Tata, yaya and the house

Tradition described: Palo Monte / Regla de Congo (Cuba)

Tata, yaya and the house

A Palo house — a munanso, in the lengua — is a tata or yaya nganga, the prenda or prendas they keep, and the people who have been received under them. The tata (father) or yaya (mother) is the one with the authority to work the prenda and to initiate; Cabrera records both men and women in the role, and the title yaya is not a courtesy but a rank. A person is received into a house by rayamiento — from rayar, to scratch — an initiation named for the small cuts it involves, after which they are a ngueyo, a junior, and may in time receive a prenda of their own and become a tata or yaya in turn. The elder who initiated one's initiator is spoken of as a grandparent in the tradition, and a house keeps its genealogy.

Other roles appear in the record with names that vary by house: the bakofula or mayordomo who assists the tata in ceremony; the “perro de prenda” or “caballo”, the person the nfumbe mounts when it comes to speak; the musicians and singers of the mambos, the call-and-response songs that carry the ceremony. The branches — Mayombe, held to be the oldest and most strictly Congo; Briyumba, which admitted more from Lucumí religion; and Kimbisa, the Regla Kimbisa del Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje founded in the nineteenth century by Andrés Petit, which took in Catholic and spiritist elements openly — differ in their ceremonies and their vocabulary, and a house belongs to one of them.

The rayamiento is named here and not described, for the same reason the making of a prenda is not: it is the tradition's own, and it is not the site's to publish. What can be said from the record is what it is for — it binds the initiate to the house and its dead, under the protection of the prenda — and that it is the beginning of an apprenticeship, not the end of one.

Editorially reviewed against the sources named

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