West Africa and the Caribbean

"West Africa and the Caribbean" names one of the most consequential religious diasporas in history: the traditions of West Africa and the new faiths their forced transatlantic passage created. At its heart is the religion of the Yoruba of what is now Nigeria and Benin, one of the most elaborate of African religious systems, a cosmos presided over by the remote high god Olodumare and served through the orishas, a great pantheon of deities (Shango of thunder, Ogun of iron and war, Yemoja of the waters, Oshun of rivers and love) each with their own personalities, praises, colours, and domains, and approached through the profound Ifa divination system.

Carried across the Atlantic in the horror of the slave trade, this religion survived by fusing with the Catholicism imposed on the enslaved, the orishas identified with Catholic saints, to generate the great Afro-Atlantic religions: Santeria (Lucumi) in Cuba, Candomble in Brazil, and, drawing on the neighbouring Fon tradition of Dahomey, Haitian Vodou with its lwa, as well as Brazilian Umbanda.

The region and its diaspora also produced Rastafari, the twentieth-century Jamaican movement. This tradition thus demonstrates the extraordinary resilience of West African religion, which, though the label undercounts its homelands, not only endured enslavement but seeded a family of vibrant living faiths across the Americas.

This region is held as one because its religious history is a single history: West African traditions carried across the Atlantic by enslaved people and rebuilt under conditions designed to prevent exactly that.

What was rebuilt was not a copy. People from many peoples and languages were thrown together, and what emerged in Cuba, Brazil and Haiti drew on several West and Central African sources at once, took cover under Catholic saints where it had to, and developed its own priesthoods, liturgies and lineages. These are not survivals. They are religions made in the Americas by people using what they had.

The written record is correspondingly awkward. For the African side, the earliest substantial descriptions are by traders, missionaries and colonial officials. For the American side, much of the archive is legal and ecclesiastical, generated because the practice was being prosecuted or policed, and Brazilian and Cuban authorities kept files on it well into the twentieth century.

A further complication is the category itself. The consolidation of a single Yoruba identity across peoples who had not previously used one name owes much to the nineteenth century, to mission schools, to standardised written Yoruba and to returnees from Brazil and Sierra Leone. The religion now studied as Yoruba tradition took shape in dialogue with the diaspora rather than simply preceding it.

Both sides of the ocean are living traditions with living authorities, and the atlas describes rather than instructs.