Most of the Africans forcibly brought to the plantations, mines, and workshops of the New World made their involuntary journey from the coast of West Africa, which runs between present-day Senegal and Angola. Today this heritage is part of the religious landscape of the United States. While always subtly visible in the Christianity of black North Americans, it is evident in the religious traditions that were brought to the United States by Caribbean immigrants in the late 20th century, including the Cuban Regla de Ocha-Ifa/Lucumi (commonly known as Santeria.) ), 21 divisions (21 divisions) from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rican sansé, Haitian voodoo, Brazilian candomblé, Jamaican revivalism (also known as obeah), and Rastafarianism. The presence of these African-Caribbean traditions in the United States has contributed to the emergence of new forms of religious life for African Americans influenced by Africans.
African religious traditions, which came to America through enslaved Africans, share a number of qualities. In a reciprocal relationship with these deities, people enjoy success, perform rites of passage, and overcome adversity, illness, and sorrow. Like many modern African traditions, these streams of faith and practice include sacred polyrhythmic dance, music, and chants of invocation and response to welcome the deities into the ceremonial space. Practitioners are often called children of the deities, and the deities, in turn, believe that they guide and care for them. Practitioners of many such traditions make offerings of food and flowers to deities and spirits during ceremonies and initiations.
Distinctly African traditions have made the most obvious contributions to Caribbean and South American religions-Candomblé and Umbanda in Brazil; Regla de Ocha-Ifa in Cuba; Shango, Shango Baptist, and Trinidad Orisha in Trinidad and Tobago; Obeah and Myalism in Jamaica; and voodoo in Haiti-while in the United States they have been transformed into less recognizable forms. Researchers of African American history, noting that supposedly similar traditions survived only as cultural fragments until they were reintroduced across the Caribbean, have wondered what distinguishes the experience of these traditions in the Caribbean and South America from that of the United States.
Caribbean immigration to the United States from the late 1950s created a new series of African-inspired religions, which then changed the pan-Africanist impulse among Native black Americans. Some joined these Afro-Caribbean traditions, while others borrowed practices from them as part of their desire to reconnect with Africa.
Furthermore, despite its distance from the West African source of the slave trade, biblical “Ethiopia” has become for some African American Christians a beacon of hope as a source of black dignity. The political pan-African vision culminated in the 1920s with Marcus Garvey’s “back to Africa” movement. Led by Garvey, the United Negro Improvement Association, the largest mass organization in African American history, did not adhere to any one denomination, but declared missionary work and the building of an African homeland the responsibility of all African American Christians. Garvey’s redemptive pan-Africanism finds prominent followers not only in secular African American fashion and politics, but also in religious movements such as the Nation of Islam.
For many African American Christians and Muslims, identification with Africa did not imply identification with Africa’s unbiblical religious traditions. Until recently, most African American Christians consciously downplayed their cultural and hereditary ties to Africa. Herskovitz, in particular, argued that American culture, while not retaining distinctive Caribbean religious traditions, nevertheless abounds in “Africanisms” or African remnants. Among these are many forms of dance, movement, music, and the experience of being “filled with the Holy Spirit that the Black Church has contributed to American Protestantism in general and Pentecostalism in particular.
In many ways Americans today identify with the distinctly African culture and religion of the African diaspora. There is a new awareness among African Americans in the United States of the contributions their ancestors made to shaping American culture, which is reflected in new forms of African American celebration, such as the nine-day Kwanzaa Festival held in December. Caribbean Americans bring with them a legacy of Catholicism as well as Afro-Caribbean traditions associated with Haiti, Cuba, or Jamaica. In addition, new immigrants from many African countries, including Coptic Christians from Ethiopia, Pentecostals from Nigeria, and Anglicans from Ghana, bring with them Christian traditions shaped by their own African culture. These very different streams of tradition and culture associated with Africa are now present in America.