Abstract
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the island of Cuba underwent a surging economic expansion based on increased production of sugar. At the same time the Yoruba people of what is present-day Nigeria were waging a series of disastrous wars with their neighbors and among themselves. Prisoners of these wars were sold in huge numbers to European slave traders and hundreds of thousands of Yoruba were brought to Cuba to labor in the new sugar mills.1 Yet despite the atrocious conditions of the Middle Passage, and the disorientations of plantation slavery, the Yoruba were able to reconstitute their identity and equilibrium by means of their religious practices. The transplanted practices were gradually adapted to complement and reflect the Roman Catholicism of the Spanish colonies. The resulting tradition came to be known as santeria, the cult of the saints.2 In order to assess the role of African religion in the make-up of Afro-American religion it would be useful to develop a way to distinguish African from European religion. I think that the best way to do this is to examine the ritual side of a religion: what I am calling the ritual approach. A ritual approach is the way a people “go about’’ their religion, the way they put it into practice. To paraphrase Anthony Wallace, a ritual approach is what accomplishes what a religion sets
out to do.3 This is a loose distinction, valuable, I think, because it is more useful and interesting than the traditional ways of dealing with the African religious inheritance in the Americas. If it is truly useful it should have applications to other Afro-American religious traditions. To begin to explore these possibilities we can begin with a very brief sketch of santeria.