A Tata Nganga, father of the nganga, with the female Yaya, is the priest of Palo, the Kongo-derived religion of Cuba.
The office and its vessel
The Tata Nganga is an initiate who has received and who keeps the nganga, the consecrated vessel in which the spirit of the dead and the powers of nature are held to be concentrated, and who works with it on behalf of the community. General practitioners of the religion are paleros; the priesthood is a further, initiatory office, and its central knowledge is closed. The making of the nganga and the pact between the priest and the spirit it houses are not reproduced here.
Descent and reputation
The office descends from the Kongo nganga, the ritual expert and healer of Central Africa, carried to Cuba by enslaved people from the Kongo region and rebuilt there as the priesthood of the Reglas de Congo. Palo is frequently and unfairly cast as black magic by outsiders, including by practitioners of other Afro-Cuban religions. Paleros distinguish, as Vodou does, between work done to help and work done to harm, and the reduction of the whole religion to the second is a caricature rather than a description.