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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Black Africans who were brought to Cuba as slaves represented a variety of origins and belonged to linguistic groups that were as divergent as their cultural backgrounds. A huge majority, however, originated in the Congo basin. The last officially recorded arrival of a slave ship in a Cuban port took place in 1873.
It would be impossible to classify expressions of Bantu origin that were used in the slave trade. The arbitrary label “Congo” has been applied to most such expressions with a view to noting and suggesting a kinship with the cultural and religious heritage branching off from the Bantu linguistic trunk.
1. Cabildos, brotherhoods of black slaves and their descendants who shared com mon tribal roots, were established for social and charitable purposes in an attempt to recreate the old African traditions. Cabildos engaged in ritual wor ship, singing, and dancing. The first such brotherhoods came into being at the close of the seventeenth century, and a few survived until the beginning of the republican period.
This article is a revised and shortened translation of a chapter in the author's volume Cultos Afrocubanos (Havana, 1996).
2. Lydia Cabrera, Reglas de congo, palo monte mayombe … (Miami, 1979), p. 15.
3. Nãnigos: members of the Abakuá sect, an exclusively male society that had originated in Africa and which still survives in Cuba in the provinces of Havana and Matanzas.
4. Lucumí: a popular denomination arbitrarily used in Cuba to designate Africans coming from Nigeria and probably also from other Sudanese regions, particularly the Gulf of Guinea.
5. Changó: a Yoruba deity, the god of lightning and thunder, of love, virility, and music.
6. Tata Nganga: the totemic ancester, from the Bantu tata, or “father,” and nganga, “magic power.”
7. French translator's note: palo is the central term of the Congo cult. It refers to a totemic or magic baton or stick. The translations do not do justice to the term's semantic richness, for it refers at once to a material, wood, in the form of a “baton” used in governance or in dancing, and to a pole that symbolizes the earth's axis, and so forth. The palo comes from the monte or wild forest, a symbol of the primordial cosmos, which as a free territory takes on even richer connotations for slaves.
8. Translator's note: The term barracoon designates the the slaves' cramped living quarters on plantations in colonial Cuba.
9. Conga or Congo is the name given in Cuba to Blacks from the banks of the Congo River or to their descendents.
10. French translator's note: chicherekú: a magic doll of Congo origin.
11. French translator's note: nkise: a Lingala (Congo) term meaning a “medicine” or a “talisman.” Among the Yombés, nkisi was the name given to statues pecu liar to secret societies.
12. Cazuela: a receptacle made of terra cotta in which are placed the magic attrib utes of supernatural forces worshiped in the Congo rites.
13. Miguel Barnet, Biography of a Runaway Slave, trans. W. Nick Hill (Willimantic, Connecticut, 1994), pp. 33-34. Born in 1860, Esteban Montejo had worked on a sugar plantation in colonial Cuba before running away. In 1963, when he was 104 years old, the author Miguel Barnet, then a young writer and ethnologist, learned of his existence through a notice in the press and decided to record his recollections.
14. Lydia Cabrera, Reglas de congo, (see note 2 above), p. 213.
15. Ibid., p. 60.
16. An ethnic group originating in Benin.
17. An ethnic group originating in Nigeria.
18. French translator's note: In Lingala, ndoki means “bad spirit.”
19. Translator's note: The urubu is a type of vulture or buzzard that figures in Congo religious culture; see the story of the buzzard's egg, below.
20. “Palo judío” in the original text.
21. Miguel Barnet, Biography of a Runaway Slave, (see note 13 above), pp. 123-124.
22. French translator's note: In Lingala nzambe means “God.”
23. Walterio Carbonell, Mayombe en Cuba (Havana, 1967).
24. French translator's note: In Lingala ntangu means “Sun.”
25. French translator's note: the garabato is a palo (baton) with a hook at one end.
26. Lydia Cabrera, Reglas de congo, (see note 2 above), p. 93.
27. French translator's note: the gangarria is a musical instrument.
28. Lydia Cabrera, Reglas de congo, (see note 2 above), p. 77.
29. French translator's note: An ethnic group of northwest Nigeria.
30. Argeliers León (Dir. Gen. de la Culture, Min. de l'Education), Artes Plásticas 1 (1960) p. 28.
31. Leovigildo López, “Las firmas de los santos,” in Actas de Folklore 1, no. 5 (1961).
32. The urubu is a variety of buzzard found in Cuba.
33. Miguel Barnet, Biography of a Runaway Slave, (see note 13 above), pp. 119-120.
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