African diaspora religions

Example of Louisiana-Tradition Voodoo altar inside a temple in New Orleans.

Afro-American religions (also African diasporic religions) are a number of related religions that developed in the Americas among enslaved Africans and their descendants in various countries of Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts of the southern United States. They derive from African traditional religions, especially of West and Central Africa.

Characteristics

These religions usually involve ancestor veneration and/or a pantheon of divine spirits, such as the loas of Haitian Vodou, or the orishas of Santería. Similar divine spirits are also found in the Central and West African traditions from which they derive — the orishas of Yoruba cultures, the nkisi of Bantu (Kongo) traditions, and the Vodun of Dahomey (Benin), Togo, southern Ghana, and Burkina Faso. In addition to mixing these various but related African traditions, many Afro-American religions incorporate elements of Christian, indigenous American, Kardecist, Spiritualist and even Islamic traditions. This mixing of traditions is known as religious syncretism.

List of traditions

Afro-American Religions
Religion	Location	Ancestral roots	Also practiced in	Remarks
Candomblé	Brazil	Yoruba		Some elements of Dahomey Vodun (deities) and Kongo nkisi. Also called Batuque.
Umbanda	Brazil	Yoruba (mainly)	Uruguay	Syncretism. Mixed the Yoruba's deities (Orishas) with the Bantu's veneration of ancestral spirits (Preto Velho), indigenous elements (Caboclos and Caciques), Allan Kardec's Spiritism and Catholicism. Founded in the early 20th century.
Quimbanda	Brazil	Kongo, Witchcraft, Brazilian Shamanism		Veneration of ancestral spirits called Exu and Pomba Gira
Santería	Cuba	Yoruba	Puerto Rico, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, USA	Catholicism Syncretism
Regla de Arará	Cuba	Fon	Puerto Rico
Regla de Palo	Cuba	Kongo nkisi	Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, USA, Venezuela	Also called Palo Mayombe, Las Reglas del Congo, Palo Monte
Abakua	Cuba	Ekpe		society of the Annang, Efik, Ibibio, Ekoi and Igbo
21 Divisiones	Dominican Republic	Taino, Fon, Yoruba, Kongo	USA
Haitian Vodou	Haiti	Fon	Cuba, Dominican Republic, USA, Canada
Obeah	Jamaica	Igbo	Trinidad and Tobago, Bahamas, Virgin Islands, Grenada, Barbados, Guyana, Suriname, Belize	Related to Hoodoo folk magic. Derives from the Igbo 'obia' (or dibia, Igbo: doctoring) traditions.
Kumina	Jamaica	Kongo
Winti	Suriname	Akan, Yoruba, Kongo	Netherlands
Spiritual Baptist	Trinidad and Tobago	Yoruba	Jamaica, Bahamas, USA	Protestantism Syncretism, since the early 19th century
Orisha	Trinidad and Tobago	Yoruba	USA	originally Yoruba, later syncretized with Catholicism.
Louisiana Voodoo	Southern USA	Fon	USA

Other closely related regional faiths include:

• Sanse (also known as Puerto Rican Vudú) (Fon, Puerto Rico)
• Xangô de Recife (Yoruba, Brazil)
• Xangô do Nordeste (Yoruba, Brazil
• Tambor de Mina (Yoruba, Brazil)

New religious movements

Some syncretic new religious movements have elements of these African religions, but are predominantly rooted in other spiritual traditions. A first wave of such movements originated in the early twentieth century:

• Santo Daime (folk Catholicism and Spiritism, Brazil);
• Moorish Science Temple of America (Eastern philosophy, USA);
• Nation of Islam (Islam, USA)
• Black Hebrew Israelites (Judaism, USA)
• Nation of Gods and Earths (Islam and Emanationism, USA)
• Rastafari movement (African-influenced Judeo-Christian, Jamaica); and
• Espiritismo (mixture of Taino and Kongo beliefs, Puerto Rico)

A second wave of new movements originated in the 1960s to 1970s, in the context of the emergence of New Age and Neopaganism in the United States:

• União do Vegetal (Brazil, entheogenic, since 1961);
• Vale do Amanhecer (Brazil, Spiritism, since 1965);
• Nuwaubian Nation (USA, Kemetism, UFO religion and Islam, since the 1980s)
• Ausar Auset Society (USA, Kemetism, Pan-Africanism, since 1973); and
• Black Buddhist Community in America (USA, Buddhism, since the 1960s).

See also

• African traditional religion
• Afro-Brazilian Religion
• Ifá

Further reading

• Davis, Cyprian. The History of Black Catholics in the United States (1990).
• Fallin, Jr., Wilson. Uplifting the People: Three Centuries of Black Baptists in Alabama (2007)
• Fitts, Leroy. A history of black Baptists (Broadman Press, 1985)
• Frey, Sylvia R. "The Visible Church: Historiography of African American Religion since Raboteau," Slavery & Abolition (2008) 29#1 pp 83-110
• Frey, Sylvia R. and Betty Wood. Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (1998).
• Garrow, David. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986).
• Harris, Fredrick C. Something within: Religion in African-American political activism (1999)
• Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Woman’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1993).
• Johnson, Paul E., ed. African-American Christianity: Essays in History (1994).
• Moody, Joycelyn. Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-century African American Women (2001)
• Owens, A. Nevell. Formation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Nineteenth Century: Rhetoric of Identification (2014)
• Raboteau, Albert. Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (1978)
• Raboteau, Albert. African American-Religion (1999) 145pp online basic introduction
• Raboteau, Albert J. Canaan land: A religious history of African Americans (2001).
• Sensbach, Jon F. Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (2005)
• Sobel, M. Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (1979)
• Wills, David W. and Richard Newman, eds. Black Apostles at Home and Abroad: Afro-Americans and the Christian Mission from the Revolution to Reconstruction (1982)
• Yong, Amos, and Estrelda Y. Alexander. Afro-Pentecostalism: Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in History and Culture (2012)

Primary sources

• Sernett, Milton C, ed. Afro-American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (Duke University Press, 1985)

External links

• Roots and Rooted