Santeria

Origins

The history of Santeria effectively begins in West Africa, where the Yoruba had evolved their own religious and social traditions. The Yoruba kingdom was set in a network of political and cultural interaction with the old kingdom of Benin in Nigeria and the kingdom of Dahomey in what is now the Republic of Benin. In the 18th and 19th centuries, all three of these kingdoms battled against each other and were unwillingly involved in the European slave trade. Yorubas were only a small segment of the enslaved Africans brought into Cuba in its beginnings, but at the height of the warfare and the slave trade (1840–1870), more than one third of all the Africans brought into Cuba were Yorubas. Because Cuba's Catholic church was closely allied with the national government and because Catholicism was the only religion that was legal, as Cuba remained a Spanish colony, once they were in Cuba, all the African ethnic groups—including the Yorubas—came under pressure to convert to Catholicism and abandon their traditional religions. The Catholic church's strategy was this: Guide the Africans gradually toward a complete conversion to Christianity, but tolerate some mixing of African and Catholic religions along the way. To this end, the Catholic church founded Afro-Catholic fraternities in cities with sizable African populations. The fraternities, called cabildos, formed mutual aid societies for people from the same African ethnic background. The Yoruba-based cabildos formed an institutional basis for what would later become known as Santeria, regia de ocba, Oricba, or Lucumi.

At the same time as they preserved African traditions, the cabildos also promoted Catholic religious education and participation in the church's public festivals. In the late 19th century, however, when it became clear that the cabildos' African religious traditions—even in their mixed and modified forms—were not about to disappear, the Catholic church and the colonial government joined hands to try to stamp them out. The Catholic church cut its ties to the cabildos, the government passed increasingly oppressive legislation against them, and the police clamped down on them, too, treating involvement in the Afro-Cuban religions as a criminal activity. In response, the cabildos went underground, and Santeria worship became clandestine.

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