Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba (Caribbean Studies Series)

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Description

In Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, Ivor L. Miller shows how African migrants and their political fraternities played a formative role within the history of Cuba. All through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, no large kingdoms controlled Nigeria and Cameroon’s multilingual Cross River basin. As an alternative, each and every settlement had its own lodge of the initiation society known as Ékpè, or “leopard,” which used to be the highest indigenous authority. Ékpè lodges ruled local communities whilst also managing regional and long-distance trade. Cross River Africans, enslaved and forcibly brought to colonial Cuba, reorganized their Ékpè clubs covertly in Havana and Matanzas into a mutual-aid society known as Abakuá, which became foundational to Cuba’s urban life and music.

Miller’s extensive fieldwork in Cuba and West Africa documents ritual languages and practices that survived the Middle Passage and evolved into a unifying charter for transplanted slaves and their successors. To gain deeper understanding of the material, Miller underwent Ékpè initiation rites in Nigeria after ten years’ collaboration with Abakuá initiates in Cuba and america. He argues that Cuban music, art, or even politics depend on complexities of these African-inspired codes of conduct and leadership. Voice of the Leopard is an unprecedented tracing of an African title-society to its Caribbean incarnation, which has deeply influenced Cuba’s creative energy and popular consciousness.

This book is sponsored by a grant from the InterAmericas(r)/Society of Arts and Letters of the Americas, a program of the Reed Foundation.

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