Journal of the University Film and Video Association,
35 (2), 109–128.
Tassy, E. (1994, January 25). “Sankofa” Takes a Different
Route to Theatres.Los Angeles Times, p. B2.
Thomas, K. (1995, May 12). “Sankofa” Delivers
Powerful Indictment of Evil of Slavery.Los Angeles
Times, p. B6.
Yearwood, G. (Ed.). (1982).Black Cinema Aesthetics:
Issues in Independent Black Filmmaking. Athens:
Center for Afro-American Studies, Ohio University.
SANTERIA
Santeria (also known in Cuba asregla de ocha,
Oricha, orLucumi) is a trans-Atlantic extension
of Yoruba religion into the African diaspora.
Santeria is one of a number of related Yoruba-
based religions existing in the Caribbean, Central
America, and South America. Throughout this
region, relatively new religious forms arose out of
the encounters of indigenous Amerindian peoples,
European settlers, and imported Africans and
Asians as Europe colonized the Americas. The
religion of the Yoruba people, mainly found in the
countries of Nigeria, Togo, and the Republic of
Benin, is an ancient religious system with millions
of adherents on the African continent as well as in
the Americas. Just as there are regional and doc-
trinal variants within the Christian, Buddhist, and
Islamic religions, this is the case with Yoruba reli-
gion as well, and Santeria is simply the Cuban
variant of this older, more extensive Yoruba reli-
gious tradition.
OriginsThe history of Santeria effectively begins in West
Africa, where the Yoruba had evolved their own
religious and social traditions. The Yoruba king-
dom was set in a network of political and cultural
interaction with the old kingdom of Benin in
Nigeria and the kingdom of Dahomey in what is
now the Republic of Benin. In the 18th and 19th
centuries, all three of these kingdoms battled
against each other and were unwillingly involved
in the European slave trade. Yorubas were only a
small segment of the enslaved Africans brought
into Cuba in its beginnings, but at the height of
the warfare and the slave trade (1840–1870),
more than one third of all the Africans brought
into Cuba were Yorubas. Because Cuba’s Catholic
church was closely allied with the national gov-
ernment and because Catholicism was the only
religion that was legal, as Cuba remained
a Spanish colony, once they were in Cuba, all the
African ethnic groups—including the Yorubas—
came under pressure to convert to Catholicism
and abandon their traditional religions. The
Catholic church’s strategy was this: Guide the
Africans gradually toward a complete conversion
to Christianity, but tolerate some mixing of
African and Catholic religions along the way. To
this end, the Catholic church founded Afro-
Catholic fraternities in cities with sizable African
populations. The fraternities, called cabildos,
formed mutual aid societies for people from the
same African ethnic background. The Yoruba-
based cabildos formed an institutional basis for
what would later become known asSanteria,regla
de ocha,Oricha, orLucumi.
At the same time as they preserved African tra-
ditions, the cabildos also promoted Catholic reli-
gious education and participation in the church’s
public festivals. In the late 19th century, however,
when it became clear that the cabildos’ African
religious traditions—even in their mixed and
modified forms—were not about to disappear, the
Catholic church and the colonial government
joined hands to try to stamp them out. The
Catholic church cut its ties to the cabildos, the
government passed increasingly oppressive legisla-
tion against them, and the police clamped down
on them, too, treating involvement in the Afro-
Cuban religions as a criminal activity. In response,
the cabildos went underground, and Santeria wor-
ship became clandestine.
During this era of suppression, Santeria was
also influenced by the spiritist doctrines of
Hippolyte Rivail. Rivail’s books had begun
appearing in Cuba as early as the 1850s, but
between 1870 and 1880, his writings spread like a
tidal wave throughout the French and Spanish
Caribbean and into Central and South America.
Writing under the pen name Allan Kardec, this
French engineer proclaimed the revelation of an
updated, scientistic spiritualism. His books
described the results of a positive investigation of
the spiritual world, which others could also carrySanteria 589