On Santiago, the most African of Cabo Verde's islands, the festivals of the Catholic calendar belong to the tabankas, neighbourhood societies that are at once confraternity, mutual aid association and carnival troupe. Each tabanka keeps a chapel house, a set of drums, conch shell trumpets and a hierarchy of kings, queens, captains and guards elected from the membership, offices that scholars trace to the lay brotherhoods into which the church once organised enslaved and free Africans, and through them to older West African patterns of association.
In May and June, around the feasts of the Holy Spirit and Saint John, a tabanka takes its saint from the chapel and processes through the district behind the drums, the community dancing, singing call and response, and collecting alms; the saint is then ceremonially stolen, ransomed and returned, a drama of loss and redemption played out over days. Colonial authorities and clergy periodically banned the societies as disorder or superstition, which pushed them to the margins of the towns and deepened their role as guardians of badiu identity, the culture of Santiago's hinterland descended from runaways and rural folk. Since independence the tabankas have been embraced as national heritage, with a museum in Assomada and state support for the festivals, and they remain the clearest living example of how Cabo Verde made Catholicism its own instrument, tuned to drums.