Keeping in with the Afro-Latino theme from my previous post, the London Lucumi Choir will be performing at the Royal Festival Hall on 12th October 2008.

Having taken part in their workshop during the recent Open Rehearsal Weekend (part of the Cultural Olympiad), I have no doubt it will be an exhilarating experience to be in a room awash with animated songs of praise to Orishas (deities) of the Yoruba tradition, to a rhythmic accompaniment of Afro-Cuban percussion including Batá drums.

The word ‘Lucumi’ derives from Yoruba and is how the Yoruban people used to salute each other in Cuba in the early days of slavery: it roughly translates as ‘My friend’. These days, the word Lucumi is used to describe the practitioners of the religion Santeriá or Regla de Ocha (the rule of the Orishas), a religion now spread worldwide which has its roots in West Africa.

The fascinating thing, I find, is the literally and metaphorically arduous journey that frequently ill-understood Traditional African Spirituality that was exported from West and Central Africa through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, took to Latin America, was absorbed and integrated by virtue of the strength of the bearers and descendants of this tradition, and inevitably evolved and manifested into distinct but related forms – Candomblé in Brazil, Santeriá in Cuba, Haitian Voodoo, amongst others – through the organic syncreticism of a ‘pure’ African practice with the then current local culture and tradition, which constituted the indigenous populations (aka ‘Indians’) and the Roman Catholic faith imported by the Spanish Conquistadores.

These newly formed, unique religions in their own right (aka New World religions), have since been exported by significant numbers of the Latino and Caribbean diaspora, e.g. to the USA, thus inevitably spreading their practice to non-Caribbean / non-Latino converts. Interestingly, on the African continent, Benin is the only country that recognises Voodoo as its official religion.

If it hasn’t yet been assessed, it would be a fascinating ethnographic enquiry to explore the exportation of these Afro-Latino / Afro-Caribbean religions to Africa or their practice by Africans in the diaspora. Afterall, the merging of Christianity with Traditional African Spirituality is not a novel concept in post-colonial Africa. (Any ideas Native Anthropologist?)

Quoting Anani Dzidzienyo whose sentiments accurately resonate with mine,

That these institutions moved from the clandestine to the marginal to their present day status as national institutions [in Latin America] is indeed remarkable.

For me, the survival and proliferation of these syncreticised religions with African roots is even more jaw-droppingly remarkable as I reflect on my personal circumstance as an East African who went to a Catholic primary school in Nairobi and had a short stint in not-overtly-Catholic-’modern’ Spain, participating in a West African-via-Cuba spiritual tradition that emanated from a region that was historically colonial French West Africa (i.e. Dahomey), conducted in an archaic West African patois that has since evolved, in the former HQ of the British Empire. In addition, the London Lucumi Choir is itself a cosmopolitan mestizo of various nationalities. If this is not a powerful attestation to globalisation, then I don’t know what is.