Abakua

The Cross River region of what is now south-eastern Nigeria and western Cameroon holds a set of male title societies, known among the Efik as Ekpe and by related names among the Ejagham, Efut and their neighbours, which governed trade, settled disputes, enforced debts and held authority independent of any chief. Men bought their way upward through ranked titles, and the society's authority rested on that structure rather than on lineage.

Efik and neighbouring people taken to Cuba in the slave trade of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries arrived in Havana and its port districts in numbers, and were permitted to organise in cabildos de nacion, mutual aid associations grouped by African origin, which the colonial authorities tolerated as a means of control. Within that framework the Cross River society was reconstituted. The tradition dates its first lodge to 1836 at Regla, across the harbour from Havana, and further potencias, also called juegos, were founded from it by a process of authorised descent that the society keeps track of.

Membership was initially confined to men of Cross River origin, then extended to Africans of other origins and to Cuban-born black men. A juego of white Cubans was initiated in 1863, and that step is treated in the society's own history as a decisive one.

Abakua is a Havana and Matanzas institution before it is anything else, rooted in the dock districts, in Regla and Guanabacoa, and in the working port. Its most public face is the ireme, the masked and costumed dancer who appears at ceremonies and in the street, moving in a stooped, sweeping manner that is instantly recognisable in Cuba and widely photographed.

Its musical influence is very large and very well documented. The society maintains a drum ensemble with a specific set of instruments and rhythms, and those rhythms fed directly into Cuban popular music: the abakua patterns are audible in rumba, and a number of the musicians who carried Cuban music into jazz and into the wider world were initiates. That line of transmission is one of the reasons the society is known far outside the island.

Its history with the state has been difficult. Colonial authorities banned it and prosecuted members, the press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated it with criminality, and campaigns of suppression followed; later scholarship has substantially revised that picture and read the campaigns in the light of what they were reacting to.

Abakua is oath-bound. Its ritual register and the material spoken in it, and the drawn signs that carry authority within it, are held by the potencias and their titleholders.