Yoruba Twins: Slavery, Cuba & Santería | From The Andes

Field Notes · Art, Religion & Cultural History

Two carved figures open a history of forced migration, sacred kinship and the making of an Afro-Cuban religion that remains a living inheritance.

A wooden figure can be washed, dressed and offered food. The person it represents has died, but the relationship has not ended. In the Yoruba tradition of ère ìbejì, care for a deceased twin can continue through a carving.^[1]

Seen without that context, the object might appear to be a portrait, a keepsake or a decorative sculpture. Within the religious practice, it can be a means of maintaining contact with someone whose place in the family remains consequential. The figure is not simply evidence that a person once lived. It participates in the relationship that follows.^[1]

The Yoruba-style twin figures in the From The Andes collection prompt a larger question. Their maker and original place of carving are undocumented. Yet the tradition their forms evoke reaches far beyond the history of an individual pair.^[2]

It leads across the Atlantic to Cuba, where Yoruba religious knowledge helped shape the Afro-Cuban tradition widely known as Santería. The connection was made through the forced transportation of people, not the voluntary circulation of ideas. What followed was neither an unchanged African religion nor a complete surrender to the religion of the colonizers. It was a new religious life built under slavery and continued in freedom.^[3]

To follow the twins is therefore to follow two histories at once: the religious meaning of an extraordinary bond, and the human work of sustaining belief after forced displacement.

Before Cuba, a place for the dead

In Yoruba religious traditions, twins have been understood as beings of exceptional spiritual power. Associated with Ṣàngó, the deity of thunder, they could bring prosperity to those who honored them and misfortune to those who neglected them. The relationship involved affection, but also obligations.^[1]

After a twin’s death, parents might consult an Ifá diviner about commissioning a figure. Accounts assembled for Penn State’s African Brilliance exhibition describe carvings kept in a mother’s room, washed, clothed and offered food. Camwood and oil could be applied to the body, indigo to the hair. In some documented practices, a figure received a blanket in cold weather; responsibility for its care could eventually pass to the surviving twin.^[4]

The details make the obligation legible. Food, clothing and shelter are not abstract symbols of attention. They are its ordinary forms. Here, those forms extend beyond the boundary that separates the living from the dead.

The person commemorated was not necessarily an infant. The Birmingham Museum of Art notes that ibeji figures can honor twins who died as babies or as adults. Their mature bodies commonly present an idealized person in the prime of life, rather than reproducing the age at death. An image associated with loss can therefore insist on fullness rather than diminishment.^[5]

This practice belonged to a broader world of religious learning. UNESCO describes Ifá as a complex system of signs and oral knowledge, encompassing subjects including history, philosophy, medicine and mythology. Its transmission requires people who learn and teach. That intellectual dimension matters when considering what enslavement displaced: not just objects or isolated customs, but people with knowledge, obligations and ways of interpreting existence.^[6]

The Atlantic crossing was a forced migration

The expansion of sugar and coffee plantations in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Cuba intensified the demand for enslaved labor. Yoruba people from areas now within southwestern Nigeria and neighboring Benin were among those transported to the island. The growth of the plantation economy and the development of Afro-Cuban religious life belong to the same history, although they describe radically different uses of human power.^[7]

Writing for the Smithsonian, scholar David Brown identifies 1790 to 1865 as a period when Yoruba people were taken to Cuba in large numbers. There they became known as Lucumí. He emphasizes that the resulting religion developed through the circumstances of slavery and freedom rather than remaining a static remnant of Africa.^[3]

Cuba did not abolish slavery until 1886. The religious communities that emerged had therefore taken shape within a society where people could be bought and sold long after their beliefs had begun to transform the island’s cultural life.^[8]

A chronology can establish those conditions. An individual life reveals what they cost.

The woman who paid to go home

In Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World, scholar Solimar Otero recounts the history of Dolores Real. Taken from Lagos as a girl, she was sold in Havana to Carmen Real, a free Yoruba woman who operated a laundry with enslaved workers. Carmen gave her the name Dolores. Her original Yoruba name is unknown.^[9]

Dolores was later sold to a Catholic priest. After seven years, she had saved the 450 pesos required to purchase her freedom from him. Working independently as a laundress, she then saved for a passage back to Lagos. On June 7, 1854, at forty, she was heading home after thirty years in Havana.^[9]

This account does not establish what Dolores believed, whether she honored the twins or whether she owned a carving. It establishes something different: the price of recovering control over her own life. The word diaspora can sound like a map of cultural connections. In her history, it also contains a lost name, years of labor and a return journey she had to finance herself.^[9]

How Santería took shape in Cuba

Religious continuity depended on social organization as well as memory. In Cuba, cabildos served as African mutual-aid associations. The Smithsonian describes their role in preserving religious practices, music and dance among communities including the Lucumí. Such institutions gave people a setting in which knowledge could be shared and obligations sustained. Survival was not simply a matter of privately remembering Africa; it also involved making community in Cuba.^[10]

Within Spanish colonial society, Yoruba deities became associated with Catholic saints. The Museum of Miami describes how Catholic imagery could provide a protective exterior for African religious practice, while the encounter also produced new interpretations. An image of a saint could be present in a religious life whose foundations were not exhausted by Catholic doctrine.^[7]

But describing the entire religion as African gods hiding behind Catholic masks makes adaptation sound simpler than it was. Brown’s account instead treats Santería as an Afro-Caribbean development, shaped by the people who practiced it and the conditions in which they lived.^[3]

The name itself carries that tension. Harvard’s Pluralism Project notes that many practitioners prefer Lucumí, Regla de Ocha or related names because Santería emphasizes the saints and can obscure the African inheritance. The orishas are deities, not simply alternative names for Catholic figures.^[11]

Religious life is organized in houses, or ilés, whose priests, priestesses, initiates and godchildren form chosen-kinship communities. Here, transmission is a relationship between people, not merely a collection of beliefs preserved on a shelf. The institution of the religious house makes belonging part of the practice itself.^[11]

The Ibeyi: a connection, not an identical object

In Cuban Lucumí, the sacred twins are known as the Ibeyi, also written Ibeji. They are not simply the spirits of two particular children whose identities have been lost. In practitioner Ócháni Lele’s account, they are divine protectors who act together against traps, hostile intentions and malicious witchcraft. He also describes dolls associated with their worship and differences between religious houses.^[12]

That distinction matters when looking at a wooden pair. A Yoruba memorial figure can maintain a relationship with an individual who died. An account of the Ibeyi in Cuba concerns divine twins and their powers. The traditions are connected, but a resemblance between objects cannot make their functions interchangeable.^[4][12]

Nor does protection against witchcraft mean that an object was made to practice harmful magic. The difference is present within the practitioner’s explanation: the twins are described as confronting danger, not as evidence that every representation of them is an instrument of a curse.^[12]

The twins who reopened the roads

Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera gave the twins a formidable adversary in a tale from Cuentos negros de Cuba. In this literary retelling, the island’s paths have become impassable. A monstrous being, Okurri Borukú, devours travelers. The twins Taewo and Kaínde set out to confront him.^[13]

The adversary demands music: a child must play his guitar until he tires of dancing, or be eaten. One twin plays while the other stays hidden. When the musician needs a rest, his brother takes his place. The creature does not recognize the substitution. What he believes is one child’s inexhaustible endurance is the cooperation of two.^[13]

Exhausted, the adversary is defeated; the roads can open again. This is Cabrera’s particular telling, not a standardized account of every Lucumí house’s teaching. Its resolution nevertheless offers a compelling way to read the power of the twins: together, they overcome the force that prevents people from moving. The story restores passage where there had been captivity.^[13]

Thirty-six seconds in a sound archive

A different kind of evidence survives in a recording. Smithsonian Folkways’ Havana, Cuba, ca. 1957: Rhythms and Songs for the Orishas includes a track titled “Ibeyi.” It lasts thirty-six seconds. The catalogue names Miguel Santa Cruz, Gustavo Díaz and Juan González as its performers.^[14]

The collection documents Afro-Cuban religious music and the relationship between Cuban batá drumming and West African traditions. A carving offers evidence through material and form; a recording preserves an event in sound. Here the twins are not merely a subject described by someone else. They belong to a performed religious repertoire.^[14]

The fragment cannot represent the whole tradition. Its value is more specific: named musicians, a documented recording and a dedication to the twins in Cuba. The connection across the Atlantic is not being inferred from the appearance of a pair of statues.^[14]

When a religion has to defend its place

The distinction between religion and a hostile caricature of it has had consequences beyond interpretation. In 1987, the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye planned a public place of worship in Hialeah, Florida. The city adopted ordinances targeting ritual animal sacrifice. The dispute eventually reached the United States Supreme Court.^[15]

On June 11, 1993, in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, the Court struck down the challenged ordinances. Their design singled out religious conduct while leaving comparable nonreligious killing of animals outside key prohibitions. The decision addressed discrimination against religious exercise; it did not declare every religious practice exempt from neutral, generally applicable laws.^[15]

The Court did not have to endorse the religion’s supernatural claims to recognize its constitutional protection. That is the distinction the case brings into view: disagreement with a belief is not, by itself, a justification for targeting the people who practice it.^[15]

A living inheritance, not a vanished world

The twins’ place in contemporary culture is not confined to historical collections. Elliot and Erick Jiménez, identical twin artists raised as Cuban Americans within Lucumí, brought that inheritance into their exhibition El Monte at Pérez Art Museum Miami, held from August 28, 2025, through March 22, 2026. Their photographs and installation drew on Yoruba, Catholic and other Afro-Caribbean spiritual imagery.^[16]

The exhibition took its title from Cabrera’s El Monte, first published in Cuba in 1954. At its center stood a structure evoking both a chapel and a forest, also referring to the twins’ shared beginnings in the womb. An image identified by the museum as El Monte (Ibejí), made in 2024, placed the sacred twins within the brothers’ contemporary visual language.^[16]

In the museum’s published announcement, the artists described their interest in “the power of duality.” They were not encountering the religion solely as collectors of unfamiliar things. Their work interpreted an inheritance in which their own upbringing and twinship were involved.^[17]

Nor has the Yoruba memorial tradition remained fixed in wood. The Birmingham Museum of Art notes that photographs and plastic dolls have sometimes taken the place of carved figures. A change in material does not necessarily mean that the relationship the object supports has disappeared.^[5]

For Nigerian researcher Beulah Oluwadamilola Abu, seeing ibeji figures at the Ulster Museum in Belfast was an encounter with family as well as art. Her elder sisters are twins. In her account for the museum, the display offered “a piece of home so far away.” The object did not need to be exotic to be meaningful. It was recognizable.^[18]

What these carvings can and cannot tell us

The pair at From The Andes has been in our collection since the 1980s. The figures have carved crests, facial markings and fiber accents. Their maker and original place of carving are undocumented, and their date of manufacture and any ceremonial use have not been established. They are offered as Yoruba-style, not as authenticated Santería objects or documented relics of slavery.^[2]

They cannot supply a missing account of their own journey. Their resemblance to a religious sculptural tradition cannot tell us who touched them, what those people believed or whether the figures ever stood in a shrine. Those gaps belong in the description, not in an invented story.

The product and the history meet at a question, not at a claim of provenance. Looking at the pair can lead to learning about Yoruba twinship, Cuban Lucumí and the people who sustained religious life under forced displacement. It cannot turn the figures into witnesses to events for which there is no documentation.

That boundary leaves room for a larger history. A carved figure, a name in an account of enslavement, a song in an archive and a contemporary photograph preserve different kinds of evidence. None can stand for the whole. Together, they move attention from an object’s appearance to the lives and relationships around it.

The gods did not cross the Atlantic by themselves. The history belongs first to the people who carried, taught and remade their religious traditions.

Sources and further reading

This research-based feature draws on museum records, historical scholarship, archival recordings, a court opinion and attributed religious and literary accounts. No original interviews are represented. Religious beliefs and stories are described as such, not as verified supernatural events. The sources explain the traditions; they do not authenticate the From The Andes pair or establish its ceremonial history.

1. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twin Figure: Female (Ibeji), workshop of Ibuke Compound. Yoruba twin veneration, Ṣàngó and memorial figures.
2. From The Andes, Yoruba-Style Twin Figures, Carved Wooden Pair. The seller’s description of this pair, its condition and the limits of its attribution.
3. David Brown, Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Santería. 1989. Yoruba religious traditions and the development of an Afro-Caribbean religion under slavery and in freedom.
4. Palmer Museum of Art, Penn State, African Brilliance, Catalogue 34. 2020. Divination, commissioning and the care of Yoruba twin figures.
5. Birmingham Museum of Art, Ibeji Figure. 2019. Memorials for twins who died at different ages, idealized adult forms and changing materials.
6. UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, Safeguarding of the Ifa Divination System. The intellectual and oral traditions associated with Ifá.
7. Museum of Miami, At the Crossroads: Afro-Cuban Orisha Arts in Miami. Cuba’s plantation economy, Yoruba religious heritage and Catholic associations.
8. Library of Congress, The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War, Cuba Chronology. The abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1886.
9. Solimar Otero, Grassroots Africans: Havana’s “Lagosians”. Chapter 1 of Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World, Boydell & Brewer, 2010. The publicly accessible chapter summary recounts Dolores Real’s history.
10. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian, Latin Jazz Glossary: Cabildos. Mutual-aid organizations and the preservation of religious and musical traditions in Cuba.
11. The Pluralism Project, Harvard University, “Santeria”: La Regla de Ocha-Ifa and Lukumi. Religious names, orishas, Catholic associations and chosen-kinship communities.
12. Ócháni Lele, The Ibeji, the Children of Miraculous Birth. June 7, 2015. An attributed practitioner’s account of the divine twins and their protective powers, not independent verification of supernatural claims.
13. Lydia Cabrera, republished by Alas Tensas, Se cerraron y volvieron a abrirse los caminos de la isla. A literary tale from Cuentos negros de Cuba, republished April 28, 2024. This particular version uses a guitar and an adversary named Okurri Borukú.
14. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Havana, Cuba, ca. 1957: Rhythms and Songs for the Orishas. Collection issued in 2001. The catalogue includes a 36-second recording titled “Ibeyi.”
15. Supreme Court of the United States, via Cornell Legal Information Institute, Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520. Decided June 11, 1993. The Court’s opinion on ordinances targeting religious animal sacrifice.
16. Pérez Art Museum Miami, Elliot & Erick Jiménez: El Monte. Exhibition held August 28, 2025, through March 22, 2026. Cuban-American twin artists, Lucumí and contemporary art.
17. Pérez Art Museum Miami, Pérez Art Museum Miami Presents Elliot and Erick Jiménez: El Monte. June 25, 2025. The museum announcement includes the artists’ published statement.
18. Beulah Oluwadamilola Abu, Ulster Museum, Nigerian Twin Figures. A Nigerian researcher’s first-person account of encountering ibeji figures in Belfast.

Read more about the objects we live with and the histories behind them in Field Notes from From The Andes.