History of Christianity’s interest in Afro-American Christianity awakened

HAVANA, Cuba, October 8, 2007

The complex nature of African and Afro-American Christianity, that has so often been ignored and Taxi Heathrow Airport even rejected by the Christian churches, both Catholic and Reformed and Evangelical, was the theme that caused an intense discussion among the students attending the post-graduate course on the History of Christianity, that is part of the Masters program in General History of the Philosophy and History Faculty of the Havana University.

Led by María Ileana Faguaga Iglesias, Director of the CEHILA-Cuba program (Comisión for the Study of the History of the Church in Latin America), the class had as invited lecturer Ramón Torres, a journalist and researcher who spoke about “The Abakua or ‘Nanigos’ Cuban Society,” that is found in the sea-port cities of Havana, Matanzas and Cardenas, and which arose more than one hundred and fifty years ago in the small Havana community of Regla – where the shipments of slaves arrived during the colony – located off to one side of Havana Bay.

It is precisely in that community, in front of the bay, that a Catholic church exists dedicated to the Virgin of Regla (Yemaya, “orisha,” a sea deity in the Afro-Cuban pantheon), a black image similar to the one done in North Africa by St. Augustine, and which was taken to the Spanish peninsula when Christianity collapsed as a result of the invasion by vandal peoples coming from Europe, and the later expansion of Islam in the region.

There still exist today among some sectors of the Cuban people, prejudices and stereotypes having to do with this mutual help religious society of African origin, the majority of which have come about out of a lack of knowledge of its characteristics, giving to its members the undeserved description of being a “criminal society,” “violent group,” and discriminating against women… Torres explained that “the exclusive association of men self-supported itself through quotas and collections, and has a complex ritual that makes it appear to be the only fraternity of its kind in America, at least in terms of that of African heritage.”

Torres pointed out that, “we suspect that the African slave immersed in an outright struggle for survival, minimized, marginalized and degradated, belonging to the most impoverished social strata or, what is the same, joined by fortune to the potential of ‘the excluded,’ (…) was unable to find a functional way out of the situation without the constituting of a fraternity through which to mutually support themselves,” a society that evolved until it incorporated into itself mulattos and whites, and which subsists today. The Cuban Abakua Society became legal over the last years and “remains faithful to the codes of its Carabalí ancestors” (who came from the African coastland of Calabar).

This course on the History of Christianity, directed by Professor Enrique López Oliva, Secretary of the Commission for the Study of the History of the Church in Latin America (CEHILA-Cuba), is sponsored by the Macro-Ecumenical Program for Inter-Cultural and Inter-Religious Dialogue of the Cuban CEHILA team.