Legend · 18th century–present
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Men taken in chains from Old Calabar carried a secret society across the Atlantic in their heads. In 1836 they founded it again in a port town near Havana. It is still there, and its chants still carry the names of places in Nigeria.
Ekpe grew up in the Cross River basin, in country that is now split between Nigeria and Cameroon. It began among the Ejagham people in the eighteenth century and spread to their neighbours, including the Efik of Old Calabar. It was a men's society, secret, with grades you climbed one by one. But it was not only a religion. In the trading towns of the Cross River, Ekpe was also a kind of government. It kept order, settled disputes and backed up debts.
That last part is the uncomfortable side of the story. Old Calabar was a big slave port, and Ekpe was tied up in the trade. It helped organise and spread the Efik slave trade and played a part in setting up the old town slave centre at Old Calabar. Efik traders sold enslaved people to British ships, and the British trade from the Bight of Biafra was at its heaviest between 1700 and 1807, when Britain banned it.
Here is the twist. The trade did not only take strangers from the interior. Some Efik people were enslaved and shipped out too, and some of them were Ekpe members. They knew the society's secrets, its rituals and its drums. When they landed in Cuba, they carried all of it with them.
In Cuba, people who had been sold from Old Calabar became known as the Carabalí nation. Spanish authorities allowed Africans to form associations called cabildos de nación, partly as a way of keeping an eye on them. Inside the Carabalí cabildos of Havana and Matanzas, the Ekpe secrets were quietly kept alive.
In 1836, in Regla, the port town across the bay from Havana, those secrets became a new society. Its name was Abakuá. The word probably comes from Àbàkpà, the name of one of the peoples of Calabar.
The first lodge was called Efik Buton. That name is worth a pause. It probably comes from Obutong, the Efik settlement in Old Calabar that English traders called "Old Town". So the founders named their first Cuban lodge after a neighbourhood back in Calabar. One account from the 1880s says the Carabalí cabildo in Regla pushed for Abakuá's creation as a way to pass their secrets to black people born in Cuba, without letting them into the cabildo itself.
At first, Efik Buton and the lodges that came from it accepted only men of African descent, and kept to that for over twenty years. Later Abakuá let in mixed-race and white men too. The scholar Ivor Miller says what came to matter was not race but "a demonstration of a moral character as well as discretion". The society also split into two branches, the Efó and the Efí.
Much of Ekpe is still recognisable. Abakuá is for men only, members swear lifelong oaths of secrecy, and they call each other brothers. The supreme god is called Abasí. Members look back to Calabar as a holy place. Their origin story is about a power that came from Abasí as a fish called Tanze, fought over by two groups, the Efor and the Efik. In some versions, a woman named Sikán found the fish in the river and was killed for revealing it, and women were shut out of the society from then on. The versions do not all agree.
Abakuá did not stay in the shadows. Between the 1870s and 1942 it controlled much of the dock work, transport and local manufacturing labour in Cuba's port cities. That gave it real power, and also a bad name. People started using the old word for members, Ñáñigos, to mean something like "sorcerer" or "delinquent". Fights between rival lodges did not help.
After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Fidel Castro's government treated Abakuá as criminal and counter-revolutionary, and the persecution went on through the 1960s and 1970s. Things eased in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba began backing some Afro-Cuban traditions, partly to draw tourists. In 2014, Miller counted about 150 lodges active in Cuba. Initiation can only happen in Cuba itself.
Today, most of what goes on in the lodge room, the fambá, stays secret. But some of it is public. On 6 January, the Day of the Three Kings, members parade through the streets dressed as íremes, masked spirits of the dead returning to earth.
The drums are everywhere too. If you have heard Cuban music, you have probably heard Abakuá without knowing it. Looking at recordings from the 1920s on, scholars find its influence in nearly every genre of Cuban popular music. Abakuá musicians have recorded parts of their history in the secret Abakuá language, songs that carry, buried inside them, the memory of the Cross River.
So a society from the creeks of Calabar, caught up in the very trade that scattered its members, rebuilt itself in a Cuban dock town and outlived slavery, colonialism and a revolution. Its first lodge still carries the name of an old neighbourhood in Calabar.
