Shango — THE WEST AFRICAN, AFRO-LATINO, AND AFRO-CARIBBEAN, GOD (Orisha) OF THUNDER — BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
In Praise of Shango
The rain beats the Egun because he cannot find shelter.
He cries “help me, dead people in heaven, help me!”
But the rain cannot beat Shango.
They say fire is the one who kills water.
Lightening — with what kind of cloth do you cover your body?
With the cloth of death.
The man who tells lies will die in his home.
Shango strikes the one who is so stupid
Oríkì (praises) from the Ifa Literary Corpus recorded in Yorùbáland in the early 1950s
by H.U. Beier in “Yorùbá Vocal Music” — African Music Society Journal 1.3 (1956)
Shango (in Yoruba: Ṣàngó, also known as Changó or Xangô in Latin America and in the Caribbean as Jakuta or Badé) is an Orisha, a type of divine spirit found in all Yoruba derived religions. Shango is a West African God of Thunder. Legends tell that Shango is the son of the Yemaja the Yoruba mother goddess. In Latin America and the Caribbean, Shango is syncretized (blended) with either Saint Barbara or Saint Jerome. Shango also figures in the religion of the Edo people of southeastern Nigeria, who refer to him as Esango, and in the religion of the Fon people of Benin, who call him Sogbo or Ebioso. In Yoruba religious traditions, gods and goddesses are often famous kings, queens, and wise people, whom after their deaths are considered the reincarnation of primordial spirits. Thus most Yoruba gods and goddesses are both a mixture of historical figures and divine beings of creation. This rather unique mixture of the historical and the divine is a hallmark of the Yoruba. Yoruba names tend to have direct meanings and Shango means to strike (Shan = strike), and his favorite colors are red and white, which are regarded as being holy.
Representation of Ṣàngó, National Museum of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro
The Orishas are the powerful divine spirits of the Yoruba religion. They are the agents of Olorun (Olodumare, Eledumare) the creator and sustainer of all things. They are the manifestations of primordial energies energies both creative and destructive. They are the conduits, in which life and all civilizing forces entered the world. Orishas enter the mortal world, complete epic feats, live, die and then are reincarnated into the world to complete even more amazing tasks. They are immortal energies that represent a core part of Yoruba philosophy and belief
I first heard about Shango when I was listening to reggae music as child. Although not widely worshiped In Jamaica as a Orisha (Jamaica’s native African religion Obeah doesn’t have Orishas), Shango the warrior king is a popular figure among certain Rastafari secs and dancehall artist. After hearing his name frequently being referenced in the music, I looked him up to get a better understanding of who he was.
Like all of the Yoruba gods (orishas), Shango is both a deified historical ancestor and a divine natural spiritual force. These duel aspects of Shango are associated with both a priesthood and a smaller more fervent cult like group of followers. Shango has numerous manifestations, including various spirits with names like Airá, Agodo, Afonja, Lubé, and Obomin. Shango is renowned for his powerful axe oshe, a double-headed battle-ax. Outside of the world of mythology the King Shango is considered to be one of the most powerful rulers that Yorubaland has ever produced. King Shango is said to have played bata drums to magical summon storms. These bata drums continue to be used by his devotees for bringing rain storms. The stories surround Shango’s marriage to his three wives rival Orisha goddess Oya, Oshun, and Oba are legendary.
The mortal historical Shango’s genealogy is from the royal line of the Yoruba. Shango was the third Alaafin (king) of the city state Oyo Kingdom prior to his posthumous deification. Oral traditions describes him as powerful man, with a voice like thunder and a mouth that figuratively spewed fire when he spoke. Shango's rule was marked by his capricious use of power. Yoruba legends tell that he was particularly fascinated with magical powers. Shango careless use of magic is said to have inadvertently caused a thunderstorm resulting in lightning striking his own palace. This calamity killed his many wives and children. After the tragedy a subordinate chief challenged Shango’s rule.
A clear majority of townspeople of Oyo were impressed by this subordinate chief’s feats of magic and deserted Shango. Defeated in the eyes of his subjects, a repentant Shango abandoned his kingdom of Oyo and traveled to nearby Koso, where he committed suicide by hanging himself. His faithful followers, however, claimed that he didn’t really die but instead ascended to the heavens on a golden chain.
Legends tell that after King Shango’s death his enemies cast dispersion upon his name. Suddenly a rash of storms destroyed parts of his former city of Oyo. Shango's followers claimed that these storms proved his disappearance was not his true death but instead signaled transformation into an orisha. Shango's followers proclaimed him a god and said the storms were Shango's wrath, avenging his enemies.
Dancer with Shango totems
Shango’s followers eventually succeeded in securing a place for their cult in the religious and political system of Oyo, and the Shango cult eventually became integral to the installation of Oyo’s kings. It spread widely when Oyo became the center of an expansive empire dominating most of the other Yoruba kingdoms as well as the Edo and the Fon, both of whom incorporated Shango worship into their religions and continued his cult even after they ceased being under Oyo’s control.
Shango's later took on some of the attributes of a preexisting deity, Jakuta, who represented the wrath of God and whose name continues to be associated with Shango in Cuba. This is a common theme in Yoruba gods and goddesses as they mix historical figures and divine beings of creation, and orishas are constantly reincarnated as new being taking on other names. But there is a common theme of all of the stories concerning Shango. Shango represents a capricious, authoritative, creative, destructive, magical, medicinal, and also a moral power. Shango's staff visualizes the unpredictable and violent power of the divine being. This power is personified through dance.
The natural forces associated with Shango are fire and lightning. His most prominent ritual symbol is the oshe, a double-headed battle-ax. Statues representing Shango often show the oshe emerging directly from the top of his head, indicating that war and the slaying of enemies are his essential attributes. The oshe is also used by Shango’s priesthood.
While dancing, priests hold a wooden oshe close to their chests as protection or swing it in a wide chest-high arc. During Shango’s reign, he selected the bata drum as the specific kind of drum to be played for him. Shango is said to have played bata drums to summon storms; they continue to be used by his devotees for that purpose. Ṣhango is said to be the son of Oranyan, and his wives include Oya (who stole Shango’s secrets of magic), Oshun*, and Oba, (*See Black Kos, Week In Review - Oshun West Africa's Goddess of Love -— February 14, 2020)
During the 18th and 19th centuries, tens of thousands of Yoruba, Bini, and Fon people were enslaved and transported to the Americas. In some locations in the Caribbean and South America, African slaves and their descendants were able to reestablish Shango’s worship. In the early 21st century, Shango was worshipped in the Vodou religion of Haiti, the Santería tradition of Cuba, and also in the Candomblé cult of Brazil. Two new religious movements also bear his name: Trinidad Shango (also known as the Shango Baptists) and the Afro-Brazilian cult Xangô, most prominent in the city of Recife.
Xangô took on strong importance among slaves in Brazil for his qualities of strength, resistance, and aggression. He is noted as the god of lightning and thunder. He became the patron orixa of plantations and many Candomblé terreiros. In contrast Oko, the orixá of agriculture, found little favor among slaves in Brazil and has few followers in the Americas. The main barracão of Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká, or the terreiro Casa Branca, is dedicated to Xangô. Xangô is depicted with an oxê, or double-sided ax similar to a labrys; and a brass crown. Stones such as granite are made into totems in Shango’s temples.
The religious worshiping of Shango in Latin America and the Caribbean centers on the Chapelle, a small house of worship, and the Palais, a tent where ceremonies and healing take place. Every Chapelle has a collection of stones honoring Shango. But no stones holds as much value as meteorite in a temple to Shango. Meteorites are referred to as “lightning stones”. The stones must be washed each year in a mixture of certain leaves and water, and from time to time they must be fed by pouring palm oil on them.
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Each year inside a Palais there is a major festival for Shango that ranges from recitation of the Lord's prayer to manifestations of Shango’s spirit and animal sacrifices. At the festival, an entranced devotee, the elegunshango, dances to the sharp staccato rhythms of the bata drum and waves the staff, oshe, with violent and threatening gestures, before suddenly drawing it to himself in a motion of quiet serenity. In one account regarding the oshe shango, the female figure who balances the ax, the sign of Shango's power, is equated with the "caprice and creative experience of human sexuality."
In Nigeria similar ceremonies are performed in bangas in Yoruba country. Bangas are four-cornered temples with a room in a compound building and a circular temple. The altar in the rectangular temple consisted of “ . . . a stack of jars, used as the oracle’s shrine, wooden images with the ‘Thunderbolt,’ cloth with plates of metal . . . , the amulet-robes of the Shamans, wallets hanging on the walls, etc. . . . ”
Santeria alter offering to Shango
Shango's power is associated with the human libido which may prove dangerous to the possibilities of creative sexual relationships. This interpretation is controversial as it’s seen as reinforcing the racial stereotypes of African male sexual prowess. Modern students of African religion instead view Shango’s religious dance as a warning of the arrogant use of military power to political leadership. But the Shango drum dance is clearly associated with sexual passion through dance.
Shango comes down and strikes with his head and gives three rounds down to the drums. He flaunts his axe and touches his testicles and make threatening gestures. Like lover, he tries to demonstrate the size of his penis, bends and make winks to the women. The dancers imitate his movement. No other orisha will give higher jumps, dance more violently or make stranger gestures. The dances of Shango usually are erotic or warrior like. Commonly Shango is portrayed with an axe (the symbol of thunder), and his favorite colors are red and white, which are regarded as being holy.
"Yoruba Myth in Cuba and Brazil" in Research in African Literature's — William Bascom
Legends tell that while the Orisha Oshun was still mortal, one fateful day she went to a drum festival and fell in love with the mighty god-king Shango. From that day forward, Shango was married to Oshun as well as the goddesses Oba and Oya the goddess of the winds and tempests. There are many interesting legends about the romantic, passionate rivalry that existed between Oshun and Oya. In fact the confluence of two rivers at a grand rapids in the west of Nigeria is named after Osun and Oya, due to the intimidating turbulence that marks their intersection.
But Oshun is infamous for humiliating Oba's her other rival co-wife in one of the most well-known tales associated with the Orisha. Historian William Bascom's identified several unusual variations of it, but the most popular myth found in West Africa, Brazil, and Cuba has Oba cutting off her ear to serve to her husband Shango as food, because Oshun has convinced her this will secure Shango's attention. Once Shango sees the ear and realizes Oba has mutilated herself, he chases her from his house.
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Shango as a powerful Orisha and a Western African thunder God, had a major impact on the beliefs and cultures of West Africa. Shango’s impact was felt all the places where West Africa’s captured people where taken throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Shango’s renowned power and explicit masculine sexuality, impacted the dances and culture of millions of people throughout the New World where ever Africa’s lost children landed. Shango is the West African God of Thunder and is still honored today throughout Latin America and the Caribbean as an Orisha.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Black pastors have recently exited in dismay over what they see as racial insensitivity from some leaders of the predominantly white Southern Baptist Convention. The Grio: Some Black Southern Baptists feel shut out by white leaders
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As a student in college and seminary, then as a pastor in Texas, Dwight McKissic has been affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention for more than 45 years. Now he’s pondering whether he and his congregation should break away.
“It would feel like a divorce,” McKissic said. “That’s something I’ve never had, but that’s what it would feel like.”
If he does, he would be following in the footsteps of several other Black pastors who have recently exited in dismay over what they see as racial insensitivity from some leaders of the predominantly white SBC. Tensions are high after an election year in which racism was a central issue, and after a provocative declaration by SBC seminary presidents in late 2020 that a fundamental concept in the struggle against racial injustice contravenes church doctrine.
A crucial moment for McKissic and other Black pastors could come in June at the SBC’s national meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, if delegates rebuff their views on systemic racism in the U.S., and if Rev. Albert Mohler, a high-profile conservative who heads the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is elected SBC president.
Last year, even while announcing new scholarship funds for Black students, the seminary’s leadership declined to change the names of buildings at his seminary named after slaveholders. More recently Mohler played a key role in the seminary presidents’ repudiation of critical race theory — a broad term used in academic and activist circles to describe critiques of systemic racism.
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Among Dee’s friends, talking about money is considered impolite. But that’s not really what stops her. “Most of my peers are white,” she says, “and I get very angry about the systemic inequality evident in our situations, and their seeming obliviousness to it.”
Dee’s family has been middle-class and college-educated going back three generations, “since Black people reasonably could be,” she says. Her maternal grandparents were the children of sharecroppers in the South, migrated north as adults, got graduate degrees, and, unlike millions of Black Americans who were unable to secure mortgages at the time due to racist housing covenants and lending practices, bought a home.
Homeownership was, and remains, the beating heart of wealth accumulation for the American middle class. Our society privileges homeowners in everything from the tax code to the availability of home equity lines to membership requirements for neighborhood associations. You buy a place, that place grows in value, and either you trade up to a bigger place or you keep it until you can pass it down to your kids or your kids get the money from its sale. Stability gives birth to even more stability.
That’s not what happened with Dee’s family. “My grandparents were bludgeoned every time the economy took a downturn,” Dee recalls, in part because of the legacy of redlining and the devaluation of property in Black neighborhoods. “They ended up losing their house. They had enough to live on, but no wealth.” The same happened to her parents. She says they were “destroyed” by the 2008 housing crisis, which disproportionately affected Black homeowners, many of whom, because of longstanding discriminatory lending practices, believed subprime mortgages were the best financing option available to them. Dee’s grandparents managed to make ends meet, but their retirement savings were drastically diminished, and they’ll eventually require some subsidization from Dee.
Dee describes herself as frustrated and so very, very angry. “Having everything ‘right’ and still living with precarity, literally living paycheck to paycheck, is deeply upsetting,” she says. Which is why her extra income is going toward her kids’ college savings: to prevent them starting their lives already behind, the way she feels she did. The hole Dee dug in search of middle-class stability for her family is so deep that she’d realistically need to double, even triple her income to pull herself out and have enough to stabilize her parents as well.
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Still, NPR reviewed thousands of pages of job applications, personnel records, use-of-force reports, citizen complaints, court records, lawsuits, news releases, witness statements and local and state police investigative reports to examine the backgrounds of the officers and analyze details of each shooting. We also interviewed use of force experts, criminologists, police, lawyers, prosecutors and relatives of victims.
Among NPR's other findings:
- At least six officers had troubled pasts before being hired onto police departments, including drug use and domestic violence. One officer had been fired from another law enforcement agency, and at least two others were forced out.
- Several officers were convicted of crimes while on the force, such as battery, and resisting and obstructing, but kept their jobs. In one instance, officials in a tiny Louisiana parish repeatedly fired and rehired a deputy who got into trouble with the law: three times over 30 years, records show.
- More than two dozen officers have racked up citizen complaints or use-of-force incidents. A Fort Lauderdale, Fla., police officer had 82 reviews over use-of-force incidents but was never found in violation; a Vineland, N.J., officer had more than three dozen use-of-force incidents over a five-year period.
- Several officers have violated their department policies and been cited for ethics violations, including a Hollywood, Fla., officer accused of trying to steer business to his company, and an Arizona state trooper accused of misuse of state property.
Nineteen of the officers involved in deadly shootings were rookies, with less than a year on the force. One was on the job for four hours, another for four days. More than a quarter of the killings occurred during traffic stops, and 24 of the dead — 18% — suffered from mental illness. The youngest person shot was a 15-year-old Balch Springs, Texas, high school freshman who played on the football team. The oldest was a 62-year-old man killed in his Los Angeles County home. Nearly 60% of the shootings occurred in the South, with more than a quarter in Texas, Georgia and Louisiana, NPR found.
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Martin is a Congolese pastor with a sideline in coltan smuggling. “You can hide it in the petrol tank of a motorbike,” he says, “or in a secret compartment under a lorry.” He smuggles coltan into neighbouring Rwanda, where it costs about half as much to export the stuff. The border police know which vehicles are smugglers’, says Martin (not his real name), but they look away in exchange for a cut.
Tantalum, a metal used in smartphone and laptop batteries, is extracted from coltan ore. In 2019 40% of the world’s coltan was produced in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to official data. More was sneaked into Rwanda and exported from there. Locals dig for the ore by hand in Congo’s eastern provinces, where more than 100 armed groups hide in the bush. Some mines are run by warlords who work with rogue members of the Congolese army to smuggle the coltan out.
When demand for electronics soared in the early 2000s, coltan went from being an obscure, semi-valuable ore to one of the world’s most sought-after minerals. Rebels fought over mines and hunted for new deposits. Soldiers forced locals to dig for it at gunpoint. Foreign money poured into Congo. Armed groups multiplied, eager for a share. Then, in 2010, a clause in America’s Dodd-Frank Act (a reform of financial regulations) forced American firms to audit their supply chains. The aim was to ensure they were not using minerals such as coltan, gold and tin that were funding Congo’s protracted war. For six months mines in eastern Congo were closed, as the authorities grappled with the new rules. Even when they reopened, big companies, such as Intel and Apple, shied away from Congo’s coltan, fearing a bad press.
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In the early days of the pandemic, hip-hop producers Swizz Beats and Timbaland created a music industry monster: Verzuz, a live-on-Instagram music battle show that broke livestreaming records on social media. Now, the Caribbean has responded with its own version. The emergence of Showdown (or, officially, Digicel Showdown, after the telecom company that sponsors the series) feels only natural — one more handoff a long-running cultural exchange between Caribbean music and African American traditions.
Showdown debuted last October with artists Alison Hinds from Barbados and Patrice Roberts from Trinidad. Andrew Bailey of Perception Management, which co-produced the series, says that rather than begin with a dancehall pairing— which Verzuz had already done with a performance by Jamaica's Beenie Man and Bounty Killer — the team elected to showcase soca music, the fast-paced child of Trinidadian calypso and the soundtrack of Caribbean carnival.
"The reason we went with soca artists was because it was a genre that hasn't been represented in Verzuz. Dancehall had been represented, so we wanted to do something for the culture," Bailey says.
Hinds says that representing soca in Showdown was an honor. "It gave me the opportunity to appreciate the other performer's music," she says, "and to give a little history lesson about some of the fan favorite songs that have become classics."
Speaking of history, you could argue that even though Verzuz came first, the series actually owes its existence to Caribbean music.
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