Ecués Atlantic an essay

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/157006607X184825

www.brill.nl/jra

Ecué’s Atlantic: An Essay in Methodology

Stephan PalmiéUniversity of Chicago, Department of Anthropology,

1126 E 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, [email protected]

Abstract Arguing from an exposition of the principal epistemological and methodological problems that have plagued African-Americanist research since its inception as a properly disciplined anthro-pological pursuit, this essay focuses on an ostensibly ‘clear’ case of ‘transatlantic continuities’ to question linear construction of historical relations between ‘African’ and ‘African-American’ cul-tural forms. Detailing the social history of an African male initiatory sodality and its supposed Cuban equivalent within their wider political economic contexts, I argue that the apparent dis-persion of Cross-River-type secret societies ought not to be seen as a pattern of diffusion from a (temporally prior) point of inception to (temporally later) sites of recreation, but as a total pat-tern of simultaneous ‘Atlantic’ eventuation and cultural production.

Keywords Cuba, Cross River Region, male secret societies, Atlantic world, non-linear history

Introduction

My contribution to this special issue derives from a larger project concerned with issues of continuity and disjunction in Atlantic cultural history. I aim to explore here a number of questions to do with whether, and under what con-ditions, Africanist and African-Americanist forms of knowledge might become subject to epistemologically sound forms of integration. Originally conceived almost ten years ago,1 this essay perhaps ought to be read as a companion piece to my exploration of the growth of both Afro-Cuban traditions and western forms of modernity out of a single structural and discursive formation of ‘Atlantic’ scope (Palmié 2002). But it also forms an historiographical counter-part to Kenneth Routon’s (2005) and my own (Palmié 2006a) more recent ethnographically focused attempts to delineate the contours of forms of his-torical consciousness characteristic of a male secret society known as abakuá in western Cuba. In the latter contributions, both Routon and I mainly concern ourselves with how contemporary members of this association reproduce their

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particular form of consociation by ritually recalling, into Cuban time and space, a complex series of actions that—in their understanding—once unfolded at a conceptually distant site of origin called Usagaré, Bekura Mendo or Enllenisón. Indexing notions of graded spatial inclusivity in contemporary abakuá parlance and ritual practice (such that Usagaré is considered part of Bekura Mendó which, in turn, is part of Enllenisón), these terms have long been taken to encode ‘memories’ of potentially identifiable African place names that slaves from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon carried to Cuba, and there passed on to their descend-ants. Th e most recent, as well as most literal-minded, version of this argument has been presented by Miller (2005) who argues that etymological research, combined with ethnographically elicited approval of word-by-word transla-tions by exiled Cuban members of abakuá and native Efik-speakers (whom he has brought together on several occasions in New York and Nigeria), and addi-tional glosses authorized by trained linguists can unambiguously disclose and authenticate the objectively true history of a transatlantic historical relation-ship. Th e result, or so Miller believes, is not only that, thanks to his assistance, contemporary members of a Nigerian secret society known as ekpe and Cuban abakuá can now ‘perceive themselves in the other’s language and ritual prac-tice’ (Miller 2005: 26). It is also that ritual signifiers such as Usagaré, Bekura Mendó and Enllenisón, according to him, acquire secular transparency as geo-graphic and/or ethnic indicators—so that the first term really refers to a place in southwestern Cameroon known as Usak Edet or Usaghade, the second to a Balondo village to its east named Bekura, and the third to ethnically Efik ‘sons of the soil’ (i.e., free-born inhabitant of Old Calabar in present-day Nigeria).

Miller’s work falls squarely into a longstanding tradition in African-Ameri-canist research, established in the United States since the time of Melville Herskovits’s first efforts, in the 1930s, to demolish the reigning consensus that slavery had stripped black Americans of any vestiges of their ancestral African cultures (cf. Jackson 1986, Apter 1991, Yelvington 2001, 2006). It belongs to a genre of anthropological inquiry aiming to identify and authenticate his-torical continuities between African and New World cultural forms that has always been driven not just by explicitly announced theoretical concerns, but by political ones as well (Scott 1991, 1999). In that regard, neither Routon nor I question Miller’s commitment to a good cause—such as helping Nige-rian Efik and Cuban members of abakuá establish ‘a common history [that] is an international connection that gives both groups new status as representa-tives of valuable and ancient cultural traditions’ (Miller 2005:36). However, not only are such historical rescue missions politically far from unambiguous (given that, as Routon [2005: 37] puts it, they ‘inevitably, if unwittingly lend


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legitimacy to the authority claims of some [local] groups while denying it to others’ and, perhaps even more troubling, allocate the authority to arbitrate such claims to us); rather, once regarded as an end in itself, the search for the ‘African origins’ of New World practices and identities also forecloses an important analytical dimension: what if, for example, the terminology on which Miller2 tends to focus indexes localities that exist on a plane that simply has no fixed, or even only concretizable geographic equivalent in the world as non-members of abakuá know it? What if (irrespective of the origin of these words) Usagaré, Bekura Mendó or Enllenisón designated assumable positions or states of being, established by chronotopic illocutionary devices that localize specific forms of agency and subjectivity in an ‘epochal’ (Wagner 1986) ritual frame of interpretation?3 If so, what would be gained by calling such locations or positionalities ‘Africa’ in any other than a figurative way?

Like Routon and Wirtz (this issue), I have previously argued that terms such as, for example, Enllenisón (generally taken to mean ‘Africa’) do not so much index (principally verifiable) topographic data as impose sacred value on specific situations or utterances. If this is valid, even only in principle, we may be ill served by rashly literalizing the deictical referents of abakuá speech and ritual in order to assimilate them to an ‘Africa’ delineated in geographic and ethnological categories of our making. What is at issue here is not just that the latter categories do not, at least at this point in time, have much salience for members of contemporary Cuban members of abakuá (though they may well come to do so in the future).4 Rather, it is that, in naively engineering align-ments between topography and tropology, we are, in a methodological sense, attempting to commensurate incommensurables. Why this is so is a question I would like to dwell on in what follows—not, however, by going further down the analytical road of ethnographic criticism of etymological pathways to his-tory. What I intend to do here instead is return to a set of basic, but nowadays seemingly all but forgotten, questions concerning the analytical viability of the transatlantic comparisons on which endeavors such as Miller’s must necessarily rest. While I will not suggest any easily operationalizable solution to conceptu-alizing the historical relations between ‘African’ and ‘African-American’ cul-tural formations, I hope to shed light on some of the metatheoretical questions with which any attempt to transcend the current terms of debate would neces-sarily have to engage.

Galton rides again

As in my previous contributions to this debate, I take my departure from David Scott’s (1991, 1999) observations about what he calls the ‘verificationist



epistemology’, which, to this day, has tended to dominate historical and anthro-pological studies of African-American cultures. Scott is concerned with a tra-dition of inquiry that defines the central task of African-Americanist research as providing answers to question such as ‘whether or not or to what extent Caribbean culture [or other African-American cultures, for that matter] is authentically African; and whether or not or to what extent Caribbean peoples have retained an authentic memory of their past, in particular a memory of slavery’ (Scott 1999: 108). In Scott’s view, the primary reason for why we should critically revisit this agenda is that it ultimately arises from an ‘ideo-logical desire to supply a foundational past’. Yet this is not the only problem. For verificationist approaches also obscure a whole range of epistemological issues. Th ey do so by suggesting that such a past is, in principle, transparent, and that its ‘recovery’ is, therefore, merely a question of empirically engineer-ing, to use Scott’s (1991) earlier formulation, a plausible match between ‘that event’ and ‘this memory’—the former (properly evidenced ‘historical facts’) presumably enjoying a verifiable prediscursive objectivity that adds critical corroborative weight to what might otherwise remain the contestable product of the undisciplined collective imagination.

Leaving aside the numerous problems connected with operationalizing the concept of ‘memory’ on a supra-individual level (cf., e.g., Klein 2000, Lambek and Antze 1996), it is the idea of the feasibility of engineering methodologi-cally defensible and theoretically sound transcontinental analytical correla-tions—or juxtapositions, depending upon perspectives—between documentary records on past forms of sociality and eventuation (‘history’) and ethnographic data concerning contemporary local constructions of ‘the past’ (‘memory’)5 that I intend to call into question in the following. My point of departure lies in a simple issue to do with time, space and units of analysis in African-Amer-ican anthropology. If traditional narratives of ‘universal history’ have fractured under the destabilizing impact of non-western histories (Feierman 1993), the opposite effect seems to be observable in anthropology, where the notion of ‘the local’ is in rapidly increasing disarray (cf. Fardon 1990, Appadurai 1995, Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Today we know that many, perhaps most, classical ethnographies presented us with artificial constructions of spatially overdeter-mined, while temporally underdetermined, units of analysis. Th is is no longer so. Gone are the discrete and seemingly pelagic ‘villages’ and ‘tribes’ of yore, moored as they were in a kind of analytical Sargasso Sea known as the ‘ethno-graphic present’. In their stead, we have become increasingly aware of an expanding heuristic frontier defined by a dazzling multitude of supra-local linkages extending across considerably vast stretches of time. Th e price we paid for this historicization and globalization of anthropology was that the clean and empirically manageable unit of analysis went out with the murky bathwa-



ter. We cannot simply go somewhere, stay there for a time, and come home with a monograph based merely on a circumstantial moment of observation.

If this is true for anthropologists working in ‘classical’ ethnographic locali-ties today, African-Americanists have faced such problems all along. From its inception at the turn of the twentieth century in the work of pioneers like the Brazilian medical examiner Raimundo Nina Rodrigues or the Cuban lawyer Fernando Ortiz, the central problematic of this field of inquiry was defined in terms that transcended, and thereby bound, vast geographical and temporal expanses. What they initially set out to explain was the existence, within their own societies, of modes of thought and behavior that appeared too alien, too obviously tied into a history of forced transatlantic mass migration to be writ-ten off as locally bred forms of deviance from the cultural norms of the respec-tive postcolonial elites.6 It eventually was the North American anthropologist Melville Herskovits who would systematize such early glances across the Atlan-tic into a coherent, though theoretically and methodologically naïve, research agenda. He did so by fusing a concept of culture areas (which Herskovits him-self had helped to pioneer) with the historicism of its philological precursor theories that had long depended on the notion of clearly separable units of analysis, thereby imparting to African-American anthropology a set of assump-tions the problematic nature of which has still to be fully acknowledged (cf. Apter 1991, Scott 1999, Bennett 2000, Yelvington 2001, 2006).7

Th is cannot be the place for a sustained examination of theory-building in this field of inquiry. Still, it needs to be noted that most anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century who eschewed popular racist interpretations of African-American cultures as biologically determined phenomena ran head-long into a peculiarly inverted version of what is known as Galton’s problem. Th is term refers to a methodological conundrum particularly pertinent to a nowadays (perhaps fortunately) defunct form of cross-cultural statistical com-parison (cf. Narroll 1970, Jorgenson 1979).8 Th e substantive issue, however, was clearly involved in the famous debate between Herskovits and E. Franklin Frazier about how to weigh transatlantic continuities against the impact of independent local factors (i.e., the crushing impact of New World slavery) in the development of African-American cultures. Stated in most simplistic terms, the question was (and, in many ways, still is): given that both similari-ties and differences between African and African-American cultural forms cannot well be fortuitous, do we primarily look to Africa or the Americas for an explanation? Each option gives us a different choice of which factors to regard as more significant for the cultural history of African-American socie-ties: those relating to transatlantic diffusion of African forms, or to those pro-ductive of New World functional ‘adhesions’ (as Tylor would have put it). Is it, in other words, movement or structure that we need to focus on?



By the mid-1970s, a rather elegant solution to this African-Americanist ver-sion of Galton’s problem was offered by Mintz and Price (1992). For several cogently argued reasons, these authors advocated an analytic shift from com-paring seemingly free-floating units of cultural form to units of historically contextualized social enactment. Problematizing the historical conditions of social re-aggregation among enslaved Africans in the New World, they directed attention not only to processually induced discontinuities in cultural trans-mission, but to the theoretical importance of assuming cultural creativity and large-scale ad hoc syntheses to have precipitated the institutional crystalliza-tion of such cultural forms as were observable in the Americas. Th ough careful not to deny the importance of Old World resources in African-American soci-etalization and culture building, their re-statement of the problem neverthe-less placed the explanatory onus squarely on the shoulders of those arguing for immediate and ethnically specific African continuities. If Herskovits’s approach had implied an imagery of erosion and fragmentation of transplanted African units, theirs emphasized the fusion of fragments into essentially new cultural entities. What came into view, thus, were processes of ‘creolization’, informed both by Old World cultural resources and the exigencies of the particular New World ‘social arenas’ in which they were put to use.

Despite its theoretical sophistication and methodological soundness, how-ever, the ‘rapid early synthesis’ model suggested by Mintz and Price fell short of stimulating a thorough historicization of African-American anthropology. Shifting, as it did, the explanatory premium onto the American side (and, therefore, into the realm of history rather than the search for origins), Mintz and Price’s book rather seems to have encouraged, quite contrary to these authors’ intentions, hypostatizing the concept of creolization to a degree where it allows glossing over history in a manner much reminiscent of an earlier inflationary use of the (historically quite vacuous) concept of ‘acculturation’.9 Th is tendency might be viewed as fairly inconsequential in cases where the documentary record is simply too thin to allow more than educated guesses about the particulars of process. Yet it not only trivializes the question of how exactly ‘creole’ syntheses were achieved, but also obscures the formidable prob-lems presented by cases where covariational ‘adhesions’ might plausibly be attributed to Atlantic transfer—not necessarily of concrete forms, but of organizational models (Palmié 1993). More importantly for my present con-cerns, it evades the issue of systemic articulations that may—at least in some cases—reveal single observational units (on whichever side of the Atlantic) to be part and parcel of larger, encompassing historical constellations shaped by processes operating on a scale that cannot adequately be described (let alone analyzed) within a cis- or transatlantic frame of reference.



On the leopard’s trail

In order to illustrate this point, let me begin by reiterating a story that has become a kind of myth of origin, not only among the people directly involved, but among scholars concerned with championing what one might call an ‘Africanistic’ view. It pertains to the Afro-Cuban secret society of abakuá, also known as the ñáñigos,10 an all-male sodality that probably emerged in Cuba in the first third of the nineteenth century and continues to exist to this very day. Here is how the probable codifier of this narrative, the Cuban scholar Fern-ando Ortiz (1986: 14), put it some 80 years ago:

Due to a quirk of fate, one day there were brought to Havana a group of black slaves of Efik origin, who had been caught there [in Africa] by the slave traders and trans-ported jointly to the Cuban coast in order to be sold in the barracoons of the slave market of [the town of ] Regla. And those of that group who pertained to the secret and defensive society which was and still is called ekpe or ekpon there [in Africa], reorganized it here to augment their collective power, just as it had functioned there in the estuaries of Calabar.

So far Ortiz’s opinion on the subject which has, more recently, been restated with but minor alterations by, for example, Enrique Sosa (Sosa Rodrigues 1982: 118 f.), Robert F. Th ompson (1983: 228), Jorge and Isabel Castellanos (1992: 211-213), Ivor Miller (2000: 164, 2005), and David Brown (2003). On face value, it is a pretty good story, since it is not based on an unduly large amount of guesswork. Th anks to the attention the Cuban police paid to this secret society, we have some fairly straightforward information on the events sur-rounding the inception of what came to be known as abakuá. Summarizing the evidence, we can piece the events together as follows. In 1836, a group of creole slaves from Havana’s well-to-do ‘barrio’ of Belén traveled across the bay to Regla. Th eir destination was a house owned by an officially accredited associa-tion of first-generation Africans known as the ‘cabildo de la nación carabalí bricamo apapa efí ’. Th ere they acquired, by payment of a considerable amount of money, a body of secret knowledge that enabled them to form an independ-ent sodality named Efik Butón. We do not know how the transaction pro-ceeded, but the institution it engendered—presumably an association comparable to modern abakuá chapters (known as ‘potencias’, ‘juegos’ or ‘tier-ras’)—proved an instantaneous and lasting success.11

By 1839 a police raid on the house of the free ‘morena’ Dominga Cárdenas in Havana’s barrio Jesus María yielded information that led to the subsequent arrest of the 25-year-old creole cook and dockworker Margarito Blanco. In his home the Cuban authorities found written invitations addressed to the



‘ocongos’ of ‘Obane, Ososo and Efó’, thus indicating the likelihood that at least three other such associations were already in existence. For Blanco had not only signed these letters with his name but had included his title of ‘ocongo de Ultán’ and a peculiar graphic sign of which we know that it represented the equivalent of the ‘signature’ (‘firma’) of the mocongo-title holder of modern abakuá.12 Blanco’s abortive attempt to organize a chapter of abakuá in Jesus María terminated with his deportation to Spain. Yet other such ventures fol-lowed in rapid succession. Despite the massive wave of repression in the after-math of the so-called ‘La Escalera’ conspiracy of 1844, the growth of abakuá continued virtually unchecked. By 1850, some 40 independent chapters were in operation in Havana and Regla, concentrating mostly in harbor-near bar-rios, but increasingly branching out into other neighborhoods (and towns such as Guanabacoa) where they repeatedly engaged the Cuban police force in pitched battles over the control of single barrios.13 A mere ten years later abakuá had reached the important port city of Matanzas (1862), and finally penetrated the city of Cárdenas in 1927—the last Cuban urban environment to become a lasting stronghold of abakuá.14 Time and again, violence flared up throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and, despite repeated mass arrests, the growth of abakuá seemed beyond control.

Th at this mysterious, aggressive brotherhood somehow ‘came’ from Africa appears to have been a commonplace among nineteenth-century observers, and speculations about the origin and nature of this ostensibly African secret organization repeatedly occupied the popular press. What added to the mix-ture of revulsion and curiosity that abakuá inspired in the public imagination were the colorful ritual processions that its members periodically performed: guided by drummers and bearers of sacred staffs and ensigns, the so-called ‘diablitos’ or íremes—dancers entirely covered by a tight-fitting checkered cos-tume with a conical headpiece—would emerge from the meeting-houses of single ‘potencias’ to perform in the streets what contemporaries described as an outlandish pantomime.15 Yet it was not until the 1920s that Fernando Ortiz finally pinned down the fons et origo of abakuá.16 Judging from the names of some ‘potencias’ and the fact that a group of Africans who chose to refer to themselves as ‘carabalí’ had been implicated in the founding of the first such sodality, Ortiz concluded that abakuá was nothing but a transplanted version of a localizable African institution: the so-called ‘leopard societies’ of Old Calabar known indigenously as ekpe or ngbe. By the time of Ortiz’s writ-ing, ekpe had acquired enough notoriety among missionaries and colonial administrators in southeastern Nigeria and the British part of the Cameroons to have left a prominent imprint in the early Africanist literature. Since at least the 1850s, the Efik of Old Calabar were known to the Victorian world as the



leading African experts in secret-society building.17 Following the Brazilian Nina Rodrigues’s example of ransacking such literature for ethnographic analogies, Ortiz had begun to systematically assemble a library of precisely such writings. Hence his ‘once upon a time a group of enslaved Efik’ story.

And, indeed, scores of formal characteristics of this association appear far too specific to be written off into a narrative of New World creation. An origin myth replete with references to African toponymy and ethnic designations, linguistic features of abakuá’s ritual idiom, the use of an ideographic script clearly related to the nsibidi signs of the Efik,18 a ceremonial complex pertain-ing to the sounding of an esoteric friction drum (ecué ),19 dancers in multi-colored body masks, and several other features ostensibly conspire to render abakuá/ekpe/ngbe a prime example for direct Atlantic transfer, coast to coast, unit to unit so to speak.20 Th e timing of diffusion is late, but it occurred under slavery, and precisely at the moment when Cuban slavery was entering its most brutalizing phase. Have we then, finally, found an instance of Africa transplanted intact that we could hold up to what some historians nowadays claim is a league of ‘creolizers’ sailing in the wake of Mintz and Price?21 I do not think so, and, as I will argue in the following, if this case might teach us a lesson, it is that we will have to recalibrate our units of analysis towards con-ceptions that enable us to accommodate data pertaining to both Africa and the New World within explanatory frameworks capable of articulating them in a historically meaningful way.

An onomastic conundrum

Interpreting Cuban abakuá in light of the so-called ‘new revisionism’ (to use Lovejoy’s [1997] phrase) as an ‘essentially’ African institution merely trans-planted to another continent is, therefore, not so much wrong as ultimately misleading. For such a conception generates a spurious sense of clarity in a situ-ation where some of our most basic conceptual tools are far from adequately operationalized. One of the first red herrings one encounters when probing into the standard narrative, thus, concerns what M.G. Smith (1957, 1965) called the problem of specific ascription. Can we pin down—in time and space—a con-crete African antecedent? In logical terms, this question boils down to:

is carabalí : Efik :: abakuá : ekpe?

Already the first part of this statement presents thorny problems. Surely, the people congregating in the ‘cabildo de la nación carabalí bricamó apapa efí ’ may well have thought of themselves as ‘carabalí ’ . But what does that mean



in terms that relate to African—instead of Cuban—categories of (ethnic) space and (historical) time? Baldly stated, the answer is: not very much—or, at least, not necessarily so (cf. Northrup 2000). For neither ‘Calabar’ nor ‘cara-balí ’ are terms whose referents are diachronically stable or even only syn-chronically unambiguous. In fact, as I shall argue, the Cuban term ‘carabalí ’ simply has no spatio-temporally localizable African referent. Th is may sound trite to anyone familiar with the extreme volatility of the trade names employed in the international marketing of human chattel, but, in view of the height-ened emphasis given in recent years to questions of whether ‘African’ forms of ethnic identification were maintained or reasserted themselves in New World settings, it nevertheless merits brief attention.22

In the course of the seventeenth century the (European) toponym ‘Calabar’ traveled from the Rio Real area to the Cross River estuary and, therefore, across what even then must have been a dividing line between the Kwa and Benue-Congo language groups (Simmons 1956: 4, Jones 1963: 33-48, Hair 1967: 262 f.).23 As a result, the terminology used on the American end of the slave trade eventually came to include what must have been speakers not only of Igbo, but Ibibio and even Bantu languages. Th us, although slaves known by the trade name ‘carabalí’ may very well have been present in Cuba since at least the end of the sixteenth century,24 in terms of their African ethnic origins they probably had little in common with the nineteenth-century founders of abakuá: for, different from the record on the former area (known to Europeans as ‘New Calabar’), that for the latter (‘Old Calabar’) does not offer evidence for a commencement of the slave trade on more than a modest scale prior to 1672,25 and for mass exportations not before the 1730s (Latham 1973: 17 f., Curtin 1969: 150, Northrup 1978: 50-54, Lovejoy and Richardson 1999). Th is situation is likely to have changed during the first half of the eighteenth century, which saw the rise to prominence of Old Calabar as one of the most important suppliers for the British slave trade.26 Because of the lack of a sufficiently developed plantation sector, Cuban slave imports during that time still remained at a low level,27 yet we have some indications for assuming a marked increase of the inflow of human merchandise marketed under the label ‘carabalí’.28 In Moreno Fraginals’s analysis of Cuban plantation records between 1760 and 1769, slaves designated as ‘carabalí’ made up 25 percent of his total sample of slaves working in sugar mills, rendering them the second largest contingent. While remaining stable percentually in relation to other ‘provenance groups’ (to employ Carvalho Soares’s [2001] useful term), by the decade between 1800 and 1810 they had risen to the position of the numerically largest aggregate in Moreno’s sample (Moreno Fraginals 1977).

Such records obviously tell us little about how slaves so designated might have construed their own identity. Still, the records on the so-called ‘cabildos



de nación’ provide us with crucial data on the formation and collective man-agement of Afro-Cuban identities: representing colonial transformations of the Sevillan institution of legally recognized councils (‘cabildos’) of resident aliens to urban New World environments (Ortiz 1921), these officially con-doned voluntary organizations of Africans were not just social aggregates arbi-trarily created by the colonial state. Instead, and very obviously so, the ‘cabildos’ represented intentional communities based not on ascriptions of origin, but on autonomous constructions of collective identity and allegiance (Palmié 1993). Viewed in this light, the existence of ‘cabildos’ of any one named Afro-Cuban ‘nación’ becomes an indicator less of the mere numerical strength of particular African population segments in the Cuban diaspora, than of the capacity of groupings of Africans (however constituted) to forge common pat-terns of identification under certain New World conditions—whether the resulting collective identities were based on factual Old World ethnic com-monalities, or on New World allegiances translated into an ethnic idiom.

An inventory of Havana’s black ‘cabildos de nación’, compiled in 1755 by Bishop Morell de Santa Cruz, thus provides us with what may be taken as an ‘inside view’ of Afro-Cuban ‘carabalí ethnicity’ and its internal differentiation: Morell listed five different ‘carabalí cabildos’—more than any other Afro-Cuban ‘nación’ could boast of at that time (Marrero 1972-78, VIII: 160).29 Whatever the African origins of the members of these associations might have been, they had chosen to identify with a terminology that—taxonomically speaking—no longer referred to African, but essentially Cuban social units.30 Quite obviously, the Cuban ‘carabalí naciones’ were not transplanted frag-ments torn from preexisting African ‘tribes’. However their members may have defined their collective identities—on various levels of particularity or inclusiveness—there simply was no concrete African antecedent to these nas-cent New World African ethnic units.

Yet even though this provides us with insights on which to base speculations about the emergence of that one crucial unit under study—the ‘cabildo de los carabalí bricamo apapa efí’31—it is of little help in explaining why this particu-lar grouping should have provided the context for the re-creation of ekpe/ngbe on Cuban soil. For such considerations still leave us with several vexing ques-tions related to the sociology of knowledge about ekpe/ngbe in the Cuban diaspora. If Afro-Cubans who called themselves ‘carabalí’ after about 1750 could have possessed the necessary knowledge, why did they wait until 1836 to put it to use? Th ere could still have been a majority of Ijaw from New Cala-bar among the Cuban ‘carabalí’—which would explain the fact that an ekpe-like institution did not emerge in Cuba for another three generations, for secret societies of this type are unknown in that region of the Niger delta. But this is not very likely. Th e more compelling hypothesis—corroborated as I



think it is by Africanist findings—is that ekpe, the African antecedent to Cuban abakuá, had simply not yet assumed the shape and functions, or had not yet risen to the kind of prominence, that mid-nineteenth-century British observ-ers committed to the pages that Ortiz, eventually, was to read, and which allowed him to identify Cuban abakuá as a Cross-River-type secret sodality.

Whence ekpe?

Limitations of space will not allow me to fully rehearse the available evidence, but, from what we know today, ekpe/ngbe was by no means a time-hallowed institution in Old Calabar. It was an innovation on both cultural and social-economic levels, befitting the ideological and political needs of fishing villages turned multi-ethnic city states—part and parcel of an Atlantic world built around the exchange of trade goods for commodified people. Th is esoteric cult association recruited its members not on the basis of lineage affiliation and descent. It rather revolved around the economic power to buy the sacred knowledge and initiatory grades necessary to be privy to the sounding of a mystical leopard’s voice and partake of its juridical powers. In a very crucial sense, the body of secret knowledge, as well as the titles, cult agencies and powers that comprised ekpe, were objects of commercial exchange circulating in increasingly wider networks of mercantile transactions.32

Modern Efik traditions maintain that ekpe was originally sold to one of the first Efik settlers at Creek Town (Ikot Itunko) by an Ejagham/Ekoi from Usak Edet (Bakasi) on the Cameroon side of the Cross River estuary (Waddell 1863: 313, Nair 1972: 14 f., Latham 1973: 36, Nicklin 1991: 13). Th ere is little doubt that on a functional level this tradition represents a charter defining an exchange-sphere for what became a flourishing commerce in ekpe-related eso-teric knowledge. Yet both Ejagham/Ekoi and Afro-Cuban traditions seem to corroborate an Ejagham/Ekoi to Efik diffusion (Talbot 1969, III: 779 f., Jones 1956: 16, Ruel 1969: 250, Sosa Rodriguez 1982: 282 f., Röschenthaler 2000, 2006).33 Th e Efik, indeed, claim to have possessed an indigenous secret society prior to the introduction of ekpe (Latham 1973: 35). Different from this indigenous precursor sodality, however, ekpe seems to have provided the Efik with a unique medium of ideological and political arbitrage facilitating the conversion of sacred knowledge into wealth and social power and vice versa.34 And it was the secret of this mode of transvaluation that allowed them to engineer their society into a pivotal nexus within a commercial exchange sys-tem of Atlantic proportions.

Ekpe may well have had other functions in the past, about which we have very little knowledge. By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, it clearly



served the goal of organizing—and articulating the interests of—a rising com-mercial elite of ethnically highly heterogeneous origin. More so: ekpe itself had, in a way, become a commodity circulating within an expanding com-mercial orbit.35 It was the sale and resale of ekpe’s secrets—in fact, their very integration within an exchange sphere including the sale of human merchan-dise—that facilitated the building of a growing network of supra-local and trans-ethnic trading connections which, by the early twentieth century, extended as far inland as the Cameroon Grassfields.36

By the same token, ekpe’s mystical voice rang out to the Atlantic as well. Indeed, one might say that ekpe reached Liverpool before it even reached Cuba. By 1828 the British traveler Holman (1840: 392) observed that ‘Cap-tain Burrell of the ship Heywood, of Liverpool, held the rank of Yampai, which is of considerable importance [in fact, it was the highest grade in Old Calabar at the time], and he found it exceedingly to his advantage, as it ena-bled him to recover all debts due to him by the natives.’ Burrell may have been among the first Europeans to become privy to ekpe’s secret of how to moralize contractual ties. But he certainly was not the last: just as the African hinter-land suppliers of human cargo succumbed to the lure of this spiritual broker of economic power, about a score of European buyers documentably fell under its charm as well.37 Th e mystical leopard, it seems, beckoned to whoever could pay for its services—which consisted in facilitating the transformation of eco-nomic assets into sacred authority, and vice versa. Latham’s (1973: 29 f.) char-acterization of ekpe as ‘an elementary capitalist institution of entirely African origin’ may overstate the case. Yet the numinous entity these associations wor-shiped may well have been an African avatar of the spirit of capitalism: what ekpe offered to a rising African elite on the Cross River was an ideology capable of domesticating the savage forces unleashed by seaborne European merchant capital—by harnessing them to distinctly local goals.

But to return to the American side: even by the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Cuban version of ekpe—if it really was that—could quite obviously have had a large number of points of origin.38 Ekpe/ngbe-related knowledge might have diffused to Cuba at any time between, say, the 1750s and 1836, and probably did so several times and from a wide variety of locations within the sphere of operation of what Malcolm Ruel (1969) calls the ‘ngbe-polity’,39 before it finally congealed in the process of recreating the institution on Cuban soil. Likewise, the original ethnic and even social identity of its carriers seems indeterminate, to say the least: not just scores of unredeemed pawns, but the sons of the headmen of Old Town abducted in the course of the 1767 massacre (Lovejoy and Richardson 1999: 346), or the ‘semi-Bantu’ ‘Bakassey genllmen’ [sic] Antera Duke recounts having lured on board a ship in August 1786 (Forde



1956: 98) may have possessed such knowledge. So may the ‘upwards of twenty’ Igbo victims of the Arochukwu oracle who, according to Baikie’s informants (1966: 313) had been shipped to Cuba via Old Calabar. Or take the slaves loaded onto the Cuban schooner which Holman (1840: 389) observed at the Duke Town landing in 1828, and whom Duke Ephraim may have procured from as far as the Cameroons, or from as close as Old Calabar and its immediate vicinity.40 All could have carried their ekpe-titles and the respective bodies of sacred knowledge aboard the ships and into the plantation barracoons, or urban black barrios that became their destination. Ekpe, in other words, was a body of ‘local knowledge’ impossible to localize in space and time; a structure that moves and is moved onward by the effects of the changes it wreaks upon the social and economic relations within the field through which it passes.

Why, then, did such an (ethnically entirely ambiguous) version of ekpe/ngbe emerge in Cuba at the time it did? Th e answer I would like to give in the fol-lowing is ostensibly simple: it did so because both the ‘barrios’ of urban Cuba and the Cross River city states—small republics, the missionary Waddell (1863: 314) called them—by then formed part of a single historical conjunc-ture. Th ough of encompassing, Atlantic nature, it brought forth in both places conditions allowing for certain patterns of what Sidney Mintz (1977) called ‘local initiative and local response’. Th at ekpe/abakuá entered this transconti-nental political-economic constellation may have been accidental. Th at it came to mediate these patterns—producing as it did, pronounced similarities on a surface level of form—was due not so much to the agency of a small group of Cuban ‘carabalí’ (whoever they may have been) who enacted the first sale of the secret on Cuban soil.41 It was due to the fact that the institution to which they introduced another batch of creole Afro-Cubans was already integral to that evolving historical space which we may call the ‘Atlantic world’.

Watery solutions

So the question to which we should direct ourselves is: why did it catch on? And why did it become endemic to merely a few port towns in western Cuba? Th e British sold slaves from Old Calabar to virtually all the Antillean colonies and even the North American mainland at just about the same time. Why not there? Let us pursue an old line of inquiry first, one laid out, again, by Fernando Ortiz. Abakuá, Ortiz reasoned, emerged not just in port towns, but in harbor-near barrios, and this for quite specific reasons: casting a glance across the Atlan-tic tells us that these sodalities originated in an riverine environment, and that aquatic symbolism also features prominently in their ritual life. So it does—and,



in fact, apparently even more so—in their New World version where important parts of abakuá’s elaborate founding myth center on the aquatic origins of the mystery, and its initial transaction across a body of water. In keeping with the fact that abakuá seemed to condense African toponymy into what Ortiz’s sister-in-law Lydia Cabrera (1969) would later call a ‘geography by way of remem-brance’, and Ernesto Sosa (Sosa Rodriguez 1982: 17) a ‘geography of sacred memory’, Ortiz thus anticipated contemporary theories of ‘lieux de mémoire’ (to use Pierre Nora’s [1989] well-known phrase) in postulating a sort of mystical grid which abakuá had, for ritual reasons, superimposed upon the actual topog-raphy of Cuba.42 ‘In the beginning’, he writes (Ortiz 1986: 15),

various potencias settled near the piers of Regla and its shores; then they scattered in the maritime barrios of the city, such as Jesús María, Carraguao, Luz, Atarés, etc. Even when they diffused to the barrios of San Lázaro, Colón and others, they always main-tained the tradition that the juego was supposed to be at the anchorage of a marina, i.e. a barrio close to the sea or a river like the Almendares . . . Th is territorialization which resulted in the division of Havana into independent and rivalling areas, per-petuated, here in the Americas, the legendary insular and localist spirit which, in Africa, was characteristic of the different chapters of the fearsome Ekpe.

Ortiz was right—though, perhaps, for the wrong reasons. To this day, abakuá lodges—known as ‘juegos’, ‘potencias’ or ‘tierras’—indeed map out their territo-ries of operation in line with coordinates, both sacred and secular, of their own making. Th e term ‘juego’, thus, refers not just to the notion of a ‘set’ of obones or plazas (i.e., titleholders), but to their ritual agency in affirming and extending power (‘potencia’) over a specific territory (‘tierra’)—whether this be a mythical homeland in Enllenisón (a term only insufficiently glossed as Africa) or a ‘barrio’ of Itia Nuncue (Havana), Itía Ororó Cande (Regla), Itía Mororó (Guanabacoa), Itía Fondoga (Matanzas), or Itía Canimansene (Cárdenas), as the four principal strongholds of abakuá in Cuba are known today in ritual language.

Such assimilation of diasporic space into the categories of an imagined Africa, perhaps, need not surprise us. If, in the early nineteenth-century Euro-pean mercantile imagination, the Niger Delta had become an inland exten-sion of the Atlantic ocean, ‘a highway into the heart of Central Africa’ and toward its commercial possibilities (Dike 1956: 18), so had the Efik river gen-tlemen—who routinely apprenticed their sons on British vessels, amassed vast collections of Victorian bric-a-brac, and even mail-ordered cast-iron palaces from Liverpool—built a Europe of the African merchant imagination into what Edwin Ardener (1989) might have called their essentially Atlantic ‘world structure.’43 Surely, given what we know about the repeated enslavement of members of the Old Calabar merchant elite, there is little a priori reason not



to entertain the hypothesis that these same waters which united actors in Bris-tol and Old Calabar in the Atlantic pursuit of (however culturally divergent) fantasies of wealth and power might have acquired an analogous transconti-nental significance in the Cuban diaspora: a linkage—though of symbolic nature—between the piers and dockyards of urban Cuba and the landings and beaches of far away Old Calabar.

Central parts of abakuá ritual, thus, reenact the initial discovery of the mys-tical voice of ecué and the founding of the association in Enllenisón—a term for a landscape distant in space and time that we might be inclined to back-translate into a chronotopic rendering of abakuá’s ‘African past’. During a plante or baroko (ceremony), the title-holders of a ‘potencia’ are considered to act as, and speak with the voices of, the original founders of the association transacting the secret of ecué.44 In fact, once the ‘power’ of a ‘potencia’ is acti-vated and displayed in ritual drama, there is no distinction between Enllenisón (conceived as an ‘African past’) and the Cuban present: both space and time collapse as the voice of the holder of the Ecueñón-title rings out from the door-step of a meeting-house to announce the exoteric sequence of a ceremony in the early hours of the morning, and the roaring ‘voice’ of ecué ’s sacred friction drum emerges from the ‘cuarto fambá’ (initiatory chamber) of an abakuá meeting-house. At that moment any street or alleyway in contemporary Havana can transform into the stage for primordial transactions on the banks of the mythical river Oldán where a woman named Sikan once discovered the secret and was put to death, where the sorcerer Nasakó first fashioned the sacred drum transmitting ecué’s voice, and where the obones of the ‘tierra efí’ came across the water to purchase the secret from the ‘tierra efó’.

In sum, there is little doubt that water was a key to the spread of ekpe/abakuá. Its importance, however, lies both in its symbolic functions, and in its economic ones as well. It thus is in the maritime exchanges that historically articulated the landings of Old Calabar with the bay of Havana that we ought to look for an answer to the question of how ekpe not only managed to reassert itself in the New World, but became lastingly ensconced in a few port towns of western Cuba. For, regardless of the continuing capacity of the cultural forms deployed by contemporary adherents of abakuá to ritually merge American space and twenty-first-century time with the event-structure of an African mythical char-ter, the history of such forms lies elsewhere—viz. in the conditions which ren-dered the harnessing of ekpe-related knowledge to concrete social goals a contextually successful pattern of ‘local initiative and local response’.

What is at issue, then, is not only how the changing structure of opportu-nity and constraint given in nineteenth-century Havana allowed the leopard’s voice to first ring out on Cuban soil in 1836. Th e analytical challenge rather lies in bridging the distance between this (New World) event, and those con-



temporary practices by which ecué ’s Cuban adepts nowadays commemorate the mystery’s African origins, real or imagined. How, to phrase the matter in less abstract terms, did ekpe-related knowledge and practice—including the entire structure of African sacred memory it appears to revolve around—become subject to continuous social reproduction in Cuba?

Th e first part of this question is relatively easy to answer. Havana’s urban growth had always been related to its strategic position on the eastern rim of the Spanish seaborne empire. With Spain’s turn to free trade and the onset of Cuba’s sugar boom in the 1790s, however, the bay of Havana turned into a hub for legal as well as illegal Atlantic exchanges. Th e volume of merchandise, capital and slaves channeled through Havana’s harbor virtually exploded.45 So did its urban population which more than doubled from c. 50,000 in 1791 (Scott 1986: 28) to 112,023 in 1828 (Deschamps Chapeaux 1971: 17), spill-ing over from the city itself into sprawling ‘barrios extramuros’ that grew from shanty towns into teeming black neighborhoods. By then, Afro-Cubans made up over 60 percent of the city’s population of 112,000, and only a minority of them were slaves.46 Concurrently, a wide variety of licit as well as illicit eco-nomic venues opened within the bustling world of docks, warehouses and foundries centered around the bay. Both on account of the scarcity of white labor and the inability or unwillingness of the government to control the flow of merchandise into the channels of an informal and partly illegal market system, enterprising Afro-Cubans came to monopolize strategic positions within an increasingly complex and truly ‘Atlantic’ structure of economic opportunity.47 One such nodal position was that of the ‘capataz del muelle’ or dockside labor contractor. And it was around this particular node that abakuá appears to have initially begun to crystallize.48

Th ese organizers of the appropriation of Afro-Cuban labor by increasingly international trading companies, in a sense, rode the current of transatlantic economic conjunctures. For they secured the supply of manpower at the point where the streams of Cuban sugar and other export articles intersected the incoming flow of trade goods, slaves and capital. By the same token, however, their position rose and fell with their ability to draw on, and manipulate to their profit, the local labor resources of the harbor-near barrios. It was this intermediate position between international merchant capital and the com-moditized black labor it sought after that may have drawn such rising entre-preneurs—some of whose careers are well documented49—towards the secrets of abakuá. And just as ekpe galvanized a slave-trading elite in the Niger delta, its organizational model once more allowed these Afro-Cuban labor-brokers to convert economic assets into sacred power and social control.

Partly this was because Havana’s Afro-Cuban barrios represented residential and, to a certain extent, economic units whose members evidenced strongly



differentiated patterns of local identification and solidarity. Th e structural analogy—suggested by Enrique Sosa (1982: 143)—with the towns, wards and quarters of Old Calabar may not be overdrawn, but is certainly beyond empir-ical corroboration, given what little we know about both places before the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it is sufficiently clear that, once a ‘potencia’ of abakuá moved into one such neighborhood, it began to build up a centralized political structure hinging upon the economic assets accruing from membership, and the sanctioning power single chapters held over their constituency.50 By maneuvering religious title-holders into gate-keeping positions on the local labor market or, alternatively, attracting holders of such positions into their fold (cf. Martínez Bordón 1971: 38), abakuá ‘potencias’ effectively controlled access to employment within their ‘barrios’ of operation.

By the time the Spanish government finally moved to outlaw the associa-tion in 1876, some 80 ‘potencias’51 had superimposed upon the economic geography of Havana and the industrial zone and warehousing districts of Regla and Guanabacoa the conceptual grid of a ‘geography of sacred memory’, thus transforming sites of capitalist production and exchange into what one might call sites for the reproduction of an ‘African past’. More crucially, how-ever, they had simultaneously established a tight network of religiously struc-tured relations between members occupying crucial positions in terms of access to labor, the circulation of petty merchandize and contraband goods, and the flow of cash, credit and services throughout the social fields comprised by single ‘barrios’ or sections thereof. At the same time, they had begun to monopolize access to employment at those outlying industrial or commercial complexes—tabaquerías, slaughterhouses, markets, warehouses and dock-yards—which they increasingly infiltrated, and whose vast demand in physical labor they satisfied by channeling workers from their own neighborhoods onto the payroll of these large scale enterprises. ‘Already prior to the War of 1895’, writes the labor historian José Rivero Muñíz,

Th e tabaqueros had been accused of pertaining to the said ‘potencias’, and if not all of them, so especially those living in the neigborhoods of El Pilar, Los Sitios, Jesús María and El Horcón, for it was known that there were tabaquerías in which those who were not ñáñigos did not receive employment, given that the foremen themselves were sworn in and, therefore, obliged to give preferential treatment to their fellow mem-bers. It has also been said—and according to our judgment, on good grounds—that among the meat-packers and workers on the public markets there also abounded the ñáñigos, whose associations—about which so many falsehoods have been written—were in reality nothing but societies for mutual assistance . . . (Rivero Muñiz 1961: 167).52



Th e same held true for the harborside labor market where, as the popular say-ing went, abakuá determined ‘who would eat and who would not’ (Martínez Bordon 1971: 38). Indeed, as Rivero Muñíz (ibid.) surmises, part of the repeated violent skirmishes different ‘potencias’ fought out on Havana’s streets in the last quarter of the nineteenth century may well have been struggles over access to sources of employment and economic power. Such rivalries obviously were the product of a highly differentiated structure of economic opportunity, which, for Havana’s working population, translated into not just spatial, but also social proximity to sources of employment. But the resulting conflicts were nevertheless structured by cultural precepts laid out by ecué itself. Th ere did exist venues of securing amicable relations with or tolerance of an alien ‘poten-cia’ on one’s native turf.53 Yet although each ‘potencia’ was in possession of the secret that facilitated the crucial transmutation of economic assets into political as well as sacred power, ecué apparently would not accept tampering with its very sources of strength. Just as the rank and file membership rose and fell with the ability of a ‘potencia’ to provide steady labor in an economic environment subject to extreme fluctuations, so the ‘plazas’ or ‘obones’ were loath to relin-quish their monopoly over employment options at those key points where Havana’s internal distributive system intersected with the world market.

By the turn of the twentieth century, abakuá-mediated economic linkages between single ‘barrios’ and the dockside nexuses of transatlantic commercial exchange had solidified to a degree where it had become a commonplace to refer to a maritime terminal or shipping line as ‘belonging’ to this or that neighborhood (López Valdés 1966: 14), and, by extension, to such and such a ‘potencia’. According to López Valdés’s data (based on research in the early 1960s), the holders of the Illamba-title of the Belén-based ‘potencias’ Bakokó and Kanfioró had risen to the rank of exclusive labor contractors (‘contratistas’) at the docks of the American-owned Ward line, uneasily sharing the labor market of the former with Enlleguellé Efó, a powerful and highly prolific ‘potencia’ from Regla which, under its formidable Illamba Manuel de Jesús ‘Chuchu’ Capaz (1881-1962), would, by the early twentieth century, maneu-ver itself into the position of ‘dueño del embarcadero’ (lord of the embank-ment) of the Regla warehousing district and maritime terminal across the bay.54 Urianabón of the ‘barrio’ of Colón and Betóngo of Pueblo Nuevo domi-nated the Havana Dock terminal. Regla’s Otán Efó ruled at the docks of the United Fruit Company’s Flota Blanca line through the offices of its Illamba-cum-contratista Blas ‘Blasito’ Pérez Rojas. Equereguá Momí and Uriapapá of Jesús María together held sway at the embankments of the Harry Brother line and monopolized two other docks in the southwestern harbor sections of Vac-caro, Atarés and Tallapiedra (López Valdés 1966: 14 ff.).



What emerged, then, was a triply coded system of spatial relations between ‘barrios’, abakuá ‘potencias’ and those economic complexes that—whether by producing trade goods for the world market, or distributing the inflowing merchandise—generated large-scale employment and a few privileged venues for social mobility; venues open to those who managed to combine organiza-tional skill with social capital and hard cash: the former prerequisite to open the doors of the ‘cuarto fambá’ (secret initiatory chamber) of a ‘potencia’, and the second necessary to buy a title of strategic import.55 As for the merchant princes of the Niger Delta, ecué to them became a transforming power, one that transforms both those who harness its mysteries to their own goals, and the very world their agency impinges upon.

Ecué unbound

By then, however, abakuá had long crossed the most deeply entrenched social barrier existing in Cuba: in 1857 Andrés Facundo de los Dolores Petit, the famous Isue of the ‘potencia’ Bakokó Efó, and himself a ‘light skinned mulatto of Haitian origin’ (Ortiz 1952-55, IV: 68),56 sold the secrets of ecué to a group of young white Cubans. On Christmas Eve of 1863, thirteen whites were sworn in as the obones (titleholders) of the first white ‘potencia’ of abakuá (Roche Monteagudo 1925: 137), appropriately named Okobio Macarará (Ortiz 1952-55, IV: 69) or Ecobio Efó Mucarará (Sosa Rodriguez 1982: 142)—trans-latable as either ‘white brothers’ or ‘white brothers of Efó’.57 Large as it looms in the annals of Cuban abakuá, this event has variously been recounted as involving the payment of 1,000 gold ounces (17,000 pesos) with which Bakokó Efó bought the freedom of numerous slaves; 500 ‘centenes’ (2,650 pesos) plus the promise to free certain important members elicited from the whites who were the progeny of elite families; and finally the symbolical sum of 30 ounces, strongly resonating with biblical connotations of treason and deceit (Ortiz 1952-55, VI: 69). Yet whatever the concrete amount was, whatever use Petit and his fellow ocobios put the money to,58 and whatever violent conflicts the transaction engendered,59 as Ortiz succinctly put it, the exchange of knowledge around which it revolved finally and irrevocably transformed abakuá from a ‘cosa de negros’ into a ‘cosa de Cuba’ (Ortiz 1952-55, IV: 71).60 Not only would the memory of the foundational events on the banks of the river Oldán now be carried onward in time by socially white Cubans, but the spirits of the primordial transactants of ecué’s secret would incarnate in their bodies as well.

Th e paradox, however, is more apparent than real: far from severing what might be perceived as the last ties uniting an African-derived institution with its transatlantic origins, Petit’s had acted in accordance with the mechanisms of



reproduction by which ekpe had generated a vast network of commercial and political relations in the Bight of Biafra and its hinterland. It is not only that European slavers had been documentably integrated into ekpe’s network of sacred allegiance and commercial reciprocity on the African side long before Petit availed himself of an opportunity—generated, in the last instance, by a larger Atlantic system—which may have brought the interests of the first white indísime (candidates for initiation) in alignment with those of their black oco-bios (i.e., brothers in ecué).61 Rather, from its very origin athwart the African riverine highways along which knowledge about the law-giving voice of the leopard was sold from one slave-trading local unit to the other, ekpe’s success had been pegged to its nature as a sacred commodity circulating against other carriers of values. More than anything else, it was this characteristic that imbued it with a unique capacity to break through, and reproduce itself across, deeply entrenched ethnic barriers. And just as ekpe managed to build up proliferating networks of trade and cooperation among diverse African populations—even-tually incorporating an array of hinterland societies reaching as far as the Cam-eroon grasslands into what Ruel (1969) has, perhaps not inappropriately, called an ‘ngbe-polity’—so did Cuban ocobios reproduce the secret and its political-economic functions by strategically widening its sphere of circulation.

For even though the inception of the first white ‘potencia’ initially seems to have incited violent reactions, abakuá eventually became the first Cuban insti-tution integrating individuals of African and European descent into a com-mon pattern of identification and solidarity. Paradoxical as it may seem, by the 1860s, we might say, ecué had achieved what José Martí’s visionary anti-racist program of Cuban nation-building would (rather less than successfully) posit some three decades later (Helg 1995, Ferrer 1999). Th e difference was that in this case white Cubans did not grudgingly consent to Afro-Cuban participa-tion in an American national project, but eagerly paid for their own inclusion in a black secret society of African origin.

Hence whether or not Petit’s agency was salient within the symbolic uni-verse of African ekpe/ngbe may not be the most appropriate question. For its historical significance rather lies in transforming Cuban abakuá into an endur-ing part of a transcontinentally dispersed, indeed virtually rhizomatic, system of knowledge and ritual practice capable of rendering the forces of global cap-italism locally coextensive with an awesome African power. Like the mythical founders of the association in a Niger Delta of the Cuban imagination, the ‘Africans who founded in 1836 the secret society of Abakuá’—as one can read today on a plaque erected under Cuban government auspices near the embank-ment of Regla—capitalized on local structures of opportunity generated, ulti-mately, by the heaving and swelling of larger political-economic tides. And no



less than their historical contemporaries in Africa, the members of the ‘cabildo carabalí bricamó apapa efí ’ in Regla, the mysterious creole Belenistas to whom they sold the secret, and Andrés Petit who engineered yet another expansion of its New World sphere of exchange, built a lasting system of commercial transactions in esoteric knowledge into the local conjunctural structure of such Atlantic circulations.

In the end, it seems that in the Bay of Havana, local and global political- economic constellations meshed to a degree where international capitalism and an African-derived secret society lastingly became mutually constitutive. If so, however, what do we make of all this? Was it, after all, nothing but the result of the accidental opening up of a diffusionary path from here to there? A bunch of initiates, originating who knows where, being shuttled from Cala-bar to Cuba by the energy generated through the operation of what Philip Curtin (1955) called the South Atlantic system? An ‘obscure miracle of con-nection’ as David Scott (1999) puts it in harnessing Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic phrase to the characterization of a history both too evident and too elusive to be captured by simple empiricist procedures? To be sure, the move-ment of ekpe to Cuba occurred along a trajectory defined by the historical conjunction of two disparate localities. Call it an accident, if you will. Still, once removed from African soil, ekpe turned into a body of knowledge that had yet to be re-transformed into a system of practice capable of reproduction on Cuban soil. What made for the striking success of ekpe in Cuba was that the ideology it provided seems to have matched the social situation it encoun-tered there to an astonishing degree.

As a result, Cubans of various socio-racial identities today ritually enact ecué ’s initial discovery and sale across African ethnic boundaries. Th ey map sacred memories of an Africa of their collective imagination upon the New World social spaces in which they live and act. And they compete with each other in accumulating ritualistic knowledge about a myth of African origins and the meaning of its New World re-enactment, thereby building up social and cultural capital within their communities which—to this day—not only is transactable into masculine reputation, but economic options as well. Yet whether such ‘African origins’ ever existed or not (and the question really should be moot by now), a valid explanation for why this is so cannot be found on one single side of those waters which, for a time, brought the bay of Havana into intimate alignment with the landings and beaches of the Cross River and its slave-supplying hinterland.

In the final analysis then, ekpe itself, in a sense, was an ‘Atlantic’—‘creole’, if you will—institution before it even arrived in Cuba. More paradoxically even, in a surprising reversal of received notions about directionality in the



Afro-Atlantic space-time continuum, abakuá eventually became an ‘African’ phenomenon. In 1912 the British colonial agent and prolific amateur eth-nographer B. Amaury Talbot published the first photograph of an ekpe body mask taken in southeastern Nigeria (Talbot 1912, plate facing page 42). What Talbot did not know was that the long-time resident Spanish genre painter Victor Patricio Landaluze had documented such masks nearly two genera-tions earlier in Cuba (e.g., Landaluze 1881). More astonishing, the first pho-tographic images of Cross-River-style body masks taken on the African continent had been published a little over a decade before Talbot’s, and Talbot could not have known about them either because these photographs had been taken in no less unlikely a place than the prison of Monte Achó in the North-African Spanish penal colony of Ceuta (Salillas 1901). For in yet another series of Atlantic movements, of which we know only the barest outlines, Cuban ocobios deported to the Spanish presidios of Santa Isabel de Fernando Poo and Ceuta since the late 1850s recreated the sodality there. Here we could begin to ask how Spanish counterinsurgent policy—more than 600 supposed ñáñigos were exiled during the last Cuban war of independence alone62—might be linked to wider economic and ideological conjunctures and concerns, and what factors made for the transformation of abakuá into a British Caribbean-style Christmas mummery on Fernando Poo (Moreno Moreno 1948), whereas it retained or even augmented its political functions in Cuba where—despite massive persecution—by the 1920s it played an increasing role in electoral politics.63 But this must be the subject of another publication.

In lieu of a conclusion

Th e more important question for now may be the following one: do we even want to continue to speak about ekpe and abakuá as institutions—patterned arrangements of social relations and practices that can be, as it were, moni-tored in their trajectories, like an object hurled from one side of the Atlantic to the other, and, by analogy recalled into New World history from African remembrance? Th e question is far from trivial, for such a view is what any attempt at the comparative elucidation of a historical relation between ekpe and abakuá must realistically be based on. But how can we establish such a relation if we cannot be sure of the separate existence of the entities we aim to relate? Might we not rather think of both ekpe and abakuá as part of a single proces-sual constellation—something akin to a meteorological formation, perhaps; a weather system that moves across time and space, circulating against other airmasses within larger formations, and producing, as it articulates with



regional micro-climates, the specific ‘historical’ effects which enter the local record. Th e analogy may not be as whimsical as it would appear.64 To suggest two examples: Fernand Braudel’s conception of hierarchically layered, but interacting strata of historical time each with their proper set of spatial param-eters of historical eventuation represents one such model, though Braudel’s own profound lack of interest in historical subjectivity seems to have pre-empted a good deal of its impact. So did—despite its pitiful neglect of human agency, monstrous jargon and eventual dissipation into the utterly sterile ‘modes of production controversy’ (cf. Foster Carter 1978)—the Marxist the-ory of structural articulation with its inherent tendency to problematize con-ceptions of ‘the local’ and the conditions of its emergence and reproduction.

I am not arguing for a return to or emulation of such endeavors, strictu sensu.65 Nor would I want this entire essay to be understood as anything but a methodological note of caution that—or so I would hope—might come to inform further ethnographic and archival scholarship. But I do think that the case of abakuá presents sufficient evidence for the need to recalibrate our intel-lectual tool kit if we want to keep concepts like that of an ‘Atlantic World’ from degenerating into fashionable metaphors for what everybody has been doing all along anyway. Clearly, in the case at hand, both space and time are deceptive, for they exist on ontological as well as discursive levels, neither of which easily or even only unproblematically reduces to the other. Given this fact, we might be well advised to treat concepts such as ‘Africa’, ‘Cuba’, ‘his-tory’ and ‘memory’ as heuristic metaphors, lest we feel prepared to once more wrestle with the ghosts of Tylor and Galton, Frazier and Herskovits. In the end, perhaps the question worth asking is not whether there is an Africa in the Americas and how we can find it, but rather what is the conceptual frame within which we might phrase useful questions about both places at one and the same time.

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Notes

1. Its earliest version was presented at a conference on ‘Th e Atlantic Slave Trade in Afri-can and African American Memory’, held at the University of Chicago, 24-25 May 1997. It has gone through its own set of historical changes since then.

2. As well as self-consciously ‘New Revisionist’ historians aiming to refocus scholarly debate on the question of ‘African origins’. On such tendencies see below, as well as my more specific critique in Palmié (2005).

3. What Wagner has in mind here are not the extended, internally discontinuous ‘events’ (like ‘Th e French Revolution’) that Danto (1965) calls ‘temporal structures’, nor a Bergso-nian notion of phenomenological ‘duration’ (Bergson 1912). For Wagner, ‘epoch’ desig-



nates a unit of experienced ‘figurative time that belongs to a flow of analogy—a “now” that remembers or imagines itself into (or out of ) other “nows”’ (Wagner 1986: 90), and so creates a unitary ‘presence’ beyond chronological measurement, and scalar resolution. As I tried to show earlier (Palmié 2006a), Usagaré, Bekura Mendó or Enllenisón might be consid-ered as designations of such ‘nows’.

4. In the long run, Miller’s efforts might well result in the creation of what Johnson (this issue) might call a novel ‘diasporic horizon’ for Cuban abakuá. If so, it would be fascinating to document this ethnographically.

5. Or simply read as such out of behaviors whose ‘pastfulness’ is not discursively avail-able to the actors themselves (cf. Shaw 2002, Argenti 2006).

6. Ironically, the fact that both initially cast their endeavors in the mold of Lombro-sian criminal anthropology (with its emphasis on biologistically conceived—i.e., context-independent—determinants of behavior) may have steered them towards a transcontinental view, albeit for the wrong reasons. At least Ortiz, however, had clearly transcended these earlier ‘racialist’ views by 1930 and embarked on an ethnographic and historical quest which produced some of the finest African-Americanist research to this date (cf. Coronil 1995, Palmié 1998, 2002, Palmié and Pérez 2005, Díaz 2005).

7. Herskovits’s program for African-American studies remained crucially indebted to the maxim his teacher Franz Boas had laid out in terms of linguistic reconstruction: ‘Com-parison of related forms throws light upon the history of their differentiation’ (Boas 1938: 2). What may have made African-America such an attractive field for a student of Boas was the fact that in this particular case historical relationships did not have to be inferred (e.g., in the form of hypothetical migrations) from modern evidence, but seemed to be on record.

8. It takes its origin from a famous debate between Sir Edward Burnett Tylor and the eminent statistician Sir Francis Galton, mostly remembered today as the founder of Eugen-ics—an infamous outgrowth of nineteenth-century scientism. In the case at hand Galton authored an important intervention in the complacent social evolutionism of contempo-rary armchair anthropologists. At a meeting of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1889, Tylor presented the results of an ambitious inquiry aiming to derive universal laws of the evolution of human systems of marriage and descent from the comparison of a sample of 350 cultures culled from the ethnographic record. To Tylor’s dismay, Galton asked him about the independence of his sampling units: how could Tylor guarantee that what he called ‘adhesions’ (i.e., correlations) between variables (such as, e.g., modes of reckoning descent, incest-barriers, residence rules or forms of kin-avoidance) reflected universal pat-terns of social evolution if he could not rule out the mutual contamination of his sample units through historically contingent processes of cultural diffusion? Tylor could not answer the question, and neither has anybody after him ever solved the problem of how to infer presumably universally valid ‘laws’ of human social development from historical, and there-fore necessarily contingent, data.

9. Th ere are additional theoretical problems bound up with the creolization concept which is recently enjoying a remarkable renaissance. Scholars from various walks of theory have seized upon its potential for signifying states of ‘hybridity’ as an antidote against diverse forms of ‘foundational thought’. Since most of them seem to derive the concept from lin-guistics, the historical usage of the term ‘criollo’ as a designation of an Old World species grown indigenous in the New World has virtually been obliterated. Th is is ironical, for all fanciful talk about ‘hybridity’ notwithstanding, the roots of the creolization-metaphor lie in a discourse on breeding—hardly the genre in which postmodern critics like to express



themselves. An ingenuous use of the term close to its historical origins is evident in Breen (1984). Both Mintz (1996) and Price (2001) have recently independently clarified their points of view in respect to some of the unintended consequences of their intervention. For other issues involved in operationalizing the ‘creolizaton’ metaphor see Palmié (2006b).

10. Particularly in nineteenth-century sources the association is typically referred to as los ñáñigos. Today, members of abakuá regard the term as derogatory and offensive, and prefer to call themselves and each other ocobios (‘brothers’) or ecoria ñene abakuá (‘men born over the drum skin’—i.e., into abakuá).

11. See Archivo Nacional de Cuba (hencewith ANC) Asuntos Polítcos, leg. 76 #56, Trujillo y Monagas (1882: 364), Roche Monteagudo (1925: 4), Deschamps Chapeaux (1964: 97).

12. See ANC Comisión Militar leg 23 #1, Deschamps Chapeaux (1964: 98, 101). Aba-kuá has a complex system of titles. Each chapter or ‘potencia’ consists of 13 holders of major ranked titles, up to 12 titled minor functionaries and an unspecified number of untitled members. Th e four highest ranking functionaries bear the titles of Illamba, Mocongo, Isué and Isunecué.

13. In 1853 one such clash in the barrio of Jesús María resulted in the death of police inspector José Esquivel, and a series of shoot-outs between ñáñigos and the police during the carnival season of 1865 sparked a period of urban warfare that lasted until September 1866 (Roche Monteagudo 1925: 52).

14. See ANC Asuntos Políticos leg 76 #56, Trujillo y Monagas (1882: 365), Moliner Castañeda (1988: 14), Sosa Rodriguez (1982: 131), Abascal Lopez (1985: 60) and Dávila Nodarse (1981: 2 f.).

15. See, e.g., Barras y Prado (1925: 123 f.) for an account dating to 1852. Th e paintings of the visiting Basque artist Landaluze (1881), reprinted, e.g., in Ortiz (1981), Th ompson (1983) or Brown (2003) provide intriguing pictorial evidence for costume and comportment of these masked dancers at mid-nineteenth century. Castellanos (1928) describes the íreme body masks (‘saco’, afoíreme) in detail, though his interpretation is wildly off the mark.

16. Th e pertinent publications include Ortiz (1950), (1951), (1952-55), (1975), and especially the series of articles on the ‘negros curros’ published between 1926 and 1928 in Archivos del Folklore Cubano, and edited by Diana Iznaga (Ortiz 1986). Ortiz seems to have reached the conclusion that the ‘negros efí y carabalí son los mismos’ upon reading Samuel Crowther’s Journal of an Expedition on the Niger and Tshadde Rivers (1856) in 1916 (see Ortiz 1975: 46).

17. ‘Th e most uncivilized part of Africa ever I was in was Old Calabar’, the explorer MacGregor Laird stated in 1833, adding that ‘[t]he Calabar River has been so long fre-quented by British vessels that a description of it would now be superfluous’ (McFarlan 1957: 2 f.). Th e operation of ekpe received rather extensive coverage in the writings of the Scottish Presbyterian missionaries stationed there since the 1850s (e.g., Waddell 1863). Towards the end of the century, Mary Kingsley subtitled chapter four of her Travels in West Africa with the ironic suggestion that ‘the general reader may omit [it] as the voyager gives herein no details of Old Calabar or of other things of general interest’ (Kingsley 1897: 73).

18. Often described (e.g., by Th ompson 1983) as a prime example (along with the so-called Vai script) for the existence of indigenously African writing systems.

19. Obviously an adaptation of the Efik term ekpe to Hispanic phonology. 20. See e.g. Ortiz (1952-55, IV: 1-85, V: 203-261), 1981), Cabrera (1969), Sosa Rodri-

guez (1982), Th ompson (1983), Ottenberg and Knudsen (1985) and Nicklin (1991). Th e one aspect that has most consistently worried investigators interpreting abakuá along such



lines are some strangely inconsistent permutations in the central mythological charter of abakuá and its ritual reenactment. African versions of ekpe ritual seem to center around the idea of accessing ‘outside forces’ associated with the ‘leopard’s voice’ produced by sounding an esoteric friction drum (see, e.g., Talbot 1912, chapter 4, Simmons 1956: 16 ff., Ruel 1969: 246 ff., Th ompson 1974: 182 ff., Leib and Romano 1984, Ottenberg and Knudsen 1985, Nicklin 1991). In Cuba, however, we find an elaborate mythology centering on the capture by a woman named Sikán of a sacred fish which produces the mysterious voice. Having heard the voice of the mystery, Sikán is subsequently put to death and a friction drum (ecué ) is constructed from her (and/or a goat’s) skin and that of the fish. Th is drum is held to objectify the secret power, and its sound is instrumental to attracting and coercing the forces or beings personified by the íreme dancers (see Ortiz 1950, Cabrera 1969 and Sosa Rodriguez 1982, chapters 6 and 9). Th e conspicuous absence of leopard imagery in abakuá, and the apparent substitution of the prime African ‘royal animal’ by a fish has given rise to considerable, and usually quite strained, speculation. See Th ompson (1983: 241 ff.) and Sosa Rodriguez (1982: 289 ff.) for hypotheses about how the leopard turned into a fish, or whether there may be a (male) symbolic leopard hidden in the (female) fish. Th e problem is compounded by the fact that (excepting an even more incongruous myth recorded by Talbot (1912: 46 ff.) we do not know the mythological background to the African institution (if a single such mythology exists at all).

21. Since the early 1990s, Mintz and Price’s formulation has come under harsh criti-cism, mainly by Africanist historians who argue (incorrectly) that Mintz and Price simply ruled out the significance of Africa for New World history and culture. Th e most promi-nent exponents of this Neo-Herskovitsian ‘new revisionism’ in African-American cultural history, John Th ornton (1992) and Paul Lovejoy, not only insist on writing African history ‘forward’ into the Diaspora (e.g., Lovejoy 1997), but on what Lovejoy (2000) has recently, and quite confusingly, called an ‘Afro-centric’ approach to African-American history. For a powerfully argued theoretical critique see Scott (1999), for an ethnographically focused one see Palmié (2006a).

22. See, e.g., Th ornton (1992), Midlo Hall (1992), Lovejoy (1994, 1997, 2000), Chambers (1997, 2000) and the criticism by Palmié (1993, 1994), Morgan (1997), Eltis and Richardson (1997), Caron (1997) and Northrup (2000).

23. While an Ijaw-group in the Rio Real area today identifies with the ethnonym ‘Kala-bari’, its use in the Cross River region was and still is restricted to topography.

24. Ortiz (1975: 44) notes the documented presence in Havana since 1568 of slaves designated as ‘bras’ (Brass) whom he (given the then current terminology probably cor-rectly) identified as ‘carabalíes’.

25. Th e evidence most usually cited is a piece of Royal African Company correspon-dence published by Elizabeth Donnan (1930-35, I: 93). Th ere it was said that ‘many ships are sent to New and Old Calabar for slaves and teeth, which are there to be had in plenty’. In other words: different from the overall pattern in the eighteenth century, it seems as if the region’s export economy was still ‘mixed’ instead of wholly slave-based. On the other hand, in 1678 Barbot recorded the presence in Old Calabar of an English vessel with 300 slaves and gave a detailled account of the trade modalities in 1698 (Ardener 1970: 109). Nevertheless, the most recent treatment of the issue concurs that the trade at Old Calabar ‘remained relatively small until Bristol ships became active in the slave trade early in the [eighteenth] century’ (Lovejoy and Richardson 1999: 338).

26. Conceding the limited value of data from which to compute possible numbers of slaves exported from this region, Latham (1973: 22 f.) estimates the total exports for



the period between 1710 and 1810 as lying somewhere between 133,600 and 250,000. Drawing upon the Harvard Slave Trade Database, Lovejoy and Richardson (1999: 337) present vastly higher figures (over one million) for the slave exports from the Bight of Biafra in the period between 1701 and 1810, but fail to disaggregate Old Calabar exports from the overall regional picture.

27. Palmer (1981: 106) cites the (official) figure of 6,387 slave imports into Havana (the port officially privileged for international trade) in the period between 1715 and 1738. Given the chronic lack of capital in Cuba prior to the Bourbonic reforms (cf. Le Riverend 1974: 73 ff.), the contraband trade is not likely to have hiked the total figure up to more than double this number.

28. By mid-century we find an official of the Real Compañía de Comercio of Havana complaining that the English kept the best slaves for their own islands while only selling those pertaining to such unwanted, useless or dangerous ‘nations’ as ‘congo’ and ‘carabalí’ (Marrero 1972-78, VI: 36). Assuming this complaint to be based on some measure of fact, one might surmise that the massive slave imports the English undertook during their short, but eco-nomically crucial, occupation of Havana in 1763 might have derived from similar sources.

29. Th is list seems especially valuable, since bishop Morell claimed to have recorded only those ‘cabildos’ he had personally visited in order to inquire about their conformity to Christian standards. Judging from the (for him devastating) results of his inquiry, we may presume that he, indeed, had first-hand knowledge of these associations.

30. In other words, one might say that such ‘New World African identities’ as those marked by the autonomous use of terms like ‘carabalí’ had undergone (and necessarily so) a process of creolization (in the historical sense of becoming peculiar to the New World despite Old World origins) even before they could be passed on to people who were ‘creoles’ by birth. At the same time, these ‘New World carabalí’ represented not one, but several intentional communities which—although differentiating among themselves—collectively set themselves apart from such ‘generic’ collectivities as ‘congos’, ‘ararás’, ‘mandingas’, etc., whose different ‘cabildos’ also appear on Morell’s list.

31. One could argue that the name itself already indicates the origin of this association from a deliberate fusion of ethnically heterogeneous ‘African’ personnel into a new, and essentially ‘Cuban’, social entity. Considerable caution is warranted in the use of onomas-tics for historical reconstruction. Yet the following conclusions do not seem entirely implau-sible: ‘efí ’ may be taken as a reference to Efik, and ‘apapa’ as either a corruption of the indigenous name of Duke Town (Atakpa) or of the Qua group (Ejagham-Ekoi) settled in its vicinity whom the Efik called Abakpa (Goldie 1964: 353, Baikie 1966: 351). ‘Bricamo’ might conceivably be interpreted as relating to Mbarakom, a name pointing to a part of the Cameroon grasslands close to a trade route from Old Calabar to Mamfe (Jones 1984, III: 503). Baikie (1966: 351) thus writes that ‘[p]eople from a tribe named Mbrúkim come to E’fik occasionally to trade. Th ey pass through the Kwá country, and the journey from their own land . . . occupies from two to three months’. Hutchinson (1856: 138) states that the ‘Mbrikum or Mbudikum race . . . are [sic] located between Kalabar and Cameroons, and comprises many tribes’. Listing some of these, he mentions ‘a people or country, or both, far on the other side of Qua (i.e., S.E. of Duketown) called Mbafum, some of whom are brought occasionally as slaves to Old Kalabar. . . . Th ey are by some persons styled Mbafong, or Ekoi’ (ibid.). But ‘Mbarakom’ also seems to have been used in reference to the Ambo lineage of Creek Town (Ikot Itunko) in the nineteenth century (Ardener 1970: 110, Nair 1972: 79). Ardener (ibid.) surmises—not at all improbably—that the ‘Ambo’, though obvi-ously thoroughly ‘Eficized’ by the nineteenth century, might have originiated in the Cam-



eroons. Regla’s nineteenth-century community of ‘carabalí bricamó apapa efí’ thus, might have consisted of a) Efik or ‘Eficized’ Ejagham from Duke town and its vicinity, and/or b) members of the ‘Ambo’ ward/lineage of Creek town, and/or c) originally Bantu-speaking, but perhaps bilingual people from the Cameroons who accepted the Efik designation ‘mbarakom’ and/or d) entirely different people who took over such an identity because of perceived advantages in a New World environment. But does that really tell us anything about the provenience of the actual cultural forms that might have integrated such a com-munity? And why would the founders of abakuá choose to use yet another African top-onym—Obutong (i.e., the name of the Efik settlement known to Europeans as ‘Old Town’)—in naming the first Cuban ‘potencia’ Efik Butón? Could this have been the place/port of origin of the mysterious ‘Belenistas’? (cf. Sosa Rodrigues 1982: 50-54 for a similar problem concerning a ‘carabalí cabildo’ named ‘isuama isieque de oro’ which Sosa qualifies as a ‘multi-tribal association’).

32. African accounts of the origin of ekpe/ngbe among specific regional populations are usually phrased in an idiom of economic transaction: the coming of the leopard’s voice and the secret of its temporal domestication revolved around payment. While Cuban traditions center around the theme of encountering and tapping mystical forces that reveal themselves to man, with the exception of a myth published by Talbot (1912: 46 ff.) no traditions of sacred origin seem to have been recorded in Africa.

33. Members of abakuá locate the first revelation of the secret to mankind in a place called ‘Usagaré’ (cf. Ortiz [1952-55, V: 242]). Ortiz surmises—quite plausibly—that it relates to the locality Goldie (1964: 361) called ‘Usahadet, Bakasy’ (i.e., Usak Edet) and described as ‘a tribe and district on the east side of the estuary of the Calabar river. It is divided into two districts, Bakasy and Quä Bakasy. Th e country has connected itself with Calabar as a dependence, and Ädön, v., Örön, Amotung and Efut-Iñwañ are towns where the Calabar people procure canoes, oil, and fish’ (ibid.). Nicklin (1991, and personal com-munication) thinks he discovered the location referred to in Afro-Cuban mythology as ‘Usagaré’ among Oroko-speaking people in the vicinity of Isangale (on the Cameroon side of the present international border). Nicklin’s informants in Isangale refer to themselves as Balondo, and claim to have sold the secret to a group of Efik from Duke Town (Atakpa). Upon less than clear evidence, Lovejoy and Richardson (1999) assert that ekpe initially was controlled by the Old Town (Obutong) ward, became increasingly contested with the founding of Duke Town after about 1748, and eventually passed there after the massacre of 1767 when Duke Town merchants attacked Old Town with the help of British ship cap-tains, killing hundreds of its residents, and selling many of them (including members of the ruling elite) into slavery. An interesting suggestion for reconciling divergences in Cuban and African traditions about the source from which the Efik may have derived ekpe is ven-tured by Leib and Romano (1984: 94 n. 8).

34. Contemporary members of abakuá with whom I worked in Regla are aware that there existed ‘deities’ who were worshipped in ‘tierra de efó y efí ’ (the land of efó and efí—the two main groups figuring in the origin myth) before the sacred fish tanze reveled the secret of ecue’s voice to mankind.

35. Th us, far from being a mere reaction to the inclusion of a few villages of immigrants on the banks of the Cross River in the emergent capitalist world system, ekpe itself must be credited with creating the conditions crucial to the transformation of Old Calabar into a machine for the production of human commodities for transatlantic consumption. By about 1760 the so-called ‘trust-system’ had become established as the principal modality of commercial interaction between the supercargoes of slave ships and their Efik suppliers.



Credit in the form of trade goods would be advanced to the African merchants, who then organized up-river slaving expeditions, or—with the increasing growth of a hinterland trade network—dispatched agents to collect the human merchandise in the respective sup-plying areas (Holman 1840: 393, 396, Jones 1956: 142 ff., Northup 1978: 36-38, 114-145, Lovejoy and Richardson 1999). Th is system—noteworthy for both the extent of its operations and the enormous commercial value of the goods advanced—hinged upon the universally recognized authority of ekpe to invoke its sanctions against those who defaulted on their debts. ‘It was this power to insist on the repayment of credit’, Latham (1973: 38 f.) notes, ‘which lay behind the spread of Ekpe societies among the other peoples further inland up the Cross river, for by adopting Ekpe they made themselves credit-worthy in the eyes of the Efik, and therefore could avail themselves of Efik credit.’ In addition, as Ruel (1969: 250) maintains, the adoption of ekpe by hinterland trading societies not only added the prestige of association with the powerful merchant houses of Old Calabar, but served to insure the safety and commercial interests of their own traders, moving as they were through areas controlled by small autonomus groups who might waylay a stranger unless bound by mutual ties to the jurisdiction of ekpe.

36. In the early nineteenth century ekpe had reached Arochukwu. From there it spread not only to the proliferating Aro colonies and their Igbo host populations, but also to the Annang and northern Ibibio areas as far as the Ohaffia/Abam region in the east and Isuama in the west. At about the same time, it returned to the Ejagham, Ekoi and other southeast-ern ‘semi-Bantu’ in considerably modified form and replaced its indigenous precursor, ngbe (Ruel 1969: 250, Noah 1980, Ottenberg and Knudson 1985, Nicklin 1991). Farther northward on the east side of the middle Cross river, ekpe flourished among the Ekuri, Ododop, Akunakuna, Yakö and Mbembe, and towards the end of the nineteenth century it reached the Lower Banyang (Ruel 1969: 217 f.), continuing along the trade route from Old Calabar to Mamfe and the escarpment. Th ere it was acquired by the Bangwa in the 1930s or 1940s. Th ey, in turn, carried it into the Grassfields where the Bamileke and Mam-bila eventually purchased what, by then, were considerably modified versions clearly deriv-ing from more than a single source. For a sophisticated ethnographically based account of the diffusionary dynamics of ekpe/ngbe see Röschenthaler (2006).

37. By 1859, the German traveller Adolf Bastian (1859: 294) similarly observed that captains of slave ships found it advantageous to join ekpe in order to pursue their—by then illegal—business. Latham (1973: 80) lists the names of five commanders of British com-mercial vessels who underwent initiation into this truly cosmopolitan association between 1874 and 1880. And the German colonial administrator Mansfeld (1908: 160) likewise recounts that his joining a Banyang chapter of ekpe proved ‘mutually beneficial’. Mansfeld thought the possibility of having colonial decrees promulgated and enacted through ekpe would eliminate native resistance. But it seems clear that the Banyang elders who initiated him had their own thoughts upon the matter: when they announced their decision to admit Mansfeld, they demanded that the association be extended to the seven other social units within the district Mansfeld administered, thereby pressing the German colonial state in the service of the extension of ekpe’s sphere of operation (ibid.).

38. Cabrera’s (1969: 63-76) Cuban informants were obviously aware of this fact, for they distinguished between ‘carabalí’ groups who came to Cuba with and without prior possession of a version of ecué.

39. What complicates matters is that, since the growth of an ‘ekpe/ngbe polity’ must be presumed to have largely paralleled the transatlantic diffusion of ekpe-related knowledge,



the later such ‘exports’ occurred, the higher not only the number of potential exporting local ‘units’ became, but also the possibility of fusion of exports from different locales.

40. Holman (1840: 396) describes the Duke’s method of obtaining slaves ‘on trust’ from European slavers as follows:

He . . . sends his agents into the country with the goods to purchase slaves, promising the Captains their cargoes, amounting to any given number, within a stated time; in the meanwhile he employs other persons to collect in his own town and neighbor-hood, and if he is very hard pressed, (for the Captains of slavers are always very impa-tient), he obliges his great men to furnish him with a certain number each. Th is is done by sending him every individual from the neighboring villages, who have com-mitted any crime or misdemeanor; and should he still continue unable to make up the specified demand, they sell their own servants to him.

See Jeffreys (1954) and Northrup (1978: 65-80) for an overview of modes of slave procuring. 41. Here it is apposite to call attention to a detail that has gone largely unnoticed in the

scholarly accounts of the rise of abakuá. Abakuá seems to have occupied the Cuban author-ities ever since that day in July 1839 when Blanco and several of his associates—a group composed of young free creole working men—had been arrested. One of the reasons for their heightened concern was the realization that the grouping, whose head and treasurer Blanco claimed to have been, represented an essentially novel form of association. Th is is remarkable, for as in other parts of Spanish America, voluntary association of Africans—the ‘cabildos de nación’—were a part of institutional social life in urban Cuba. Since at least the seventeenth century such ‘cabildos’ had been condoned as a means to solve the admin-istrative problems created by the urban masses of free blacks and intractable slaves by allow-ing them to organize into ethnically differentiated corporations chartered by, and answerable to, the local government. Blanco’s group, however, was a different matter. As the govern-mental functionaries involved in their case put it, what set them apart from such ‘tradi-tional’ associations was these young creoles apparently tried to ‘imitate the manners and customs of the Africans’ (Deschamps Chapeaux 1964: 101). Despite the Cuban authori-ties’ consistent efforts to drive a wedge between the African and creole segments of the black population, what they seemed to be facing was a creole group that had chosen to integrate itself by adopting an ostensibly African organizational model.

42. Ortiz never seems to have seen fit to theoretically elaborate this important insight, choosing to analogize abakuá-ritual to ancient Greek mystery religions instead (e.g., Ortiz 1981: 486-523). Nevertheless, it may be quite indicative of a lack of institutional memory in the social sciences that the current ‘History and Memory’ vogue has largely bypassed Roger Bastide’s (1978 [1960]) highly original, though by no means unproblematic attempt to harness Maurice Halbwachs’s (1942) theories about sites of sacred memory to an Afri-can-American case (cf. Capone, forthcoming).

43. Th riving on European credit of truly fantastic proportions, these native merchant princes regularly entertained the captains of trading vessels in their ‘English houses’—two-story wooden, or even cast iron constructions ‘mail-ordered’ from Liverpool—where they served meals accompanied by a choice of native palm wine and reportedly excellent cham-pagne (Holman 1840: 362, 364, Waddell 1863: 243 f.). Crow’s description of the interior of Duke Ephraim’s iron palace gives a vivid impression of the setting in which such ‘Atlantic’ encounters would take place: ‘Th is house or palace is stocked with numerous clocks, watches,



and other articles of mechanism, sofas, tables, pictures, beds, porcelain cabinets &c. of Euro-pean manufacture; most of which are huddled together, in confusion, amongst numerous fetiches, and in a state of decay, from disuse, carelessness, and want of cleaning’ (Crow 1830 in Simmons 1956a: 9). Several of the notables Hope Waddell encountered in the 1850s—including ‘King’ Eyo Honesty II—had not only been to sea, but had travelled to England and the Caribbean as well (Nair 1977: 246 f.). Just as Bonny’s Bill Peppel was fond of inquiring about his ‘brother George’ (meaning the king of England) when in the company of Europe-ans (Adams 1966: 135), we find Duke Ephraim of Old Calabar expressing ‘great regret at not being able to read the newspapers [since they were not handwritten], of the contents of which, although he had seen many, he still remained ignorant.’ (Holman 1840: 399). A few decades later, one of his successors who signed his letters as ‘Eyamba V., King of all black men’ would express to consul Hutchinson ‘his desire to see Wellington and Napoleon, that he might show his pre-eminence over them’ (Hutchinson 1856: 118). Yet at the same time, and in good keeping with the European stereotype of the savagery of African rulers, these sophis-ticated river gentlemen casually engaged in outdoing each other in massacring scores of slaves in the course of funeral ceremonies, and periodically decimated their own ranks by a poison ordeal in order to stem the tide of witchcraft felt to be rising in their midst.

44. Cf. Cabrera (1969, 1983: 209, 286), Ortiz (1950), Sosa Rodríguez (1982: 189-250). In fact, given that the Cuban government has lifted its restriction of party member-ship for religious practitioners in 1991, today individuals socially classified as ‘militante comunistas’ can—and do—ritually embody ancestral African presences.

45. Economic growth did not occur in an even, linear fashion, but was punctuated by the crises in international trade caused by, e.g., the Napoleonic wars, the British-American war of 1812-1815, or the Latin American wars of independence, as well as by periodic price depressions on the sugar market. Yet although aggregate data must, accordingly, be viewed as problematic, they do evidence a truly phenomenal pattern of absolute growth. In the period between 1800 and 1827 the amount of sugar exported through Havana’s harbor doubled (Le Riverend 1974: 196). Between 1830 and 1864 Cuban sugar production evi-denced an increase of 400%. In the same period the average value of total Cuban imports rose from 16.3 to 44.3 million pesos, while that of Cuban exports increased from 13.2 to 57 million pesos (Knight 1970: 44). In 1852 the value of imports unloaded in Havana alone had reached the startling figure of 22.1 million pesos (Knight 1977: 247). Th at year Havana’s harbor registered 1,594 incoming and 1,140 outgoing commercial vessels, accounting for 44% and 34.8% of all Cuban seaborne trade (Knight 1977: 245 f.). Knight (1977) and Th omas (1971: 136-167) give a vivid impression of the careers of a new entre-preneurial class and the ostentatious consumption patterns developed by the rising planter and merchant segment.

46. Out of those 112,023 inhabitants cited by Deschamps Chapeaux (ibid.) merely 46,621 were counted as white.

47. Up until 1829, when the new Codigo Comercial went into effect, the outlets for both imported and locally produced consumer goods (‘pulperías’) had been subject to highly restrictive legal reglementation (Le Riverend 1974: 222 ff.). Given the notorious corruption of the Cuban colonial authorities (cf. Knight 1970: 102 ff.), however, smug-gling and other sorts of illicit trade flourished. It is quite probable that the black market the very restrictions imposed by Spain had helped to create provided an important distributive economic niche for small-scale traders fencing contraband goods, and the ubiquitous itin-erant vendors whose supply undoubtedly derived from both legitimate and illegal sources. Although I am, in the following, mainly concerned with this economy of subversion, it



should not be forgotten that free Afro-Cubans also monopolized a wide variety of licit trades and, in fact, formed what Deschamps Chapeaux aptly called a ‘pequeña burguesía de color’ (cf. Deschamps Chapeaux 1971 and Klein 1967: 202-227).

48. By 1763 a set of orders issued by the Conde de Ricla had given rise to a peculiar form of organizing dockside labor. By assigning control over longshore labor gangs (‘cua-drillas’) to former members of the ‘batalliones de pardos y morenos leales’ (black militia), these orders opened up a new career path for enterprising Afro-Cubans; and with the advent of free trade, the black ‘capataces del muelle’—some of whom occupied their pres-tigious positions for several decades (Deschamps Chapeaux 1971: 90 ff.)—began to reap the profits their position as brokers between Atlantic buyers and local sellers of manpower promised. Like other Afro-Cubans who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, monop-olized numerous lucrative trades shunned by those white creoles who could afford to dis-sociate themselves from the stigma of manual labor, these dockyard ‘captains’ sometimes amassed considerable fortunes: José Oñoro, e.g., a born African who continued to identify himself as a ‘carabalí’, was able to sign over four houses and eight ‘coartados’ (i.e., slaves towards whose freedom he had willed parts of his estate) to his heirs (Deschamps Chapeaux 1971: 94). Yet men like Oñoro not only stand as vivid exceptions to the general assumption about the marginal position of free blacks in the slave societies of the Americas. Th eir careers also give us a clue as to why this expanding maritime world of seamen, dockyard workers, porters, hucksters, tavern keepers, entertainers, prostitutes, petty criminals, entre-preneurs and self-styled organizers of the appropriation of Afro-Cuban labor by increas-ingly international trading companies might have given rise to abakuá.

49. Deschamps Chapeaux (1971: 93 ff.) lists several cases of fortunes acquired by ‘capa-taces del muelle’. At least one of them, José Agustín Ceballos, surpassed all that José Oñoro could have dreamed of: by 1833, Ceballos employed 160 dockworkers whose collective wages ran up to 1,000 pesos per week. Calculating the income Ceballos received from rent-ing out several houses, his dockyard business and the profits he received from hiring out his slaves, Deschamps Chapeaux (1971: 100) estimates that, at the height of his career, Cebal-los may have earned as much as 10,000 pesos a year.

50. Comparing the modern Banyang situation with the historical record on Old Cala-bar at the middle of the nineteenth century, Ruel (1969: 256) writes:

Each lodge [of ekpe/ngbe] has separate access to its own formal Ngbe sanctions; in accord with the basic political principle of autonomous rule, these sanctions can be applied only within the residential group associated with the lodge, or with the agreement of that group’s representatives; if the representatives of a number of residen-tial groups (usually hamlets of a village, but it may be villages of village group, and it can be a wide series of ad hoc groupings) agree to common political action (usually the enactment of a law), such action can still be promulgated through Ngbe, despite the fact that different lodges are involved.

Some of this clearly holds true for Cuba as well. Th e written reglements of Akanarán Efó published by Pérez Beato (El Curioso Americano vol. 1.3, 35-38, vol. 1.4, 56-58; partly reprinted in Sosa Rodríguez [1982: 381-390]) give a vivid impression of the complex forensic apparatus that existed within this ‘potencia’ in 1882, and the sanctioning power it arrogated for itself. Upon receipt of complaints about a member’s behavior, ritual hearings would be held in front of the highest ranking title holders in order to establish the truth of the accusation and determine the gravity of the offense. According to the verdict of the



‘jefatura’, the accused could be fined, or subjected to corporal punishment meted out by an íreme personifying a force of retributive justice. In cases of grave offences, he could be tem-porarily or permanently suspended from membership, or even sentenced to ‘muerte en vida’, in which case the ‘potencia’ performed funeral rites signaling the offender’s social death. In the latter cases, the ‘potencia’ involved would send messages—often in the form of written notices (known today as ‘oficios’)—to other chapters of abakuá obliging them to respect the sanctions it had passed, in a manner much reminiscent of nineteenth-century descriptions of how the pronouncement of ekpe sanctions by one local chapter in the lower Cross River region bound other chapters to mutual enforcement. Whether or not abakuá really ‘killed’ capital offenders (as has been alleged), it could effectively wreck a person’s life by ordering the culprit to be economically ostracized and socially isolated not only from the rest of his neighborhood, but from other ‘barrios’ as well.

51. Six years after the official prohibition, Rodriguez Arías cited the names of 83 ‘poten-cias’ still in existence in 1881 (ANC Asuntos Políticos leg. 76 # 56).

52. If the (highly clientelistic) organization of labor at Havana’s centralized market (in existence since 1921—see Borroto Mora [1966]) is any guide to the situations obtaining prior to that, abakuá would have found a fertile field among the hundreds, perhaps thou-sands, of cartmen, porters, ‘tarimeros’ (stall-holders), ‘macheteros’ (vendors of rotting goods), and watchmen trying to earn a living there, often on a day-to-day basis.

53. An elaborate code of ‘foreign relations’ is evident in the ‘reglamentos’ of Akanarán Efó published by Pérez Beato (reprinted in Sosa Rodríguez [1982: 381-392]). Cabrera (1975) explicitly mentions rituals of ‘crossing itones’ (i.e., the sacred batons of the four principal titleholders) by which rival ‘potencias’ concluded peaceful agreements. But there were other mechanisms: in cases where ‘potencias’ branched out through sale of secrets and sponsorship of ‘daughter cells’—whose relation were sometimes expressed by adding quantifiers like taiba (or ‘segundo’), eroba (or ‘tercero’) etc. to the name of the junior ‘poten-cia’—such lines of ‘kinship’ frequently seem to have crossed the established territorial (and, perhaps also, economic) boundaries of single ‘barrios’. Th is, indeed (rather than merely the mythological ‘charter’ of an initial sale of the secret across a body of water) may have been one reason why the ‘Belenistas’ journeyed to Regla in 1836.

54. As Ortiz estimated in 1927 (FO uncatalogued folder entited Negros-Cabildos), Enlleguellé (with some 400 members) was clearly the largest ‘potencia’ in the eastern bay, surpassed only by Marianao’s ‘potencias’ Usagaré and Focondo Ndibo (about 500 members each), and the powerful Betongo, based in Pueblo Nuevo (and therefore probably targetting Havana’s inner-city tobacco industry as well as the harborside) which, by then, had become Havana’s largest ‘potencia’, boasting around a thousand members.

55. Th is is speculation, but it seems reasonable to assume that rank and file members rose to positions of prominence not only because of their good standing within a chapter of the association, or their command of ritual particulars, but not the least on account of their economic position (whether in terms of personal liquidity or occupation of key posi-tions within certain enterprises).

56. Cabrera (1969: plate facing page 26) reproduces a photograph of Petit which is nowadays found in the cult houses of several efó potencias in Havana and Regla.

57. ‘Makára’ is the Efik designation for Europeans (cf. Waddell 1863: 253, 256). It is this ‘potencia’ which served as the proximate source for all ‘potencias’ of the ‘rama efó’ exist-ing in Regla today (cf. Palmié 2006a).

58. Th e practice of emancipation through gradual compensation of the owner for a slave’s commercial value (‘coartación’) had been institutionalized in Cuba since early on



(Aimes 1906). In that way, many gainfully employed urban slaves bought their freedom, but the cabildos are also known to have collected money for buying the freedom of their members. To this end they often engaged in the widespread informal lottery systems (see Bremer 1968: 339 for a contemporary report on such practices). Th at abakuá ‘potencias’ may have used the revenues from the sale of esoteric knowledge and cult agencies in a similar manner is very likely. Since free blacks were legally entitled to own slaves themselves (cf. Deschamps Chapeaux 1971: 47-57 and passim), we might, however, speculate about whether the slaves bought by a given ‘potencia’ were ‘free’ in any other than a mere legal sense. Could it be that although they were ‘coartados’ in the eyes of the law, the respective ‘potencia’ or some of its individual members had rights to their person and/or services that simply went unrecognized by the Cuban authorities? Access to the papers—deeds, wills etc.— of known title holders of abakuá might help to solve this question.

59. Ortiz reports that two members of Bakokó Efó were killed by rival black ‘potencias’ in revenge for ‘Petit’s treason’. Some versions of oral tradition maintain that the demise of Bakokó Efo, after a police raid in the course of which their sacred drums were confiscated, was the result of ‘divine vengeance’ (Ortiz 1952-55, IV: 69).

60. As an octogenarian informant of Ortiz (1952-55, VI: 70) put it: ‘thanks to Petit, the ñáñigos continue to persist in Cuba’ (Gracias a Petit, siguen en Cuba los ñáñigos). Ortiz qualifies this statement as follows: ‘Th is belief is exaggerated, for the endurance of these religions is due to complex causes and not the talents of a single personage; yet the reforms Petit introduced into ñáñigoismo and mayombería [Petit also was a priest of a Bantu-Cuban religion] definitively linked the Africans with the creoles, and the blacks with the mulattoes and the whites’ (ibid.).

61. Oral history has it that the first white ocobios (members of abakuá) subsequently participated in the struggle against Spanish domination which would, in 1868, lead to the first Cuban war of independence. Th ough adequate documentation about this event has still to be uncovered, it is likely that members of abakuá were involved in attempting to rescue the famous habanero medical students from the fusillade following their protest against Spanish domination in 1871 (cf. Dávila Nodarse 1981: 23 who cites documents corroborating this event, but provides only incomplete archival references).

62. See the lists of deportees in Archivo Histórico Nacional de España, Ministerio de Gobernación leg. 597 # 2-4, and Ultramár leg. 5007 # 832. On Ceuta as a destination for Cuban deportees during the wars of independence compare Serrano (1985). Other destina-tions for supposed members of abakuá included presidios in Cadiz, Santander and Chafa-rinas (which tends to be remembered most by contemporary ocobios in Regla).

63. By the 1920s, the populist Liberal government of Regla headed by Dr Antonio Bosch not only erected the first monument to ‘labor’ in the Americas, and dedicated a public park to the memory of Lenin, but also printed election placards in the ritual lan-guage of abakuá. Chuchu Capaz eventually came to serve on Regla’s city council until the fall of the Machado dictatorship forced him out of office in 1933.

64. David Scott’s phrase ‘an obscure miracle of connection’ derives precisely from the context of Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic distillation of a history of tragic displace-ment from the winter winds that envelop West Africa in clouds of Saharan dust, and once heralded not just the advent of dry weather, but the impending arrival of slave ships in the Caribbean.

65. But see Tomich (2004) for a cogently argued attempt to salvage some of their insights.



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