Carried Across the Atlantic Into Santeria and Candomble

The sekere travelled with enslaved Yoruba people across the Atlantic and remains an active ritual instrument today within the African diaspora traditions that carried Yoruba orisha worship forward under new names and new local forms, including Santeria in Cuba and the wider Caribbean and Candomble in Brazil, where orishas continue to be honoured with specific music, including sekere rhythms, closely related to their West African originals despite centuries of separate development on different continents.

Idowu's and Peel's scholarship on Yoruba religious life documents how thoroughly music and specific instrumentation are treated as inseparable from correct ritual practice across this whole diasporic religious family, so an instrument like the sekere is never merely decorative accompaniment but functions as part of the technical apparatus of worship itself, comparable in that sense to how a bell or gong operates in liturgical traditions on other continents. Its continued use across West Africa and the diaspora alike makes it one of the more geographically widespread sacred percussion instruments still in active religious use anywhere in the world. Contemporary practitioners in Cuba and Brazil continue to train new sekere players within their respective houses of worship, maintaining a continuous chain of oral transmission that in some documented lineages can be traced back many generations.