Afro-Atlantic religions: Vodou, Candomble, Santeria

Across the plantation societies of the Americas, enslaved Africans and their descendants built new religions from the beliefs they carried with them. In Haiti this became Vodou, drawing on Fon and Ewe vodun worship from the Bight of Benin and on Kongo traditions. In Cuba, Yoruba-speaking captives and their descendants created the faith known as Santeria or Regla de Ocha, and in Bahia, Brazil, a related religion called Candomble took shape around the Yoruba orishas, Fon and Bantu spirits. Each took shape between the 1700s and mid 1800s, so one year is only a convenience.¹²³

Their roots lay in the transatlantic slave trade, which carried several million West and Central Africans to Brazil, Cuba and Saint-Domingue, many to the sugar plantations. People from different peoples were mixed together, forced to share one world, and denied their own temples. Slaveholders and Catholic authorities pressed baptism on them, and the enslaved matched their spirits with Catholic saints: in Cuba and Brazil, for example, the thunder orisha Shango became linked with Saint Barbara or Saint Jerome. Scholars now stress that this was more than disguise: many believers practiced both religions sincerely, and the fusion became real new systems with their own priests, drumming and initiation. The fall of the Oyo empire in the early 1800s sent large numbers of Yoruba captives to Cuba and Brazil, strengthening Yoruba elements.²³¹

These religions survived suppression by colonial governments, the Catholic Church and later states, which often banned them as witchcraft. Vodou had a central place in the Haitian Revolution that began in 1791 and in the nation's identity, though Haiti did not recognize it as an official religion until 2003. Candomble was legally persecuted in Brazil until the twentieth century and is now protected, and Santeria spread to the United States after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Their music and imagery also fed into jazz, samba and Latin popular culture.⁴²