms of communication with the inherited gods. This innovation
obviated the existing channels of access to the wa, dreams and posses-
sion, which were open, at least in principle, to everyone. As a result,
‘possession... lost its oracular function’ (Murray 1980: 300).
The loss of the oracular function of possession in Cul-de-Sac had
already been mentioned (in passing) by Harold Courlander, who
conducted his research between 1937 and 1955, in Cul-de-Sac and
Port-au-Prince. Gourlander quoted one aged man from Belladére who
was quite cynical about the rise of the gangan ason. ‘The man’s analysis
of what had changed was that people could no longer talk to their
inherited /wa (except by means of the professional priest).
Some of the things that are going on down there in the Plain [of the
Cul-de-Sac] are not right. They are not the old way. In the old days we
did things differently. We did not always run to the houngan. ‘The grande
famille knew how to talk to the [/wa]. Up here we don’t do things the
way they do them down below in the city (1960: 71-72).
I had the great fortune to befriend Camolien Alexandre when he was
in his nineties and, though the second oldest living member in the vil-
lage, still in excellent health. Gamolien identified himself as a ‘Florvil
person’ (mounn Florvil) because he was born during Florvil Hyppolite’s

* Sales of garden plots financed these costs. Murray concluded that by putting land
into circulation among members of the same socio-economic stratum, this religious
innovation indirectly resolved the Kinanbwa peasants’ land shortage problem. This
pattern did not appear to apply to Ti Rivyé a decade later. Rituals for the /wa and
funerals were financed with cash, provided almost entirely by migrants.
 RITUAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LOWLAND HAITI 299

presidency (1889-1896). He did not know his exact date of birth. Camo
was respected for his esoteric knowledge of the long past ‘foreigner
period’ (/é blan), and for his competence in the idiom he called ‘Africa
talk” (pawol Ginen)—the old rituals, songs and tales taught to him by
the ‘old time people’ (gran mounn lontan-yo). In my conversations with
him about long-term ritual change in ‘Ti Rivyé, the monopolization of
spiritual communication was similarly emphasized. In his ninth decade,
Camolien had a cynical view of the evolution of religious leadership
in Ti Rivyé over the course of the century. He recalled when people
like his father, rather than an elite few, ‘knew everything’ (papa m te konn
tout bagay) to protect and nurture themselves and their families. He felt
increasingly alienated from the organization of ritual practice, which
he dismissed as a “business”, and instead continued to rely on what his
inherited /wa told him in his dreams:

What 1 know, the gangan [ason] do not know. As soon as the lwa speak
to me—you won't find me at dances or anybody’s prayers. I don’t go to
the gangan. I didn’t grow up seeing my father involved in it... I am my
own gangan. If I should do this, if it’s that ‘root’ [wa], I see it all in my
sleep. After that, I have nothing to do with the lwa.
Sa m konnen an, gangan pa sa konnen. Defi lwa pal avé m, m pa nan dans, prie
pésann. M pa al kay gangan. M pa leve jwenn papa m ladan n. Mwen se gangan
tet mwen. Si se _fé sa, si se rasin sa a, m we sa tout nan dómi. Ápre sa a m pa
konn afé lwa.

As for the ason, the rattle and bell apparatus used by the gangan to
summon the /wa, Gamolien clarified that the language of ‘giving’ and
‘taking’ the ason obscures what is, in fact, an act of selling and buying.
He said that, before, gangan absorbed their knowledge directly from
Guinea (Ginen). Some were thought to travel there (in their dreams and
in trance) to the far-off homeland ‘across’ or ‘under the water’. Some
of their Guinea ancestors were said to be shaman who brought their
magical objects with them in a sack. (Gontemporary shaman who are
not initiated and do not run temple-like congregations are sometimes
called gangan makout or houngan makout, literally ‘gangan with a sack.’)
Camo’s African ancestor, Christophe, for example, supposedly car-
ried in his sack a sapling of the magically potent silk cotton tree (cezba
pentandra), which he planted in a rural section of Léogane.
Christophe himself came from Africa. He was a gangan. He came with a
little mapou tree in his sack. He planted it and it became large. ‘The mapou
is still there but it is far from us, in the Gran Rivyé rural section.
300 KAREN E. RICHMAN

Christophe sot nan Afnk li menm. Li te gangan. Li vin avek youn ti pre bwa mapou
nan makout lt. Li plante lr epi li vin gwo. Mapou-a la toujou men h lwen nou...
nan seksyon Gran Riwye.
Today the priests “buy” their credentials. Camolien called their qualify-
ing ason ‘a purchased thing’ (bagay achte). He dismissed the gangan ason's
secrets as ‘a bunch of lies’.
The gangan of the old days had real knowledge but the gangan here have
a lot of les. Those gangan, they didn’t give the ason. "The lwa was the one
who gave it to you. You went to get it under the water. That was called
the Guinea ason. The ason these gangan give today is something you buy.
Gangan lontan te gen bon rezon men gangan isit gen anfil manti. Gangan sa yo, yo
pa bay ason. Se lwa ki ba ou. Ou al pran m anba dlo. Sa rele ason ginen. Ason
gangan bay—se bagay achte.

Although the gangan ason’s power was something purchased, it came

to be substantiated by kinship ties to the descent group, the inherited
land and the /wa. An (inherited) /wa is said to be the one who asks the
gangan to ‘take the ason’, while Loko, another ancient, African Guinea
lwa, presides over the initiation. Moreover, ‘calling the /wa (and the
dead) with the ason’ came to be deemed necessary for the most impor-
tant and ‘traditional’ rituals involving the descent group, the ancestors
and their /wa. Through the formalization of new nites of passage, the
gangan ason guided the transformation of the descent group as a ritual
and corporate group and positioned themselves as managers of the
shrines on all the large estates.
In Ti Rivye, the catalyst for these profound shifts in the ritual
management of the descent group was an extremely charismatic and
powerful gangan ason named Misdor, who succeeded his father and
grandfather in the role of gangan. But he was the first in his line, to
use Camolien's words, to “buy” his secrets and then ‘sell’ them to oth-
ers. One of Misdor's sons estimated in a conversation with me that
his father “gave the ason’ to more than one hundred and fifty ‘students’
(elev). His use of the term ‘student’ aptly captured the modern character
of the rite of passage. Like his three brothers, he eventually became a
gangan ason. Misdor’s sons, who were schooled in Port-au-Prince, and
were among the few of their generation in Ti Rivye who were literate,
helped mediate the introduction of new practices coming from urban
shrines. Aiscar proudly told me, for example, of the local celebration
on All Souls Day, a raucous dance honoring the Gede /wa: ‘I was the
one who brought the Banda here. I was at school in Port-au-Prince.
 RITUAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LOWLAND HAITI 301

I saw how they danced the Banda. I came here, and I did it here’ (Se
mwen ki mennen Banda sit. M te lekol Port-au-Prince. M te we jan yo tap danse
Banda la-a. M vin isit, me fe-l isit.)
Misdor’s sons succeeded him after his death in 1967. The eldest,
Victor, was widely regarded as the most powerful gangan ason in ‘Ti
Rivyé, despite his declining health (he suffered from diabetes and
died in 1989 at the age of seventy-two). Victor succeeded his father
at the shrine on their paternally inherited estate and he also managed
two other shrines on maternally inherited land. Aiscar, a younger son
by a different mother, managed a shrine about five kilometers away
after replacing his maternal uncle in the role of gangan ason. As Victor
declined, Aiscar asserted his authority to ensure that other local gangan
ason, most of whom were his father’s, brother’s or his own disciples,
remained faithful to the traditions (however recently introduced) of
his father’s ‘house’. Pointing to the temple where his father presided,
Aiscar told me, ‘Misdor gave the ason to everyone (every gangan ason)
here. Everything they know comes from this house.’
Misdor’s most profound influence on ritual practice in Ti Rivyé may have
been his introduction of two rites of passage from temple voodoo: post-
funeral mortuary rites and the initiation of women (kanzo). These
practices were incorporated into the charters of local descent groups,
transforming the representation and enactment of their corporate iden-
tity. In the following sections, I discuss Misdor’s introduction of these
rites of passage and their incorporation as authentic African traditions
into the charters of the families descended from the peasant founders
of the settlements.

The new mortuary nites of passage

Death rites practiced throughout Haiti today generally include wake,

funeral (in a chapel, if possible), procession to the cemetery and burial,
if the ‘dead’ (mo) wishes to avoid eternal social disgrace, in an above-
ground tomb.’ After a church funeral and burial begins the nine-day
mourning period, in which relatives and neighbors of the deceased
gather nightly to mourn, chant Catholic texts, socialize, recreate and
cajole the dead (with food) to take leave of the living for the world of

3 Thanks to the recent, massive labor migrations of Ti Rivyé’s young, few of those
at home have to worry any longer about repose under the ground.
302 KAREN E. RICHMAN

the ancestors. ‘The culminating ‘final prayer’ (denye priye) may precede
or coincide with an elaborate and generous banquet for the guest of
honor—the dead himself or herself—and for scores of discriminating
relatives and neighbors equally presuming to be received with generos-
ity and grace. Because this reception requires a huge capital outlay, it
may be postponed until survivors muster the funds and assemble the
key participants, who may be working outside the country.
To this ritual funerary structure, the gangan ason annexed the temple
customs of ‘sending’ and ‘retrieving the dead from the water’ (voye/wete
mó nan dlo).* Thus in Ti Rivye, after “the final prayer”, as part of a
relatively modest ritual, the gangan ason today performs the ceremony
known as dragozen which ‘sends’ the spirit of the deceased ‘under the
water’ (anba dlo) far below the earth’s surface. Before departing, the spirit
of the deceased typically attempts to speak to the family but his/her
fragile voice, sounded through that of the gangan ason, fades out before
he/she can communicate anything substantive. The family is resigned
to wait until the ancestor emerges to ‘speak’ at the far more elaborate
and expensive ‘retrieval from the waters’ ceremony to learn more fully
the circumstances of his/her death.
No sooner than a year and a day, but sometimes as long as several
years later, the gangan ason, assisted by a corps of initiated female ser-
vitors (ounsi), performs the ‘retrieval’. Because of the high expense,
kinsmen often collaborate to retrieve several of their dead relatives at
the same time. Although each family must purchase their own ritual
objects and a new set of white garments and shoes for the dead, they
may share the burden of fees for the gangan ason, offerings and food and
drink for guests. This collaboration lowers the cost for each unit. The
voice of the ancestor is heard from inside a white tent, where at least
two gangan ason—I have seen as many as four—are sitting. The main
Guinea spirit authorizing the rite is Loko, the same spirit who confers
Guinea authority to the gangan ason. Loko responds to the rhythmic
language of the ason beseeching him to go and fetch the dead under
the water. Speaking through a gangan ason, Loko narrates his journey
to a far-away body of water where he encounters the ancestor who
only reluctantly agrees to move from the liquid oblivion into a basin

* Descriptions of death rites are provided in Lowenthal (1987: 231-252), Murray

(1977: 528-32), Métraux (1972: 243-265), Deren (1953: 41-53), Maximilien (1945:
171-177), and Larose (1975a: 112-114). See Richman (2005) for descriptions of con-
temporary mortuary rites in Ti Rivye.
 RITUAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LOWLAND HAITI 303

of water which has been placed inside the tent (the dead’s element is
fluid; they cannot move around on the earth).
The retrieval of the dead provides the frame for a ‘social drama’
(Turner 1957). Everyone expects the ancestor to settle personal accounts
as his or her spirit individually addresses each relative and close friend
he or she left behind. The ancestor is thought to have been in a kind
of time warp and to have no knowledge of what has transpired since
being sent into oblivion. Neither is the ancestor able to see who 1s
present. Hence the ancestor typically addresses persons who have
since died or emigrated or who chose not to attend. ‘The assembled
answer in their stead, bringing the ancestor up to date on their fates
or excusable absences. An unexcused absence may be interpreted as
an admission of guilt.
The reclamation rite progresses with the gangan ason mediating the
conversation between the bereaved and the ancestor until the /wa, Loko,
barges in to terminate the dialogue. The departure of the dead leaves
the microphone available, as it were, to certain key /wa with whom the
deceased was known to have shared a special relationship. These wa
take turns addressing both individual members of the descent group
and the group as a whole. At least one /wa can be expected to remind
the assembled of the dead’s outstanding ritual ‘debts’. The threats by
the /wa to harm the descent group if they fail to collaborate to ‘pay up’
typically elicit repeated, earnest pledges on the parts of the assembled.
The same gangan ason is likely to be the one to consult when the heirs
begin to fall sick, to divine the /wa’s continued displeasure as the source
of the afflictions and to direct the ceremonies required to acquit the
heirs of the debt.
Once the /wa finish settling their scores with the family, the gangan ason
and the ounsi perform a ceremony that uses fire to consecrate objects or
people. Known as ‘burning pots’ (bwule wazen), this frequently required
Guinea transformation ritual can only be carried out by specialists
who have ‘taken the ason’. At the close of the ‘burning pots’, a vessel
consecrated for the ancestor is set upon the altar of the shrine next to
those of the other ancestors. Henceforth, whenever a descendant needs
to communicate with the ancestor, he or she may go to the shrine and
employ the gangan ason to summon the ancestor to speak in the jar.’

> Lowenthal (1987: 361) writes that several authors have mistakenly claimed that the
secondary mortuary rite transforms the ancestor into a /wa. Ancestors, who link the
living members of the descent group to their spints, are clearly distinct from /wa.
304 KAREN E. RICHMAN

I inadvertently learned about Misdor’s introduction of rites for

reclaiming the dead during a conversation with ‘Tenten about reclama-
tion rites for his brother, Breton, which was conducted by Misdor’s eldest
son and two other gangan ason. ‘Tenten mentioned that he had witnessed
the first ‘reclaiming of the dead’ in the village, a fact of which he was
genuinely proud. I asked him to explain. With great enthusiasm, he
proceeded to recount the story of how Misdor removed his paternal
great-grandfather and apical ancestor, Tonton Ogoun, from the waters
below the earth. It was around 1937; ‘Jenten said that he must have
been about fifteen years old at the time.® Tenten recalled that
they pitched the tent in front of the mouth of the well. Misdor and his
assistant went inside—there weren’t a lot of gangan [ason in those days
who might accompany him inside as they would today]. He went inside
with the ason in his hand. He called the /wa with his ason. Papa Legwa,
Papa Loko—they have to come first. Papa Loko... went to fetch him.
Papa Loko said, “The man doesn’t want to come out!’ He preferred to
stay and make trouble.
Yo fe kad-la devan bouch fn a. Misdor e laplas ht te rantre andan—pat gen anpil
gangan le a. Li te rantre nan kad la ak ason n nan men an. La rele lwa ak ason n:
Papa Legwa, Papa Loko—fo yo parét avan. Papa Loko... l al chache h.... se lwa
pare li. Papa Loko di, “Masye pa vle sot, non!’ Li pito rete fe dezod.

Suddenly there was a loud splash that wet the people standing nearby,
yet no one observed anything falling into the well. Because the ances-
tors are thought to need water—recall the basin of water inside the
tent—the splash was a tangible sign of the ancestor's presence. The
spray of water from the well convinced ‘Tenten that what the skeptics
said about the gangan ason was untrue:
That’s why, when people say they don’t believe in what the gangan do, I
say, ‘it’s because you don’t understand.’ It’s the real thing. There is no
sclence—they say they [the gangan] he. ‘They do real things. They really
do take people out of the water.
Se pou sa-a—moun di yo pa kwe sa oungan fé-a. Se paske ou pa konprann. Se
bon bagay, wt. Nan pwen syans—yo di se manti yo bay. E bon bay yo fe. Yo retire
moun nan dlo vre.

* Tenten's residence in Ti Rivyé at the time was partly the result of his defiance of
his family’s plan for him to be a domestic slave (restavek) for a female relative in Port-
au-Prince. He refused to endure the beatings of his mistress and returned home.
 RITUAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LOWLAND HAITI 305

Although in contemporary practice the period of the ‘dead’s’ submer-

sion in the abysmal waters rarely lasts more than two years, approxi-
mately sixty years passed before Misdor advised his heirs that it was
time to retrieve ‘lonton Ogoun from the water. I asked ‘Tenten why his
family had waited so long to retrieve Tonton Ogoun’s spirit from the
abysmal waters. According to Tenten, until Misdor’s introduction of
the reclamation of the dead, his family had not practiced the custom
of retrieving the dead from the waters: ‘Long, long ago, they didn’t
take dead out of the waters. When someone died you left them there.’
(Lontan, lontan, yo pat retire mo-nan dlo. Mounn nan moun, ou kite | la a.)
Tenten explained that his grandparents “did not understand the
African Guinea ways back then ( yo pat konprann afé Lafnk lé a).’ Even
though ‘Tenten had frequently professed to serve ‘authentic Guinea’
(fran Ginen) in the way of his ancestors (who were direct descendants
of Africans), he was now asserting that those very ancestors were not
familiar with the genuine Guinea practices. During the mortuary ritual,
he heard the ancestor, ‘Ionton Ogoun, imparting new ritual instructions
to the assembled family, even though he now seemed to be asserting
that Ionton Ogoun himself was not enlightened to these same ritual
practices. Tenten’s apparent innocence of the contradictions posed by
that statement suggests just how convincingly the professional gangan
ason had laundered the changes in ritual practice.
The emergence of the custom of performing the two-phased mor-
tuary nite signaled a shift in the ritual “function” of the dead. Instead
of being ‘out there’, the ancestor could now be ritually transformed
through the flames of the ‘burning pots’ ceremony, contained in a
vessel and managed through the language of the ason. When the dead
spoke through the clay vessels inside their shrine, it was to give ritual
instructions. The ancestors now functioned, in other words, to solicit
the fidelity of descendants to their (the ancestors’) newly discovered
authentic Guinea legacy.
The introduction of rites for retrieving the founding first testament
may well have been the single most pivotal social innovation during
the first half of the century. The mortuary nites of passage facilitated
transformations of ‘the eritaj’, the incorporation of a formal charter
and the annexation of a professional temple voodoo hierarchy. ‘These
changes in the minimal definition of ‘the entaj” in ‘Ti Rivyé account
for the ascendance of a few ‘families’ and the disappearance of many
more who lacked the organization necessary to fulfill the ‘Guinean’
spiritual legacies of their founders.
306 KAREN E. RICHMAN

The kanzo: inmtiation rites for women

Misdor's influence on ritual practice in ‘Ti Rivyé 1s also felt in the

incorporation of temple voodoo’s formalized ritual roles for women
into the African traditions of the entaj (descent) groups. At the end of
the ten-day initiation the novices achieve the rank of ouns, qualifying
them to perform a specialized role in the lineage’s core rituals under
the direction of (male) gangan ason.’ When I interviewed Camolien
about the ritual innovations introduced by the gangan ason over the last
half-century, the topic of kanzo seemed to exasperate him more than
any other. In his view, the practice of kanzo was a racket for the gangan
ason, who benefited not only from fees collected from the initiates, but
also from their unlimited supply of ‘free’ labor whenever the gangan ason
was hired to direct a descent group’s rites. Gamolien said that
Long ago there weren’t a lot of oun. My mother wasn’t an ounsi. We
didn’t have people who were ounsi. My mother—they inherited the /wa,
they served the /wa. Now, there is no lack of ounsi. It’s so the gangan can
make money, beat the drums, pay—Long ago we didn’t have this—all
this nonsense. Now there is all this business. That’s why I don’t pay
attention to them.
Lontan pat genyen anfil ouns. Manman m pat ounsi. Nou pat gen mounn ounst.
Manman m—yo leve ¡wenn lwa, yo sévant lwa. Kountyé a pa manke ounsi. Se pou
gangan fé lajan, bat tanbou, peye—Lontan pat gen bagay sa yo —bann tenten sa yo.
Kountyé a gen tout komés sa. Konsa tou m pa okipe yo.
The formalization of the woman’s role of ouns had to do with the
gangan ason’s consolidation of communication with the inherited lwa
and the countervailing decline of the oracular function of possession.
There appears also to have been a shift in the usage of metaphors for
possession: from possession as a means of speech to a mode of dance.
‘The oracular sense of possession, conveyed by the image of ‘to speak
in the head of someone’ (pale nan tét), for example, ‘Ezili Danto speaks
in the head of Sirina’ has been replaced by a metaphor of display,

7 As for dating the introduction of the kanzo initiation elsewhere in Haiti, Herskovits
(1937) writes that initiations of servitors (ouns:) were not being carried out in more
remote Mirebalais but were taking place closer to Port-au-Prince in the Cul-de-Sac.
Dorsainvil (1931) and Maximilien (1945) describe these rites. (None of these authors
specifies a location.) For later descriptions of the kanzo confinement see also Métraux
(1972: 192-212) and Deren (1953: 154-155, and 216-224).
 RITUAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LOWLAND HAITI 307

that is, ‘to dance in the head of someone’, e.g., Ezili Dantó dances in
the head of Sirina..
Thus when I asked a gangan ason (who ‘took the ason’ from Misdor)
why there were no women in the community who had become fully
fledged ritual leaders (manbo ason), he responded, ‘Men take the ason
here and /wa dance in the heads of women.’ (/sit gason pran ason; lwa
danse nan tet fi.) (In fact women came from elsewhere to take the ason
from Misdor and his son but they did not ‘practice’ locally.) It was less
acceptable for men to become vessels for the /wa at public rituals, as
Ravenscroft (1965: 178) found during his fieldwork with Misdor and his
family. Occasionally a gangan ason’s body would quiver momentarily or
appear to totter off balance. I was told that these involuntary motions
meant that a /wa was attempting (in vain) to ‘mount’ the gangan ason.
When the /wa manifested themselves through ounsi, it was not primar-
ily to talk to the descent group, but rather to dance to the drums and
songs. Put to silence, the wa became virtuoso performers. However
profound the truths that can be communicated through dance, posses-
sion-performance has been transformed into the least congenial setting
for the /wa to speak directly to the heirs. The /wa dance and gesture
rather than speak. When they do converse it is through pantomime.
The male gangan ason supplies the words to interpret the ‘charades’ for
everyone else.
Access to the /wa was now restricted to two channels controlled by the
gangan ason: the language of the ason (more often heard from across the
wall of a tent or shrine) and initiated ounst women. Ouns: had become
the appropriately mute ‘horses’ for the /wa at increasingly spectacular
and costly ‘services for the gods’ (sévis lwa), replete with drumming,
singing, flag bearing, parades, etc. It was rare for a /wa to overtake the
body of an heir who was not either an ounst or preparing to become
one. But it was not uncommon to see a /wa overtake a guest of the
gangan ason, that is, someone who was not a member of the descent
group and whose /wa was not specifically invited to the ceremony.
The kanzo initiation today is a ten-day rite of passage during which
novices ‘lie down’ (kouche) in the altar room of the shrine in utter
submission to the old, venerated, African, male spirit named Danbala
Wedo. ‘Lying down for Danbala’ (kouche pou Danbala) does not symbolize
sexuality as much as symbolic death in preparation for rebirth into a
new identity. The novices are dressed in white cloth and are treated as
though they were delicate, vulnerable newborns. The social expectation
that every woman go through kanzo notwithstanding, it is assumed that
308 KAREN E. RICHMAN

a lwa “claims” (reklame) a woman to go through the rite of passage. The

spirit Danbala Wedo typically communicates this request by ‘holding’
(kenbe) her, that is, by making her sick. He temporarily releases her once
she makes the commitment to get initiated.
In contrast to the severe, life-threatening afflictions caused by gods
of the ‘hot’ or ‘bitter’ pantheons, illnesses sent by Danbala and other
members of his relatively ‘cooler’ and ‘sweeter’ pantheon tend to be
non-acute, chronic and to affect any part of the body. These afflictions
are diffuse enough to accommodate a broad constellation of symptoms
which nevertheless respond to one, and only one, remedy: kanzo (the
term is used as noun, adjective and verb).°
‘Today, between the months of June and October, most local gangan
ason conduct annual kanzo rites. Until the early 1980s, Misdor’s eldest
son, Victor, held three kanzo a year in order to accept all of the ail-
ing women needing to be ‘cured’. The public ceremonies and dances
accompanying the retreat of the novices, and their emergence as ounsi
at the end of the rite of passage, were the most important and festive
social events of the summer season. They were attended by hundreds
of white-clad owns: and their relatives. Initiation rites were also com-
petitive occasions for the gangan ason and their ouns:. People ranked the
kanzo according to the ‘heat’ of the music and dancing, the refinement
of the ntual, how many attended and the generosity and etiquette of
the hosts and hostesses, etc. (cf. Deren 1953: 161).
The conspicuous expenditure of financial resources by the novices
is a significant social achievement. Everyone is keenly aware that such-
and-such a woman has succeeded in amassing the considerable funds
associated with the kanzo initiation: fees to the gangan ason, drummers,
a lay Catholic priest and the novice’s ntual ‘mother’ and purchases of
ritual objects, three sets of new garments, sacrificial victims, various

® Our census of all of the households in the community included questions about
ritual affiliation. The senior woman in each house was asked whether she was an ounst,
where she got initiated, her age at the time, the name of the gangan ason leading the
rite of passage and his relationship to her. (The same senes of questions was asked
about any other ouns in her immediate family: mother, sister, child.) The next ques-
tion posed to her was ‘why did you get initiated?’ The uniform response was ‘I was
sick.’ ‘The seventy-one respondents identified headache as the most common ailment
leading to the decision to kanzo (41%), followed by respiratory problems (11%), fever
(10%), digestive ailments (10°), sudden blindness (9%), sudden weight loss (4%) and
other suffering (15%) including toothache, hearing loss, emotional crises and pain in
body and limbs. See Richman (2005) for an extended discussion of gender relations
and affliction in kanzo.
 RITUAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LOWLAND HAITI 309

offerings to the gods, and food and beverages to be served to scores of

guests on four separate public occasions. Not to be ignored as a cost is the
loss of the novice’s labor for almost two months, which means foregoing
income and/or compensating someone else to take her place.
_ Even by local standards (elsewhere in Léogane), this particular ‘Ti
Rivyé community has a reputation of being especially disposed toward
the kanzo. One individual’s perception that “every woman was initiated’
(denye fi kanzo) was supported by my calculations that fully half of the
adult women had gone through this expensive rite of passage and the
majority had done so within-the past decade. Some ouns: novices were
young girls who had not yet been ‘claimed’ to be initiated but rather
accompanied their mothers into the altar room. Among the eight novices
being initiated at Tonton Ogoun’s shrine in 1983, for instance, were
four adult women and four girls ranging in ages from nine months to
fifteen years old. The mother of the three-year-old told me that she
decided to take advantage of the reduced rate to initiate her daughter.
She fully expected that the girl would eventually need to kanzo. Ironi-
cally, it was becoming increasingly common for ounsi to submit to the
kanzo ordeal a second time, it having been divined that immunization
conferred by the first initiation had lost its effectiveness.
The extent of kanzo initiations in this community provides evidence
of the profound success of Misdor, his sons and their ‘students’ in dis-
ciplining people to be good and loyal producers and consumers of new
ritual ‘products’. Women fulfilled their duty to ‘the family’ by becoming
ounsi and then expending enormous amounts of their labor in the per-
formance of ritual duties. But they also learned—as did their spouses,
children and siblings—the ‘good’ habits of contributing lavishly to ever
more codified and spectacular rituals. More than other ‘children of the
lwa’, ounsi and their close kin can be expected to contribute regularly
and generously to the /wa.
The novices’ confinement ends on a Sunday morning with a cheerful
and festive rite of incorporation. The novices emerge from the altar
room dressed in crisp, new dresses of sky blue but still under cover of
large straw hats and towels. (Because of their heated condition, they
are particularly susceptible to exposure to cold.) The novices have not
only recuperated; they are more beautiful than before. While stand-
ing among relatives and friends attending their emergence, I recall
hearing flattering comments as to how healthy the various fattened-up
individuals looked.
310 KAREN E. RICHMAN

After the lay priest baptizes the new ouns:, they fall into rank behind
the gangan ason, his assistant (laplas), and the two flag-bearers in an
enormous processional of white-clad ouns: and their families. When
the descendants of Tonton Ogoun and his neighbor, Mme Andre,
carried out this parade, their destination was a fresh-water spring at
the edge of the sea, the haunt of their respective Danbala Wedo(s). At
the spring they would perform a ceremony invoking the divine water
serpent. Iwo or more Danbala would appear in the persons of already
initiated ouns: to welcome the new ounsi into the fold. The ‘serpents’
would fall into the water with a great splash and wriggle around until
ready to creep onto land, where they would be helped to stand by the
gangan ason. "The Danbala would perform the devotional greeting to the
gangan ason, an acknowledgment of the authority of the latter, and then
each new ounst would greet the spirit(s).
On their way to the spring, the procession would pause to perform
ceremonies at certain sacred places (demanbre) that symbolized the his-
tory and charter of “the family’: various trees which were ‘depots’ (depo)
for the ancestral wa and the remains of the homestead of the apical
ancestor—a piece of the foundation to his/her house, the ruins of a
well, or the stump of a tree (cf. Lowenthal 1987: 275-283). ‘The cer-
emonies included tracing flour blazons (vévé) identified with individual
lwa, libations, chants, flag waving, and often possession. As they knelt
to kiss the flour blazons of the /wa identified with each of these sites,
the novices were physically identified with the landscape of the original
peasant estate and initiated into the spiritual legacy of ‘the family’,
united in a single web of connection with the /wa, the founder, the
ancestors and the family land.
At the climax of a kanzo initiation rite in August 1984, a lwa served
by Mme André, the founder of a local descent group, mounted one
of the heirs. Just as the participants arrived at the site by the beach
where Mme André’s house once stood, an ounss named Yanpwin, who
had been initiated by Misdor five decades before, was overcome by Met
Olokan. The /wa paraded back and forth over a narrow space loftily
proclaiming “This is my first testament! This is my first testament!’ (Se
prenmye téstaman m! Se prenmye téstaman m!) Met Olokan/Yanpwin’s
declarations could have been heard as a proud and forceful affirmation
of collective identity, a stirring testimony of the unity of the /wa, the
descent group and their land. The great wa did not, however, announce
that powerful outsiders had commandeered the testament and reduced
 RITUAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LOWLAND HAITI 311

it to a third of its onginal size. Neither did Mét Olokan/ Yanpwin

mention the unequal distnbution of the land that remained, nor the
relatively disadvantaged position of Yanpwin herself. Yanpwin’s first
(cross) cousin, Yvon, was the gangan ason of the fanmi. Yanpwin ritually
addressed him as ‘papa’ even though he was eighteen years her junior.
He could count on this ouns: to re-enact the ‘history’ of Mme Andre’s
estate. Significantly, Yanpwin underwent a ‘second’ kanzo initiation by
Yvon the following year. Misdor had initiated her along with her mother
when she was a young child. At the age of sixty-eight she again ‘laid
down for the /wa’ at the shrine established during the sixties by Yvon’s
father, who had been a ‘student’ of Misdor.

The Guinea Prayer

The entaj appropriated new, invented temple voodoo traditions into its
authentic African charter. This charter is solemnly recited during the
Guinea Prayer (Lapné Ginen) at the beginning of virtually every ritual
conducted on the estate. The exceedingly somber and reverent style
of the Guinea Prayer proceeds in marked contrast to the exuberant
drumming, singing and dance which immediately follow. Accompanied
only by the percussion of his ason, the gangan leads the group in drone-
hke antiphonal chanting of invocatory formula.
The Guinea Prayer is rendered by repeating a strophe in the esoteric
ritual idiom called langaj, spoken only by lwa and gangan ason, into which
a genealogy of names is sequentially inserted. ‘The gangan ason solicits
the assistance of the participants to complete the genealogy, who duly
display their ‘genealogical erudition’ (Lowenthal 1987: 251).
Listening to the descent group’s ‘genealogical myth’ gives one the
impression of an uninterrupted continuum of descent from the time
of Guinea and the /wa, through the moment of purchase by the First
Owner of the Estate (Prenmye Mét Bitasyon), the generations of his or
her descendants, and, last but not least, the temple staff mediating the
descent group’s connection with its Guinea legacy. ‘Thus the formalized
temple roles have been completely. integrated into the substance and
identity of ‘the family? in Ti Rivye.?

> A review of various descriptions of the African Prayer in the literature suggests
that Misdor employed a version of the Africa Prayer mediating urban, congregational
and rural, kin-based systems of substantiation. The temple voodoo versions do not
312 KAREN E. RICHMAN

In Ti Rivyé, as we have seen, the catalyst for the introduction of

temple practices and their successful incorporation into local practice
was Misdor. Under his guidance, heirs of "“Ionton Ogoun, Michel Pe
and other descent groups ‘discovered’ their ancient and authentic
Guinea traditions. ‘Temple rituals and roles were incorporated into the
substance and charters of these ‘great families’ and henceforth mediated
the enactment of descent. The perception of Misdor’s ritual innova-
tions as authentic Guinea traditions handed down by the ‘first owners
of the estate’ concealed the fact that they were bagay achte, “things you
buy’, born out of money. Ritual practices had been thoroughly mon-
etized, elaborate and spectacular. Professionals mediated access to the
ancestors and the /wa; a member of ‘the family’ had to employ the
gangan ason to ‘talk’ to the ancestors and inherited /wa because posses-
sion and dreaming had lost their oracular functions. The concept of
‘claiming’ was redefined such that an inherited /wa ‘held’ a person to
buy power, that is, to get initiated. Loko, the refined, priestly, inherited
lwa who legitimizes the gangan ason’s authority. and rescues the ‘dead’
from the abyss, 1s said to ‘claim’ his ‘godchild’ (ftyél) to purchase his
privileged access to the Guinea cosmos. The metaphor of the Catholic
ritual godparent-godchild relationship is apt. In a godparent-godchild
relationship, a contractual relationship (which may overlap with kin-
ship since godparents are often close relatives) becomes substantialized.
The children of ritual co-parents refer to one another as ‘brother’ and

present a genealogy linking the participants to the founder while the domestic voodoo
examples do not include the temple hierarchy. See Maximilien (1945: 98-101), Brown
(1976: 54-58), Métraux (1972: 206) and Deren (1953: 208). Mennesson-Rigaud (1946)
reports a service sponsored by a trader from Miragoane who lived in the capital and
belonged to an urban shrine. The manbo (priestess-shaman) rendered the Prayer by
invoking her own inherited /wa and official temple roles and relied upon the sponsor
to recite names of her ancestors and her particular /wa. Mennesson-Rigaud translates
mait’bitation (mét bitasyon) as ‘master of the house’ (or shrine), rather than founding
ancestor of the family’s cultivable land.
In contrast to these examples of urban performances of the Africa Prayer, Lowenthal’s
(1987: 250-251) account from the rural area of Fond des Négres is a genealogy of
all of the remembered ‘dead’ members of the descent group. Names of the /wa are
not integrated in the Prayer; neither are the ranks of the temple hierarchy since these
formalized roles are relatively rare in the region. Larose’s (1975b: 506) description from
a community in Léogane is, as we would expect, the closest to the Ti Rivyé version,
with the important difference that a temple hierarchy is not invoked. The Bois L'Etang
Prayer includes an enumeration of ‘all the spirits worshiped by the family (which he
defines as a cognatic descent group)’, ‘those of prominent ancestors’, the ‘founding
ancestor and even the ‘French plantation owners’.
 RITUAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LOWLAND HAITI 313

‘sister’ and they and their children are prohibited from marrying one
another.
In the wake of the turbulent incorporation of peasant land and
labor into the expanding American empire, the descent group was
being redefined as a traditionally African Guinea ritual unit. By the
time ‘Tonton Ogoun’s heirs retrieved him from the abysmal waters, for
example, the Haytian American Sugar Company was sitting on half of
the estate (which they leased from Joseph Lacombe) and offering wage
labor to the very people who were its nghtful owners (at artificially
depressed rates insuring the corporation’s comparative advantage). Even
as outsiders violated the founders’ estates, ‘the family’ accorded their
founders the status of deities (but not /wa). ‘The shrine, which became a
constitutive symbol for the descent group, housed the spirit of the ‘first
testament’ in a clay jar surrounded by vessels containing the spirits of
all other ancestors whose spirits had been reclaimed from the waters
below the earth. Places where the first ‘testament’ (#staman) once dwelled
or fetched water or served /wa became sacred sites (demanbre) worshiped
during ‘the family’s’ core rituals.

Relations of performance and observation of ntual practice

It is not coincidental that the ritual leader who ushered modern forms
of ntual communication and worship into ‘Ti Rivyé was very familar
with foreign and elite Haitian ethnologists studying the popular religion.
Nor is it accidental that his ‘house’ hosted a regular stream of foreign
researchers, including Alfred Métraux, Erika Bourguignon (1976 and
1979), Kent Ravenscroft (1965) and Diane Wolkstein (1978) and remains
the point of contact between local participants and foreign voyeurs as
outsiders from the capital and beyond come to view the spectacle at the
temple, and the temple staff occasionally travel to wealthy neighbor-
hoods of the capital to stage authentic peasant rituals.’°

10 When I first visited the shrine in 1983, it was as a guest of some of the poorer
cousins of Misdor’s sons. Since his sons were the established brokers between the
insiders and foreign researchers, my arrival through unexpectedly humble channels
and without a request for them to be my guides did cause some initial puzzlement.
They were also surprised by my ignorance about the relationship between their temple
and the ethnography of Vodou in Haiti. That ignorance was mainly the result of the
authors having disguised the names and places in their texts.
314 KAREN E. RICHMAN

The person who escorted foreigners to observe the ntuals at Misdor’s

temple was Odette Mennesson-Rigaud, a self-taught French ethnologist
who was associated, along with her Haitian elite spouse, Milo Rigaud,
with the national Bureau of Ethnology. Misdor’s son recalled how
Mennesson-Rigaud brought foreigners to a particular 24 December
ritual, known as man (magic), in the early 1950s. Indeed both Mennes-
son-Rigaud (1951) and Métraux (1954-1955 and 1972) wrote about a
maji service celebrated in December at Misdor’s shrine.'’ Mennesson-
Rigaud’s (1951) article, ‘Noél Vaudou en Haiti’, is a detailed description
of the maji ritual, in which she praises him for his virtuoso playing
of the lead drum and his elder brother for his soaring lead vocals in
the antiphonal sacred singing (Mennesson-Rigaud 1951: 46-7). Their
father, though, received Mennesson-Rigaud's most effusive praise in
Mennesson-Rigaud' article. She describes the charming Misdor wel-
coming his foreign visitors.
Friendly and conscientious, he put us at ease right away. He is a peasant
with an open mind, who is happy to welcome you at his house and make
you feel at home. Immediately, we had the same feeling as relatives who,
on a happy occasion, would come to spend a few hours in a familiar
surrounding (Mennesson-Rigaud 1951: 38).

Misdor's charismatic sons have obviously mastered his skills in mediat-

ing relations across class and culture. Having observed them in various
interactions with individuals from the urban elites, I can attest to their
subtle ways of charmingly confirming dominant outsiders in their supe-
riority. One son recounted to me how he charmed a Haitian diplomat
in order to get a job as his property manager. Proudly demonstrating
his taste for dramatic presentation, he told me that when he met the
diplomat, who had come to Léogane to look over his new purchase, he
pretended to be a simple, illiterate peasant, even though he had lived
and gone to school in the capital city. He strategically let the diplomat
discover that the peasant could read time on a watch. Having projected
an ideal model of the competent but deferential caretaker, he got the
job and the valuable political clout that went with it.
To what extent did Misdor and his sons project an image of peasant
ritual that foreign researchers desired to consume? The elite’s appetite

'' Métraux (1972: 236-243) provides a lively description of the same ceremony.
The closeness of the two texts suggests that some of Métraux’s (1972) may have been
borrowed from Mennesson-Rigaud’s (1951) without proper citation.
 RITUAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LOWLAND HAITI 315

for ritual, or Misdor’s perceptions of their expectations, reinforced the

trends toward codification of elaborate ritual performance. Misdor
encouraged his foreign visitors to participate in the spectacle, even to the
extent of ‘experiencing’ trance. According to Misdor’s son, Mennesson-
Rigaud escorted a group of foreigners to a 24 December ritual around
1950 (probably the one described in her article). He took pride in his
ability to manipulate the foreigners’ desire to embody ‘real’ Vodou. In
such hallowed ethnographic texts as Divine Horsemen by Maya Deren and
Island Possessed by Katherine Dunham, trance is the consummation of
the subject’s desire to know the Other. It is a quintessentially modern
experience, which is inwardly directed at knowing the autonomous self.
This notion is of course far removed from local ‘traditional’ ideas of
spirit possession-performance whose only moral purpose is ritual com-
munication between spirit and members of the descent group. Misdor’s
son in effect admitted this sleight of psycho-cultural hand when he
recounted how his playing of the lead drum helped make the music
so ‘hot’ that the foreigners lost consciousness."
Mme Mul Rigaud used to take foreigners here during Magloire’s term
(1950-1956). Magic was jamming at Misdor’s shrine—the 24th of
December. Everyone lost it. Mme Milo had escorted fifteen foreigners.
All of them lost it.... The Magic (music) overtook them, entered them.
The Magic took over everybody.
Mime Milo Rigaud te konn mennen blan isit sou Magloire. Man tap tonbe Kay
Misdor youn 24 Desanb... Se pa moun nan kay-la ki gen konesans. Mme Milo
mennen kenz blan. Tout te tonbe... Se map kt pran yo, ki rantre nan ko-yo. Map te
dominen tout moun.

In light of Misdor's son's account, Métraux's report of what he witnessed

at the ritual is all the more revealing. Métraux’s report is a thoroughly
voyeuristic account of the spectacular aspects of the rite. Curiously
entitled ‘Christmas in the Countryside’, it gives the erroneous impres-
sion that the exaggerated spectacle he describes 1s typical of domestic
or rural practice.
The other question raised by the re-examination of Misdor’s
interactions with researchers concerns the possible impact of the
‘professional’ audience on the study of, and perhaps even the shape

'2 Métraux (1972: 236-243) provides a lively description of the same ceremony,
though some of his text appears to have been borrowed from Mennesson-Rigaud
(1951) without proper citation. Bourguignon (1976) also describes this ritual. There 1s
no mention in any of these accounts of foreigners going into trance.
316 KAREN E. RICHMAN

of temple Vodou emerging from the Port-au-Prince, Cul-de-Sac and

Léogane “laboratory”. There was fluid movement between the sites
of recreational and religious Vodou by paid performers, managers,
professional (academic) and recreational observers, including well-off
Haitians and European and North American tourists. By the 1940s,
Haiti had become a fashionable tourist site and Haitian fashion was all
the rage (Plummer 1990). Members of the ‘folkloric troupes’ were also
(or later became) priests and priestesses. ‘The most renowned of the
latter was the dancer and ethnologist, Kathernne Dunham. Drummers
for these troupes moved between recreational and religious Vodou, I
learned from Ti Marcel Jean, who had accompanied Dunham’s troupe.
According to Lois Wilkin (1992), research was apparently carried out at
local hotels observing, monitoring, recording and studying the practices
of ‘authentic’ adepts.
An important sponsor of this research was the Haitian state’s new
Bureau d’Ethnologie Haitien (Haitian Bureau of Ethnology). The
Bureau’s sponsorship of studies of the peasants’ religion and folklore
provided the material for promotion of an authentic Haitian identity
rooted in African culture and relocated in Haitian peasant religion.
Local and foreign ethnologists, some of whom had professional eth-
nological training, answered the call for the black nation to assert
an anchor of identity that challenged the hegemonic narrative. This
anchor was found in Africa. Nicholls (1979) and others have argued
that Haitians’ humiliating encounter with the cultural imperialism and
racism of the Americans who occupied their nation-state between 1915
and 1934 (the longest military occupation in the region), inspired the
search for an alternative national identity. Yet similar movements were
transpiring simultaneously elsewhere in the Americas. With the encour-
agement of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, for example, a similar
Africanist project was unfolding (Sansone 1999: 13) that focused on
the African essence of Gandombleé. A medical doctor and ethnologist,
Francois Duvalier, who later became Haiti’s first pro-Vodou president,
was a central member of the Bureau D’Ethnologie, and he authored
or co-authored with Lorimer Denis several studies of the peasant reli-
gion. Yet the quintessential scholarly article authorizing an onginal,
black, counter-hegemonic Haitian identity was ‘Le role du Vaudou dans
l’indépendence d’Hait’ by Odette Mennesson-Rigaud (1958).
Outside of a very limited Haitianist circle, Odette Mennesson-
Rigaud's influence on the study of temple Vodou is insufficiently recog-
nized. Ethnomusicologist Harold Courlander studied in Haiti from
 RITUAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LOWLAND HAITI 317

the late 1930s through the 1950s. Mennesson-Rigaud was, he told

me during a 1993 interview, ‘the ultimate insider, the outstanding
non-Haitian. She knew everybody. She was the best informed of all
researchers and scholars.’ Erika Bourguignon, who conducted her
research in 1947, echoed Courlander when she reflected on the per-
sonality of her host and mentor (in Haiti). “Odette Mennesson-Rigaud
set herself up as the official guide to and interpreter for Vodou’, Bour-
guignon told me in 2005. Mennesson-Rigaud’s influence, she suggested,
resulted from the fact that she ‘operated on a variety of (social and
cultural) levels. And she had a car, which few people did. She had
access to whatever level she wanted to get to.’
Mennesson-Rigaud led Maya Deren, newly arrived in Port-au-Prince,
to the temple in Cul-de-Sac that was the basis for the famous text,
Divine Horsemen. Mennesson-Rigaud introduced Alfred Métraux to the
Port-au-Prince manbo, Lorgina, who, as a priestess and head of an
urban temple, was a central source for Voodoo in Hait. She later brought
Erika Bourguignon to the same manbo. Over three decades, Mennes-
son-Rigaud, as noted above, led a stream of researchers to meet and
observe Misdor and his sons in ‘Ti Rivye.
Just as Mennesson-Rigaud linked professional researchers from Port-
au-Prince to the surrounding plains, where they allegedly witnessed
‘rural Vodou’, she also linked plains people to the capital, as they joined
the ranks of ruined peasants whose resources had been devastated
by expropriation of lands, low wage labor and the reintroduction of
intensive sugar cane production. Mennesson-Rigaud found jobs for
members of Misdor’s family in the city. She helped his niece Antoinette,
for example, find work in a hotel. In 1946, when Enka Bourguignon
arrived in Port-au-Prince to begin fieldwork, Mennesson-Rigaud intro-
duced her to Antoinette, who became her Creole teacher and a key
informant. Bourguignon accompanied Antoinette to Ti Rivyé to con-
tinue her research there.
Mennesson-Rigaud’s ‘access to whatever level she wanted to get to’
and her routes from urban to peri-urban shrines leads to consideration
of the visitors’ impact on the practices that were becoming standard-
ized in the peristyles. Reflecting on their possible impact does not imply
that the researchers diluted or polluted pure ritual forms (if there ever
were such forms). Nor does it suggest that local actors were passive
receptacles. Rather our attention is drawn to how foreign researchers
and local performers were creatively involved in mimetic interplay. Did
this ‘play’ contribute to the disappearance of some ritual forms and
318 KAREN E. RICHMAN

the transformation and promotion of others, including new forms that

researchers misidentified as traditional African legacies and which the
new professional ritual leaders imbued with the authority of precedence
and authenticity?
A further issue is to what extent did the performers at Misdor’s
temple imitate an idea of what they thought the voyeurs—academic
or pleasure seekers—wanted to see? We can speculate on the role the
ethnographers played at these temples by giving performers something
to imitate and, by acting as social scientists, using their discipline to
reify and stabilize the results. It is worth thinking about how these stud-
les may have shaped understandings of what constitutes Vodou and
what practices and objects are worthy of being studied and collected.
Sansone’s (1999) analysis of the ‘Use and Abuse of Africa in Brazil’
offers intriguing parallels to this case. He argues that research justifying
African roots of Candomblé devalued hybrid elements of practice that
appeared less African and thus, less authentic and may have helped to
hasten their disappearance.
Ryk van Dijk (1998: 155) has argued with regard to discourses on
tradition in Africa, ‘we have to shift our perspective from nostalgic
theory to a theory of nostalgia.’ The imagination of Vodou’s Afn-
can timelessness suggests a sort of fundamentalism that is common
in modernity’s discourses of history and ‘primitives’. ‘The modernity
of Vodou is reinscribed in the application of the term itself. Even
today, some rural dwellers are confused when outsiders (mis)use this
specific ritual term to indicate a broad and coherent set of beliefs and
practices. Neither do they recognize its contents as assimilable in the
same category. The Creole term, vodou, refers to a genre of sacred
music and dance performed in worship of a particular pantheon.
Indeed the ritual and cosmological importance of this pantheon
greatly increased in the last century. Loko, Danbala and other spir-
its of the pantheon authorized the power of the professional priests
and temple organization that emerged in Port-au-Prince in the early
decades of the twentieth century and spread to the nearby plains of
Cul-de-Sac and Léogane, displacing simpler and more egalitarian ritual
practices. These religious dislocations were both the subject and the
object of the study of Vodou in Haiti and a fleeting point of Métraux’s
prescient but ultimately duplicitous interest.
 RITUAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LOWLAND HAITI 319

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 AFRICAN ACCENTS, SPEAKING CHILD SPIRITS AND
THE BRAZILIAN POPULAR IMAGINARY: .
PERMUTATIONS OF AFRICANNESS IN CANDOMBLE

Elina Hartikainen

The role of African influences has constituted a central dilemma for

Brazilian attempts to construct a national identity from the end of
colonial times.' Since abolition views of the influence of African people
and their cultures on the nation’s character have undergone a number
of permutations. ‘These have ranged from explicit attempts to ‘whiten’
the makeup of Brazil’s population to celebrations of miscegenation and
on to more recent debates on affirmative action in higher education (see
e.g. Skidmore 1993, Segato 1998, Fry 2000, ‘Telles 2004). In more recent
years Africanness has also come to figure as an object of celebration in
its own right. While some have posited African cultural influences and
expressions at the core of Brazilianness, others have seen the apprecia-
tive representations of Africanness as a means to mobilize the nation’s
darker-skinned masses around more positive self-identifications than
those offered by valorizations of miscegenation. Such varied agendas
have predictably led to disputes over the nght to define and represent
the content of the newly celebrated Africanness (see e.g. Hanchard
1994, Sansone 2003, Teles dos Santos 2005). Nevertheless, despite the
multiplicity of perspectives in this highly fraught discursive field—occu-
pied at present by such diverse actors as politicians, Afrocentric activists,
intellectuals, tourist guides, and martial artists—there is one issue that
all agree upon: the Candomble religion as it is practiced in the most
prestigious temples of Bahia represents the purest and most authentic
expression of Africa in Brazil, if not the contemporary world.” Like

' Brazil constituted the world’s largest slave economy. Estimates of the number of
people transported from Africa to Brazil vary from three to six million. While slavery
was abolished in 1888, people of African descent still constitute the majority of the
poor in Brazil, whereas the country’s elite is predominantly white.
* The claims for the resilience of Candomblé as a reservoir of African religiosity
are often supported by advocates’ observations concerning the declining popularity of
traditional religions in Africa itself, where increasing numbers of practitioners have
converted to Islam and Chnistianity. Many have also heard of African practitioners
324 ELINA HARTIKAINEN

Herskovits’ (1966) and Bastide’s (1978a) valonizations of African surviv-

als, these more recent celebrations of GCandomblé have been founded
on the degree to which the religion’s practice and theology appears
to have retained fidelity to its African origins. Indeed, there is much
that ostensibly speaks for such a view. In most temples the gods are
still sung and prayed to in what are understood to be sacrolects of
African origin. Similarly, Gandomblé ritual foods and drum rhythms
bear strong resemblance to those by which the gods have been féted
on the other side of the Atlantic. Most importantly, however, the gods
that practitioners incorporate are themselves held to be African.
The particular manner in which Candomblé' Africanness has come
to be celebrated in these broader discourses has, however, been highly
selective. This is clearly reflected in the way in which Candomblé has
come to be known as a cult of the onxd, inquice and vodun gods. Despite
their central role in Gandomblé theology, however, these gods are not
the only African spirit entities that are revered in the religion. Instead,
practitioners also incorporate a group of African child spirits called erés.*
Like the onxás, inquices and voduns, these spirit entities play a crucial role
in many Candomblé ceremonies. Sull, they are but rarely mentioned in
either popular or scholarly depictions of Gandomble. In fact, the few
earlier anthropological accounts of Gandomblé that acknowledge the
child spirits do not even consider them to constitute autonomous spirit
entities. Instead, they describe the erés as a transitional state between full
possession by the onxds, inquices and voduns, and a medium’s mundane
personhood (see Landes 1947: 55-7, Leacock 1964: 107, Herskovits
1966: 21-22, Bastide 1978b: 206-34). It is only in recent scholarly
treatments that the erés have been depicted as spiritual entities distinct
from the higher gods (see Wafer 1991, Pessoa de Castro 2005).*

traveling to Brazil in search of religious knowledge that has been forgotten on the
other side of the Atlantic.
* Candomblé temples are divided into lineages called nagées (nations) on the basis
of their purported places of origin in Africa (Lima 2003 [1972], see also Matory
2001). In Salvador, Bahia, where I conducted my research, temples tend to identify as
representatives of the Ketu, Angola or Gege nagdo. In the Ketu tradition the African
gods are called onxds, in the Angola tradition they are called inquices and in the Gege
tradition voduns. In practice, however, the Ketu terminology often dominates even in
temples of the other nations. As such, the African child spirits are generally referred
to by the Ketu term eré in all temples although on occasion I would hear practitioners
of the Angola tradition employ the term vunp.
* Whether this represents a misperception on the part of earlier ethnographers or
a genuine change is, of course, impossible to say.
 PERMUTATIONS OF AFRICANNESS IN CANDOMBLE 325

The absence of the erés from attempts to represent Gandomblé as

an African religion raises some important questions about the ways in
which the religion’s celebrated Africanness has come to be configured.
Why have the child spirits not been included in the representations of
Candomblé? Is there something about the erés that is incompatible with
the understanding of Africanness put forward by celebratory views of
the religion? If they cannot be understood in terms of these glorified
views, then what kind of Africanness do the erés represent? How is their
identity constructed and maintained in spirit possession performances,
and how does their audience recognize them as African?
In this chapter I argue that an answer to these questions can be found
through an investigation into the ways in which the erés? African identity
comes to be created in their linguistic performance when manifesting
in the human world. Unlike the silent and oftentimes distant orixás,
inquices and voduns, the erés interact and communicate extensively with
each other as well as their human audiences. It is the peculiar manner
in which the erés’ speech comes to be constructed in these interactions
that is taken by Candomble practitioners as the primary index of their
African identity. However, as I will demonstrate, a closer examination
of the erés’ speech reveals their identities to be constructed on a strik-
ingly different understanding of Africanness than that promoted in the
celebratory discourses. Instead of conforming to such positive valoriza-
tions, the linguistic means by which the erés’ character 1s constructed and
made recognizable to an audience of Brazilian Candomblé practitioners
can be traced to a long literary and popular tradition of Iberian and
Brazilian derogatory racial stereotypes concerning ‘African’ speech.
Why might this be? Why would the predominantly Afro-Brazilian
practitioners of Candomblé venerate a group of spirits that appears
to reproduce and reinforce racial stereotypes?

Speaking child spirits in Candomblé

The erés may be absent from scholarly and popular depictions of

Candomblé, but they are omni-present in the religious lives of practi-
tioners. One can be sure to encounter these child spirits in conjunction
with most manifestations of the orixds, inquices and voduns as they are
‘given passage’ (dar passagem) by the higher gods to relax and fulfill the
physiological needs of the bodies of the mediums. It is the erés that
are responsible for performing the biological functions of defecating,
326 ELINA HARTIKAINEN

urinating, drinking water and eating. The onxás, inquices and voduns,
in contrast, do not engage in such activities. Thus, where the higher
gods’ actions reflect spiritual purity, the erés can be seen to constitute
the vulgar, corporeal counterpart that is necessary to enable divine
manifestations in the mortal world of Candomblé practitioners. This
function of the erés is paralleled in the behavior they engage in while
possessing their mediums. Unlike the ceremonies performed for the
solemn orixds, voduns and inquices, events organized for the erés are rarely
high-toned. As the African child spirits descend into the bodies of their
mediums they transform respectable adults into pacifier-sucking infants
that take great enjoyment in smearing food over each other as well as
other forms of lewd horse-play and vulgar joking.
The ritual role of the erés is, however, not only limited to the physi-
ological and comic respite they provide for their mediums and audience.
As such spirits continue to manifest in the human realm they gradually
come to acquire a more independent and better-socialized character
that enables them to interact in more complex’ ways with their audi-
ence and, as a result, act as important mediators for the orixás, inguices
and voduns. ‘The higher gods themselves rarely speak directly to their
human followers, and even then only in ritual languages understood to
be of African origin, which are incomprehensible to most practitioners.”
Thus, it 1s through such lower spirits as the erés that most Candomblé
practitioners communicate with the divine. The crucial characteristic
of the erés that makes the intimate interactions between them and their
adherents possible is, however, not only that they speak, but also that
they do so in Portuguese.® The Portuguese of the erés, though, is far

> As Wirtz (this volume) argues in the Cuban case, the notion that particular African
languages are spoken in Gandomblé temples is all but unproblematic. The identification
of ritual languages spoken in Gandomblé temples with African ones is commonly split
between different branches of the religion in the following way: The African language
attributed to Ketu Candomblé temples is most commonly Yoruba. Angola temples are
thought to demonstrate Kikongo, Kimbundo and Umbundo influences and the Gege
ritual register is understood to be Fon-derived. However, in practice as Pessoa de Cas-
tro (2005) observes Yoruba, also commonly called Nagé by Candomblé practitioners,
is often employed in the Candomblé community as a generic term to refer to speech
displaying words and expressions from any African language.
* The erés share this mediatory role between the higher gods and their human fol-
lowers with the other lower spints of Candomblé. Like the erés the caboclos and exus
also speak Portuguese, although with different accents that are understood to reflect
their particular identities: the caboclos as Brazilian backlands cowboys and Indians,
and the exus as hucksters, pimps and fallen women of the urban underworld (for a
discussion of the distinction between Exu the African onxd and the Brazilianized exus
 PERMUTATIONS OF AFRICANNESS IN CANDOMBLE 327

from the Brazilian standard and even the Bahian vernacular. As ‘Tata
Muta, a Candombleé priest with whom I discussed the African child
spirits, instructed me, like the onixds, inquices and voduns, the erés arrive in
this world speaking African languages only. However, in contrast to the
higher gods, the erés are willing to learn the language of their Brazil-
ian followers. Nonetheless, like other foreigners the child spints never
achieve full native competence. Instead, they come to communicate
in a broken version of Portuguese that displays the influence of their
native African tongues:
They [the erés] don’t speak either Kikongo, Kimbundo, Umbundo
or Portuguese. Instead [their speech] is a mixture...It is a bit like an
American who in trying to learn Portuguese ends up speaking different-
ly... The erés speak African, but they have to communicate with the New
World. And so, they have to change their linguistic conduct [comportamento
linguistico| to be able to communicate with the people of the New World.
And then they also speak like children and a bit like the person they are
talking to and a bit like the medium they are incorporating... And so
they end up speaking a mixture that sometimes even we don’t understand.
(Interview with ‘Tata Muta, August 17, 2006)
While the general conduct of the erés highlights their childlike and
unsocialized character, it is this pecuhar manner of speaking that is
taken by Candombleé practitioners as the primary index of their African
identity.
The significance of language use in the construction of the erés’ Afri-
canness is foregrounded by the central role spoken communication plays
in their interactions with Candombleé adherents. While the erés’ part as
bodily mediators is crucial to the realization of rituals organized for
the higher gods, it is the fact that they speak, and enjoy doing so, that
makes them a popular conduit to the divine. Furthermore, in contrast
to the silent and aloof onxds, inquices and voduns, the erés also tend to
manifest outside of ceremonial contexts, thus significantly increasing
their interactions with their human audience. In consequence, these
spirits often come to hold a veritable social existence in the every-day

see Wafer 1991: 9, Capone 1999). The erés however seem to occupy a privileged place
as mediators due to their closer relationship with the higher gods and their child-like
character. Being children, the erés are understood to have greater access to even the
most guarded secrets since they can enter unnoticed into many places adults may
not. Also, paralleling Christian understandings of children, the erés are considered to
have privileged access to Olorum, the highest of all Candomblé gods who is often
synchretized with the Christian God.
 328 ELINA HARTIKAINEN

lives of practitioners. They are known by distinct personalities and

often form lasting friendships and enmities among themselves and their
human companions.’
The approachable and human-like character of the erés, however,
places a set of restrictions on their performance. As Irvine (1982) has
argued, the ability to maintain a coherent and consistent spirit identity
in distinction to that of the medium is fundamental to the construction
of any credible spirit possession performance. In the case of the onxds,
inquices and voduns such a distinction is efficiently made by means of
their silent and aloof character. The multiplicity of the erés? and their
mediums interactions, however, makes the maintenance of a coherent
spirit identity significantly more difficult. Not only do the erés interact
with their human audiences across a wide range of social situations,
but they also do so repeatedly and on a frequent basis.® As I will dem-
onstrate in the following, the coherent production and maintenance of
these spirits’ identity is accomplished by the consistent use of particular

’ This was demonstrated to me during visits to the home and temple of Ana Celia,
an established Candomblé priestess from Salvador who regularly incorporates an eré
- called Rainha das Margaridas, In addition to formal ritual activities, the eré would often
pop in on every-day social gatherings, thus becoming the center of attention for the
moment. On these occasions Rainha would entertain her audience with her childish
behavior and somewhat peculiar jokes and stories. Every now and then she could also
be coaxed into longer conversations with members of Ana Celia's small Candomblé
community as well as with friends and neighbors who sought the spirit's advice for
such common problems as persistent headaches and unrealized career prospects. On
the few nights I visited the temple that Rainha did not make an appearance I was
in turn entertained with stones about her exploits. For example her medium would
fondly recount her surprise when the eré”s love for chicken had led her to steal the
neighbor’s hens and cook them into a stew. Indeed, Rainha played such a central role
in the every-day life of Ana Celia’s temple that she could have well been considered
a member of the family.
® Here it is important to note that the every-day manifestations of the erés are often
performed to an audience that is familiar with the medium and thus could be expected
to be more likely to believe in the authenticity of possession than an uninitiated outsider.
However, faith in the integrity of a human host is not sufficient to establish spint-
presence in Candomblé communities any more than it is elsewhere. On the contrary,
an audience’s intimate knowledge of and close interactions with both the medium and
the spint they incorporate may be expected to make the successful presentation and
maintenance of a distinction between their personalities all the more difficult. While
fake possession may well go unnoticed in the context of public ceremonies where spirit
performances are expected to follow fairly rigid ritual scripts and where participants
are not familiar with all the mediums that present signs of possession by the gods,
the presence of spirits is much more difficult to simulate for a familiar audience or
outside of a ritual context (see Birman 1995: 118-21, for a discussion of the all but
institutionalized forms fake possession has come to take in some Candomblé temples
in Rio de Janeiro. For fake possession in Afro-Cuban religions, see Palmié 2004).
 PERMUTATIONS OF AFRICANNESS IN CANDOMBLE 329

linguistic markers that Candombleé practitioners interpret as constitutive

of an African accent. The analysis is based on data acquired through
an interview I conducted with an eré called Rainha das Margaridas in
August 2006. ‘The eré was commonly received by Ana Celia, an estab-
lished Gandombleé priestess of a temple located in central Salvador.

Constructing an Afncan’ spirit identity through accented speech

My interview with the eré Rainha das Margaridas took place on a quiet
August evening at the home of her medium, Ana Celia. With the help
of Ana Celia’s grandson the interview situation allowed me to inquire
directly about Rainha’s linguistic usage, as well as to develop a more
general sense of her linguistic practice. As I learned, despite the quite
remarkable social competence Rainha had achieved in her thirty-year
experience of manifesting through Ana Celia, she still found communi-
cating in the Portuguese language challenging. When I asked the spirit
to describe the problems she experienced in speaking Portuguese, she
promptly launched into the following exercise of naming the objects
that fell into her line of sight in Ana Celia's kitchen.”
R (Rainha das Margaridas): Aqui, tudo na minha vida tem nome, aqui também
boto na lingua ser 0 nome, at vem essa coisa, como é, transparente?
R: Here, everything in my life has a name, here I also put the name in
the language, so we get this transparent thing, how is it called [again]?

G (the medium’s grandson who was present at the interview): Banco

G: A bench

R: Na minha é sapot. Aí 1550 que é?

R: In mine [my language] it is sapoti. And this?

G: Copo
G: Glass

R: Aqui é dilonga
R: This is dilonga.

2 My transcription of this segment of the interview aims to highlight Rainha’s use

of words and expressions understood to derive from African languages. ‘Thus it should
not be read as a phonetic transcription. The phonetic changes that her speech pres-
ents will be discussed further on in the paper. The :talicized sections are in Portuguese,
whereas African language elements are underlined.
330 ELINA HARTIKAINEN

E (the anthropologist): Dilonga?

E: Dilonga?

R: £. Dilonga, e o que é isso?

R: Uhum. Dilonga, and this?

G: Ah, caneca
G: Oh, cup.

R: E, dilonga. E at tudo é... aqui, aquilo

R: Right, dilonga. All that is...this, here

G: Fogáo?
G: Stove?

R: ...NVa minha é ilé ajeum... quer dizer a pega que faz cozinha que é 1lé que é
da casa onde cozinha, dé ajeum e ahí como é?
R:...in mine its ilé ajeum...in other words the thing with which you
cook, because ilé, so the house where you cook [ilé refers to house in
Yoruba], ilé ajeum, and that, what 1s it?

G: Panela?
G: Pot?

R: É, tuilaí
R: Right, tuilaí.

G: Prato?
G: Plate?

R: Abó
R: Abo.

G: Aguida é o que?
G: So what's aguidá?

R: Abó e aguidá é o mesmo... aí tudo, tudo, tudo, tem nome. Obé que é a faca,
obé faré que é o garfo... At tudo, tudo tem nome.
R: Abó and aguidá are the same thing...so everything, everything has
a name. Obé is a knife, and obé faré is a fork. So everything has a
name.
(Interview with Rainha das Margandas, August 23, 2006)
Rainha’s remarks indicate that the spirit understood the differences
between her native language and Portuguese to be primarily lexical. ‘This
lexical emphasis is not surprising considering the manner in which the
 PERMUTATIONS OF AFRICANNESS IN CANDOMBLE 331

spirits are socialized into speaking Portuguese in Candomblé temples.

As Tata Muta explained, the evés learn Portuguese by substituting words
and expressions in one language with their equivalents in the other:
If a spirit were to ask you for a broom [...] you would speak in the
language that the spirit understands but also in Portuguese so that she’
would learn how to say broom 1n Portuguese. See, you give it to her in her
language and then say it in Portuguese. It’s the same thing with [human]
novices. You ask them for things in the African language and then you
say it in Portuguese, and in this way the novice comes to learn the names
of things in the language he or she is to learn. So, it is the opposite for
them than for the erés who already speak the African language. (Interview
with Tata Muta, August 17, 2006)
Thus, the method by which the erés are taught to speak Portuguese
parallels the manner in which human novices learn the sacred African
languages of Candomble. Like the novices, the erés are primarily guided
to substitute lexemes in their native languages with the equivalent ref-
erential units of Portuguese.
According to Póvoas (1989), a Candomblé priest turned linguist,
the heavy emphasis on the lexical level in language acquisition reflects
more general Candomblé understandings of the relationship between
African sacred registers and the cosmological order. Whereas the
dynamic character of the Portuguese language is taken to reflect a
constantly transforming modern Brazilian world, the careful mainte-
nance of archaic forms of African languages aligns with the Candomblé
community’s attempts to preserve a ‘traditional’ African cosmological
order. In addition, the African words and expressions are understood
to contain deeper meanings. ‘They do not simply refer. Instead, when
spoken aloud, African languages are considered to wield a performative
power that may recalibrate the cosmological order. Words spoken in
the ‘African’ ritual idioms can literally effect changes in the world. It 1s
this constitutive character of the lexicon of the ‘African’ ritual register
that accounts for the importance set on teaching novices their correct
usage. Viewed thus, a misspoken word can threaten the balance of the
cosmological order.

'* The gender of an eré usually corresponds to that of the higher god primarily
received by their medium who can be either male or female. Hence, female and male
mediums can both incorporate male as well as female erés.
332 ELINA HARTIKAINEN

This understanding of referential units as icons of the cosmological

order is reflected in a lack of attention in Candomblé communities to
morphology and syntax when determining a speaker’s proficiency in
an African language. As Póvoas (1989) and Pessoa de Castro (2005),
another linguist who has studied Candomblé, both observe, 1t is the
proportion of correctly used lexemes, not the syntactic structure by
which they are connected, that determines whether an utterance comes
to be identified as ‘African’ speech by Candomblé practitioners. ‘Thus
even sentences like “onde está o isana?” (where is the isana?),'* in which
the subject of the otherwise Portuguese language sentence has been
substituted for 1ts African equivalent, can be considered to be spoken
in African (see Póvoas 1989: 68). In my own research 1 came across
this understanding when I tried to elicit descriptions of the extent and
manner in which African languages were spoken in the Gandombleé
communities in which my interlocutors participated. Practitioners
would respond to my questions with long lists of what they understood
as words and expressions deriving from Yoruba, Fon or Kikongo. For
them it was the knowledge of these word lists and the ability to cor-
rectly sprinkle one’s speech with the lexemes contained in them that
. constituted proficiency in an African language.’* In parallel fashion, my
interlocutors’ attempts to translate ritual texts from African languages to
Portuguese appeared to be founded on their identification of individual
words and expressions.’
The prominence of lexical substitution in the linguistic practice of
both the erés and Gandombleé practitioners, however, raises the question

'! Póvoas translates isana as fósforo, a match (Póvoas 1989: 68).

'2 Interestingly a similar emphasis on learning a lexicon prevailed in a Yoruba lan-
guage class I had the opportunity to sit in on in Salvador in July 2005. In contrast to
the heavy emphasis on learning the grammatical structures of a new language I was
accustomed to from language classes I had taken in Europe and the United States,
these lessons in Yoruba focused primarily on lexical translation. Little if any mention
was made of the significant morpho-syntactic differences between Portuguese and
Yoruba. Instead, from day one, lessons concentrated on learning the correct Yoruba
equivalents to Portuguese words and expressions. As I eventually realized, it was not
the ability to converse in Yoruba per se that motivated my fellow classmates, all of
whom were Candomblé practitioners, but rather the ambition to address the higher
gods more adequately.
'5 ‘While I did not pursue the issue of translation further, the attempts to translate
ritual texts that I observed suggest that Candomble practitioners employ their knowledge
of individual lexemes and the contexts in which they are commonly used as clues for
interpreting the general meaning of the segment in similar ways as Wirtz (this volume)
describes for Cuban santeros.
 PERMUTATIONS OF AFRICANNESS IN CANDOMBLE 333

of how the contrast between the spirits and their mediums 1s constituted.
Indeed, if the correct use of African language lexemes such as the ones
described by Rainha is sufficient for describing even a native Portuguese
speaker’s speech as African, how do Candomble practitioners identify
her utterances as authored by an African child spirit?
Pessoa de Castro (2005) and Wafer (1991), who have both touched
on the subject of eré speech, suggest that the erés’ communications are
distinguished from those of human practitioners not by their lexical
form, but on the basis of their semantic content. According to these
authors, the erés’ use of African lexemes focuses on terms that denote
obscene or vulgar behavior and bodily practices (Pessoa de Castro 2005:
89; Wafer 1991: 63).'* Rainha’s speech, however, rarely presented such
semantic shifts towards the obscene. In fact, apart from the explicit
description of the problems she experienced in learning to communi-
cate in the Portuguese-speaking world of Bahian Candomblé, Rainha
employed very few identifiably African lexemes in the course of our
conversation. While Rainha did refer to money with zimbi and day-
break with mene-mene, both of which are considered by Candomblé
practitioners to be African expressions, the majority of non-standard
Portuguese lexemes she employed did not appear to be Africanisms.
Instead, despite the spirit's own metapragmatic emphasis on African
words and expressions, but similar to ‘Tata Muta’s observations, her
actual speech was marked by phonological and morphological processes
that made her Portuguese ‘sound’ different.
The Candomblé adepts with whom I discussed the features of eré
speech did not formulate their observations in terms of formal phono-
logical or morpho-syntactic descriptions. However, they did provide a
variety of examples of the ‘difficulties’ the spirits experienced in pro-
nouncing particular sounds and sound clusters. For example, Rainha’s
medium, Ana Celia, explained to me that instead of the standard
Portuguese third person singular pronoun vocé (also commonly used
in place of the second person singular pronoun in standard Brazilian
Portuguese) the spirit was known to say sesé, an apparently nonsensical
form constituted by reduplicating the last syllable of vocé.

'* Some examples Pessoa de Castro provides for such obscene words and expressions
adopted from Bantu languages into Bahian Portuguese and employed by the erés are:
xibungo (homosexual), guenga (prostitute), binga (penis), cabago (hymen, female virginity),
bot/ bode (menstruation) (Pessoa de Castro 2005: 89).
334 ELINA HARTIKAINEN

In comparing Rainha’s speech with that of Ana Celia, the most

marked phonological differences can be observed in her pronunciation
of the liquid consonants /r/ and /1/. As the following excerpt from my
interview with Rainha demonstrates the spirit would commonly change
the alveolar tapped /r/’s of the Bahian Portuguese pronunciation of
words such as maravilha (wonder) and senhora (madam) to /1/’s. In result,
senhora became senho[I]a,'? and maravilha ma[l]avilha:
Pow é senhola [...] é táo melevilhoso assim quando, eh, alguém diga, porque quer
dar pra vocé
So, madam...it is so wonderful when, um, someone says, because they
want to give you
que merece, é porque goste assim, é porque se representa alguma corsa,
what you deserve, its because they like...its because you represent
something.
vocé pra mim é melevelhosa, pra quem vai te amar, que var te [...] vocé é uma
malavilha,
For me you are wonderful, but for the person «who loves you [...] you
are a wonder.
Similar changes also occurred in Rainha’s speech with words like cobra
(snake), hora (hour), pra (already an abbreviated form of the preposi-
tion para) and loiva (blond), which became cob[I]a, ho[l]a, p[l]a and
loi{l]a. However, interestingly, maravilhosa (wonderful) did not become
ma|l]avilhosa, but instead m[ele]vilhosa. In fact, not all liquid con-
sonants were merged in Rainha’s speech. For example procurado and
diferente retained their normal pronunciation. This would suggest that
the mergers of liquids occurred only to the degree necessary to index
Rainha's speech as that of an eré spirit.
In addition to these prominent de-rhotacizations, shifts between liq-
uids also occurred in the opposite direction in Rainha’s speech. Thus,
for example, galinha (chicken) became ga[r]inha in the spirit's descrip-
tion of a Candomblé ceremony at which her favorite food items had
been served:

'5 In the transcriptions I provide here I underline the phonemic changes that dis-
tinguish Rainha’s pronunciation from that of the Bahian Portuguese spoken by her
medium and other members of the Candomblé community of which she is part. As a
means to keep the analysis as simple as possible, I have chosen to maintain other parts
of the lexemes as close to their orthographic transcription as possible.
 PERMUTATIONS OF AFRICANNESS IN CANDOMBLE 335

toda semana futa, eh, beliscoito,'® doge, cocada,

all through the week, fruits, um, cookies, sweets, cocada [a Bahian sweet
made of coconut],
Baton, desse que é chocolate, botava, é um bucado de coisas,
Baton, the chocolate, they’d give us, and a lot of things,
garinha, gosto muito de garinha, fazer escaldado...
chicken, I like chicken a lot, to make stews...

Similarly, filosofía became fi[rJosofia. In addition, as the example of

Jruia, which was transformed to [futa] indicates, in certain circumstances
Rainha would leave her /r/’s unpronounced. The fact that a similar
omission also occurred for the word programa, pronounced [pograma]
by Rainha, would seem to suggest that her omission of /r/’s reflected
more general Brazilian understandings of word initial consonant clusters
being difficult to pronounce for ‘African’ language speakers that already
experience problems with their /r/’s.
The central role Rainha’s apparent difficulty to differentiate between
palato-alveolar and alveolar sounds played in marking her speech as
that of an eré spirit was also supported by another set of phonetic shifts.
Similar to her alternations in the pronunciation of liquids, Rainha would
commonly shift between palato-alveolar and alveolar pronunciations
when voicing word-initial fricatives. For example, words like chamada
(called) (Jama:da] and chegar (to arrive) [Jega:] became samada [sama:
da] and segar [sega:].'”
The broad variation of liquids and especially the merger of / 1 /
and the tapped / r / common to Rainha’s speech have, in fact, been
commonly interpreted as markers of African language influence by
Brazilian linguists and non-linguists. For example, scholars like Pessoa
de Castro (2005) and Bortoni-Ricardo (1985) have maintained that the
merging of liquid consonants that is typical of vernacular Brazilian
Portuguese can be traced to the influence of such Bantu languages as
Kikongo and Kimbundo that do not distinguish between the liquids
(see e.g. Pessoa de Castro 2005: 96, Bortoni-Ricardo 1985: 58-61). In
addition to such linguistically informed interpretations, Freyre’s classic

'© Beliscoito would appear to be a play on the words biscoito (cookie) and beliscar (to
nibble, to pinch) (I thank Brian Brazeal for this observation).
'7 Note that while Rainha’s shifts between palatoalveolar and alveolar pronounciation
of liquids and fricatives are reminiscent of Chinook consonant play as described by
Sapir (1926), in this case it is the shifting itself that marks the spirit's speech as African
and not the values assigned to particular consonants.
336 ELINA HARTIKAINEN

etiology of the phonology of Brazilian Portuguese from The Masters and

the Slaves suggests that the variation has long played a central role in a
popular Brazilian imaginary about African language influence:
The Negro nurse did very often with words what she did with food: she
mashed them, removed the bones, took away the hardness, and left them
as soft and pleasing syllables in the mouth of the white child. For this
reason Portuguese as spoken in the north of Brazil, principally is one of
the most melodious forms of speech to be found anywhere in the world.
Without double 7’s or double s’s; the final syllables soft; the words all but
chewed up in the mouth. The language of the Brazilian young, and the
same is true of Portuguese children, has a flavor that is almost African
(Freyre 1946 [1933]: 343).

In addition to the phonological shifts discussed above, Rainha’s utter-

ances differed from those of her devotees in her tendency to insert velar
tapped /r/’s in front of syllables beginning with vowels in the middle of
noun phrases. ‘Thus for example the spirit pronounced satde (health) as
sarude. Similarly, scientificamente (scientifically) became si[r]entificamente,
espiritual (spiritual) espiritural, and consciente (conscious) consirente.
One of the effects such insertions of /r/’s can be seen to have had on
Rainha’s speech is the simplification of the (C)CG)V(Q) syllable structure
common to the Portuguese language to a CVCV.CV one in which all
syllables end in open vowels. For example the shift from saúde to sarúde
changes the CV.V.CV syllable structure of the common pronunciation
of the lexeme to CV.CV.CV structure. While such modifications of
syllable structure have been identified in baby talk and other simplified
registers in a wide range of languages (see e.g. Ferguson 1964, 1977),
Pessoa de Castro suggests that in relation to the Brazilian context they
should rather be interpreted as actual calques of Bantu and Yoruba
CV.CV. syllable structures.'* Interestingly, in the case of Rainha’s speech,

'8 Pessoa de Castro’s (2005) interpretation on syllable structure transformations

as calques of structures typical of Bantu languages appears to be a common one
in Brazilian lnguistics. Paralleling Pessoa de Castro’s observations, Bortoni-Ricardo
(1985) suggests that the common tendency in spoken Brazilian Portuguese to delete
post-vocalic consonants in word-end positions, particularly final /r/’s in the infinitive
forms of verbs (e.g., falar > fala) and final /s/’s that serve as plural markers for nouns
(e.g., 05 meninos > os menino), could also be interpeted as a calque of Bantu or Yoruba
syllable structures onto Portuguese. In contrast to Portuguese, all syllables in the Bantu
languages as well as in Yoruba are open, 1.e., they always end in vowels. Such deletions
of post-vocalic consonants in word-end positions are also common in Rainha’s speech.
 PERMUTATIONS OF AFRICANNESS IN CANDOMBLE 337

such syllable structure transformations occurred primarily in the case

of words and expressions that in the local language ideology would
be deemed ‘more difficult’. Accordingly, in addition to being longer in
length, such lexemes as scientificamente, espintual and consciente would be
interpreted by the majority of Rainha's devotees as part of a refined
and educated register of Portuguese. Hence, children and uneducated
people, and therefore also African child spirits, would be expected to be
less familiar with these lexemes and to experience problems with their
pronunciation. Rainha often stuttered and stumbled over the pronuncia-
tion of such higher register lexemes, only to be corrected by the more
educated of her followers. Still, even after having been corrected the
spirit would continue to mispronounce the words in question.
In addition to displaying her inability to produce the more difficult
lexemes, Rainha’s consistency in holding onto her linguistic errors points
to the crucial role her mistakes play in constructing and maintaining a
contrast between her spirit identity and Ana Celia's unpossessed human
state. Whereas the particular words and expressions the spirit identified
as African could have been easily employed by her medium as well, the
phonological and morphological peculiarities of Rainha' Portuguese
clearly distinguished her speech from Ana Celia’s.
Ironically, then, it is not the use of African languages that constitutes
Rainha’s African identity, but rather her apparent inability to master
Portuguese. The marked ways in which her African character thus
comes to be conflated with an unsocialized one reveal the significant
differences in conceptualization of the erés’ Africanness and the more
positive configurations displayed in the popular celebrations of Can-
domble. In contrast to the awe-inspiring beauty and dignified demeanor
of the higher gods, the child spirits’ Africanness stands out as distinctly
unsocialized and unsophisticated. ‘They may be African, but they are also
children. However, unlike human children, who ultimately grow up, the
erés never fully do. Instead, their character as spirit entities is centrally
constructed through their inherent immunity to socialization. In contrast
to their human hosts, no degree of linguistic or bodily instruction can
fully relieve the erés of their African ‘accents’ and infantile ways. Such a

However, the deletion of final consonants does not constitute a feature specific to the
speech of the child spirits. Instead, it is one that occurs commonly in the speech of
most Bahian Candomblé practitioners.
338 ELINA HARTIKAINEN

reliance in the erés’ identity construction on markers that would appear

to index a lack of socialization and sophistication rather than African-
ness in itself raises an important question: How do the phonological
and morphological peculiarities of eré speech come to be recognized as
African rather than merely unsocialized or unsophisticated by Bahian
Candomble practitioners?
As Irvine (1982) has argued the recognition of spirit possession per-
formances, no matter what their form, necessarily depends on their
conformity to their audience’s dramaturgical expectations. Accordingly,
for possession performances by the erés to be identified as manifesta-
tion of African child spirits, they must not only be recognized as such
(given, for example, their occurrence in the ritual sequence), but also
need to comply with their audience’s understandings of how an African
person would act, and most specifically, speak. Obviously, few of the
present-day Candomblé practitioners who manifest the spirits could
be expected to have had opportunities to interact with human native
speakers of African languages,'” or for that matter, read such linguistic
theses as Pessoa de Castro’s (2005) work concerning the particular effects
African language speakers may have had on Brazilian Portuguese. What
kind of model of Africanized Portuguese might Candomblé adherents,
then, rely on when evaluating the erés’ utterances? In the following I
will suggest that, instead of being modeled on the attempts of actual
native speakers of African languages to communicate in Portuguese,
practitioners’ understandings of what such speech sounds like are more
directly founded on the ways in which it has come to be depicted in the
Brazilian popular media. These contemporary media representations
in turn draw on an Iberian literary tradition that can be traced back
to the sixteenth century.

Representing African Speech

In an analysis on the development of Afro-Portuguese Pidgin, Lipski

(1994) describes how the speech of Sub-Saharan Africans living in the
Iberian Peninsula as slaves and bound laborers after the middle of the

'9 Despite the breadth and significance of trans-Atlantic contacts to Bahian society
after slavery that Matory (2004) describes, the majority of present-day Candombleé
practitioners amongst whom éré spirits ike Rainha manifest have few opportunities to
interact with ‘humans from Africa’ as opposed to African possession spirits.
 PERMUTATIONS OF AFRICANNESS IN CANDOMBLE 339

fifteenth century came to be depicted in contemporary literary works. In

Portugal, the hterary lingua do preto (language of the blacks), or bogal as
it was often called (a term roughly translatable as ‘savage’, ‘untamed’),
reached its high point in the sixteenth century. While this literary device
subsequently declined in elite works, it continued to thrive until the
middle of the nineteenth century in popular forms of entertainment
such as pamphlet literature (literatura de cordel) and in humorous calen-
dars directed at a working class audience. As Lipski observes ‘most of
the literary representations were humorous and unflattering, reflecting
prejudice and disdain’ (Lipski 1994: 2). The central means by which
authors communicated negative value judgments concerning Africans
was by representing their speech as a simplified and defective form
of Portuguese. Their inability to speak proper Portuguese was held to
reflect their mental inferiority.
According to Lipski it was not until representations of African speech
spread into the more popular hteratura de cordel and calendars of the
seventeenth century that this literary, and indeed, print-borne register
became consistent in its use of stereotyped linguistic elements. Signifi-
cantly for our present purposes, the markers of the literary hingua do preto
Lipski describes are the same as those that distinguish eré speech. As
Lipski observes, these texts came to increasingly mark ‘African speech’
by the massive replacement of /r/ by /l/, the addition of vowels to
break up consonant clusters and yield series of open syllables of the
general form CV and lack of gender and number concordance.* While
it is difficult to determine whether the increasingly formulaic charac-
ter of these literary representations of the speech of Africans can be
taken as evidence for the formation of a more stable Afro-Portuguese
creole among Afnicans living in Portugal—Lipski’s chief argument—it
certainly testifies to the wide-spread salience and stability of the stereo-
types themselves.’

20 Some other common elements of these representations were the use of vowel
harmony (boso<vos, deoso<deus, faramoso<formosa) that could be attributed to the
influence of Kwa and Bantu languages, the reduction of the palatal lateral /Il/ to a
fricative [y] (o1o<olho, muiere<mulher), the use of the invariant vai for ‘go’ and the
invariant copula sa, a general lack of verb conjugation and confusion with prepositions
(see Lipski 1994: 7, 11-13).
21 Here it is important to note that I am not making an argument on the actual
origins of the linguistic features understood to mark a speaker as African. Indeed, it
is possible that the particular phonetic and morphological shifts characteristic of the
representations of ‘African speech’ do reflect the attempts of African language speakers to
340 ELINA HARTIKAINEN

These Portuguese literary stereotypes were subsequently widely

adopted by Brazilian writers to portray the speech of the large num-
bers of African slaves transplanted in the New World (Lipski 1994: 6).
Indeed, as Lipski, observes many of the linguistic features employed to
represent speech as African in Brazilian texts bear little resemblance to
the vernacular Afro-Brazilian Portuguese of the time. Instead, popular
parodic accounts of Africans, such as O preto, e o bugio ambos no mato
discorrendo sobre a arte de ter dinhewro sem 1r ao Brasil (YVhe black man and the
monkey talking in the woods about the art of making money without
going to Brazil) published in 1789 (cited in Lipski 1994: 6), relied on
the stereotypes previously established by Portuguese writers to signal
‘African’ speech.
According to Lipski the appeal of literary representations of ‘Afni-
can’ speech waned as the presence of speakers of African languages
in Portugal and its colonies declined. By the mid-nineteenth century, a
majority of slaves in Brazil were likely to be native-born, first-language
speakers of Portuguese. However, and despite. Lipski’s claims to the
contrary, the stereotypes of blacks as speakers of a simplified, erroneous
register of Portuguese do not appear to have lost their salience as the
numbers of native speakers of African languages diminished. Instead,
many of the traits associated with the speech of African-born slaves
were transposed onto their Brazilian-born descendants. As a result,
a set of literary devices originally constructed to parody the halting
attempts of Africans to learn a second language was transformed
into racist characterizations of the linguistic capacities of people of
African descent. In this context, people of African descent were no
longer considered to be challenged by the interference of native African
languages in their attempts to learn Portuguese. Rather, their speech
was taken as evidence of their racially determined inability to master
it as a first language.
To this day the association of African descent with an incapacity to
speak ‘proper’ Portuguese in Brazil is clearly echoed in the way poor,
darker-skinned people are commonly portrayed in contemporary Brazil-
lan media. Á particularly revealing example of the continuing salience
of these linguistic stereotypes is provided by a skit originally presented

communicate in Portuguese to some degree. However, and irrespective of the historical

origins of these linguistic features, the question at issue here is how they entextualize
and invoke their audience’s imaginings of Africanness.
 PERMUTATIONS OF AFRICANNESS IN CANDOMBLE 34]

at the Térga Insana comedy club in Sáo Paulo that has subsequently
come to be distributed widely by the Internet service Youtube.” As a
caricature explicitly aimed to produce a humorous effect by drawing
on the audience’s pre-existing conceptualizations of poor Afro-Brazilian
favela residents, the skit goes to the maximal degree in employing the
stereotypical linguistic elements considered to typify the speech of such
people.
The six-minute skit consists of a caricaturized sales pitch by one
‘Dona Edith,’ presented as a middle-aged, Afro-Brazilian “community
leader’ from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. After the character’s confident
introduction of herself as Edith Maria Manoelina Tarabetina Capitulina
de Jesus Amor Divino, the audience learns that she has written a book
on how to educate one’s child in the favela. Significantly, as revealed
by the reactions of the audience in the clip as well as the numerous
commentaries on its Youtube page, the humorous appeal of the skit
derives not so much from Dona Edith’s stories on how to deal with
children who have become addicted to such ‘expensive’ food items as
margarine and crackers, but rather from her incorrect Portuguese and
failed attempts to sound sophisticated. When she inserts /r/’s in the
wrong places or omits them altogether, or when she mispronounces
any word that exceeds two syllables in length, the audience roars with
laughter.*
A closer examination of the linguistic devices employed to construct
Dona Edith’s character indicates how such present-day representations

*2 | thank Joao Gongalves for pointing me to this skit. It can, for example, be found
at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO8uiwx2ghlI). The fact that this particular
rendition of the skit had been viewed 176,418 times by July Ist, 2007, favorited 534
times, rated 218 times (with an average of four out of five stars), and commented
on 36 times testifies to 1ts popularity. In addition to this rendition Youtube hosts five
other clips of the skit. On July 1st, 2007, the overall number of views for the skit on
Youtube came to 902,995.
3 The comic effect of Dona Edith's pseudo-sophistication as an author in her own
right 1s even further accentuated by her revelation of being semi-illiterate. In fact as
Dona Edith explains, it was her daughter who wrote the book on the basis of her
dictation. Additionally, as becomes apparent in the course of the skit the community
leader has misunderstood the referents of ‘such concepts as child nutrition commonly
considered pertinent to educating favela residents. Thus, for example Dona Edith’s
discussion of child nutrition revolves around the problem of how to deal with children
who threaten to devour all the food in the house. Here, the ill-informed character of
Dona Edith’s advice is highlighted by her suggestion to add extra amounts of fannha
(manioc flour) to thicken otherwise insufficient quantities of beans, when the exces-
sive use of farinha has more generally been taken to be the root cause of malnutrition
among the poor in Brazil due to its low nutritional value.
342 ELINA HARTIKAINEN

of the speech of poor Afro-Brazilians bear a striking resemblance to

colonial-era literary portrayals of ‘African’ speech.”
Boa noite! Meu nome é Edith Maria Manoelina Tarabetina Cafntulina de Jesus
Amor Divino.
Good evening! My name is Edith Maria Manoelina ‘Tarabetina Capitulina
de Jesus Amor Divino.
Eu sou lide_comumténa. Eu ‘tou aqui, nao pa fala; [...] pa langa: meu hw’o que
chama
I am a community leader. I am here, not to talk, [but] to present my
book called
“Como educa: seu filho na favela”. Vocé que náo tem os pobrema que eu tenho,
“How to raise your child in the favela”. You who don't have the problems
that I do,
nao tem os pobrema que eu passo náo pode sinti: como é educa: um filho na favela,
that haven’t experienced the problems I have, cannot know what 1t 1s like
to raise a child in the favela,
mas esse lw’o que é faci:cu de le:, quer dizer é faci:cu vat ajuda: vocé compende:
but this book that is easy to read, in other words it 1s easy, it will help
you understand.
NADA DRAMA! Poque ‘tou aqui dramando nada mais as _condigdo que a gente
uve.
NOTHING OF DRAMA! Because I’m not dramatizing anything here
but the conditions we live in.

As the first lines of Dona Edith’s speech demonstrate, one of the pri-
mary linguistic means by which the character’s identity as a poor, Afro-
Brazilian resident of the favelas of Rio is signaled to the audience is the
erratic merger of the liquids /r/ and /1/. For example, as can be seen
in the third line the /1/ in problema (problem) comes to be substituted
by an /r/ leading the character to pronounce the word as pobrema.
Similarly, later on in the monologue explique becomes espriquei (see
below) as a result of the substitution of /1/’s with /r/’s in the second
syllable of the lexeme. Such an emphasis on the mispronunciation of
liquids is even further accentuated by Dona Edith’s tendency to leave
/r/’s unpronounced altogether where they would in fact be required in
standard pronunciation. ‘Thus, for example the /r/ in the first syllable of

2* In the following I will not discuss such modifications of the literary standard as
Dona Edith’s tendency to leave verb final /r/’s and the word initial /es/ for the estar
verb unpronounced, since these are common to the spoken vernacular of Brazilian
Portuguese across classes. Instead I will focus on the linguistic characteristics that audi-
ence reactions reveal to hold special salience as indices of her identity.
 PERMUTATIONS OF AFRICANNESS IN CANDOMBLE 343

problema is omitted. In parallel fashion, pra (to) becomes pa, livro (book)
liv’o, comprende (understand) compende and porque (because) poque.
Furthermore, paralleling Lipski’s observations concerning literary
representations of African speech, Dona Edith’s utterances present a
clear lack of gender and number concordance. Instead of simply omit-
ting the word final /s/ by which plurals are marked in Portuguese as is
common to vernacular forms of the language, Dona Edith’s inability
to distinguish plural forms from singular ones is highlighted by her use
of lexical items with irregular plural forms such as her formulation
of as condicao in the last line of the above quote. The lexical item’s
irregular plural conjugation would be as condigées, which does not lend
itself as easily to abbreviations as do other more regular Portuguese
nouns. Thus, while the omission of final plural /s/’s might in other
cases be interpreted as an attempt to produce open syllables of the CV
form, as suggested by Pessoa de Castro (1995) and Bortoni-Ricardo
(1985), Dona Edith’s utterance of as condicao suggests that she indeed
simply cannot comply with Portuguese languages norms for number
concordance.
Finally, and paralleling the problems Rainha experienced in pro-
nouncing higher register lexemes, Dona Edith’s linguistic incapacity 1s
also accentuated by her mispronunciations of such ‘longer’ words as facil
(easy) and dificuldade (difficulty). ‘The semantic content of these words
of course highlights the linguistic ‘difficulties’ the character experiences
even when uttering what in other contexts would be considered com-
mon and hence ‘easy’ lexemes.
The semblances Dona Edith’s manner of speaking exhibits in com-
parison with the earlier literary depictions of Portuguese spoken by
African that Lipski describes reveal the strong influence such linguistic
stereotypes continue to hold in contemporary Brazil. Despite common
assertions that it is impossible to identify a Brazilian person’s racial
identity on the basis of speech alone, the racial implications of Dona
Edith’s manner of speaking are obvious. Her status as a favela resident
as well as her physical appearance, not to mention her title of com-
munity leader that suggests a connection to black identity movements,
all unmistakably reveal that the ulumate source of her incapacities may
well lie in her African descent.”

“ The continuing salience of the linguistic features that characterize Dona Edith’s
speech as markers of Africanness is also demonstrated by the fact that popular comedic
representations of ‘unsophisticated’ and poor white Brazilians are not constructed by
344 ELINA HARTIKAINEN

If we take in account the ways in which the creation of Dona

Edith’s racial identity is founded on the implicit equation of a lack of
socialization and sophistication with African descent, it is perhaps not
so surprising that the performance and recognition of the erés’ African
character would appear to be constructed through the same linguistic
means. In addition to being African, as child spirits the erés are by
definition lacking in proper socialization and cultural sophistication.
However, what perhaps ought to come as a surprise is that such a group
of spirits would play a central role in a religion primarily practiced by
impoverished Brazilians of African descent. Indeed, how should we
interpret the erés’ peculiar character?

Mediating discourses of Afmcanness

Following a general paradigm shift in research on the African diaspora

from attempts to trace African continuities to an interest in the discursive
processes by which situated understandings of Africanness have come to
be constituted, recent analyses of Candomblé have turned to examine
the particular ways in which its celebrated presentation as an authentic
African religion was constructed. Scholars like Dantas (1988), Wafer
(1991), Capone (1999), Matory (1999), Palmié (2005) and Teles dos
Santos (2005) have variously demonstrated that the particular model of
Africanness that came to dominate the contemporary celebrations of
Afro-Brazilian religion was by no means an ontological given. Instead,
as they argue, the particular claims on historical continuities between
Bahian religious practices and their African antecedents ought to be
understood as produced by the strategic maneuverings of a number of
well-placed individuals on both sides of the Atlantic.”’ As a result of this

the same means. Instead, the poverty and lack of sophistication of white characters 1s
commonly represented by means of a rustic rural caipira accent the linguistic features
of which are noticeably different from those attributed to Dona Edith in the Terga Insana
show. For examples of skits that employ linguistic markers to index a white character’s
poverty and lack of education see e.g. Prima nica, prima pobre (Rich cousin, poor cousin)
on Zorra Total, for regional differences see e.g. Os Trapalhóes (Videoclips of both of these
comedy shows aired by O Globo, the Brazilian national television network, can be found
at e.g. www.globo.com.br and www.youtube.com).
2% For an essay foundational to this new research agenda see Scott (1991).
27 As Palmié observes, ‘“cultural origins” or “continuities”’—whether posited as
objects of disciplined inquiry or as authenticating predicates that actors apply to
their own cultural practices—are never mere objective givens. They are the discursive
 PERMUTATIONS OF AFRICANNESS IN CANDOMBLE 345

research we now have a good comprehension of the intricate processes

by which the celebrated images of the ‘Africanness’ of Gandomblé
came to be established and valorized. However, we still lack a deeper
understanding of how the now dominant models of the religion relate
to other less-appreciative views on African influences. Indeed, analysts
of Brazil have commonly drawn a strong distinction between positive
and negative understandings of African influence.”® Yet we know little
about how these discourses might intersect with each other. As the
case of the erés demonstrates, the division analysts have drawn between
celebratory and derogatory. discourses on Africanness 1s not necessarily
as clear-cut on the level of Gandomblé religious practice. Quite the
contrary. While the erés represent a configuration of Africanness oppos-
ing that for which the religion has come to be celebrated, they also
play an important role as necessary mediators between the acclaimed
Africanness of the higher gods and their mortal followers. Indeed,
ideologies of spirit possession in Gandomblé held by the practitioners
themselves would seem to suggest that the positive, glorified aspects of
Africanness can, in practice, be accessed and realized only through the
mediation of the erés—-spirits that, in other words, blatantly conform to
the racist stereotypes many darker skinned adherents of the Gandomblé
encounter, only too often, in their everyday lives.
As a result, the erés mediations do not come about painlessly. Instead,
the stigmatized antics of the child spints often provoke significant feel-
ings of ambivalence and even anxiety among their Afro-Brazilian hosts
who commonly confront the continuing salience of racial stereotypes
that shape and constrict the range of social identities open to them
in a society that has come to capitalize on its ‘African heritage’, but
nonetheless continues to marginalize its darkest-skinned members. As
several mediums revealed to me, they often felt great embarrassment
over the grotesque conduct and speech of the spirits that they were
vicariously obliged to participate in.” The ambiguous feelings the

products of retrospective evaluations hinging on specific criteria and interests” (Palmié

2006: 101).
28 For a clear exposition of this dichotomy see Capone’s (this volume) discussion of
Bastide’s distinction between good Afncamtude and bad Négntude.
22 Many of the Candomble practitioners I spoke to described mediumship as an
arduous obligation imposed on them by the gods—one that in many cases is taken up
only reluctantly. As several adepts explained to me: “Quem “tá dentro, ndo sat, e quem ‘té fora,
nao entra’ (If you’re inside [the community], you can’t leave, and if you’re an outsider,
346 ELINA HARTIKAINEN

mediums had towards their erés’ actions were only intensified by the
increasing numbers of local non-initiates and tourists that have come
to attend Candomble ceremonies as a consequence of the religion’s
popularly celebrated status. Where fellow Candomble practitioners could
be expected to be able to distinguish the African child spirits’ actions
from those of their mediums, outside observers might not be trusted
to be as perceptive or understanding. Rather, they are often assumed
to take the spirit manifestations as confirmation for the veracity of the
more widely circulating derogatory characterizations of Africanness.
Candomblé spirit possession has often been viewed as a potent
form of ritual inversion (see e.g. Bastide 1978a [1960), Wafer 1991).*°
However, even though possession by the onxds, inquices and voduns may
have constituted a historically powerful weapon to counter dominant
racial and social hierarchies, the mediums’ discomfort demonstrates
that the child spirits’ manifestations do not hold such clear oppositional
potential. Indeed, the case of the erés would largely appear to evade
such interpretative models. Little would seem to. be gained from enact-
ing forms of spirit possession that directly reproduce derogatory racial
stereotypes, rather than invalidate them. If so, what, then is possession
by the erés ‘all about’?
Here Crapanzano’s (1977) insights into the multiple functions that
spirit possession practices may discharge in a given context suggest a
promising alternative direction of analysis. As Crapanzano observes,
besides merely providing a means to ritual inversion, spirit possession
performances often operate in much broader terms as ‘an idiom for
articulating a certain range of experience’ (Crapanzano 1974: 412). The
explanatory power of such a—significantly broadened—framework for
understanding the erés is exemplified by Lindsay Hale’s analysis of a
similarly ambiguous group of Brazilian spirits, the preto velhos received
by practitioners of Umbanda. Like the erés, these African slave spirits

you can’t enter). According to their exegesis of this saying, it highlights the lack of
agency human adepts are seen to have over their involvement in Candomble. As they
explained, the decision to become a Candomble medium is not for the human prac-
titioner to make. Such understandings of spirit mediumship as a demanding life-tme
obligation imposed on an individual by the gods is common to many spirit possession
traditions. For comparative examples see e.g. Deren (1970), Crapanzano (1980), Boddy
(1989), McCarthy Brown (1991), Kenyon (1999), Richman (2005).
30 For example Bastide argued that possession by the orxds, inguices and voduns, ‘the
rulers of the sky, the storm, or the sea’, provided socially marginalized mediums a
means to dispel their feelings of inferiority and momentarily realize an alternative
social order (1978a [1960]: 234).
 PERMUTATIONS OF AFRICANNESS IN CANDOMBLE 347

appear at first glance to reproduce popular stereotypes. However, as

Hale contends, it is precisely the ambiguous nature of the preto velhos’
relationships to Brazilian racial stereotypes that explains their appeal
among poor, Afro-Brazilian practitioners of Umbanda. Instead of
merely reproducing derogatory racial stereotypes, the slave spirits act
as flexible sign vehicles through which adherents may ‘interpret and
explore themes of racism, national identity, domination, suffering and
redemption’ that may not otherwise become discursively available to
them because such topics have become effectively ‘silenced’ in (and
by) deep-seated ideologies of the non-existence of racism in Brazil
(Hale 1997: 393, cf. Burdick 1998, Sheriff 2001). It is in this way that
spirits like the erés provide their audience an especially potent means
to ‘speak to recurring, unsettled questions of Afro-Brazilian experi-
ence and national identity’ (Hale 1997: 394). The manner in which
the erés’ Africanness is constructed clearly opens similar possibilities.
By paralleling long-standing but still present Brazilian stereotypes that
conflate African descent with childlike social incompetence, the erés’
manifestations would seem to hold rich potential not only for mediat-
ing different configurations of Africanness but also for articulating and
discussing experiences of racial discrimination that would otherwise
remain discursively unavailable.

Acknowledgments

Funding for this research was provided by the University of Chicago

Century Fellowship, the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the University
of Chicago Center for Latin American Studies Field Research Grants.
Earlier versions of the paper were presented at a linguistic anthropol-
ogy seminar on ‘qualia’ taught by Michael Silverstein in 2006, and
the Semiotics workshop of the University of Chicago in 2007. I am
especially indebted to Stephan Palmié and Michael Suverstein for their
generous feedback and support. In addition, I wish to thank Andy
Graan, Brian Brazeal, Sean Mitchell and Greg ‘Thompson for their
helpful comments. Finally, I want to express my thanks to Rainha
das Margaridas, Ana Celia and the members of her family and
Candomblé community, and Tata Muta as well as the numerous un-
named Candomblé practitioners who have welcomed me into to their
lives in Salvador. Without their generous help none of this research
would have been possible.
348 ELINA HARTIKAINEN

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 FREE TO BE A SLAVE: SLAVERY AS METAPHOR IN THE
AFRO-ATLANTIC RELIGIONS

J. Lorand Matory

Introduction

Esú Láaroyé
Exú Laroié
Egu, Lord of the Crossroads, hear my plea
Alaroyé Agó
Papa Legba, ouvé baryé pou mwen
Owner of Power, open the gate for me.

African diaspora scholars and lay people tend to represent ‘resistance’

and the desire for ‘freedom’ as the founding principles and enduring
essence of black New World identities. Yet many of the religions that
we allegedly ‘retain’ by dint of ‘cultural resistance’, as well as many that
we ‘freely’ choose, configure human relations to the divine in images
of un-freedom, representing gods as monarchs, feudal lords, masters
and shepherds, while charactenzing worshipers as subjects, slaves and
sheep. This essay surveys the well-documented but taken-for-granted
images of enslavement at the heart of Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Cuban,
Haitian and Black North American religions that employ slavery as
a sacred metaphor of proper personhood, personal efficacy and moral
rectitude.’
This comparative view thus awakens us to an apparent irony within
the political traditions that the United States best exemplifies. On the
one hand, most western nation states and the neo-liberal global capital-
ist order have conferred enormous prestige on the term ‘freedom’ as a
verbal representation of social health and consumer self-fashioning. Yet
Orlando Patterson (1991; 1982) has argued that freedom and slavery

' I dedicate this paper to my father, William E. Matory, MD, a faithful servant of
his family and of his people. Special thanks to Professor Ibrahim Sundiata for inviting
me to reflect upon these issues at the Howard University conference on ‘Slavery: A
Comparative Exploration’ (18-19 May 2001) and to the friends who illuminated them
for me based upon their personal experience: Ms Shirley Pérez, Mr Ernesto Pichardo,
Professor Liza McAlister, Professor Stephan Palmié and Professor Gerdés Fleurant.
392 J. LORAND MATORY

are interdependent in their meanings and that the ex-slave 1s the virtual
founder of the ‘freedom’ concept and its extensive web of metaphorl-
cal entailments. Barbara Fields (1990) and Rebecca Scott (1988) have
highlighted the temporal and interregional variation in the meaning of
‘freedom’. I, in turn, will argue that ‘slavery’ too 1s conceived of differ-
ently in different times and different places, and that ‘slavery’ remains
the chief of a whole family (or clan) of living metaphors through which
the descendants of Africans throughout the New World regularly (and
at their most serious moments of self-fashioning) understand themselves
and act upon their worlds.
Hence, this paper is not precisely about slavery and religion but about
when and how some present-day people think about slavery when they
are pursuing healing, wealth, power, and safe haven from their adver-
saries. It concerns how religious people’s ntual and verbal images of
slavery reflect and affect their present-day social worlds. I have spent
much of the past quarter-century observing, living with and relishing
órisa worship in Nigeria and various other religions of song, dance,
oratory, sacrifice, divination and spirit possession in the Americas.
These religions are known variously as ‘Candomblé’ in Brazil, ‘Palo
Mayombe’ and ‘Ocha’ in Cuba and its diaspora, and Sé Lwa (or, for
ease of reference, “Vodou’) in Haiti. I have also attended many Nigerian
services for Allah, not to mention my lifetime of conviviality with the
worshipers of Jesus all around the Atlantic permeter. In these traditions,
my frends’ dramatization and talk of slavery might well memorialize
the bondage suffered by their pre-twentieth-century ancestors, but they
also serve as a changing ‘model of and model for’ (Geertz 1973: 93) a
twentieth- and twenty-first-century social reality.
First, legally free people have long invoked slavery in a trope called
‘litotes’ or ‘negation’—that 1s to say, in the manner of certain figures of
speech, in which an affirmative is expressed by negation of the contrary.
The meaningfulness of certain performances also rests upon this trope.
For example, ‘blackface’ minstrelsy was one highly effective symbolic
means by which not-quite-white immigrants—most prominently, early-
twentieth-century Jewish and Irish ones—showed that they were not black
and therefore deserved the privileges of full citizenship in the United
States. To accentuate the point visually, they often applied bright white
make-up around the eyes before applying the burnt cork to the rest of
the face (see also Ignatiev 1995; Roediger 1991). Similarly, at private
parties and in comedy routines, African Americans sometimes contrive
to dance or talk like white people in order to demonstrate what we are
 SLAVERY AS METAPHOR IN THE AFRO-ATLANTIG RELIGIONS 353

not. African Americans thus identify and make a distinguishing mark of

our allegedly unique competencies. We thus construct our black selves
through the trope of litotes.
So, when I cite the litotic invocation of slavery, I am identifying,
for example, the dominant use of slavery in US political discourses, as
when the Founding Fathers urged the British not to treat ‘us Ameri-
cans’ as though ‘we’ were their slaves (see, e.g., Jordan 1968: 291-92).
In much of Afro-North Americans’ public discourse about our Black
selves as well, ‘slavery’ appears as the tropic negation of our proper
individual and collective -selves—hence the enduring importance of
‘Uncle Tom’ in the African American imaginary. Yet, in the religions
that I research, slavery is less often the negation of the normative
present than a metonym and a metaphor of it. Instead of being the
opposite of the desired personal or social state, the image and mimesis
of slavery become highly flexible instruments of legally free people’s
aspirations for themselves and for their loved ones.

The situational virtue of slavery and freedom

The cross-cultural encounter invariably requires a degree of moral

relativism. What is nght in our eyes is often wrong in theirs. Yet it
is a product of self-serving convenience, rather than honesty, that
ethnocentrists often judge the Other as though he were the moral
opposite of the self. With respect to good and evil—as well as freedom
and slavery—the Afro-Latin religions of spirit possession dramatize a
situational morality that challenges Christian America’s pretensions of
moral purity. The apparent differences between the moralities of the
modern Afro-Atlantic religions and the Abrahamic faiths variously
frighten, puzzle and intrigue western Christians, who, particularly in the
US, maintain an idealistic vision of their own faith. In fact, much of
the ethical reasoning embodied in the Afro-Atlantic gods resembles the
ethics of the Old ‘Testament high god, as well as the real-world conduct
of contemporary Christians, Muslims and Jews. For example, in both
sets of religions kindness, generosity and forgiveness are the preroga-
tives of power; the threat of rebellion, defeat or oppression sometimes
legitimately demands resort to terrible, destructive powers.
Practitioners of Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Ocha, Haitian Séu Lwa
and similar religions avow that survival ultimately depends on one’s
ability to ‘work with the right and with the left”. Communal piety and
354 J. LORAND MATORY

the worship of esteemed gods occupy a central place in the organization

of religious communities. However, self-protection, self-aggrandizement
and even anti-social magic hold an acknowledged place in the ritual
world of most temples. Therefore, no one’s practice is pure—any
more than any individual in Judeo-Christian North American culture
is considered purely good or purely evil.
There is, however, a major difference between Abrahamic and
Afro-Atlantic morality. ‘The Abrahamic religions tend to advocate a
homogeneous set of behavioral injunctions, while condemning outsid-
ers as inferior. The Afro-Atlantic religions, on the other hand, tend to
acknowledge a multiplicity of divine personalities and a multiplicity
of rule sets surrounding each. Virtue lies in the deft management of
social and divine heterogeneity, rather than in the rigid imposition of
a single divine will or rule set (see also K.M. Brown 1987; Chernoff
1979). Just as the gods must get along, so must their followers, and a
single person must often harmonize the demands of the multiple gods
and spirits, who inhabit their bodies and their communities.
Also unlike the Abrahamic faiths, in which ethnic and religious group-
ings—such as ‘Jew’ vs. ‘Gentile’ or ‘goy’, ‘Christian’ vs. ‘heathen’, and
‘believer’ vs. ‘infidel’ or ‘kafir-—posit the unworthiness of the Other,
the Afro-Latin American religions often employ ethnicity as a metaphor
for the complementary and equally necessary practice of the ‘nght’
and the ‘left’ hands. Haitian, Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian religious
traditions are each sub-divided into ‘nations’, which are believed to cor-
respond to the African origins of each ethnic sub-division. For example,
Cuba hosts a “Congo” nation and a Yoruba-affiliated 'Lucumí” nation.
Afro-Brazilian and Haitian religions host similar sacred sub-divisions.
However, cultural historian Stephan Palmié (2002) rightly corrects the
premise that such sub-divisions, or nations, owe the distinctiveness of
their practices entirely to the diversity of their African origins. In fact,
each Afro-Latin nation is a product of interaction among nations,
and of an emergent division of ritual labor. I would add some further
sources of differentiation: the class differences between nations and,
consequently, between diverse nations’ ability to travel and promote
their interests among New World elites (Matory 1999a; 1999b; 2005).
For both reasons, some nations enjoy greater prestige and better moral
reputations than others in their American host societies.
Particularly in Cuba and Haiti, those religious practices identified
with West African origins (that is, in Nigeria and the People’s Republic
of Benin) tend to be associated with communal piety and the worship
 SLAVERY AS METAPHOR IN THE AFRO-ATLANTIC RELIGIONS 355

of esteemed gods. These traditions are called ‘Ocha’ or ‘Lucumi’ in

Cuba and ‘Rada’ in Haiti. On the other hand, those religions widely
identified with West-Central African origins (in the Democratic Republic
of Congo and the Republic of Congo), which emphasize work with
the spirits of the dead, are disproportionately suspected of self-protec-
tive, self-aggrandizing and even anti-social magic. ‘These traditions are
called ‘Palo Mayombe’ in Cuba. In Haiti they are associated with the
‘Petwo’ nation and with the activities of priests known as the bdkd.” In
fact, though, the division of ritual labor among the nations 1s seldom
clear cut.
It is against this backdrop that I propose to examine some imagery
that many practitioners condemn as amoral and profess to be beyond
the limits of acceptable practice. The reader is warned, therefore,
not to judge any whole tradition according to the apparently malign
practices that I have selected for examination. ‘hese are related to a
far wider range of benign practices in the same way that Satanism 1s
related to Christianity and Judaism: they belong to the same family
of symbols, myths, expressive possibilities and culturally conceivable
forms of conduct within western culture. Moreover, I hope to illustrate
that, despite North Americans’ predilection for self-idealization, the
same situational morality exists at the heart of the officially secular
democracy of the United States. I will argue that the joint necessity of
‘working with the nght hand’ and ‘working with the left’ in the Afro-
Latin American traditions illuminates the similar inter-dependency of
‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ in North American religious and political life.
In sum, this paper concerns the North American discourse of ‘slavery’
and ‘freedom’ as they might be viewed through the lens of the Afro-
Latin American religions. First, however, let us more closely examine
the case that seems most to contradict this Afro-Latin vision.

? Unlike their counterparts in Brazil and Cuba, the nachons of Haiti are typically
families of gods rather than groupings of temples, and the Yoruba-afhliated Haitian
‘Nago’ nation is a sub-set of the larger Rada nation, which, named after the West
African city of Allada, embraces multiple ethnic categones from the Gulf of Guinea.
In Haiti, the nation bearing the most obvious references to West-Central Africa—the
Petwo nation—is associated with anger and brutality. ‘Thus Haiti fits the general pat-
tern of crediting West African-identified and West-Central African-identified religious
categories with opposite moral values (see, e.g., Métraux 1959: 86—7). For an explora-
tion of the economic and political roots of the moral superiority attributed to West
African-inspired denominations and practices, see Matory 1999a.
396 J. LORAND MATORY

America: ‘the home of the un-slave’

Most US North Americans represent slavery as nothing short of a

horror, as an unnatural aberration, and as the anti-type of the logic of
natural agency that we call ‘freedom’. US notions of ‘freedom’ posit
that it is normal for an adult individual to move about as he or she
pleases, to consume as he or she pleases, to retain the profits from his
or her exchanges and to object if he or she believes those freedoms
are being unduly infringed upon.
Such ‘freedom’ is limited by numerous regulatory conventions govern-
ing how one can speak, what one must pay to reach certain audiences,
where one can move about, at what hours, in what conveyances, which
resources must be shared with the state, who 1s free to earn how much
profit and in what ways. Hence, the ‘free’ person recognizes him- or
herself not by the absence of responsibilities or encumbrances to his or
her individual self-indulgence but by the existence of a conceptually
opposite population that is not only far more encumbered but which,
by reason of place or race of birth, deserves to be more encumbered
and, more importantly, is nghtly subject to corporal punishment and
restraint beyond the age of majority (Patterson 1991).
The positional descendants of slave-owners in the United States tend
to regard slavery as a regrettable mistake or inconsistency that, through
the vision of certain wise slaveholders and the ultimate triumph of log1-
cal consistency, was overcome, just as British government restrictions
on the practice of alternative cults and on American commerce were
overcome. The descendants of African slaves in the United States, on
the other hand, tend to regard slavery as the past form of an enduring
hypocrisy, which, in every subsequent generation, has allowed whites to
collude in denying to the descendants of slaves some form of ‘freedom’
or another that is otherwise publicly promised to all. In our religions,
Black North Americans therefore sing of being released from bond-
age, and we sometimes even renounce personal names that recall our
ancestors’ servitude to immigrants from the Bnitish Isles. (Distinctly
African-American names often convey the bearer’s dignity through
French-, Arabic- or African-sounding contrast to Anglo-Saxon names.
Ironically, many of the Arabic names avow the bearer’s enslavement
to Allah. Only at first sight is it ironic that those oppressed within one
imperial metropole construct submission to rival empires as a form
of spiritual resistance. The citation of obscurantist French writings
and the idealization of France play a similar role among the middling
 SLAVERY AS METAPHOR IN THE AFRO-ATLANTIC RELIGIONS 357

elites of the American academic class.) Black North Americans typi-

cally imagine the slave as the kidnapped and bloodily beaten man, the
raped woman, the child sold off from her mother. The implication of
bodily assault is emphasized.
Details notwithstanding, most black and white Americans (as well as
other black Atlantic anglophones) seem to agree in representing slav-
ery as the opposite of a normative present-day freedom. For example,
despite his aim to diminish the centrality of the United States in rep-
resentations of African-diaspora culture, the influential work of Paul
Gilroy (e.g., 1993) cleaves closely to Black North Americans’ public ide-
ology about the genesis of our culture and our peoplehood. For Gilroy,
the African diaspora is no mere ‘survival’ of African culture. Instead,
disappointment with the failed promises of the French Enlightenment
and the sublimated pain of the Middle Passage are the driving forces
behind the cultures of the African diaspora.
For many contemporary African Americans (and particularly the intel-
lectuals), slavery is then the foul against which our culture is believed to
have developed or the mire that, through resistance, we have striven to
rise above. Slavery is the lost progress from which we hope to recover
and the nullification of personal and collective identity, which we have
only gradually and partially reclaimed or replaced. Slavery legally made
African Americans into objects of exchange, rather than exchangers,
and thus the opposite of people in a capitalist society.

Masters who worship the slave

I admit that this sketch of present-day North Americans’ image of

slavery is over-simple and runs the risk of trivializing a subject we
all take very seriously. But it is serious enough to serve a heuristic
purpose—to capture a remarkable contrast between images of slavery
among Black estadoumdenses, on the one hand, and some other black
Atlantic peoples, on the other. For example, one well-known song
casually invokes slaves (¢ru) and pawns (iwo/fa)’ as the instruments of
the deepest love known to Yoruba people: a parent’s and, implicitly, a
mother’s love for her child:

> In late-precolonial and early colonial Yorubaland, iwvofa were usually minor relatives
lent to labor for the creditor in order to pay off the debtor’s debt.
398 J. LORAND MATORY

Aso t’o ba dara, maa ra f’omoo mi.

Ewu t’o ba dara maa ra f’omoo mi.
Gele t’o ba dara maa ra f’omoo mi
Fila to ba dara maa ra f’omoo mi
Ti m ba Pogun eru,
Ki n yá 1wofa ogbon,
[Repeat]
Io t'aa ba ku o,
S'omo Pa dele?
Baba Poke je ki oo0omo mi
Wo ile dee mi,
Nitori pe omo Paso aye.
Omo Paso.
Omo Paso aye.
Omo Paso.
[Repeat]
Good cloth 1 will buy for my child.
A good piece of clothing 1 will buy for my child.
A good head-tie I will buy for my child.
A good hat I will buy for my child.
If I own twenty slaves,
If I command thirty pawns,
The day that we die, I really mean it,
Aren’t children the ones that we leave behind in the house?
Father above, let my children
Look after the house for me,
Because children are the clothing of life.
Children are clothing.
Children are the clothing of life.
Children are clothing.
(Emphasis mine)
In this song, clothing, slaves and offspring are treated as similarly inani-
mate extensions of the agent and narrator. Inborn agency, nghts or
freedom are not what distinguishes the beloved child from the clothing
and the slaves. Rather, it is the child’s unique role in the posthumous
survival of the agent’s social personality.
In a further West African example, Judy Rosenthal (1997: 100-21)
reports on the Gorovodu and Mama Tchamba priests among the late-
twentieth-century Ewe of Togo, who worship the spirits of their slaves,
incorporating—through spirit possession—and serving those who once
served them. The slave is thus not a foil to the selves that these priests
aspire to be but, argues Rosenthal, their means to healing, spiritual
counsel and personal wholeness. By reconciling male with female and
the southern slave-owner with the northern slave in relationships of
 SLAVERY AS METAPHOR IN THE AFRO-ATLANTIC RELIGIONS 359

sacred reciprocity and union, possession by these slave spirits resists

the alienating hierarchies of colonialism and capitalism, as well as
the colonialist ‘divide-and-conquer’ strategy of pitting northern and
southern ethnic groups against one another.
The descendants of some New World slaveholders also actively seek to
re-link themselves (which 1s, after all, the etymological implication of all ‘reli-
gion’) with the slaves of their ancestors. For example, the all white Society
for the Preservation of Spirituals in Charleston, South Carolina, relives
and laments, through the music of nineteenth-century black slaves,
the loss of the conviviality that this group believes existed between its
ancestors and their slaves. Made up exclusively of the children and
grandchildren of slaveholding South Carolina Low Country planters,
the Society has, since around 1923, endeavored to preserve the nine-
teenth-century, pre-"concert hall’ versions of the Negro spirituals that
African Americans themselves have progressively abandoned. The group
not only studies and transcribes these ‘authentic’ forms of the Negro
spiritual, but, until recently, performed and recorded them in carefully
reproduced Gullah dialect. Whatever last-ditch efforts at paternalism
one might suspect in this project, the musical results and the sincerity
of the performers are sometimes moving and beautiful (Howe 1930;
Smythe et al. 1931; Society for the Preservation of Spirituals [recording]
1955; Puckett 1969 [1926]). While the Society’s transcriptions of Gullah,
like Newbell Niles Puckett’s (1969 [1926]) and Joel Chandler Harris’s
(1982 [1880]) transcriptions of Black English generally, seem intent
on conveying the ignorance or naivete of the original speakers—such
as ‘wuz’ for ‘was’ and ‘frum’ for ‘from’—the introductory presentation
of Augustine ‘I’ Smythe and the performance of this white choir, as
recorded in 1955, struck me as both sensitive and warm.‘
It is through both contempt for and admiration of the slave that
not-so-white immigrants too have linked themselves to Americanness.
Blackface minstrelsy is the most influential and widely cited instance
of this phenomenon (e.g., Lott 1993). But not-so-white immigrants
have shared leadership in the folkloric representation and use of the United
States’s principal racial Other as well. On the one hand, with a Mis-
sissipp1 College and a Yale degree, Puckett published numerous books

* My further sources of information on the Society include letters from Dale

Rosengarten to the author (dated 5 September 1996 and 12 October 1996) and a
letter from Mary Julia Royall to Dale Rosengarten (n.d.), kindly copied to the author
by Dr Rosengarten on 5 September 1996.
360 J. LORAND MATORY

on southern Black folklore, including Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro

(1969 [1926]). On the other hand, unlike most of his southern white
comrades 1n the fetishization of the slave, Joel Chandler Harris had
actually grown up poor, the illegitimate son of an Insh day-laborer.
But, like many Irish immigrants and their children, he had a great
investment in America’s guarantee of social superiority for those who
could call themselves white. ‘Thus, he became a dramatic spokesman
for the southern gentry, the goodness of its ways, and, above all, the
wisdom and loving submission of the old black slave. Harris is best
known as the creator of Uncle Remus, through whose fictional mouth
he narrated the folktales he had heard from African Americans. His
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1982 [1880]) became the basis
of a popular Disney movie, ‘Song of the South’ (1946).°
Sacred performances like those of Charleston’s Society for the
Preservation of Spirituals are also common in the Latin American
lands of mestizaje and “racial democracy”. For example, white practi-
tioners of religions hke Umbanda in Brazil and Kardecist Spiritism
(or Espiritsmo) in Cuba and Puerto Rico call in the slaves to heal and
make them whole. Practitioners of these traditions variously worship
the Yoruba-related messenger god Ext and the spirits of dead blacks,
Indians and Gypsies. ‘These religions are also grounded in the teachings
of Allan Kardec, a spirit channeled by French mystic Hippolyte Rivail.
His books (e.g., Kardec 1944 [1857]) have circulated widely in Latin
America since the nineteenth century. Among the premises of Kardecist
Spiritism is the view that human beings are in a position to ‘enlighten’
and ‘elevate’ the ‘unevolved’ spirits of those who died uneducated or
in a socially lowly position. Since some spirits are more ‘evolved’ and
‘enlightened’ than others, they too can charitably assist suffering or
unevolved spirits and people toward wellness and enlightenment. Thus,
Umbanda practitioners host sessées (‘sessions’) and Caribbean spiritists
host misas espinituales (‘spiritual masses’) where enlightened people assist
unenlightened spirits, and, more importantly, spirits of all sorts help
living people to solve their worldly problems. Those spirits typically
do so by possessing their human mediums and offering both ‘spiritual
cleansings’ and ritual or practical advice.

> See, for example, Who Was Who in Amenca (1968: vol. IV, 768; May 1983: vol.
108, 218); Trosky and Olendorf (1992: vol. 137, 191-37). See also Ignatiev. (1995)
on the violent and litotic efforts of Insh immigrants to prove their whiteness in the
nineteenth- and twentieth-century US.
 SLAVERY AS METAPHOR IN THE AFRO-ATLANTIG RELIGIONS 361

The pretos velhos, or ‘old blacks’, of Umbanda and the Congo spirits of
Caribbean spiritism are the spirits of dead slaves. ‘They are arguably the
most numerous and active spirits in these traditions of spiritual healing.
The Congo spirits are usually imagined or depicted as petroleum-black
slaves—whether as raggedly dressed and muscular field hands or as
elderly, white-clad and white-haired house servants. These spirits come
in vividly diverse types, and display a theatrical complexity of character.
While not free of racism and condescension, white priests of Cuban
Spiritism depict their slave spirits as multi-faceted and dynamic—ust as
multi-faceted and dynamic as those spirits’ interventions in the priests’
own lives. ‘These slave spirits are called by many names: muertos (‘dead
people’); Gongos and Congas (‘Congo people’); madamos and madamas;
and eguns (from the Yoruba for ‘ancestral spirits’). This last appellation
marks such priests’ adherence to both Spintism and Ocha, the Yoruba-
afhliated worship of the Afro-Cuban gods known as onchas.
The Alarcons® of Miami, who practice this religion, fled Cuba after
the 1959 socialist revolution and have since prospered in the wholesal-
ing of produce. Though white and Republican, the family is zealously
Africa-centered in its interpretation of the religion and, so, regards
the gods as Yoruba and upholds Yoruba linguistic standards wherever
possible. The dead person who is central to the Alarcóns' religious life
is Encarnacion de la Caridad y Rodriguez, or ‘Caridad’. She is the
main egun, or ‘spirit of the dead’, working with the mother of my best
friend in this family (let us call him Eduardo).
Caridad, I am told, looks like Aunt Jemima and was not just any old
slave. She had been enslaved as a child by a Portuguese ship owner,
who found her with her brothers and ‘took’ them all from some part
of Nigeria, but not the Yoruba part. Nonetheless, once in Cuba, she
was ordained as a priestess of Ochun—Yoruba goddess of gold, amber
and sensuality. She was then raised in the Cuban home of the shipper’s
family (one of several homes owned by this wealthy slaveholder). ‘There
she became the main cook and raised the children, later taking care
of the wife whenever she traveled. The lady of the house could not
bear children, so, with her consent, Gandad bore three children by the
master. Therefore, according to Eduardo, Caridad did not experience
the terrible aspects of slavery.

° The family’s name has been changed.

362 J. LORAND MATORY

In fact, she had authority over all the other slaves, which authority
remains key to her modus operand: until today. Caridad arrives regularly
in the body of Eduardo's mother during misas espirituales, or “spiritual
masses’, where the dead woman issues warnings and directs her ‘clan’
of fellow spirits to clear out any malign influences that might otherwise
injure her living hosts. She is a fia, as house slaves were honorifically
addressed, and is therefore more educated and refined than the field
slaves. Her Spanish is not perfect, but it is far more comprehensible
than that of the field slaves. Her behavior 1s said to be ‘less harsh’ and
her posture quite erect. Whereas the field slaves sit on the floor when
they come, Caridad and the other house slaves demand chairs, even the
sort of bentwood rocker that was normally the prerogative of the amo,
or ‘master’, on Caribbean plantations. When the field slaves appear in
the spiritual masses, they often arrive and depart with a limp, a stiff
leg or an atrophied arm, recalling some injury they had sustained in
hfe. Hence, the suffering slave is not invisible in the Cuban Spintst
cosmology of slavery; rather, s/he appears amid a vertically arranged
hierarchy of slave types and a range of divinely dramatized slave per-
sonalities. When the field slaves come, it is fos and ñas like Caridad
who often translate their warnings and directives, beginning with such
prefaces as ‘Let me explain to you what this dumb ass is saying...’ Na
Caridad is always in charge.
Half a decade ago, Na Caridad announced that she would begin
‘calling in her clan’. Since then, a series of people initiated into Ocha
by my friend have turned out to be accompanied by slave spirits who
had belonged to Na Caridad’s African clan. Another initiate brought
with him the spirit of Caridad” dead Portuguese owner. And Caridad
supervises them all. She has thus re-arranged not only the relationships
among the dead masters and slaves but also among the living people
who now worship them. Among the dead, it is the house slave, and not
the master, who provides authoritative healing counsel to the living. ‘The
authoritative house slave also provides the spiritual and metaphorical
armature for the authority of the elderly matriarch of a living family
and temple community.
Umbanda and Spiritism are arguably the Afro-Atlantic religions in
which w/ztes have had the greatest influence as interpreters of slavery.
With all their apparent condescension to the slave spirits, they invest
those spirits with efficacy and authority that they deny to the spirits of
the dead slaveholders and most Anglo-North Americans find unimagl-
nable in a slave.
 SLAVERY AS METAPHOR IN THE AFRO-ATLANTIC RELIGIONS 363

“Little people’: Black Latin Amencan metaphors of servitude and efficacy

Some might expect black devotees and demographically blacker Afro-

Atlantic religions to be more articulate and more direct in their naming
and interpretation of slavery. In fact, they tend to be less direct but more
articulate about the metaphoric value of the slave as a “model of and model
for” (Geertz 1973) the lives of worshipers in the early twenty-first century.
Thus, my priestly friends and I have been able to identify no explicit
reference to slavery in the liturgical songs of Brazilian Candomblé
and Cuban Ocha. However, these religions and Haitian Vodou are
rich in iconography and ritual practices suggesting the captivity and
sale of initiates, as well as the enslavement and corporal punishment
of subordinate people and spiritual entities.
Before returning to these themes, let me simply list a few of the terms
for masters and slaves that my Haitian, Brazilian and Cuban friends
offered when I asked recently about the imagery of slavery in their
practices. Some terms refer only indirectly to legal slavery, and others
possess additional referents, which is perhaps why these terms lend
themselves to such persuasive metaphorical uses. In their capacity as
overwhelming, domineering and sometimes physically punitive beings,
various spirits, priests and temple inhabitants are called mét (‘masters’
in Kreyol), duefios and amos ‘owners’ and ‘masters’ in Spanish), donos
and patrées (“owners’ and ‘bosses’ in Portuguese). The spirits, priests and
temple inhabitants dominated by them are sometimes called escravos
(or ‘slaves’ in Brazilian Portuguese), but in Spanish the terms szrvientes
(‘servants’) and cnados (“housemaids’) arose more often. Haitians use
terms like sévite (servitors”, which Joan Dayan [1995: 71] argues is a
euphemism for ‘slave’ borrowed from the Jesuits in Haiti) and restavek
(the child servants whose impoverished parents leave them to toil for those
better able to feed them).
In Haiti, there are also the terms zondi and timoun. Unlike the categorl-
cal verbal and corporal imagery of slavery in Umbanda and Spiritism,
such terms are polysemic in ways that defy easy translation into English.
My favorite in this regard is the term #moun—which literally means
‘little people’ in Haitian Kreyol. The minor children, clients, servants,
dependents and subordinates of worldly people are called t#moun, or
‘little people’, but so are kidnapped spirits of the dead and flesh-and-
blood zombies (Gerdes Fleurant, personal communication, 5/12/01;
also Cosentino 1995).
364 J. LORAND MATORY

Zombies are real. One kind of zombie (zonb1 in Kreyol) is a real living
person who has been poisoned, it 1s said, for committing some infraction
against the social order. He or she is then exhumed and revived but
sold to another part of Haiti, kept in a fnghtened and semi-conscious
state and made to labor for others. Wade Davis (1988) and a number of
journalists have documented the cases of two rescued zombies: Clairvius
Narcisse and Francina Illeus, or “Ti Femme’. Mr. Narcisse reportedly
died in 1962, in the context of a land dispute with his siblings and
allegations of stinginess toward them and toward the mothers of his
numerous children. According to Davis, a combination of poisoning by
a boké in cahoots with Narcisse’s aggrieved family, Narcisse’s own belief
in zombification, and ostracism by his community turned Narcisse into
a socially dead, involuntary worker known as a zonba.
Another kind of zombie is the kidnapped and enslaved spint of a
dead person, also called a zonbi in Kreyol. Thus, wanga, or ‘charms’,
often contain such zombies. The zombie might be embodied in and
made present by, for example, the shavings of two skulls stolen from
the graveyard and bought by a boko priest. Not all wanga contain the
enslaved spirits of the dead, but they work best 1f they do.
Thus, Haitian religious discourses generate particularly vivid meta-
phors of hierarchy and personal efficacy in the real, daily lives of
twenty-first-century people. Indeed, real daily life in Haiti is extremely
hierarchical. Says one avid student of Haiti, ‘Even the maids have
maids’. For example, a woman who works for a rich white person
might have an ill-fed and lesser-paid servant of her own at home.’
Equally ironic in the eyes of most North Americans, more than a few
mulattoes and blacks owned slaves in nineteenth-century Brazil, Guba
and other locales in the Greater Caribbean sphere, including Louisiana
and South Carolina. Even in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, the
black rulers of northern Haiti instituted a regime of forced labor and
continued to purchase African workers through the slave trade (Geg-
gus 1997: 15, 32). Thus, whites are not the worldly prototype of the
master in twenty-first-century Haitian religious and secular language.

” Liza McAlister, personal communication, 15 May 2001.

 SLAVERY AS METAPHOR IN THE AFRO-ATLANTIC RELIGIONS 305

On the contrary, the Kreyol term for an economically and politically

masterful person is gwo neg—literally, a ‘big black’.®
Despite its real-life counterparts all around the black Atlantic, hardly
any Afro-Atlantic religious concept has been more generative in its
interpellation of hierarchy than the term zondi, which can be used to
describe, for example, slow workers, people of doubtful intelligence, and
morally hamstrung intellectuals under dictatorship. In his 1977 album
‘Zombie’, the Nigerian musician Fela Ransome-Kuti used the term so
effectively to describe the soldiers of the Nigerian military dictatorship,
then led by General Olusegun Obasanjo, that the troops fatally injured
Fela’s mother in the course of burning down his nightclub.? In a society
where the elderly are so revered, Obasanjo’s soldiers gave proof of
Fela’s accusations. Not all zombies are metaphorical, but all of them
recall Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley’s metaphoric observation that
your body does not have to be in chains for you to be a slave; mental
and spiritual slavery can shackle you just as effectively. In his 1980
‘Redemption Song’, Marley paraphrased Garvey’s call—in multiple
speeches from 1929 onward—for people of African descent to eman-
cipate themselves from ‘mental slavery’, freeing their minds from the
white supremacist psychology that oppressed them from within.
Achille Mbembe (2001), for his part, highlights, through the image of
the zombie, the mutual consent and epistemological collusion between
the rulers and ruled, even in racially homogeneous settings. On the
one hand, Mbembe describes the vulgar forms of consumption and
concupiscence through which he believes post-colonial African heads of
state display their authonity. On the other, the response of the citizenry

® Like all translations, this one is imperfect. In Kreyol, the term rég—derived from
the French négre (‘black person’)—denotes ‘person’ and connotes local belonging, as
opposed to foreignness. Yet the semantic drift of this term from its French origins
suggests the degree to which, in Haitian understandings, blackness is the prototype of
normal humanity, even the most powerful classes of humanity. By contrast, human
normalcy, accomplishment and power in the US are implicitly but habitually associated
with whiteness. For example, both poor whites (in expressions like ‘poor white trash’
and ‘trailer trash’) and prosperous blacks (‘middle-class blacks’) are marked categories.
In other words, whites are assumed to be prosperous and blacks poor, unless otherwise
indicted. Moreover, observers of some US secondary schools report that many con-
temporary African American teenagers identify academic achievement as appropriate
uniquely for whites. Hence, African American students who conspicuously pursue
academic success and or give the impression of pursuing social distinction in other
ways are condemned as ‘acting white’ (Fordham and Ogbu 1986).
9 Fela Kuti: Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fela-Kut.
366 J. LORAND MATORY

is less resistance than imitation, mockery and the banalization of this

authoritarian idiom. This vulgar collusion between the rulers and the
ruled is described as ‘mutual zombification’ (2001: 104). Thus, Afro-
Atlantic imagery of mystical and mental enslavement captures important
truths about the local social order where these vocabularies of human
relations to the divine are employed.
These religious vocabularies also reveal locally credible and symbohi-
cally effective means of bargaining for survival and well-being. One
such means is Palo Mayombe. Twenty-first-century worshipers and
scholars identify this Afro-Cuban tradition with origins among the
West-Central African Kongo people, and many outsiders look askance
at 1ts enslavement of the dead. Each Palo altar houses a god or spirit
called an inquice (from the KiKongo term nkisi). The inquice pantheon
includes such generic spirits as Mamachola, Tiembla Loma and Sara-
banda. Each commands a force of'nature or society and corresponds
to a specific Lucumi, or Yoruba-related, oricha god. Any given altar for,
say, Sarabanda houses a specific avatar of this generic Congo spint,
such as Sarabanda Rompe Monte —“Pathbreaker Sarabanda”. That altar
1s an iron cauldron containing hooked sticks of wood, chalk markings,
mercury, feathers, other animal parts, and other objects intended to
‘represent the whole world. The entire iconic assemblage is called a
prenda, meaning ‘jewel’ or ‘treasure’, and many of its specific ingredi-
ents are specific to the prenda’s functions and to the personal desires of
its priestly owner, the Tata Inquce (see Cabrera 1979: 126-27; Brown
1989: 371-76; Palmié 2004). Its powerful visual, olfactory and spiritual
presence fills even unbelievers with awe.
Much of the power and efficacy of this sacred ‘jewel’ derive from its
main feature: it contains the enslaved spirit of a dead person, attracted
and secured by the presence of the skull that had belonged to him or
her in life. Ideally, the skull has come from a person who had lived a bad
life and 1s therefore ‘seeking hght’, or enlightenment, as a Spinitist would
describe it. However, instead of enlightening that spint, the Tata Inquice
priest tricks it into doing his own personal bidding, ‘The spint—known
as an mfumb1, Congo or muerto—thus becomes a servant of the greater
spirit (such as Sarabanda Rompe Monte) and of the Tata Inquice priest.
This servant also becomes the chief of all the other contents of the
prenda, which are conceived of as people in their own right. When the
dead person possesses his medium, or mbua (from the KiKongo for
‘dog’), the embodied spirit calls the priest his amo, or ‘master’. Thus,
much like Na Caridad, the dead person in the cauldron is understood
 SLAVERY AS METAPHOR IN THE AFRO-ATLANTIG RELIGIONS 367

to be a highly effective slave-worker and the chief of a team of slaves

all laboring for its owner—in this case, the Tata Inquice.

Enslavement as a form of redemption, or hierarchy as a state

of social health

What do these images of kidnapping, servitude and efficacy suggest

about the societies where they inspire so much confidence, or at
least about how these priests perceive and act upon those societies?
The vividly productive images of hierarchy and personal efficacy in
Candomblé, Ocha and Vodou invite interpretation in terms of a heu-
ristic distinction that Carl N. Degler (1971) drew years ago between
the United States and Brazil. On the one hand, the United States is
a society where the official and public ideology posits universal equal-
ity as the norm of socio-political life. According to this ideology, the
slave is anomalous. If the slave can be fitted into the system in any
way, it is as an outsider or as a foil to proper citizenship. On the other
hand, there are societies like Brazil, where hierarchy is so normal that
the place of the subordinate is not beyond the system but somewhere
below certain people and above certain other people (1971: 261-64).
Thus, in those societies, elaborate and subtle vocabularies of social
hierarchy locate people, rather than dislocating them. Whereas North
Americans tend to regard enslavement as a form of dehumanization,
many objects that North American Protestants and atheists might call
inanimate are, in the Afro-Latin possession religions, humanized by their
very subordination.
And here is one of the most striking corollaries to this heuristic contrast
between North and Latin American logics of hierarchy and personal efh-
cacy. On the one hand, contrary to the historiographic and econometric evi-
dence (e.g., Stampp 1956; Genovese 1974; Fogel and Engerman 1974), most
contemporary North Americans imagine that slavery was economi-
cally inefficient, doomed to collapse under its own weight.'? The
positional descendants of North American slave-owners project that
slaves were lazy and incapable, while the descendants of slaves project
that masters were lazy and that slaves were given to feigning laziness
and breaking tools in order to sabotage an unjust system. From either

'° The reigning popular interpretation owes much to the influence of Ulrich B.
Phillips (1918).
368 J. LORAND MATORY

position, the slave was allegedly an inefficient producer and indeed the
anti-type of the efficient laborer. True ‘freedom’ and the egalitanan
‘fairness’ of non-discnminatory proletarianization are assumed to be
uniquely efficient. All over Latin America, by contrast, a hard worker
is said to trabajar como un negro—‘to work like a black’. The slave is thus
implicitly the paradigm of sweat-of-the-brow diligence, concentration
and efficacy.
And so are Latin American slave spirits. Whether black or white,
practitioners of Cuban Palo Mayombe, as well as Cuban and Puerto
Rican Spiritism, agree that black spirits work more effectively than
white ones, and that the prendas of Palo Mayombe (which contain the
enslaved spirit of a dead person) work faster and more predictably than
the Yoruba-related onchas, or gods. Haitian pnests tell me that the wanga,
or charms, that contain the captive zonbi of a dead person are the most
effective of all. Captive souls and the spints of dead slaves are said to
warn their owners sooner and work harder because they are closer to
the world than are the heavenly spirits. Like laborers, they will do your
bidding not only fast but also in the way that you prescribe. By contrast,
if you call the ‘boss’ god in, says my friend Eduardo, the matter should
be pretty important, and he or she is likely to solve the problem in has
or her own way, rather than to your complete satisfaction.
Over a century after the official abolition of slavery in the Americas,
the relationships between these spirit-slaves and human beings resist
assimilation to the current legal model of ‘free’ labor. The medium of
exchange and reciprocity in these spiritual relationships is not money but
food. Of course, this is true of many religions, but Brazilian Candom-
blé and Cuban Ocha cultivate such elaborate cuisines, such elaborate
logics of spiritual cleansing, and, in the case of Gandomblé, such an
obsession with cleaning that one cannot help but consider domestic
labor in the nineteenth-century big house as one of these religions’ most
influential prototypes.'' In return for the right feeding (not to mention
occasional beating and threats), these sacred slaves—the Haitian timoun,
the Caribbean Spiritist Congos and the Cuban Palo inquices—can make
their owners rich and keep them safe.
Moreover, contrary to the conventional North American imagery
of the slave’s child-like dependency on his or her master, the imagery

'! See also D.H. Brown (2003: 210-86) on the references to Euro-Cuban domestic
furnishings in Afro-Cuban altars and sacred dress.
 SLAVERY AS METAPHOR IN THE AFRO-ATLANTIC RELIGIONS 369

of Ext in the Brazilian Candomblé suggests the extreme dependency of

even the most elevated master upon the competency and the goodwill
of the slave. In Brazilian Candomblé, each onxd, or god, is said to have
an Ext (pronounced ‘ay-SHOO’), who is described as that onxd’s ‘slave’,
or escravo. That Ext 1s the indispensable intermediary in all transac-
tions with and in the feeding of the god who 1s its master. ‘Thus, the
Exu must always eat first, before the master. Hence my indispensable
epigraphic salute to this sacred slave. The slave and his image are far
more central to modern politics and economics—as Buck-Morss points
out—than Hegel and most other European philosophers of modernity
have ever cared to admit."”
A further corollary of the efficacy of the slave, as Palmié points out
(2004: 159-200), is that his or her subordination is always tenuous. For
example, in Cuban Palo Mayombe, the inguice will do anything you want
(for good or for evil) if you reward him or her properly, but if you do
not, he or she can quickly turn on you, drain the life out of you and
devour you. A priestess of Cuban Ocha, or Santeria, told me of a palero
priest who keeps a “Jewish” prenda, or inquice altar. That is, because it has
not been ‘baptized’ and contains no cross, it is especially willing to do
the priest’s evil bidding. But the ‘master’ of this prenda now has cancer
(anonymous, personal communication, 12 May 2001). Stephan Palmié
(2004: 173) was told of a Miami priest of Palo who gave his prenda
cocaine to enhance its labors, but the prenda came to crave the drug;
the dead person inside it demanded so much that the deeply indebted
master was executed by his dealer. Thus, the Afro-Latin possession
religions not only acknowledge the reality of hierarchy in the societies
that surround them but also acknowledge the impermanence of that
hierarchy. ‘The master himself can be caught up in the power of the
slave and can be undone by it. This is the context of the wise actor’s
entrepreneurial efforts to secure the optimal position in a hierarchical
and humanizing community.
From the point of view of Cuban Ocha priests and Haitian priests
faithful to Ginén (or the ideal ancestral way [Larose 1977]), the more
righteous option 1s the hereditary or unwilled and serendipitous encoun-
ter with the Good Master, and submission to his or her beneficent will.

'2 Susan Buck-Morss (2000) argues that Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage was
indebted to the author’s readings of contemporary newspaper articles on the Haitian
Revolution and on communication with his Freemason brothers in Haiti.
370 J. LORAND MATORY

On the one hand, the slave spirits can be bought by anyone. On the
other, initiation in the more morally self-conscious Guban Ocha (or
Brazilian Candomblé) normally results from an involuntary calling. ‘That
is, people normally seek initiation in these religions not out of ambi-
tion or piety but because of some affliction or persistent misfortune of
supernatural origin. Some people fall ul or repeatedly lose consciousness.
Others repeatedly suffer losses in business or love. Some experience
frequent auto accidents. Most afflictions and misfortunes like these are
believed to be accidental or of natural causation, but priests of these
religions are experts at divining hidden dimensions and causes through
the casting of sacred objects (such as cowry shells, pieces of coconut,
kola nut segments and the divination chain) or through the reading
of cards, dreams and other signs. Once discovered, most problems of
supernatural causation can be ameliorated through minor cleansings
and sacrifices, but some are intendéd by the gods as a sign that the
afflicted person has no choice but to undergo initiation and contract a
lifelong relationship of service to the god.
Early in my investigation of Brazilian Candomblé, I myself consid-
ered getting initiated. I knew that some people did so out of simple
piety, and my own cuniosity did entail a significant measure of reverence
for this impressive African-inspired tradition. At the time, an influential
Bahian anthropologist had taken a generous interest in my work and
my friendship. So, naturally, I shared my thoughts with him. What
I expected was a dispassionate review of the pros and cons. What I
got was considerably less ambiguous. As we lunched in the middle of
a Bahian restaurant, he slapped his hand on the table and guffawed.
However hurt I felt, I was hardly in a position to doubt the words he
finally managed to blurt out: if I went that route, I would just become
a ‘slave’ (escravo) to the priest and learn nothing that other scholars
did not already know. The initiating priest has the power to confer or
withhold training, to protect or harm subordinates mystically, to house
or evict the initiate and to inflict corporal punishment. However, love,
loyalty and ambition are the more usual motives for initiates’ obedience
to the initiating priest, who 1s regarded as a sort of parent. A similar
expectation of deference and obedience extends to everyone previously
initiated in that temple. In the daily operation of the temple and in
the execution of rituals, the demands on the initiate’s labor and time
are extensive. Moreover, the initiate’s age and gender, combined with
the gender and character of her tutelary god, prescribe a specific set
 SLAVERY AS METAPHOR IN THE AFRO-ATLANTIC RELIGIONS 371

of duties and behavioral expectations that can be highly confining,

For example, it is the female devotees of goddesses who are normally
expected to cook the sacred foods and clean the temple. The daughters
of male gods are favored as chief priests. Initiation thus fixes one’s place
in a division of labor and in a local socio-political hierarchy.
I have since come to see that, once initiated, novices vary a great deal
with respect to how ‘slavishly’ they behave outside the ntual context,
and, as in slavery itself, the individual’s social skills and level of ambi-
tion can create highly variable outcomes, even in the ritual situation.
It is a truism in social life that rank is only partially prescribed by the
official rules; it also depends upon (and can be augmented by) effective
assertion and improvisation.'’ However, what is clear is that metaphors
of slavery (as it is recalled today) do structure the relationship among
gods, priests and novices in these religions from the moment of initia-
tion. These metaphors prescribe limits to the range of improvisations
available to any given actor and can be invoked with great force to
induce loyalty and obedience throughout the lifelong duration of these
social relationships.
Each in its own way, the Candombleé initiation and the Haitian kanzo
initiation recall the Middle Passage. For example, during the couche, or
‘lying in’, portion of the kanzo initiation, the entire cohort of novices
lies together in spoon fashion on their left sides, their ankles bound
together with vines. Throughout their subsequent lives, the members
of the initiatic cohort will be bound together socially as well (Liza
McAlister, personal communication, 15 May 2001). A similar but appar-
ently stronger relationship binds together the initiatory cohort in the
Brazilian Candomblé, which is explicitly called a barco, or ‘boat’. ‘Ties
of mutual obligation and hierarchy forever bind this group together
in ritual and non-ritual settings.'* The order in which novices are pos-
sessed by their respective gods during their joint initiation will continue
to determine the rank order among the initiates. During the initiation
itself, novices wear a bell on the ankle called a xaoré (from the Yoruba

'3 For an illustrative and true anecdote, see Emilio Rodrigué’s Gigante pela Natureza
(1991: 219). When the relative seniority of mtual participants is ambiguous, relative
knowledge, ambition and boldness can reconfigure hierarchies.
'* See also Mintz and Price (1992 [1976]: 43-4) who list a half-dozen terms for
close friendship that African-diaspora populations describe metaphorically as “ship-
mate” relationships, evidently recalling the intense camaraderie of shared suffering in
the holds of the slave ships.
372 J. LORAND MATORY

saworo for ‘bell’), which is intended symbolically to alert the priest of

any effort by the novice to escape. Some priests have told me expressly
that it marks out the novice as a ‘slave’, captive to the initiating priest
and to the god, and unable to flee even if she wants to.
In the years after the initiation, during the sacred festivals in which
the gods possess the initiates, the initiates wear bracelets called escra-
vas, because, it is said, they are exactly of the sort that slave women
used to wear. These bracelets are typically fashioned out of repoussé
metals, such as copper, chrome-plate or gold-plate, and are sometimes
bejeweled. If this sort of bracelet was indeed worn by slaves, they were
probably prosperous or favored slaves, such as slave mistresses and negros
de ganho—that 1s, the slaves who were permitted to move about freely to
ply their trades. ‘The slaveholder typically demanded a weekly dividend,
and the negro de ganho retained any additional earnings.
Thus, in these religions, redemption from affliction and misfortune
often entails a new form of privileged enslavement. Few cases are as
explicit as the one in which a Haitian priest divined that a man had
become sick because he had been mystically ‘sold’ to one of Haiti’s
secret societies. The priest therefore ordered the man to bring a large
sum of paper money, which the priest then burned in a cemetery for
the lord of the cemetery, Baron Samedi. With the essence of this money
now in hand, Baron Samedi could redeem the man from the secret
society that had bought him. Addressing the spirit, the priest declared
that no one but Baron Samedi could now kill the sick man, since Baron
Samedi was now the patient’s ‘master’, or mét (Gerdés Fleurant, personal
communication, May 2001).
On the other hand, while mitiation in Cuban Ocha also usually
results from an involuntary calling, Ocha seems to have displaced most
of its symbolism of enslavement onto the neighboring Cuban tradi-
tions of Palo Mayombe and Spiritism. In Ocha, every initiate becomes
a king or queen, ‘crowned’ by his or her god, from the first moment
of initiatory rebirth. ‘Though Ocha priests acknowledge hierarchy by
prostrating themselves when saluting longer-crowned heads, the priest
is said to be showing respect for the age of the substance in the elder’s
head, not necessarily humbling him- or herself to the senior person.
Indeed, the junior person shares in the royal substance that he or she
is saluting. ‘hus, an egalitarian (dare I say republican?) logic underlies
even the hierarchical vocabulary and body language of Cuban Ocha.
The notion that the citizen is the king of his own home is perhaps the
 SLAVERY AS METAPHOR IN THE AFRO-ATLANTIC RELIGIONS 373

defining cliché of liberal democracy. Likewise, the Ocha priest is the

monarch of his own multi-spirited body.
Yet the especially elaborate embrace of royalism in the post-slavery
societies of the Americans might contain some special lessons. First,
it may recall the fact that both British and Portuguese royals showed
themselves much friendlier to emancipation than did the white creoles
who founded the US in 1776 and the Brazilian republic in 1889.
After 1898, in cooperation with the US occupiers of the island, the
white creole republicans of Cuba betrayed the Afro-Cuban demand
for political equality, despite Afro-Cubans’ leading role in the military
struggle for independence from Spain (see, e.g., Helg 1995). ‘The royalist
theme in twentieth-century Cuban and Brazilian ritual and religious
organizations hints at the failure of republican democracy's promises
to the people of the African diaspora.
Yet this black royalism is more than nostalgia: it replies to a meta-
phoric logic at the heart of white republican aspirations. For white
creole republicanism is less the abolition of royal, hereditary authority
than the extension of that royal authority beyond one wealthy white
family to all wealthy and, eventually, middling white families (see also
Anderson 1991 [1983]: 150). Thus, a black man or woman’s declaring
himself or herself a monarch in his or her personal and ritual sphere
is also a claim of equality within the republican system. This logic is
also plainly evident in Afro-centric Black North Americans’ claims, in
resistance to oppression within the US republic, of being ‘descendants
of [African] kings and queens’.

The situational morality of ‘freedom’: the lessons of companson

We have now come full circle. In a way, the Ocha crowning resembles
the rebirth of white men when they are called by their Old World
misfortunes to immigrate to the United States. As soon as a phenotypi-
cally white man steps off the boat, so to speak, he becomes as much a
king as any man. At the very least, he is a king in his own home, the
cliché goes, and he has the nght to shoot anybody who denies it. By
this analogy I do not mean to trivialize the kariocha initiation. I excuse
myself for such an apparently odious comparison on the grounds that
vivid metaphors and other tropes are, after all, the stock-in-trade of
Afro-Atlantic ritual, and, as I have argued, these ritual tropes regularly
become insiders’ means of reading the meaningful shape of secular
374 J. LORAND MATORY

life. ‘To extend this metaphor, the entrepreneurial ethics that go along
with white America’s petty royalty are also similar to those that guide
Palo Mayombe and the Haitian bdkd, and they attract similar disap-
proval from the more pious Cuban Lucumi priests and the Haitian
upholders of Ginén.
The success of white America’s citizen-kings often comes through
the selective suspension of morality and at the expense of both the
natural environment and the people classified literally or metaphorically
as non-kings—including foreign or indigenous peoples, slaves, black
people and women. Just as ‘freedom’ is defined and made salient by
the visible co-presence of the slave, so has citizenship in the American
republics been defined and made salient by the visible co-presence
of groups whose race or gender defined them as the opposite and
as worthy victims of theft, exploitation, murder and other forms of
expiatory violence. |
Yet Anglo-North American society is no more a ‘warre of all against
all’ than is Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Cuban or Haitian society. Most Cubans,
Brazilians, Haitians and North Americans do not feel infinitely free to
pursue an entrepreneurial amorality, because most New World people,
including the descendants of slaves, believe in (or strategically invoke)
the logic of the Good Master. For Black North American Christians,
the biblical imagery of ‘redemption’ is more than a dead metaphor.
Its references to slavery are consistent with other metaphors modeling
the subsequent behavior of the redeemed. African American Christians
vow to submit to the will of the ‘Master’, as do sheep to that of the
Good Shepherd. The founding model of that submission is Abraham’s
willingness to murder his own son on the Master’s orders, and the prac-
tical equivalence of that son to the male sheep who ended up being
sacrificed instead. In exchange for a sort of healing called ‘salvation’,
the Jewish, Christian and Muslim followers of Abraham concede to
the Good Master the right to protect and bless or afflict and kill them,
and, on the model of Job, they are advised to resist those who question
the correctness of the Master’s orders.
In this covenant of servitude, we are also shown the efficacy of
‘working with the left’—that is, of efficacious and amoral magic, as in
the Battle of Jericho, when the ancient Hebrews used their inspired
magic to crumble the walls of that Canaanite city and expropriate its
lands. In the Negro spiritual ‘Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho’, Black
North American Protestants celebrate the Hebrews’ success without
 SLAVERY AS METAPHOR IN THE AFRO-ATLANTIC RELIGIONS 375

giving the least thought to what the people of Jericho might have done
to deserve the slaughter of every single chicken, goat, ass, horse, man,
woman and child within the city walls. Was their extermination not
a Holocaust? Apparently, the Good Master, as long as he receives his
ritual due from his worshipers, is willing to engineer genocide and settler
colonialism on behalf of his chosen people—be they ancient Hebrews,
white Americans, Boers, Australians or modern Israelis.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, several
US journalists and at least one talk-show host seeking to understand the
Islamic beliefs of the attackers quoted the injunction in the Qu’ran (Sura
LX, verse V) for Muslims to ‘slay the Pagans wherever ye find them,
and lie in wait for them’. I was surprised, however, by the journalists’
failure to draw a connection between such verses and the simultaneous
atrocities being committed against the peoples of southern Sudan (not to
mention the non-Muslims of northern Nigeria) in the name of Islamic
law. Other oversights in the journalistic analysis are less surprising. For
example, in the various journalistic efforts to illuminate the differences
and similarities among Islam, Christianity and Judaism, there seems to
have been no discussion of the forms of mass murder and land theft
recounted piously in the Old Testament, which seem to me just as
critical to an understanding of the Jewish and Christian faiths. Such
a comparative view could help North Americans to understand why
so many third-world, indigenous and formerly enslaved peoples might
find Zionism, Manifest Destiny and the Boer treks comparably odious,
despite the religious pieties that Jews and Christians have invested in
them.
Ironically, some of the descendants of North American slaves who
most vocally reyect mental and spiritual enslavement to white America
also embrace a patently Arabo-centnric religion that literally calls itself
‘Submission’—that is, Islam—and gives its adherents endless variants
on names like ‘Abdallah’, or ‘Slave of God’. Yet I do not doubt that
the thousands of people who convert to this religion annually find a
sense of equality (albeit a gender-specific equality) in the shared state
of enslavement to their god, as well as an energizing sense of their
superiority to the soi-disant ‘free’. people whom they call ‘unbelievers’.
It should be noted that Middle Eastern Muslims enslaved as many
African ‘unbelievers’ as did European and Euro-American Christians
and Jews, and they did so over a far longer period. Unabashed by this
history, Arabic speakers commonly employ the same term for ‘slave’
376 J. LORAND MATORY

and ‘black person’ (‘abd). Moreover, racialized slavery is still widely

documented in both the Islamic Republic of Mauretania and the
Republic of Sudan.

Freedom and slavery: coeval and interdependent metaphors

in twenty-first-century life

‘Freedom’ (as in the phrases ‘free trade’, ‘freedom of religion’ and

‘freedom of speech’) constitutes the main legitimizing discourse of the
secular, capitalist nation-state and, particularly, of the United States.
Equally persuasive is the allied view that ‘resistance’ and the pursuit
of ‘freedom’ have been the founding principles and enduring essence
of black New World identities. Yet, in a republican age, many of the
religions that the peoples of the African diaspora allegedly ‘retain’ by
dint of ‘cultural resistance’ and many religions that even Black North
Americans ‘freely’ choose configure divine-human relations in images
of un-freedom—representing gods as monarchs, feudal lords, masters
and shepherds, while characterizing worshipers as subjects, slaves and
sheep. This paper has surveyed the well-documented but taken-for-
granted images of enslavement at the heart of Afro-Brazilian, Afro-
Cuban, Haitian and Black North American religions that construct
proper personhood, personal efhcacy and/or moral rectitude in terms
of slavery.
As an anthropologist, I am not criticizing traditions that imagine the
self or others in slavery, or those that configure insiders as kings and
outsiders as nobodies.'” I do not suggest that this imagery of hierarchy
and servitude compels the faithful to act in any simple sense like slaves
or slaveholders, that it proves they are immoral, or that slavery is the
ultimate underlying principle of these religions and the social orders
where they thrive. Rather, I have tried to highlight the fact that slavery
is not merely a past transcended, a distant source of African-American
cultural practices, an aching scar, or a foil against which black New
World identities are constructed. It may at times be any of these
things—but not all the time or for every purpose. At many central

'? Muslims and Christians hold no monopoly on religious chauvinism. Some Ocha
initiates call the uninitiated cosss, from the Yoruba for ‘there is nothing’ or ‘there are
none’ (ké st), suggesting that the uninitiated are lacking in some essential content or
characteristic.
 SLAVERY AS METAPHOR IN THE AFRO-ATLANTIC RELIGIONS 377

ritual moments and in a range of important non-ritual ones throughout

the black and white Atlantic, ‘slavery’ has become a sacred ‘model of
and model for’ twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. Practitioners of
Candomblé, Ocha, Vodou, Umbanda, Spiritism, Islam and Black North
American Christianity regularly invoke slavery in efforts to name and
re-organize present-day relationships and thus to restore the well-being
of the participating individuals and communities.
Nor should it be forgotten that the imprint of these models 1s both
historically deep in the societies that host them and often biographically
deep in the lives of Brazilian, Cuban, Haitian and US citizens. These
models suffuse not only religious but also secular and political practice,
even where the principles of political ‘freedom’ and of ‘the separation
of church and state’ are most loudly proclaimed.
One is tempted to conclude, as a Marxist might, that religious
images of slavery rationalize capitalist exploitation by hiding who is
really responsible for production and who should benefit from it. But
images of slavery in Cuban Palo Mayombe, Caribbean Spiritism and
the Haitian b0k6 tradition do not appear to do that. ‘These traditions
are, more precisely, survival guides to the reality of hierarchy, cruelty
and exploitation even in a nominally ‘free’ world. Indeed, they make
explicit and available for criticism a central but unspoken principle of
the democratic nation-state: survival often depends on the suspension
of dissent (or ‘patriotism’) and on forms of cooperation with unequal
benefits for citizens with unequal resources (or ‘bargaining’).
One is also tempted, as a Foucauldian might be, to interpret these
traditions as embodying a ‘disciplinary’ function. They guide people’s
conduct through ‘discourse’, insofar as the gods embody (through the
terms of their worship) the disciplinary norms of the socio-political
order, and the priests engineer the embodiment, internalization and
naturalization of its vocabulary by the worshiper. Indeed, like physi-
clans, priests are in a position to do so at the supplicant’s moments of
greatest affliction and vulnerability, when the supplicant is least able to
resist the expert’s prescriptions for a properly lived life and a properly
constituted community. Perhaps the ‘freedom of religion’ principle
simply privatizes the disciplinary. functions of the capitalist state, allow-
ing a very un-free political and economic order to represent itself as
voluntary, legitimate and ‘free’. Albeit under vastly unequal odds and
with vastly unequal means, we have all internalized similar forms of
self-constraint and desire, and so seem equally ‘free’ to compete for
goods and power. In support of Foucault, I do suspect that, despite all
378 J. LORAND MATORY

of our talk of resistance and the will to resist, the blacks and whites
of any given New World nation often agree more than they disagree
about the logic of legitimate domination and hierarchy.
However, I am even more tempted to study the semantic slipperi-
ness of both ‘slavery’ and ‘freedom’ as they serve real-world projects.
The discourse of ‘freedom’ is often used in order to secure its seem-
ing Opposites—such as community (as when slaves sought freedom in
order to be reunited with their families) and the continuation of slavery
itself (as when Southern slaveholders sought in ‘states’ rights’ the con-
stitutional ‘freedom’ to keep their slaves). Discourses of ‘slavery’ and
rituals of enslavement can also heal people and restore their sense of
personal efficacy and self-possession. I am not the kind of scholar to
seek some deep and underlying Afro-Atlantic ‘philosophy’ in this sam-
pling of religious traditions. Rather, I would propose that, in the future
study of any given Afro-Atlantic population, we not regard ‘slavery’
and ‘freedom’ as points in a historical and teleological trajectory (no
matter how morally committed we Afro-Saxons are to the discourse of
‘freedom’) but as inter-dependent metaphors in human projects with
the most diverse local intentions and purposes behind them.

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 INDEX

Abakud 18, 179-217 Lexemes. See also Africanisms,

Among tobacco workers 208-09 linguistic 331, 333
Baroko or plante (ceremony) 20304 Learning of 148, 160, 331-332
Control over dockside labor Performative power of 331-332
market 206-09 Origins, notion of 9, 17-19, 138,
Diffusion to Africa 215 143, 163-75, 180, 256, 280, 282,
Founding of 187-89, 204, 213 318, 354
Historical relation to ekpe/ngbe 187, Past. See also pastness, pastfulness
212-17 17-19, 21, 28, 31, 104, 145, 164,
Juegos, potencias, tierras 20203, 173-75, 256, 280
207-11 Retentions, concept of 8
Linked to shipping lines 210 Source languages. See also Yoruba,
Linked to specific barrios 188, Kikongo 18, 141, 145, 166, 332,
201, 206-209 335-38, 362
Obones or plazas (titleholders) 202, Speech 325-47
20709 Construction of 26, 142, 327,
Ritual language 181 331, 336-38, 362
Sale of secret 187, 211-14 Recognition of 337-38
Theories about African ongins of Survivals, concept of 9, 145, 169
18, 212-17 Vindicationism 15
Abolitionism/antislavery 82, 84, 88, African Americanist scholarship 9-11,
98, 101-13, 121 17-25, 29, 32, 110-112, 145-46,
Abrahamic religions 353-54 164-75, 179-86, 214, 216-17, 223,
Acculturation. See also formal 255, 293, 313-18, 324-25, 344-47,
acculturation, material 359-60
acculturation 255, 267-68 Africanism(s) 8, 21, 144-46
Affliction. See also drums of affliction Linguistic 144
308, 370, 372 Scale of intensity of. See also
Africa Herskovits, Melville J. 22, 145
Concept of 2, 12-13, 256 Africamtude 259, 277, 283
As project 13, 15, 19, 31-32, Africanity 3, 14, 20, 22, 26, 32, 224,
280 287, 317-18
Trope of 11 Horizons of 24
African Africanization 6-7, 25, 32, 53
Accents 334-38 Africanized Portuguese 26-27,
Diaspora 41-42, 72-74, 80, 141-42, 329-38
144-45, 164, 168-69, 174, 286, Africanness 1-32, 45, 67, 70, 136,
334, 351 323, 325, 338, 344-47
Identity 10, 12, 15, 327, 337 And blackness 9, 14, 26, 41,
Christianity and 15-16, 80-81, 53, 68, 70-71, 100-101, 323,
89-90, 95, 101-102 38-47
Ethnic identities and 7, 12, Discourses of 5-8, 12-14, 17-18,
49-50, 69, 80, 91, 95-96, 102, 276, 344-47
181, 192, 286 Invocations of 70, 238, 344
Diaspora and 12-13, 41-42, Afro-Brazilian religions 19, 25,
96 110-111, 223-52, 257, 323-47
Ethiopia and 27, 96-97 Afro-Brazilian studies 223-24, 255-59,
Lybia and 99-100 265-72, 344-45
382 INDEX

Afro-Catholic syncretism. See also Braudel, Fernand 216

Catholicism, Syncretism 273-74 Brazil 19-20, 119, 223-52, 255-89,
Afro-Cuban Religions. See also Abakua, 323-47, 352, 360, 363, 367, 370-73,
Palo Monte, Palo Mayombe, Regla de 377
Ocha 3-4, 17-18, 141-75 Briggs, Charles 173
Afro-Futurism 15, 30 Bronfman, Alejandra 129
Afro-Latin American religions 29, 353 Brujería. See also witchcraft and sorcery
Concept of ‘nations’ in 354 112, 126-29, 135
Conceptions of morality 353-54 Buya 55-56, 70
Agha, Asif 143, 163
Aiscar 300-01 Cabildos de nación 193-94
Alexandre, CGamolien (Camo) 295, Caboclos 228-29, 232-35, 237-39, 241,
298-99, 306 245, 250-51, 270
Alterity 6-7, 9, 20-25, 28-29 Cabrera, Lydia 150-51, 201
Alto Songo, Cuba. See also El Quemado, Cachoeira 19, 223, 225-31, 235-36,
Cuba 122-123, 126-27 240-42, 244, 246-47, 250-52
American Yoruba Movement. See also Calabar See also Old Calabar 191-92
Oyontunji Village 1-5, 31 Cameroon Grassfields 198, 213
Amselle, Jean Loup 17, 111 Candomblé 19, 23, 26, 144, 223-25,
Ana Celia 329, 333-334, 337 228-29, 241-48, 250-51, 260-62,
Andrade, Mario de 256, 260 266, 272-73, 278-85, 287-89, 316,
Anglican Church 82, 97, 102 318, 323-47, 352-53, 363, 368-71,
Aranquet, Dolores. See also Man-gods 377
116 de Caboclo ‘270
Arias, Mayor J. 123-124 de nagáo 227, 237-39
Ason 298-300, 305, 307, 311 Capataz del muelle (dockside labor
Authenticity 39, 41, 170, 224 contractor) See also Havana, Cuba,
African 170, 297, 301, 311-13, dockside labor market 206-07
323 Capaz, Manuel de Jesus ‘Chuchu’ 210
Axé Opó Afonjá 262-63, 278 Carabali 168, 191, 200
African referent of 191-93
Baby talk 336-38 Bneamó ápapa efi 187, 191, 194, 213
Bahia. See also Salvador 263, 281, 323 Cabildos 194
Bakokó Efó 211 Instability of ethnonym 194
Baron Samedi 372 Carrego 247
Bastide, Roger 22-23, 110-111, Carretta, Vincent 12, 15, 94
255-89, 324 Carneiro, Edison 257
Bayamo, Cuba 117, 122 Catholicism 58, 63, 65, 69, 105, 120,
Bedward, Alexander 114 128, 266, 271, 273-74, 283, 285, 301
Bekura Mendo 179-81 Centro Espiritual Público 127
Benezet, Anthony 100 El Cerro, Cuba 132
Benzedetra 229-30 Ceuta 215
Bermudez, Armando Andrés 119-20 Changó 154-57, 160
Bible 31, 97-100, 104 Charisma 229, 250
Blackness 53, 68-71, 353, 357 Charlatan and Charlatanism 130, 134,
And Africanness 10, 14, 53, 70, 79, 230
81, 96, 100-02, 271-78, 282-85 Chatoyer 54, 60
Becoming black 40, 68-69 Christianity 6, 15-16, 58-59, 80-81,
Black Atlantic 32, 146 89-90, 95-100, 104-05, 273, 284,
Black Hebrew Israelites 31 393, 355, 374, 377
Blackface minstrelsy 352, 359 Chronotope 17, 142, 146, 160, 164,
Blanco, Margarito 188 167-68, 181, 203
Bogal/bozal 27, 339 Clarke, Kaman 1-3
Bourguignon, Erika 313, 317 Clinton, George 31
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 214 Cohn, Norman 115
 INDEX 383

Collective memory 25, 44, 279-80, Ebó 228

282 Ecué 190, 209, 212
‘Colonial tribes’ 47-55 Myth of discovery 203-04
Conversion 6, 81, 92, 98-100, 283 Sacred drum 190
Cornente (spiritual force) 138 Voice of 204
Crapanzano, Vincent 346 Efik 50, 168, 180, 187, 189-90,
Creolization 185-86 196-200, 202
Cross River Region 50, 179, 196-200, Efik Butón 187
214 Efficacy 224, 230, 250-51, 366, 369,
Cuba 107-38, 141-75, 179-96, 374
201-15, 287, 289, 352, 354-55, Egum/Eguns 228, 236, 239, 245-47,
360-62, 364, 373 249-50, 252
U.S. Occupation of 109, 118 Ejagham/Ekoi 196
War of Independence 109. Ekpe/ngbe See also Ngbe polity 180,
Cullen, Countee 13 195-200, 213-14
Cultural encystment 259, 278-81 As a body of knowledge 196-97,
Curadeira 232 200, 204
Curanderismo 109, 134 As commodity 196-98
History of 195
Danbala (Danbala Wedo) 307, 310, Role in Atlantic commerce
318 197-99
“dance in the head” See also spirit Sale to Europeans 198
possession 307 Elenita 114
Degler, Carl N. 367 Encarnación de la Caridad y Rodríguez
Deren, Maya 315, 317 (Na Candad) 361-62
Dery, Mark 30 As house slave 361
Descent group 297, 300-01, 311, Enlleguellé Efó 210
313 Enllensén 18, 179-81, 204
Diaspora. See also African diaspora Epistemology 3-4, 11, 20-21, 25,
281 27-28, 31-32, 14546, 164-65,
Analytical framing 14, 17, 39, 173-75, 182-86, 216-17, 255-56,
42-46, 70-74 318
Etymology 43-44 Enregisterment 27, 163
Typology 44 Equiano, Olaudah See also Vassa,
Diasporic Gustavus 12, 20, 28, 80-106
Horizon 14-16, 19, 39-40, 43, 69 Use of ‘countrymen’ 91, 96, 100
Subjectivity 12-13, 73, 83, 96 Erés (African child spirits) 26-28,
Divination 55, 142, 146, 153, 160-64, 324-47
172-75, 237, 240 242-49 Anthropological descriptions of 26,
consultas 161-64, 249 324-25
cowne shell 161-64 As mediators 325-29, 345
Historical approach 17-18, 22, As social actors 327-29
164-75 Conduct of 326
Domestic cult 293, 298 Bodily 326
Dona Edith 341-44 Linguistic 327-29, 333-38
Dona Preta 201, 223, 225, 231-52 features of speech 334-38
Drums of affliction 113 Entaj 297, 305, 311
DuBois, W.E.B. 12, 21, 275 Essaka 94-95
Dunham, Katherine 315-16 Ethiopianism 27, 98
Durkheim, Emile 226 Ethnogenesis 46, 47, 49, 51, 55, 72,
Duvalier, Francois 24, 316 146, 167
Duvalón, Domingo 127 Ethnonyms 50, 61-62, 67, 91,
Duverger, Jacinto. See also Mustelier 191-96
Garzón, Hilario, arrests of 126-27 Etymological reconstruction 143-44,
Diigii +56, 64-695 164, 166, 170-72, 174, 180-81
 384 INDEX

Exú/Exús 228, 232-22, 235-37, Hacking, lan 11-12, 24

239, 243-45,
249, 252, 267, 351, Haiti 22-25, 61, 293-318, 352,
369 354-55, 363-65, 368-69, 371-72,
374, 376-77
Faith 118, 230, 251 Ethnologists 23-24, 294, 316-18
Fanaticism 115, 124 Landholding 294-97
Feira de Santana 236-37 Haitian Bureau of Ethnology (Bureau
FENACAB (Federagáo Nacional dos d’Ethnologie Haitien) 316
Cultos Afro-Brasileros) 20, 238 Haitian Revolution 294-95, 364
Fernando Poo 215 Halbwachs, Maurice 39, 279
First owner of the estate 295, Harris, Joel Chandler 359
310-11 Havana, Cuba 108-09, 131-36,
Formal acculturation 258, 266, 187-88, 202, 204-11
272-72, 274-75 As Atlantic commercial hub
Foucault, Michel 377-78 205-11
Fraternal San Hilarion 123, 130-31 Barrios of 205
Franklin, Benjamin 90 Demographic history 205
Frazier, E. Franklin 21, 145, 172, 185, Dockside labor market 206—09
217 Internal economy of 205-06,
Freedom 81, 351-53, 355-57, 209-10
373-74, 376 Haytian American Sugar Company
Concept of 351-53, 355-57 (HASCO) 296-97, 313
Of religion. See also Superstitions, Hamitic hypothesis 15-16
campaigns against 118, 124, 131, Hermanos de la Fe de San Hilarion.
376-78 See also Spiritism: societies and
in republican Cuba 124, 131 federations 122
under Spain 118 Herskovits, Melville J. 8, 10, 21-22,
. under U.S. rule 118 26, 46, 145, 165, 170, 172, 180,
Free labor 368 184-85, 217, 257, 167-69, 273, 275,
Freyre, Gilberto 9, 260, 335-36 287, 324
Fuentes Guerra, Jesús (and Armin Hierarchy 228, 364-67, 370-71
Schwegler) 170-73 Historical consciousness and
subjectivity 15-16, 44-46, 66,
Galton’s Problem 184-85 69-74, 102, 105-06, 142, 144,
Gangan (houngan) ason 298-99, 302-03, 158-60, 163-5, 170, 172-73, 175,
306-08, 311-12 179, 181-83, 201-04, 275-80,
Gangan makout (contemporary shaman) 283—298-88, 300-03, 305, 318,
299 344, 346-47, 356-62, 367
Garifuna (and Black Carib) 14, 20, Historicity 1, 11, 19-20, 32, 46, 142,
39-74 163, 179-82, 214, 216-17
Garvey, Marcus 365 Homelands 14, 17, 43-45, 84-86, 92,
Genipapo 232, 234, 237, 242, 142, 299
251-52 Honduras 14, 40, 46, 61, 63, 67-69
Geography of sacred memory 201 Howell, Leonard P 114
Gestalt 279 Huntingdonian Methodist
Gilroy, Paul 14, 45, 72, 146, 357 movement 82, 97
Governmentality 108, 127
Gubida 56, 64-65 Igbo 12, 16, 50, 80, 83, 85-86, 92,
Guinea/ginen 299, 303 305, 369 95-96, 105, 192
Guinea Prayer 311-13 Illamba (abakuá title) 211
Gullah dialect 359 Initiation 228-29, 238, 307-11,
Gurvitch, Georges 284 370-72
Gwo nég 365 And subordination 307, 370-71
 INDEX 385

imagery of ‘Middle Passage’ and Lineage, ritual 223, 227, 236

enslavement 371 Lingua do preto 339
Imagery of royalty 372-73 Lipski, John 338-41
Inquices 324-29, 366, 368 Liverpool 202
INTECAB 282, 285 Loko 300, 302, 304, 312, 318
Interdiscursivity 9, 11, 15-16, 18-19, La Loma de San Juan, Havana 132
22-28, 30-31, 92-93, 97-98, 103-05, Lovejoy, Paul 94, 191
164-75, 180-82, 224, 285-89, Lucumi 141, 143-44, 147-48, 273, 288,
313-18, 338-44 354-55, 366
Interpretative strategies 143-44, 152, Ambiguity of denotation in 148-51,
161, 172-73 157, 164
remes 189 As divine language 147, 156, 163,
Irvine, Judith 328, 338 173
Islam 6, 97, 352-53, 374-77. Etymological reconstruction 143-44
Island Canbs 47-51, 55-57 Glossaries 148,150
Interesting Narratwe of the Life of Olaudah Relationship to Yoruba 141, 143,
Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, 158
Whiten by Himself 79-106 Song 141, 143, 147, 155-57, 164
prophetic voice in 83, 89-90, Speech 154-57, 164
10306 Vocabulary 147-48, 151-53,
16364
Jacobina, Brazil 237-39, 248, 250 Lwa (or sen) 298, 30, 303, 307-08,
Jagua Baralt (ingenio) 122 310, 313

Kanzo 301, 306-11, 371 Maceo, Antonio 116

Kardec, Allan (Hippolite Léon Denizard Macumba. See also witchcraft and
Rivail). See also Spiriism 108, sorcery 226, 235, 237, 239, 270,
119-20 278, 280
Karenga, Maluana 285 Man 24, 315
Kikongo 168, 170, 172, 174, 332, 335, Malign ritual practices. See witchcraft
366 and sorcery
Kinds, ‘interactive’ and ‘natural’ See Mama Kengue 171-72
Hacking, lan Man-gods 16-17, 107-38
Koselleck, Reinhart 13, 30 and disasters 115
Kreyol 363-65 Manso Estévez, Juan 17, 20, 107, 110,
112-13, 115-16, 118, 120, 131-36
Jews/Ancient Israelites 93, 353, 355, arrest of 108
374-75 links to Hilario Mustelier 17, 108,
135-36
Lacombe, Joseph 295-96, 313 practices of 132, 134-35
Langa 311 press coverage of 108, 132-35
Landaluze, Victor Patricio 215 Mao de morto. See also Mortuary
Language ideology 172-73, 323-47 rites 234, 237, 239, 245, 247,
Language learning and socialization 249-250
148, 152-53, 160, 164 Marley, Bob 365
in Candomblé 27, 327, 331-32 Marquez Sterling, Manuel 133
human novices 323 Marujo 233, 239-41
Lay, Emilio. See also Man-gods 116 Mason, John 164-70
Legitimacy. See also charlatan and Matanzas, Cuba 132, 165, 188, 202
charlatanism 225, 231, 238, 241, Mateo, Olivorio (Dios Olivorio) 114
251 Material acculturation 258, 272, 274
Léogane 294-99, 309, 314, 318 Matory, J. Lorand 17, 144
Leopard societies 189 Mayarí, Cuba 122
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 266 Mbembe, Achille 6, 365-66
386 INDEX

Medahochi, K.O. Zannu 285-86 Nagé Candomblé 242, 263, 270, 278,
Memory See also Collective memory 282, 284-85
182-83 Names/naming 83, 93-94, 103,
Mennesson-Rigaud, Odile 93, 314-17 356-57
Mesmerism 119, 121 African American 356-57
Methodist providentialism 89-90, Negritude 259, 274, 276-78, 284
97-98 New York 40, 67-69, 72, 100
Métraux, Alfred 22-25, 264, 293-95, Ngbe polity See also Ekpe/Ngbe 199,
313-15, 317-18 213
Mfumbr See also Spirits 366 Nin y Valiente, Nicolás 124
Middle Passage 82, 86, 91, 288, 357, Nina Rodrigues, Raymundo 9, 183,
371 190, 257, 265, 269, 271-72
Migration 41, 67-72, 294 Náñigos. See abakuá
Miller, Ivor 180-81, 187
Mimesis 23-25, 317-18 Oba Oseijeman Efuntola Adelabu
Mintz, Sidney and Richard Price Adefunmi I 2, 285
145-46, 169, 185-86, 191 Obeah 64, 66
Misas espirituales See also Spiritism, Ochin 141, 144, 166
spirits 360, 362, Ogum 232-33, 236, 242, 244, 247-48
Misdor 23-24, 30001, 304-312, - Ogún 171
314-15, 317-18 Okobrwo Macarará (Ecobiw Efó Mucarará)
Miskitos 61-6 211
Mo 301 Old Calabar 50, 179-80, 189, 192,
Modernity 12, 17, 294, 318 196-200, 202-04
Modernization 107 Cuban slave imports from 199-200
Moore, David Chioni 12-13 Merchant elites of 197, 202-03
Moral artefact 112 Slave exports from 192-93, 201
.Morality. See also Candomblé, Old Testament 85, 104, 353, 375
Christianity, Protestantism, sorcery Old Town (Obutong) 199
and witchcraft, Spintism 117, Onchas 40, 147, 153, 160-61, 166,
235-36, 243-45, 286, 366
In modern Afro-Atlantic religions Onisha- Voodoo 159, 280-81, 285,
353-55, 373-78 287
Mortuary rites 58, 228, 234, 301-05 Onxás 228-30, 232-33, 236-37, 243,
Mosaic syncretism 270-73 245, 247-49, 251, 261, 287, 324-25,
Moses, Wilson 14 369
Mudimbe, Valentin Y. 9 Character of 325-06
Muertos See also Spirits 361, 366 Ortiz, Fernando 9, 114, 118, 120, 183,
Muhammad, Elijah 31 187, 189, 201-02, 212, 257, 269
Mustelier Garzón, Hilario (el Dios Ouns: 303, 306-11
Nuevo, San Hilarión) See also Oyotunji Village. See also American
Fraternal San Hilarión, Man-gods, Yoruba Movement 1, 285, 287
Manso Estévez, Juan 17, 20, 107,
109-10, 112-13, 115-16, 118, 120, Palmié, Stephan 110, 147, 158-59,
122-23, 136-38 354, 369
arrests of 107, 109, 122-24 Palo Monte 70, 147, 170-74
hospitalization of 122-24 Palo Mayombe 10, 352, 366, 368,
practices of 128-30 372, 374, 377
press coverage of 125-26 Pascal, Michael Henry 87-88, 97, 104
temple of 126, 129 Pastness/pastfulness 17-18, 145, 175
trials of 126-31 Pataki (divination myth) 153, 159, 167
Pedroso, Lazaro 166-68
nagdo (Candomblé ‘nations’) 224 Pentecostalism 120
Nagó 273
 INDEX 387

Pérez, José (el dios Nuevo) See also Religious authority. See also legitimacy
Man-gods 115 158-161
Pérez, Manuel See also Man-gods 115 Resistance 351, 376
Perry, Lee “Scratch” - 31 Retrieval (of the dead). See Mortuary
Pessoa de Castro, Yéda 331, 333, ritual
335-36, 338 Rezadeira 229, 232, 250
Petit, Andrés Facundo de los Dolores Ritual
211-14 Language 17-18, 143, 147-75, 311,
Piedrahita, Rosario (Our Lady of 324-47
Jiquiabo) 114 Of enslavement 363-73, 378
Polygyny 63, 85, 275 Panafricanism 24, 168, 259, 281,
Port-au-Prince 25, 293-94, 300, 285-87
316-17 Role of women 301, 306-11
Pévoas, Ruy do Carmo 331-32 Routon, Kenneth 179-80
Prenda 366, 368-69
As agent 368-69 Salvador de Bahia 19, 224, 227, 250,
‘jewish’ 369 260-61, 264-65, 287
Pretos velhos 361 Santeria 3-4, 17, 40, 70, 141-175,
Price Mars, Louis 23 287, 289
Principle of compartmentalization Santero-scholars 18, 26, 144, 153
256, 258, 265-69, 271 Santiago de Cuba 122, 142, 157
Proletarianization 294, 368 Santos 223, 244, 247
Protestantism 59, 65-66, 69, 98, 118, Scott, David 10-11, 111-112, 165,
273, 374-5 182
in Cuba 118 Secrecy 153
Puckett, Newbell Niles 359-60 Sertáo 20, 224-31, 245, 247, 251-52
Sertanejo/a 19, 226-31, 234
El Quemado, Cuba See also Alto Songo, Seven Years’ War 104
Cuba 122, 125-26, 130, 135 Sierra Leone 45, 82, 92, 96, 101
Quimbanda. See also witchcraft and Slavery 1, 83-85, 88, 295, 351-78
sorcery 243 As foil for the development of African
Quintero Rivera, Angel 136 American cultures 27-29, 45,
48-55, 79, 323, 358, 376-77
Race and racial identity 14, 68-72, And citizenship 88, 255, 356,
79, 90, 95-96, 103, 108, 134-55, 323 372-74
stereotypes, linguistic 27, 325, Economic efficiency of 367-68
338-45 And ideology of individual
Racialized language 27, 133, 338-47 freedom 29, 351-53, 355-57,
Racism 10, 14, 27, 325 373-74
Rainha das Margandas 329-30, 333-38, As litotic trope 352-53
343 And mastery 366, 374-76
Ramos, Arthur 257, 267-68, 271 As metaphor 351-53, 363, 370-72
Ransome-Kut, Fela 365 As opposed to ‘freedom’ 29,
Rastafan 27, 31, 114 351-53
Re-Africanization 70, 259, 277-78, As ‘regretable mistake’ 356
280, 287 Slaves 47-55, 357-58
Redemption 80, 374 Runaway 50-52
Regla, Cuba 187, 202, 213 Spirits of 358-62, 368
Founding of abakuá in 187 As victims 356-57
Regla de Ocha. See also Santería 3-4, Sociedades de color 110
147, 287, 352-55, 363, 367-70, 372, Society for the Preservation of
377 Spirituals 359
Reinterpretation 256-57, 273-76 Sosa Rodriguez, Enrique 187, 201
Relationality 44-45 Spirit geography 40, 45, 55, 66
388 INDEX

Spirit possession 26, 40, 56, 152, Heterogeneous 21, 163, 204
228, 233, 239-40, 298, 315, 325-47, Linear 19-20, 22
358-59 Tenten 30405
as anidiom 346-47 Terca Insana 340-44
as ritual inversion 346 Timoun 363, 368
interpretations of 346-47 Ti Rivyé, Haiti 294-96, 299-300, 302,
Spiritsm 17, 107-38, 360-62, 368, 306, 309, 311-12, 317
372 Tonton Ogoun 304 05, 309, 312-13
diffusion and varieties of 118-22 Turner, Victor 113, 303
politics of 17, 107-138
publications of 119 Umbanda 111, 229, 243-44, 246, 250,
regulation of 17, 116-18 278, 285, 360-62, 377
organizations 110, 121, 127, 130 Units of analysis 183-86, 216-17
Spirits See also caboclos, egums, eguns, Usagaré 179-81
Encarnacion de la Caridad y US. occupation of
Rodriguez (Na Caridad) erés, exús, Cuba 109, 118, 373
Marujo, Mfumbr, Muertos, Rainha das Hain 296, 316
Margaridas, Spiritism
Categories of 26, 56-57, 120, Vassa, Gustavus. See also Equiano,
228-29, 324-329, 360-62, 366 Olaudah 12, 80
Comportment of 324-29, 338, Verger, Pierre 23, 257, 261-64
361-62 Verificationism 165, 182, 223, 258
Congo 361, 366 Virginia 82, 87, 89, 93, 106
Enslaved 29, 358-59, 361-62 Vodou 293-318, 35, 367, 377
Hierarchies among 324-29, 360 Temple 293, 305, 316-17
St. Vincent 14, 40-41, 46, 50-59, Rural 293
66-67, 69 Voduns 324-29
.Strathern, Marilyn 3, 21
Sun Ra 31 Wanga. See also witchcraft and sorcery
Superstitions 364, 368
campaigns against, Cuba 16-17, Warner-Lewis, Maureen 168-70, 174
107, 110 Wirtz, Kristina 181
governmental approaches towards Witchcraft and sorcery. See also brujería,
16-17, 108, 110, 130-31 macumba, obeah, qumbanda 112, 230,
Syllable structure, simplification of 236, 241, 245, 253-54, 364, 374
336-37, 343 Woodson, Carter G. 21
Theones of African influence on
336 Xango 261, 263
Syncretism. See also Mosaic
syncretism 58, 111, 256, 258-59, Yanpwin (Met Olokan) 310-11
266-74, 278, 280-82, 285, 287 Yemaya 152, 154-57, 160
Systemic articulations 186, 200, Yoruba 1-6, 69, 141, 147, 164-66,
204-217 12, 174, 226, 258, 262, 264, 272-73,
286-88, 332, 358, 361, 368
Talbot, P Amaury 214 In Trinidad 168-170, 174
Tata inquice 366-67 Language 141, 143-44, 281, 323,
Tatá Mutá 327, 331, 333 336
Temporal telescoping 167-68, 170, Onk (praise song) 141
174 Temple 287
Temporality 9, 17, 25-26, 28-29, 183,
216-17, 279-280, 284 Zoila See also Brujería 128
Allochronic 9, 14, 16, 17, 22 Zombification 366
Epochal 181, 204 Konh/Zombi 363-66, 368
 STUDIES OF RELIGION
IN AFRICA
SUPPLEMENTS TO THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION IN AFRICA

. MOBLEY, H.W. The Ghanaian’s Image of the Missionary. An Analysis of the

Pubhshed Critiques of Christian Missionaries by Ghanaians, 1897-1965.
1970. ISBN 90 04 01185 4
POBEE, J.S. (ed.). Religion in a Pluralistic Society. Essays Presented to Pro-
fessor C.G. Baéta in Celebration of his Retirement from the Service of
the University of Ghana, September 1971, by Friends and Colleagues
Scattered over the Globe. 1976. ISBN 90 04 04556 2
. TASIE, G.O.M. Chnstian Missionary Enterprise in the Niger Delta, 1864-19168.
1978. ISBN 90 04 05243 7
. REECK,D. Deep Mende. Religious Interactions in a Changing African
Rural Society. 1978. ISBN 90 04 04769 7
. BUTSELAAR,J. VAN. Afncains, missionnarres et colomalistes. Les origines de
PÉglise Presbytérienne de Mozambique (Mission Suisse), 1880-1896.
1984. ISBN 90 04 07481 3
. OMENKA, N.I. The School in the Service of Evangelization. ‘The Catholic
Educational Impact in Eastern Nigeria 1886-1950. 1989.
ISBN 90 04 08932 3
JEDREJ, M.C. £ SHAW, R. (eds.). Dreaming, Religion and Society in Afnea.
1992. ISBN 90 04 08936 5
. GARVEY, B. Bembaland Church. Religious and Social Change in South
Central Africa, 1891-1964. 1994. ISBN 90 04 09957 3
. OOSTHUIZEN, G.C., KITSHOFE M.C. & DUBE, S.W.D. (eds.).
Afro-Christianity at the Grassroots. Its Dynamics and Strategies. Fore-
word by Archbishop Desmond ‘Tutu. 1994.
ISBN 90 04 10035 0
10. SHANK, D.A. Prophet Harris, the ‘Black Elyah’ of West Afnca. Abridged by
Jocelyn Murray. 1994. ISBN 90 04 09980 8
11. HINFELAAR, H.F. Bemba-speaking Women of Zambia in a Century of Reli-
gious Change (1892-1992). 1994. ISBN 90 04 10149 7
12. GIFFORD, P. (ed.). The Christian Churches and the Democratisation of Africa.
1995. ISBN 90 04 10324 4
13. JEDREJ, M.C. Ingessana. "The Religious Institutions of a People of the
Sudan-Ethiopia Borderland. 1995. ISBN 90 04 10361 9
14. FIEDLER, K. Chnstianity and Afncan Culture. Conservative German Prote-
stant Missionaries in Tanzania, 1900-1940. 1996.
ISBN 90 04 10497 6
15. OBENG, P. Asante Catholicims. Religious and Cultural Reproduction
Among the Akan of Ghana. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10631 6
16. FARGHER, B.L. The Origins of the New Churches Movement in Southern Ethao-
pia, 1927-1944. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10661 8
17. TAYLOR, W.H. Mission te Educate. A History of the Educational Work of
the Scottish Presbyterian Mission in East Nigeria, 1846-1960. 1996.
ISBN 90 04 10713 4
18. RUEL, M. Belief, Ritual and the Securing of Life. Reflexive Essays on a Bantu
Religion. 1996. ISBN 90 04 10640 5
19. McKENZIE, P. Hail Orisha! A Phenomenology of a West African Reli-
gion in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. 1997.
ISBN 90 04 10942 0
20. MIDDLETON, K. Ancestors, Power and History in Madagascar. 1999.
ISBN 90 04 11289 8
21. LUDWIG, E Church and State in Tanzania. Aspects of a Changing Rela-
tionship, 1961-1994. 1999. 90 04 11506 4
22. BURKE, J.F. These Catholic Sisters are all Mamas! Towards the Incultura-
tion of the Sisterhood in Africa, an Ethnographic Study. 2001.
ISBN 90 04 11930 2
23. MAXWELL, D., with I. LAWRIE (eds.) Christzanity and the African Imagi-
nation. Essays in Honour of Adrian Hastings. 2001,
ISBN 90 04 11668 0
24. GUNNER, E. The Man of Heaven and the Beautiful Ones of God. 2003. In pre-
paration. ISBN 90 04 12542 6
25. PEMBERTON, C. Circle Thinking. African Women Theologians in Dialo-
gue with the West. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12441 1
26. WEISS, B. (ed.). Producing African Futures. Ritual and Reproduction in a
Neoliberal Age. 2004. ISBN 90 04 13860 9
27. ASAMOAH-GYADU, J.K. African Charismatics. Gurrent Developments
within Independent Indigenous Pentecostalism in Ghana. 2004.
ISBN 90 04 14089 1
28. WESTERLUND, D. African Indigenous Religions and Disease Causation. From
Spriritual Beings to Living Humans. 2006. ISBN 90 04 14433 1
29. FAULKNER, M.R.J. Overtly Muslim, Covertly Bont. Competing Calls of
Religious Allegiance on the Kenyan Coast. 2006. ISBN 90 04 14753 5
30. SOOTHILL, J.E. Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power. Charismatic
Christianity in Ghana. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15789 7
31. CLAFFEY, P. Chnstian Churches in Dahomey-Benin. A study of their socio-
political role. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15572 5
32. WIT, H. DE and WEST, G.O. (eds.). African and European Readers of the
Bible in Dialogue. In Quest Of a Shared Meaning. 2008.
ISBN 978 90 04 16656 1 (In preparation)
33. PALMIE, S. (ed.). Africas of the Americas. Beyond the Search for Origins in
the Study of Afro-Atlantic Religions. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16472 7
 The anthropology A ea aa Con religious
NAS eit been dominated 17 PY ater aes aiming
to recover and authenticate the historical transatlantic
continuities linking such AN
source cultures. While not anit such continuities, the
RT
rl TS TES aes
ES nt instead what role notions of
“Africanity” and “pastfulness” evans social and ritual
lives of historical and contemporary practitioners of Afro-
Atlantic religious formations. The volume's goal is to
TS E Sac Ce E RO
empirical scrutiny, and so contribute to a broadening of
NE om

www.brillnl © Stephan Palmié Ph.D. (University of Munich, 1989) is

EST AOL
of Chicago. He is the author of Das Exil der Gotter (1991)
and Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban
Modernity and Tradition (2002).

ISSN 0169-9814

ISBN 978 90 04 164727

789004"164727