Cabo Verde

The islands were uninhabited when Portuguese settlers landed in 1462, so Cabo Verdean religion was born creole, forged between the chapels of the colonists and the beliefs of the West Africans they enslaved and transported through the islands' markets. Ribeira Grande, now Cidade Velha and a World Heritage site, received one of the earliest colonial churches in the tropics and, from 1533, the first diocese of West Africa, from which priests and the enslaved alike carried a creolised Catholicism along the coast.

Centuries of drought, famine and emigration made the church the islands' most constant institution, its saints' festivals, called festas, the calendar of every island, and its brotherhoods the keepers of processions that blend Portuguese liturgy with African drumming, most visibly in the tabanka societies of Santiago that parade with drums, banners and conch shells in Carnival season and on saints' days. The hinterland of Santiago also produced the rabelados, the rebels, communities that from the 1940s refused reforms brought by newly arrived Holy Ghost priests and withdrew into their own worship, a dissent since softened into a celebrated cultural identity. Independence in 1975 under a briefly Marxist party changed the state but barely touched the parish, and today Nazarene and Adventist churches planted by emigrants returning from New England add a Protestant thread to an enduringly Catholic weave.

On Santiago, the most African of Cabo Verde's islands, the festivals of the Catholic calendar belong to the tabankas, neighbourhood societies that are at once confraternity, mutual aid association and carnival troupe. Each tabanka keeps a chapel house, a set of drums, conch shell trumpets and a hierarchy of kings, queens, captains and guards elected from the membership, offices that scholars trace to the lay brotherhoods into which the church once organised enslaved and free Africans, and through them to older West African patterns of association.

In May and June, around the feasts of the Holy Spirit and Saint John, a tabanka takes its saint from the chapel and processes through the district behind the drums, the community dancing, singing call and response, and collecting alms; the saint is then ceremonially stolen, ransomed and returned, a drama of loss and redemption played out over days. Colonial authorities and clergy periodically banned the societies as disorder or superstition, which pushed them to the margins of the towns and deepened their role as guardians of badiu identity, the culture of Santiago's hinterland descended from runaways and rural folk. Since independence the tabankas have been embraced as national heritage, with a museum in Assomada and state support for the festivals, and they remain the clearest living example of how Cabo Verde made Catholicism its own instrument, tuned to drums.