1

Forthcoming in Engler, S. et B. Schimdt (eds.), The Brill Handbook of Contemporary

Religions in Brazil, Leiden: Brill.

RE-AFRICANISATION IN AFRO-BRAZILIAN RELIGIONS:

RETHINKING RELIGIOUS SYNCRETISM1

Stefania Capone (CNRS/EHESS, Paris)

Since the 1980s, the Afro-Brazilian religious field has been deeply recast by the emergence of

what is today frequently referred to as, the “re-Africanisation movement.” While in South-

Eastern Brazil this movement occurs principally via Yoruba language and divination courses,

as well as through ritual borrowings from other Afro-American religious traditions2, in the

North-East region a debate about syncretism in Candomblé has prevailed3. These two

movements –“desyncretisation” and “re-Africanisation”– have certain characteristics in

common, which could foster the belief that their objectives and aims are the same. Both

1 I would like to acknowledge the comments and criticisms offered by Paul C. Johnson to a prior version of this

text. 2 The expression “Afro-American religions” designates every religions of African origin, produced by the

colonial encounter of African, Amerindian and European cultures in the Americas. Within what is called today

“orisha religion”, different local traditions – Afro-Brazilians, Afro-Cubans and so forth – are all reclaiming a

common African (Yoruba) past. I analysed the issue of tradition in Afro-Brazilian religions in a previous work

(Capone [1999] 2010). 3 Among all the old anthropological categories employed to understand the cross-cultural encounter, a

conceptual triad has received great attention and strong criticism: syncretism, creolization, and hybridity.

Anthropologists have expressed ambivalence about all three terms, addressing criticism to the use of metaphors

that historically have “an objectionable but nevertheless instructive past” (Stewart 1999: 40). The work of S.

Palmié (1995, 2013) has proved how this system of interactive metaphors requires a deep understanding of their

own histories and contextualization. As the term creolization, that historically refers to the social and cultural

formation in the colonial period (Mintz & Price 1992), the notion of hybridity has its own “preconstraints” and

can be hardly stripped from its “racist past” (Stewart 1999: 45; on hybridity see also Webner 1996, Stewart

2007, Engler 2009, Palmié 2013). However, despite its “birth sins”, syncretism is also an emic category,

extremely significant in religious actors’ narratives at the core of symbolic struggle for legitimacy. Since the

work of Stewart and Shaw (1994), we know that contingencies of power inflect syncretic and antisyncretic

processes. In this article I will focus on the agency of Candomblé practitioners in reinterpreting syncretism -

generally understood as the merging of different forms of belief and practice- as a way of stressing their cultural

roots while downplaying the cultural mixture omnipresent in every belief system.

2

movements, for example, strive for a rejection of Afro-Catholic syncretism in Candomblé and

are characterized by a continuous search for all elements related to allegedly lost religious

practices. The “recovery” of lost fragments of ancestral knowledge is alleged to help

reconstruct the supposed purity of a religion originating in Africa. In reality, however, we will

see that these two movements, apparently so similar, display two very different views on the

issue of legitimacy and hegemony in the Afro-Brazilian religious field. Furthermore, the re-

Africanisation movement sheds new light on the formation process of Afro-Brazilian

religions, revealing two distinct types of syncretism around which the Afro-American

universe revolves: first, an “Afro-African” syncretism, as it is often defined by practitioners,

said to have existed prior to slavery, and originating in the belief in the unity of “African

culture”; and second, an “Afro-Western” syncretism, represented by Afro-Catholic

syncretism, that must be rejected in the quest after purity.

These two types of syncretism foster distinct views of the past and the “African collective

memory”: one that emphasizes continuity between African and Afro-American cultures, and

the other that highlights discontinuity as the product of slavery and the loss of real and

symbolic ties with the land of origin. “Afro-African” syncretism, recovered through re-

Africanisation, becomes therefore a “good” syncretism between “sister religions”, allowing

other Afro-Brazilian religions, such as Umbanda4, to rediscover their African past and

worldview through connections with, and ritual borrowing from other African-derived

religions.

Transnational networks and the struggle against syncretism

4 Umbanda is usually divided between “White” Umbanda and “African” Umbanda. For Umbanda as part of an

Afro-Brazilian religious continuum, see Capone ([1999] 2010).

3

One of the most significant developments in the field of Afro-American religions is their

expansion across ethnic and national barriers. In the last decades, they have left behind their

former status as secret and persecuted religions to become public and respectable, reaching

people from different social backgrounds, as well as foreigners who import them to their own

countries. The spread of these religions has created networks of ritual kinship that now span

national boundaries, giving rise to transnational communities of worshippers such as, for

instance, Brazilian Batuque in Argentine and Uruguay, and Cuban Santería in Mexico and

Venezuela. The proliferation of these increasingly active networks of priests – and their

attempts to gain recognition as a bona fide World Religion from other, more established,

religious and secular institutions – has become an important aspect of the whole array of

orisha traditions since the 1980s.

Afro-Brazilian religions, as well as other Afro-American religions, are historically

characterized by their fragmentation and lack of a centralized, superior authority that could

dictate orthodox rules to its followers. Nevertheless, some contemporary leaders aspire to

unify their practices, by highlighting the existence of a common ground in all Afro-American

religious modalities.

The International Congresses of Orisha Tradition and Culture (COMTOC) were the first to

attempt to organise an international network of initiates of Africa-derived religions. Since

their beginning, these congresses have set out to gather Yoruba and diaspora religious leaders

in order to unify the orisha tradition.5 The main discussion topics at these forums are

tradition, standardisation of religious practices, and the fight against syncretism, topics that

are common across different regional variants of the "orisha religion."6 These attempts

generate new forms of religious “creolization,” in which syncretic work is resignified, giving

5In a previous work (Capone 2005: 279-297), I have analysed COMTOCs or Orisa World Congresses from 1981

to 2005. On “orisha religion”, see also Olupona & Rey 2008 and Argyriadis & Capone 2011. 6At international forums, Afro-American religions, like Candomblé, Santería or Orisha-Voodoo, are considered

different aspects of a same whole: the "orisha religion." They become thus regional variations of the same belief

system, based on the worship of Yoruba divinities.

4

preference to African or Afro-American endogenous variables instead of European or

Catholic exogenous influences.

These debates had a direct impact on Candomblé during the first COMTOC assembly in

Brazil, in 1983. The best example of its outcome was the manifesto against syncretism, signed

on 27 of July, 1983, by five famous mães-de-santo (Candomblé female religious leaders)

from Bahia’s most prestigious terreiros (cult houses), during the II International Congress of

Orisha Tradition and Culture, held in Salvador (Consorte, 1999). This petition urged the end

of Afro-Catholic syncretism – the association of Catholic saints with African orisha– and the

rejection of all Catholic rituals “traditionally” performed by Candomblé followers, such as

masses attended on Catholic saints’ days corresponding to orisha, the iyawó (new initiate)

pilgrimage to churches at the conclusion of initiation, and the washing of the steps of

Salvador’s Bonfim Church. The petitioners, led by Mãe Stella of Axé Opô Afonjá, considered

all these practices as a residual heritage of slavery. It was now time, they reasoned, to take

pride in one’s own roots and in one’s own African ancestry. Candomblé had to cease being a

religion of slaves to become an ancestral religion, “going back to Africa, not to slavery”. The

“theory of the mask”, formulated by Bastide (1978: 162), thereafter became central to this

debate. In that theory, Africans pretended to accept Catholic values to free themselves from

colonial repression. Since Afro-Catholic syncretism is only a white mask covering black

gods’ faces, it is possible, even necessary, to return to the original practices, rejecting

everything that does not belong to “immemorial” Africa, most obviously the manifold

Catholic influences and ritual accretions.

But the main issue raised by the manifesto against syncretism was the affirmation that

Candomblé is a religion completely independent from Catholicism. Denying Afro-Catholic

syncretism, Candomblé leaders argued for the recognition of Candomblé as a “real” religion,

not a subaltern or “slave religion” (Prandi 1999: 108). Nevertheless, despite the media

5

coverage of, and public reaction to this manifesto, the movement against syncretism has faced

a lack of consensus amongst the majority of Bahian terreiros. Even the mães-de-santo who

signed the document in 1983 sometimes, in different speech-contexts, argued that, “to break

up with syncretism means to break up with tradition” (Consorte 1999: 83). What they mean is

that, to break with syncretism in Afro-Brazilian tradition is in certain respects a loss of the

specificity of their own tradition. Devotees, who wish to recover African tradition, must thus

fight against the incomplete transmission of ritual knowledge due to the lost bonds with the

original culture.

Re-Africanisation or going back to the roots

The desire, at the core of the re-Africanisation movement, to recover the lost elements of an

immemorial tradition is certainly not a new phenomenon in Candomblé. The drive to preserve

ancestral knowledge and to compensate for ritual loss is what fuels Afro-American religions.

According to practitioners, fragments of this tradition have been variously preserved in

Nigeria, Cuba and Brazil. Today, the process of strengthening the roots thus involves

travelling to these traditional centres of orisha worship, journeys that are perceived as a

temporal return to the “true” African tradition, as well as the search for re-Africanisation via

courses in Yoruba language and civilization. The reconstitution of this lost unity is an attempt

to find a common past and a shared tradition, both of which are indispensable to the creation

of a community of practitioners of “orisha religion”.

The re-Africanisation movement originates with the returnees, freed slaves and free-born

Afro-Brazilians who made their trip back to Africa in the nineteenth century. But, according

to Bastide, the search for “re-Africanisation” was also a reaction to “the increase of the

nefarious effects of tourism and of whites’ and mulattos’ participation in Candomblé”:

6

This movement of disintegration has been compensated by a tendency to the contrary, where new

means of communication play a very important role – the reinforcement of roots in Africa, fed by

the comings and goings between Brazil and Nigeria of men, merchandize and ideas. We are faced

with two tendencies: one tending towards an “Americanisation”, which encompasses the huge

expansion of Caboclo Candomblé or wild trances, a tendency which is opposed to the other,

founded upon the search for a re-Africanisation and Afro-Americans’ awareness of their intrinsic

condition [as African descendants] (Bastide 1973: XV).7

The introduction of new ritual practices into Candomblé, like the Obás of Xangô, an “African

institution” brought back to Brazil by Martiniano Eliseu do Bonfim, one of the most known

figures of Candomblé in the first half of the twentieth century, is also regarded as one of the

first examples of Candomblé’s re-Africanisation.

The journey to Africa –a means of acquiring lost knowledge while increasing one’s

prestige in the religious world– even today remains central to the re-Africanisation movement,

inciting pais and mães-de-santo to make the “pilgrimage” to the mythical land. With these

journeys, the re-Africanised terreiros of the South-East of Brazil, especially those of São

Paulo, distanced themselves from “traditional” Candomblé terreiros in Brazil, as they created

direct links with the original culture. The growing demand for trips to Nigeria –and to a lesser

extent Benin– led travel agents in São Paulo to promote organized trips for Candomblé adepts

(Silva 1995).

Since the 1970s, the ties between Brazilian Candomblé and the “land of origins” have

become even stronger. Thanks to the collaboration between universities and research centres

7See also Matory 2005. The same process has been at work in the US, with the developing of “Yoruba

Reversionism” which pleads for the religion’s return to a “preslavery state” (Edward &Mason 1985: IV-V). One

of the first to speak overtly of re-Africanisation in the US has been Alfred Cannon (1977: 206, 208) for whom

“Re-Africanization is the route to the ability of blacks to understand, relate to and accept their ancestral core” or

“ancestral” identity that has to be nurtured “through constant contact, acceptance and involvement with that

ancestral land.”

7

of the two countries, some Nigerian teachers came to Salvador to organise Yoruba courses for

Candomblé practitioners who wanted to learn the ritual language, whose meaning had been

lost over the years. The great success of these courses inspired their replication in other cities,

geographically and symbolically far away from Afro-Brazilian tradition centres. Therefore, in

São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, young Yoruba students – arriving in Brazil via the cooperation

agreement between Brazil and Nigeria – became language teachers, and quickly

metamorphosed themselves into teachers of “religious foundations” (fundamentos).

Previously accustomed to going to Salvador in search of ritual knowledge, the new courses on

the Ifá oracle afforded initiates from the South-East of Brazil an alternative, and local, source

of religious legitimacy (Capone, 2010: 234-244).

Today some Candomblé initiates in Rio de Janeiro and in São Paulo go directly to Africa

in search of this legitimacy, due to the more frequent contact with Yoruba practitioners; others

weave ritual ties with Cuban babalaos (Ifá priests) who arrived in Brazil at the beginning of

the 1990s. Several Candomblé cult houses in Rio de Janeiro are now under the ritual

protection of ramas (religious lineages) of Cuban babalaos, the late Rafael Zamora being the

most renowned. The Cuban tradition represents a diaspora model meant to be closer to the

African tradition, allowing new Brazilian Ifá initiates to move away from Yoruba babalawos,

often accused of mercantilism. This search for other variants of “orisha religion” is, above all,

a political response to the predominance of Bahian terreiros in the Afro-Brazilian religious

field. Therefore, going to Africa in search of tradition entails rejecting the oldest terreiros of

Bahia as the sole brokers and mediators of authority.

The re-Africanisation movement generates multiple visions of African tradition, often

incompatible in a conflicted and combative religious space. The modification of rituals

introduced by “re-Africanised” pais and mães-de-santo are one of the most obvious

consequences of this quest for a lost tradition. Nevertheless, the innovations are not made

8

without creating tensions with the mother terreiros, which do not always accept them

willingly. After all, which tradition should be respected and perpetuated? The one passed on

by “traditional” terreiros, or that which is sought directly on African soil? The very

legitimacy of the mediation of the great religious centres of Bahia is at stake.

The dilemma is then to know which “Africa” needs to be updated in Brazilian terreiros:

the mythical land of origins, preserved in Bahian terreiros, cleansed of the slavery stain by the

movement of desyncretisation, or the modern, post-colonial Africa, represented by Yoruba

babalawos? To what extent modern Africa does represent a real reference for re-

Africanisation and how does it confront to other traditions in the diaspora? What is really at

stake in this symbolic fight is the monopoly of this mythical “Africa”, and who is entitled to

represent “African tradition”.

From Nagoisation to Bantu Traditionalism

In order to understand the discomfort of many Candomblé initiates, it is necessary to clarify

the hegemonic position in the Afro-Brazilian religious field, held by a small number of cult

houses, identified in anthropological texts as the guardians of African traditions in Brazil. The

amazing concentration of ethnographic research in a few terreiros transformed them into the

incarnation of “African tradition” in Brazil (Dantas 1988, Capone [1999] 2010). In this way,

the Nagô culture becomes a kind of meta-language or “general ideology” (Riserio 1988: 160)

to which any other African cultural contribution must conform.

This historically established hegemony could only be questioned by another authority,

considered more traditional, closer to the “roots.” The arrival of Yoruba religious practitioners

from the late 1970s onwards deeply changed the Afro-Brazilian religious field, putting into

question the model of tradition preserved in Brazil. The predominance of Bahian terreiros had

9

already been threatened during the II COMTOC in Salvador, with the arrival of a Yoruba

group whose leader was the chancellor of the University of Ilé-Ifé, Wande Abimbola. The

campaign against Afro-Catholic syncretism could therefore be seen as an answer to the on-

going influence of Yoruba babalawos among some groups of Brazilian initiates.

In 1987, Mãe Stella overtly criticised the trips by the Candomblé initiates to Lagos or

Benin to look for the lost foundations of the religion. According to her (in Capone [1999]

2010: 230), those who have neither religious roots nor any prestigious Afro-Brazilian lineage

have no option but to search for their roots in Africa. The “real” Africa, however, has

survived in Brazil within the Candomblé Nagô cult houses, the so called “traditional temples,”

that had preserved African roots from immemorial times. The desyncretisation movement,

according to the guardians of the Nagô tradition, should not proceed via a return to Africa to

relearn secret rituals, but rather through the purification of Africa as it was preserved in

Brazil; like polishing a stone, free from everything that does not belong to its true nature.

Some authors interpret this struggle against syncretism, as well as the re-Africanisation

movement, as a “Nagoisation” (from Nagô, the term employed in Brazil to refer to Yoruba

sub-groups) (Parés 2004: 185) or “Nigerianisation” (Braga 1988: 85). Others analyse it as a

process of “de-catholicisation” and “de-bantuisation” (desbantualização), the erasing of all

Bantu religious practices (Silva 1999: 156)8. Certain practitioners have even tried to substitute

the term “Candomblé”, clearly of Bantu origin, by the expression “religion of orisha

tradition” (Rodrigué 2001: 40), which gestures toward the global notion of “orisha religion”,

formulated in the COMTOC meetings.

This trend towards a specifically Yoruba purification of a religious complex that emerged

from a long process of cultural conversations between different traditions, provoked a

8 The term “Bantu” originates in linguistic studies that, following the model of Indo-European languages,

classified African languages into several families, such as Sudanese and Bantu languages. The name of these two

large linguistic groups also came to define the different African peoples who spoke these languages; thus, in

Brazil, the Nagô (Yoruba) and the Jeje (Fon) were classified with the Sudanese, and the Angola and Congo with

the Bantu.

10

comprehensible reaction within Angola houses of Candomblé, of Bantu origin. Since the

1990s, some leaders have tried to develop their own version of re-Africanisation, called

“Bantu Traditionalism” (Botão 2008). This response to re-Africanisation in Candomblé Nagô

aims to clarify the differences between Candomblé Angola and Candomblé Nagô, the latter of

which has always been characterized as the paradigm of Candomblé. As for Bahian

Candomblé and its own struggle against Afro-Catholic syncretism, what is at stake here is the

recognition of Candomblé Angola as a religion in its own right, one that is not subservient to

the Nagô model. In order to revalorize Candomblé Angola, it is even more crucial to recover

all the ritual knowledge lost in the Middle Passage, via ritual contacts with initiates in Angola,

and the study of Bantu languages and philosophy. Since the beginning of the 2000s,

International Meetings on Bantu Culture and Tradition (ECOBANTO) have been organised in

São Paulo, a movement that had been pioneered by the Centre of Studies and Research on

Tradition of Bantu Origin (CEPTOB), created in 1997 by Laercio Sacramento, the founder of

the Bahian Angola terreiro, Manso Kilembekueta Lemba Furaman.

Africanisation or re-Africanisation

In an article published in 2004, Alejandro Frigerio analysed the re-Africanisation movement

as,

a process undergone by individuals who already practice Candomblé, Batuque or Santería (or other

comparable ones like Tambor de mina, or Xangô) who, dissatisfied with the religious knowledge they

have received, look to current day Africa, especially Yorubaland, as the true source of theological and

ritual knowledge. Through this process Africa comes to be regarded not only as the remote origin of the

religious tradition but also as contemporary model for its practice” (Frigerio 2004: 44).

11

Revising the term employed by Prandi (1991) –“Africanisation”– as the quest for a purer,

more African tradition, Frigerio interprets Africanisation as “the passage from the practice of

a more syncretic variant like Umbanda or Espiritismo to a more African one like Candomblé,

Batuque or Santería. It occurs rather early in the religious career of the individual, and is a

second step that plunges him into what devotees believe is the heart of the religious

experience” (Frigerio 2004: 44). For Frigerio, re-Africanisation is more frequent in

“secondary diaspora settings”, like Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo or Buenos Aires. Practitioners in

“primary religious diasporas”, as Salvador or La Havana, are more inclined to adopt

“orthodoxisation” and “desyncretisation” strategies, downplaying syncretism and taking as a

model of religious practice the most prestigious temples of the African diaspora in the

Americas (ibid.: 45). Hence, as stated by Mãe Stella, the “pure” roots of the religious tradition

are to be found not in present-day Africa, but in the Afro-American past already available in

Brazil.

However, this opposition between “primary” and “secondary religious diasporas” should

be nuanced, because “primary religious diasporas” have also undergone their own “re-

Africanisation” in a historical moment –the 1930s– when new figures of religious authority

were consolidating their leadership in Afro-Brazilian religious field. The first example of re-

Africanisation in Candomblé –the Obás of Xangô in the Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá– shows how the

search of a “purer” and “more African” practice has always existed in Candomblé, even in the

most prestigious and traditional terreiros in “primary religious diasporas” (Capone 2010: 222-

231; see Ramos 2003 for La Havana).

Prandi (1991) analyses what he calls “the Africanisation process” as the product of

competition within the religious market. Many Umbanda priests in São Paulo as well as in

Rio de Janeiro undergo initiation into Candomblé in order to integrate a more “coherent” and

“powerful” system of belief. For Frigerio (2004: 47), Africanisation is a “transition from a

12

more syncretic variant to a more African one”, in which “Catholic symbolism is minimized or

disappears, songs are sung in ‘African’ languages and not in Portuguese or Spanish, people

are possessed by orishas and not spirits of Amerindians, blacks or other deceased

individuals.” However, this passage from Umbanda to Candomblé is also presented by

practitioners as a “re-Africanisation” process, leading to the rediscovery of the African past of

a religion considered as “Brazilian” or “syncretic”.

The re-Africanisation process at work in the ritual reinterpretation of Umbanda exus in

Candomblé offers evidence of this transition. In the passage from Umbanda to Candomblé,

the figures of Exu and Pombagira can be thought as symbols of faithfulness to African roots

in Umbanda, as well as heterogeneous elements, signs of degeneration from their original

purity. They must therefore be reinterpreted and re-Africanised, in order to be assimilated

back into Candomblé’s religious structure (Capone [1999] 2010). However, when analyzing

the re-Africanisation process at work in the reinterpretation of the Umbanda exus and

pombagiras, it is important to understand that to “be re-Africanised” does not mean being, or

wanting to be, black, or African. The re-Africanisation process, as shown by Prandi (1991:

118), implies, on the contrary, familiarity with the literature on African and Afro-American

religions (mainly Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban) and a quest for “scientific” explanations of

religious practices. The lapses of “Black-African memory,” which would have caused,

according to Bastide (1978), the dilution of African traditions in Brazil, could thus be filled by

information gathered by anthropologists and travellers in Africa and in the Americas, as well

as by practitioners who publish on their own religion.

But re-Africanisation is also a way to highlight a “civilizing process” (Luz 2000: 15),

common to all the different cults claiming African origins. For that, it becomes necessary for

the “less pure” religions, such as Umbanda, to undergo re-Africanisation using as a model the

“purer” religion of Candomblé Nagô:

13

Umbanda cults profess a profound and veritable respect for the terreiros which perpetuate

traditional religions. Despite liturgical differences, variants and elements from other cultural

systems, by their structure and way of life, Umbanda cults are part of and derive directly from the

African heritage. This is how the most enlightened leaders of the Umbanda Federation understand

it, who attempt to maintain good relations with traditional religions and work to establish a unified

Umbandist liturgy reinforcing the elements of African tradition that it contains (Santos &Santos

1993: 162-163).

Therefore, the cults furthest from the “basic cultural complex”, such as Umbanda, must draw

closer to the “purer” forms in order to become stronger and more “African”.9

Two types of syncretism

The International Congresses of Orisha Tradition and Culture represent the classic locus

where this negotiation of ritual meanings comes to the fore. By recreating bonds with an

original culture, whether preserved in Africa or on American soil, it becomes possible to

reconstitute the past. It is a matter of filling the void left by the uprooting provoked by slavery

and the structure of the secret—at the base of Afro-American religions— fighting against the

progressive disappearance of “African collective memory”.

However, if Afro-Catholic syncretism is constantly criticised, another kind of syncretism

is fully accepted by members of Afro-American religions: “Afro-African” syncretism. This

syncretism between “sister religions” –systems of beliefs related by the same claim of Yoruba

9Taking as an example the re-Africanisation movement in the South Cone, Frigerio (2004: 53) states that “if

Africanization increased dependence on the leader who initiated the individual into a certain Afro-American

religious variant, re-Africanization is a movement of independence.” The relationship the individual establishes

with his new African mentors would then be “mostly a pay-for-service one, in which money is exchanged for

courses or lectures, not for ritual initiations that lead to prolonged dependence” (ibid.). The example of the

introduction of Ifá in Candomblé houses shows a very different relationship in a re-Africanised setting, with a

ritual tension between two hierarchical structures of religious dependence (Capone 2011).

14

origin– is premised on the idea of a common African cultural ground. This idea was created

and defended by Melville Herskovits (1941), who was the first to declare the existence of a

“cultural grammar” common to different peoples of western Africa. According to Herskovits,

this “cultural grammar” allowed the formation of an Afro-American culture, whose main

points of reference were Yoruba and Fon cultures, in part due to their putative purity vis à vis

Bantu societies. This idea of the persistence of an African substrate, in which religion plays a

fundamental role, can also be found in the “rapid early synthesis” or “creolization” model

developed by Mintz and Price (1976). In this model, we can find the same kind of tension as

in Bastide’s work between Africa and America: on the one side, the African “cognitive

orientations,” the “grammatical principles” (in the sense of an African cultural grammar) that

would have formed Afro-American cultures; and on the other side the idea of a “rigid core of

African culture” immune to external influences, which would have allowed the preservation

of African traditions in the New World.

This idea of a basic unity of African culture has inspired several unification projects of

Afro-American religious practices, for example, the National Institute of Afro-Brazilian

Tradition and Culture (INTECAB), which supports the unification of different kinds of Afro-

Brazilian religions as expressed by the motto of the institute: “Unity in diversity” (see Capone

2010: 244-251). But for unity to be possible, it is necessary to distinguish between two types

of syncretism: one that must be condemned, since it mixes “exogenous” or “heterogeneous”

variants, originating from different cultural worlds, such as Catholic influences; and another

that should be encouraged, because it is made of “endogenous” or “homogenous” variants at

the source of an “inter-tribal syncretism.” This latter version of syncretism highlights the

African culture and its continuity in the Americas. Afro-Brazilian religions such as

Candomblé and Umbanda, once free of non-African influences, become different expressions

15

of the same “basic cultural complex.” The hegemony of Bahian Nagô terreiros would

therefore be confirmed by the role they play in the preservation of African traditions in Brazil.

Furthermore, this “positive” syncretism is not limited to exchanges with African religions

but involves also a quest for all the religious practices that have been lost in Afro-American

religions. Salvador de Bahia, with its houses of Candomblé Nagô, is seen as one of the main

centres of preservation of African traditions in the diaspora, and the locus of a rediscovery of

forgotten ritual practices. Thanks to trips back and forth between the United States and Brazil,

some Cuban Americans have therefore reintroduced the worship of divinities that had

disappeared in Cuba, such as Oxumarê and Lugunedé, as well as the borí ceremony for the

head (orí). Through these ritual borrowings between religions claiming Yoruba origins, the

ceremonies held to create individual Candomblé altars have been adapted to Santería

practices. These innovations are currently responsible for the diffusion in the US of ritual

practices imported from a ‘sister religion,’ Candomblé. In the last few years, these exchanges

have not been limited to Salvador but have included also Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The

influence of Cuban babalaos in Rio has already left its imprint on several Candomblé houses

that have adopted Afro-Cuban divination practices (Capone 2011). In addition, the

COMTOCs carry the very idea of the basic unity of African religions across the world. Once a

link is established that underpins religions as different as Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban

Santería or Trinidadian Shangó – a link that is symbolized by their Yoruba component – it

becomes possible to work towards their unification. Regardless of their real origins, these

religions all become facets of “Yoruba religion” and they can thus contribute to the creation

of an “orisha religion” that concretises once again the former Brazilian dream of “unity in

diversity”.

The emphasizing of an inclusive denomination such as “orisha religion” in these

international forums makes it possible to leave in the second plan the regional differences

16

between Afro-Americans religions. By indicating them as variants of the same African

cultural complex, any local specificity is thus blurred, stressing just the “Africanness” of these

religious practices and their supposed “authenticity”. All this occurs as re-Africanisation

would reintroduce the global into the local, by the means of an Africanness that erases the

national histories and the particularisms that gave rise to these religions on the American

continent. In transnational communities of worshippers, re-Africanisation offers a new frame

that allows for a de-emphasis of nationality, transforming regional and national traditions into

different facets of a single World Religion (Oro 1999; Frigerio 2004; Argyriadis & Capone

2011).

Conclusions

Both re-Africanisation and desyncretisation point to the structural tension between two

types of syncretism, an “Afro-African” syncretism and an “Afro-Western” syncretism. We

saw how these two types of syncretism foster distinct views of the past: one that refers to the

continuity of African and Afro-American cultures, and the other that emphasizes the

discontinuity, a product of slavery, and the loss of real and symbolic ties with the land of

origin.

However, these attempts to rediscover “orthodoxy” by finding and reviving forgotten

practices and ritual knowledge generate a fundamental paradox. Ritual purity is sought in

Africa, despite the awareness of the losses produced by European colonisation on the African

continent. In consequence, the writings by Africanists like Bascom and Maupoil become one

of the rare sources of information to reconstitute a “true” form of African worship. For many

years, without a sacred book that determines religious doctrine, the published work of

anthropologists was the textual base on which practitioners rediscovered the “foundations”,

17

the religious secrets, used to confirm and affirm the traditionalism of their ritual practices.

The re-introduction of Ifá in the Candomblé houses has offered today what initiates longed

for: a Holy Book, the corpus of Ifá, which provides an ethical guide to ritual practice.

Nevertheless, the attempts to preserve “African tradition” also stimulate reorientations

that introduce exactly the change and innovation that was supposed to be erased. “To re-

Africanise” in fact means to redefine the tradition; a process of both interpretation and

rationalisation, to make its concepts work in the present context. The emphasis on Ifá allows

this corpus of mythology to function not only as a divinatory tool but – even more

importantly, since other divinatory possibilities were already in use, and perfectly adequate to

the desired tasks – as a Sacred Book, “providing yet another cherished element that upholds

claims to the desired new status of World Religion” (Frigerio 2004: 54). The new prominence

of Ifá in Candomblé ritual practices counters the earlier interpretation of Candomblé as a “non

ethical religion”, in tune with a hedonistic and narcissistic society (Prandi 1991: 186). What

Ifá is providing, then, is a new structure for, and public articulation of, ethics in Afro-

Brazilian religions, and in that sense a stepping-stone towards achieving the status of “World

Religion.” Given the import of ethics in inter-religious forums, and the capacity of Ifá to

endow Candomblé with a publically defensible ethical platform, the status of World Religion

seems achievable only via the route of re-Africanisation. Whether that status is desirable or

not, and whether it is worth the cost of reforming the specific Afro-Brazilian lineage of

“tradition,” is a question practitioners themselves will decide in the coming years.

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