The Carabalí

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A Cuban tongue heard the port-name wrong, and the error became a nation. The place was Old Calabar, on the estuary the Efik traders worked at the mouth of the Cross River; the Spanish and the enslaved who reached Havana turned it over, slid the l past the r, and said Carabalí. Inside that small inversion of a syllable the whole eastern edge of the Bight of Biafra crossed the Atlantic — the mangrove creeks and the trading towns, the ideographic signs cut into calabash and cloth, and above all the leopard whose voice, in the lodges of the homeland, was the voice of the law. In 1836, in the harbor town of Regla across the water from Havana, that voice sounded again from a single hidden drum, and the men who kept it had a name for what they were doing. They were guarding a secret brought from Africa, and they still are.

The reversed name and the leopard’s country

The country behind the name is the Cross River delta, the wet, creek-laced hinterland that today straddles the border of southeastern Nigeria and western Cameroon. Its Atlantic doorway was the cluster of Efik settlements the Europeans lumped under one label — Old Calabar, a term that before 1905 covered Duke Town, Creek Town, and Old Town, the town its own people called Obutong. The first documented European sailing vessel reached the estuary in 1625, and through the century that followed Calabar became one of the busiest coastal markets in West Africa. The Efik did not sell their own; they stood between. As middlemen they gathered captives from the peoples of the interior and delivered them to the ships, and the port became one of the great embarkation points of the Atlantic slave trade, active from roughly the 1640s until the reigning Calabar monarchs signed away the export of slaves and turned to palm oil after 1841.

The Carabalí of Cuba are the descendants of those the Efik and their rivals sent out through that door. The name did not stay narrowly Efik. In the Cuban ear it gathered in the whole Cross River world — the Efik and the Ibibio, the Ejagham the coast called Ekoi or Qua, the Efut, and their neighbors up the creeks. What held these peoples together at home was not a single language but an institution, and it is the institution, not the bloodline, that made the Carabalí what they became. That institution was Ékpè — also called Ngbè, the word for leopard — the male secret society that ran the affairs of Old Calabar from behind its masks. Consolidated as the region’s governing order by the 1770s, Ékpè was the highest court, the enforcer of debts, the guarantor of the trade treaties struck with the European captains, and the keeper of a mystery. Its authority was figured as a leopard, and its inmost sign was a sound: a growl produced on a sacred instrument, understood as the voice of the beast and of the powers behind it. Ékpè also carried a script of its own — nsibidi, the ideographic sign-writing of the Cross River, cut into skin and calabash and ritual cloth, a way of recording that outsiders could see but not read.

The passage of that world into Cuba runs through a specific wound. The Efik themselves trace the diaspora impetus in part to the Obutong massacre of 1765 — an episode in the long struggle between Old Town and Duke Town for control of the foreign trade. British slave-ship captains, in league with the Duke Town faction, invited the Obutong leaders aboard their vessels on the pretense of mediating, then turned on them; an estimated three hundred townspeople were killed and the brothers of the Obutong chief Ephraim Robin John were seized and sold into the West Indies. (The event is variously dated between 1765 and its bloody climax in 1767, and exactly which Cross River lineages seeded which Cuban lodges is a matter still being reconstructed rather than a settled record.) What is not in doubt is that men who had been initiated into Ékpè arrived in Cuba among the enslaved, carrying the memory of the order in their heads.

In Cuba the Carabalí were gathered, like the Yoruba-descended Lucumí and the Kongo-descended Congo nation, into cabildos de nación — the crown-tolerated brotherhoods organized by African “nation,” each a mutual-aid society and burial fund under a Catholic patron saint, and each, quietly, a house where a liturgy the colony had not authorized could be kept. It was inside the Carabalí cabildos of Havana and Matanzas that the knowledge of Ékpè was preserved across the Middle Passage and, in time, reconstituted. The reconstitution has a date and a place. In 1836, in Regla — the port town on the eastern lip of Havana bay — the first Abakuá lodge was founded, remembered in the tradition as Efik Butón, also given as Acabatón or Acuabutón, a name the scholarship equates with Obutong itself: Efí Kebutón, the Efik of Obutong, the drowned town reborn as a chapter across the sea. According to the Abakuá tradition the founding was underwritten by the Cabildo de Nación Carabalí Brícamo Appapá Efí. From that first lodge the society spread through Regla and Guanabacoa, into Havana proper, and along the sugar coast to Matanzas and Cárdenas.

What grew from the cabildo was something new and something old at once. Abakuá is the New World heir of Ékpè — the same leopard, the same secret voice, the same masks and signs — reassembled by the enslaved and their Cuban-born children into an order of their own. It is the only major Afro-Cuban male initiatory society, and it must not be folded into the others that grew up beside it. It is not part of Regla de Ocha, the orisha religion of the Lucumí, and it is not the Kongo-derived Palo of the Congo nation. Its drum is not a batá, its masked figure is not an orisha, its signs are not the traces of Ocha. The three worlds share the ground of a town like Guanabacoa and share the history of the trade that brought them, and nothing else. Abakuá is a brotherhood, closed and male, and its business is the keeping of a single thing.

The secret kept in the drum

The thing it keeps is told, in the lodges, as the story of a woman and a fish. In the beginning there were two rival Cross River peoples, the Efó — the Efor, Efut — and the Efik, and the supreme God, Abasí, sent into the river a source of power in the form of a fish, Tanze. It was the princess Sikán, daughter of the Efó, who found it. Going down to the water to fill her gourd, she trapped the fish without knowing what she had, and when she lifted the vessel to her head she heard the sound rising out of it — uyo, the mystic bellow, the voice of the deified king Obón Tanze and, through him, of Abasí himself. In that moment Sikán became the first to hold the secret, and by holding it she was consecrated to it.

She was also bound to silence, and she broke the silence. The tradition tells that she carried what she had heard to her betrothed, a prince of the rival Efik, and the two peoples came to the edge of war over the mystery until a pact contained it. But the secret, once spoken, had to be paid for. The fish died and its voice with it, and though the sage Nasakó labored to raise the sound again — stretching the skins of serpent and crocodile, of deer and ram, over a drum — the voice would not return. It was Sikán’s death that consecrated the covenant. Sacrificed so that the power might be contained and the order founded, she becomes in the myth the ground on which the whole hierarchy of the society stands, and the reason, the lodges hold, that Abakuá is closed to women. Her story is told inside the potencias, the lodges, in versions that vary in their particulars from house to house; it is offered here as the tradition tells it, a sacred narrative and not a chronicle.

The voice that was lost lives now in the ekue — also written ecué, or bonkó ekue — a single-headed friction drum, the holiest instrument of the society. It is not struck. A stick or a wetted reed is drawn against the skin, and the drum answers with a low, carrying roar, understood as the very voice of Tanze and of the leopard, the sound Sikán first heard at the river. The ekue is kept concealed, seen and sounded only in the presence of the fully initiated, and it is not a musical instrument in the ordinary sense at all but the reconstituted secret itself. Around it the society speaks in a second language, one of sign rather than sound. The anaforuana — the firmas, signatures — are Abakuá’s ritual sign-writing, a corpus of traced ideograms, each the mark of a spirit, a rank, a station, or a covenant, drawn in chalk to consecrate ground and person within the sacred room the tradition calls the fambá. They are the New World descendants of Cross River nsibidi, and their fullest published catalog is the work of the Cuban ethnologist Lydia Cabrera, whose Anaforuana — its subtitle ritual y símbolos de la iniciación en la sociedad secreta Abakuá — appeared in 1975, nearly five hundred pages of signs recorded from initiates who trusted her.

The íreme, the masked spirit-dancer the tradition reclaims from the mocking name “diablito,” in the checkered cloth and tasseled conical hood of the plantés. Víctor Patricio de Landaluze (1830–1889), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The society’s most visible face is the one Landaluze painted: the íreme, the masked and costumed dancer who moves through the public ceremonies, the plantés, and who embodies an ancestral spirit made briefly visible. Colonial Havana called him the diablito, the little devil, and the tradition has taken the mocking word back and worn it as its own. Sheathed in checkered cloth, hooded in a tasseled cone, bells at his waist, the íreme dances the presence of the dead into the yard, most famously in the old Day of the Kings processions of the sixth of January, when the cabildos took the streets. But the dance is the outer skin of the thing. Abakuá is an ethic before it is a spectacle — a covenant binding men to loyalty, to courage, to the defense of a brother, measured by a single standard the society names amanison, to be a good man, to keep one’s word and stand by one’s own. Its full initiation, its oaths, and the interior of its rites are closed, and are described here only at the distance the ethnographer and the public record are permitted; the society asks that much, and an account written from outside owes it that much. What can be said plainly is what it is for: to hold, and to hand on, the voice that Ékpè knew in the Cross River, unbroken.

Ñáñigos, and the men who kept faith

From the beginning the colony read the Carabalí through fear. Members were called ñáñigos, and ñañiguismo became, in the Spanish colonial press and the police blotter and then the republican newspapers, a word for organized criminality — the society hunted, its meetings raided, its rites written up as savagery and its brotherhood cast as a gang. This is the sensationalized brujería caricature, the black-magic libel that was laid on every Afro-Cuban tradition, and with the Carabalí it took a particular form, painting the closed male lodge as a conspiracy of murderers. It has to be named for what it is: a historiographic weapon, not a description, and one that the founding ethnography did not keep clean hands from. Even Fernando Ortiz, who gave social science the word transculturación for the very process by which an Ékpè lodge became an Abakuá potencia, trafficked early in the criminalizing frame, which is exactly why the foundational Cuban ethnography is read today with a critical eye rather than swallowed whole. The fuller reckoning with that slander, and with the syncretism debates that shadow the orisha religion, belongs to the account of the Afro-Cubans; what marks the Carabalí is the specific charge of the criminal brotherhood, and the specific answer the society’s own history gives to it.

Because the record also holds something the caricature cannot explain. In the middle of the nineteenth century a title-holder of the Havana lodge Bakokó Efó, Andrés Facundo Cristo de los Dolores Petit — a mystic and lay Dominican tertiary who had also founded the Kongo-derived Regla Kimbisa, the rule of Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje — did a thing that split his society and changed it. He sponsored the initiation of white and creole Cubans, opening a lodge remembered as Ekobio Efó Mucarará, the Efó of the white men, so that the mystery long reserved to those of “pure African blood” was extended across the color line. The sources place this around 1857 and again at 1863, and the exact year is genuinely contested; by the 1860s, in any case, the Havana Efó branch counted many white members, and the criterion of admission had shifted from ancestry toward moral character and discretion — amanison over bloodline. The tradition remembers, too, that Petit turned the gold the initiations brought toward freeing imprisoned brothers, ñáñigos and Palo men alike, from the Spanish jails. It was a controversial act inside the society and remains debated there, but it made Abakuá something the colonial libel insisted it could not be: a brotherhood defined by conduct rather than by race.

Día de Reyes in Havana, the sixth of January, when the cabildos de nación filled the streets and the masked figures danced — the one day the closed societies were public. Víctor Patricio de Landaluze (1830–1889), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Persecuted or not, the society sank into the culture around it and shaped it from within. The rhythms of the Carabalí, their turns of speech, their códigos of loyalty and their harbor-worker brotherhoods ran out of the lodge and into the common life of the ports — into the rumba that grew up in the same tenement yards, into the slang of the Havana docks, into the guilds of the men who loaded the ships. By 1881 the police counted seventy-seven juegos across the nine districts of Havana, with six more in Regla and Guanabacoa: not a vanishing curiosity but a dense and organized presence in the working city, its numbers a measure of how deeply the Carabalí had rooted. The society persisted through the end of the colony and through the republic that followed, keeping its rites in the ports of Havana and Matanzas.

The Revolution after 1959 brought a new pressure of the old kind. The Marxist-Leninist state read Abakuá, once again, as a criminal and counter-revolutionary organization, and the persecution ran on through the 1960s and 1970s under the banner of official atheism. The society endured that too, out of the eye of the state, and when the lean years of the 1990s pushed the government toward a selective, tourism-minded tolerance of the Afro-Cuban traditions, Abakuá came back into public view along with the rest. Into the present it is visibly alive — an estimated hundred and fifty lodges across Cuba by the 2010s, concentrated still in Havana, Regla, Guanabacoa, Matanzas, and Cárdenas, the same ports where the cabildos first stood.

And in the twenty-first century the two ends of the Middle Passage found each other again. Cuban Abakuá dignitaries and Cross River Ékpè leaders from Calabar have re-established contact across the ocean their ancestors were carried over in chains — an unprecedented reunion of a diaspora order with the parent society it was cut from, documented in the scholarship of Ivor L. Miller, whose Voice of the Leopard (2009) traced the continuities of language, chant, and rite that survived the crossing, and who was himself received into Ékpè in Nigeria after years among the Abakuá of Cuba. Miller could show that the names sung in the Havana lodges are the names of Efik towns and Efik people, that the drowned town of Obutong is remembered in the name of the oldest potencia, that the leopard’s voice is understood on both shores as the sound of legitimate authority. The Carabalí are not a closed chapter of the slave trade. They are a living community, and the drum that carries the voice of Tanze is sounded, in Regla and across the bay and along the old sugar coast, by men who still call it the secret their fathers were given, and who still keep it.

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