Trinidad and Tobago. Shango, sticking to roots.

Unknown to most people, and often considered a mere folkloric tradition, the Shango ritual plays an important role in the lives of  many inhabitants of  the islands of Trinidad and Togabo.

The Shango is a religious ritual which is still practiced today in the islands of Trinidad and Tobago where the majority of the population is black. The two Caribbean islands’ inhabitants are the descendants of those African slaves who were taken to the New World in the seventeenth century and who were renamed Lukumi by the white people after the words oluku mi, ‘my friend’, which they often used when they greeted each other. This expression also marked their group identity as ethnic Yoruba, who more than any other ethnicity has remained faithful to the ancestral tradition of the people of the ancient kingdom of Dabomey, which covered an area including the modern Benin, Togo and south-western Nigeria. These slaves brought  a complex mixture of rites and beliefs into the New World.

This spiritual amalgamation  combined the several religious elements belonging to the Yoruba, with Catholic, Hindu, Protestant and Jewish Kabalistic traditions, and it became one of the most complex and flourishing forms of religious syncretism of the African-American tradition. This is shown also in the Shango of Trinidad, whose first nucleus derives from the Yoruba cult, beliefs and religious practices, which were combined with Catholic rituals first and with many elements of Hindu tradition later.

 The white people’s refusal of the Lukumi’s ancestral traditions led the slaves of Trinidad and Tobago to disguise their traditional practices in the eyes of the Europeans. They, therefore, adopted Christian rituals and formulas, which, however, in reality were addressed to their African gods, in order to avoid persecution and prohibitions. With this clever system of homologies, the Shango ritual therefore is a relevant example of  faithfulness to the African tradition through processes of authentic cultural fossilization.

Possession

In the amazing expressive diversity of the Shango cult, possession is the only institutionalized element which is present and which is performed in the same manner  in the rituals throughout the two Caribbean islands. Achieving trance is the essential element that constantly recurs in any Shango religious ceremony.

The achievement of a trance state is stimulated by musical rhythm. The deities or gods worshipped in Lukumí religion are called orishas. The orishas serve as mediators between humankind and the Supreme Being. These deities can represent all the virtuous qualities of the divine, yet the orishas are also human-like in their characters and mannerisms. They are celestial, yet they are worldly too. The African religious tradition of Trinidad, though mainly characterized by Yoruba elements, also includes multiple elements of other ethnic groups such as the Fon (Benin) or the Ewe (Togo) . The rituals often take place in the peristyles (porticoed courtyards) of Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago.

 Both  rada (good spirits of African tradition) cults, which have been surveyed and which originate respectively from a soothsayer of Ouidah and a priest from Dahomey, perform the same rituals, and worship the same deities which are hierarchically positioned in family groupings (fanni) in the pantheon. These deities remind  one so much of  the voodoun gods of Abomey.
Dada Segbo is the Creator God in the rada cults of Trinidad, the equivalent of Nana Buluku, and Ogun and Legba and many others belonging to the Sakpatan family, such as Sobo (god of thunder), Agbe (ague) and Naete, the sea deities, are his descendants. The voodoo (rada) ceremonies and the sacrifices for the individual gods (first of all the offerings to Legba), are a precise repetition of the traditional rituals that can still be found even today in Benin, in Togo and part of southwestern Nigeria.

Orisha

Nowadays, the inhabitants of Trinidad worship the major gods of the Yoruba pantheon. In the Orisha and Shango deity lists, gods can be identified and one can notice how their original names have been locally changed. So, Ajajà o Mama Loatlè, the mother of all nations, in the Shango of Trinidad, changes into Baba-byu-aye and Yemaja in the Lukumi pantheon. Olurum, known in Cuba under the name of Olafi or Obatala, splits into the male and female principles Batala and Lyamba.
The ecclesiastical system is also run by a strongly hierarchized clergy according to the powers received during the initiation phase (the only means by which one can access to the Shango cults). According to the Yoruba model, the candidate, who wanders into the forest for a specified period of time, will receive at the end the power: a sort of Christian grace symbolically sanctioned by a liturgical object, sacred to the gods, where each colour is linked, according to the African rules, to the nature and the will of the individual orishas.
All the local Shango clergy takes part in the Shango ritual of Trinidad, which is  based on Protestant hymns and African dances around a central pole. All these elements are essential to the achievement of the hypnotic condition.

This tradition evokes the most vivid aspects of a major revivalist religion on the island, that of the shouters, which was prohibited in the early last century and which has continued  to be clandestinely performed until today, providing an even clearer picture of African-Protestant syncretism. As for the places of worship, the temple includes Christian elements (such as the altar with the Bible, the cross, the candles, the pulpit of the preacher) and African elements (the central pole, the poteau-mitan, which had already  been used  in the voodoo cults  of Haiti, and that is also found in some candomblé rituals in Bahia, Brazil). Like the deities, the Shango clergy is also hierarchically organized, according to the powers received during the initiation, and it is constituted by preachers (who interpret the Bible), teachers (who interpret the dreams of the faithful), leaders (who baptize), doctors (who have the gift of healing the sick), soothsayers and prophets (who predict the future), and nurses (corresponding to the ‘ekedey’ priestesses of the Yoruba sects). A well organized system. (M.R.)

https://www.southworld.net/trinidad-and-tobago-shango-sticking-to-roots/