Lydia Cabrera (1899-1991) was a Cuban writer and ethnographer who published extensively on Afro-Cuban religious movements, such as Santería (Lucumí) and Palo Mayombe and during her lifetime. In addition to her work on these movements, Cabrera wrote multiple books on the Abakuá society, an institution established in Cuba by enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria, including La sociedad secreta Abakuá (The Abakuá Secret Society, Ediciones C.R., 1959) and La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos (Ediciones C.R., 1988). It is the latter of these books that Ivor Miller and Patricia González Gómes-Cásseres have translated from Spanish into English for the first time. The Sacred Language of the Abakuá —Miller and Gómes-Cásseres replaced the derogatory Cuban term for the society, “ñáñigo,” with “Abakuá” in their translation of the title—is a “phrasebook” containing more than 6,000 “terms, phrases, and chants in the Abakuá ‘sacred language’ with intuitive interpretations in Spanish,” which Cabrera collected during fieldwork she conducted during the 1940s and 1950s (xi).
Perhaps the most appropriate way to describe Miller and Gómes-Cásseres’ translation would be as an extended multilingual gloss of a glossary of terms in a spoken ritual code. These terms are indirectly derived from several African languages in the course of several centuries of autonomous evolution in a closed initiation subculture that persisted despite violent demographic dislocation. To Cabrera’s book, Miller has added an engaging introduction that explains the importance of Cabrera’s dictionary for understanding both the history of the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and how enslaved Africans adapted their cultural and social traditions to new environments, since the Abakuá society was a Cuban expression of the Ékpè society, or Leopard society. The society is a graded male initiation society that developed in the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon to facilitate “cross-cultural communication” (xii). Miller and Gómes-Cásseres have also included their own commentary on many of Cabrera’s lemma entries throughout (for example, Aprosemitón [48] and Bimba [83]). Additionally, Miller has produced an appendix in which he elaborates on many of the Abakuá lodge names and titles found throughout Cabrera’s lexicon. Miller’s introduction, entry commentary, and appendix all benefit from his perspective as an initiate within the Ékpè society in West Africa and his own past research on the Abakuá society in western Cuba, which includes a monograph (Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, University of Mississippi Press, 2009) and more than a dozen articles.
The major strength of this volume lies in its demonstration of how language enhances our understanding of history. Stories about grueling language classes and challenging qualifying exams are a dime a dozen among professional historians. Language, however, is too often simply a tool in the historian’s quiver, not a source of information about the past in and of itself. Miller and Gómes-Cásseres’ adopt the latter perspective, and this is nowhere more apparent than in a second appendix that Miller and Gómes-Cásseres have included on Cross River etymologies. In this appendix, Victor Manfredi, who studies the comparative grammar of Benue-Kwa languages of the Niger-Congo Family, provides etymologies of more than 200 items from Cabrera’s phrasebook to make two arguments: (1) enslaved Africans who were transported from the port of Calabar to Cuba included the Èkóí people (Ejagham); and (2) Dùálá and Balundu speakers had moved into the Cross River and Rio del Rey estuaries of the Niger Delta by the end of the 17th century (369). Insights such as these demonstrate what could be gained if partnerships between historians and linguists were more common.
While The Sacred Language of the Abakuá will be of interest to scholars interested in both Cuban history and Nigerian history, the book will not be easily consumed by those without previous knowledge of the subject matter. Cabrera’s material itself consists of unanalyzed field notes that she published long after moving from Havana, Cuba, to Miami, Florida, following the Cuban revolution. Neophytes should consider reading this book alongside Miller’s scholarship or even Cabrera’s 1959 book on the Abakuá society. That being said, Miller and Gómes-Cásseres’ translation is an important contribution to the literature on African survivals in the Americas.
David Dmitri Hurlbut is a visiting researcher at the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University’s School of Theology.
David Hurlbut
Date Of Review:
January 10, 2024