Kimbanda: where do we come from? And where do we go from here?

Over the last two decades, a Brazilian tradition commonly referred to as Kimbanda has risen sharply in visibility, particularly outside Brazil. It is increasingly presented as an ancient, clearly structured initiatory religion with deep and traceable African roots. That narrative is reassuring. It offers stability, authority, and continuity. It is also, in any strict historical sense, inaccurate.

This does not mean that Kimbanda is fake, ineffective, or spiritually empty. Quite the opposite. Kimbanda works, often powerfully. It produces results, sometimes dramatic and life-altering ones. But effectiveness and antiquity are not the same thing, and confusing the two has created a mythology around Kimbanda that collapses under even modest historical scrutiny.

No one currently initiated in Kimbanda can genuinely trace a Kimbanda initiatory lineage further back than the mid twentieth century, with the 1950s being a very generous upper limit. In most cases, the trail stops somewhere in the 1960s. Or it goes into Umbanda and Candomble. This gap has generated anxiety and, in response, increasingly elaborate claims of continuity. Yet the reason for this break is surprisingly simple. Until around twenty years ago, almost nobody asked questions about lineage at all, other than the most traditional Candomble houses.

Brazilian spiritual practice is rarely driven by genealogical obsession. It has always been pragmatic. If something works, it is done. If it stops working, it is altered or abandoned. This attitude is not a corruption of tradition. It is one of its defining cultural features. Kimbanda survives because it delivers results, not because it preserves ritual forms unchanged across centuries.

Kimbanda, as it is generally practiced today, did not exist in its current shape before the 1950s. Even that statement requires care, because the phrase “as it is practiced today” conceals enormous variation. The last thirty years alone have seen substantial changes in ritual structure, spirit classification, symbolism, and initiation. They have also seen the emergence of new Kimbanda practices and entire Kimbanda sub-traditions. The emphasis here must be on practice, not on mythologised identity.

Two publications are central to this story. In 1942, Lourenço Braga published Umbanda (Magia Branca) e Quimbanda (Magia Negra). In this work, Umbanda was framed as clean, elevated, and morally acceptable, while Quimbanda was cast as its dark and dangerous opposite. This was not a neutral ethnographic account. It was a moral narrative that assigned light to one practice and darkness to the other. In doing so, Braga gave Quimbanda the role of Brazilian “black magic”. That image proved irresistible.

Some years later, W. W. da Matta e Silva, a respected Umbanda teacher, published O Livro dos Exus under the pseudonym Antônio de Alva. Publicly, he taught a system blending African elements with Kardecist and Theosophical ideas, refined and suitable for a respectable Brazilian middle-class audience. Privately, under another name, he depicted Quimbanda in grotesque and infernal tones, drawing heavily on European demonology. Hellish imagery, demons, transgression, and fear filled the pages.

Neither book emerged in a vacuum. Brazil at the time was deeply conflicted about its African heritage, and Umbanda itself was actively negotiating its public respectability. Early Umbanda currents explicitly rejected animal sacrifice, presenting themselves as clean, elevated, and morally acceptable. Practices involving blood were treated as contaminating influences, even though Exu and Pomba Gira are spirits who do eat blood. Those practices were pushed outside the boundaries of what could safely be called Umbanda. To this day, some older Umbanda mediums still note that the use of blood, even within Umbanda rites for Exu and Pomba Gira, means that a house is “doing Kimbanda”, despite the fact that many contemporary Umbanda houses now quietly incorporate blood offerings, sometimes even for other entities such as Ogum.

In this context, the label “Kimbanda” also functioned as more than a descriptive term. It exercised social control. To be branded as Kimbanda was to be marked as transgressive, dangerous, or morally suspect, and therefore placed beyond the boundaries of respectable Umbanda practice. Presenting African derived spirit work either as sanitised morality or as dangerous darkness served clear social and political purposes, reinforcing hierarchies at a time when African religious expression was under sustained pressure from both Church and state.

These books did not simply describe Kimbanda. They helped create it.

When later practitioners could not find the Quimbanda described in these texts in lived religious reality, they began to enact it. This is profoundly human behaviour. Printed books carried immense authority at the time, particularly as mass market publishing expanded. If something appeared in print, it was assumed to be real, ancient, and established. Practice followed text, rather than the other way around.

Much of what has been written since has attempted to legitimise practice by presenting it as "tradition". Untangling exactly how this unfolded is difficult, not least because none of us were there. But certain points are not in dispute.

The word kimbanda itself comes from Kimbundu and refers to a ritual specialist, healer, or priest. In Brazil, the term has long been used within Candomblé Angola, appearing in prayers and priestly titles. Tata Kimbanda Kambambe of the terreiro Tumba Junsara in Bahia is one clear example. The word is African. Its ritual use is African. Many initiates of Candomblé Angola are able to trace their lineage back to Roberto de Barros Reis, Tata Kimbanda Kinunga, who was born and initiated in Africa in the early 1800s. After he was taken to Brazil, he initiated Maria Genoveva do Bonfim (Maria Neném), Mam'etu Tuenda dia Nzambi, whose initiates then founded the Tumba Junçara, Bate Folha, Tanuri Junçara, and Awziidi Junçara lineages. All the way back to Africa. But this is Candomblé Angola, not Kimbanda.

What is not African is the idea that modern Kimbanda initiation systems descend intact and unchanged from Africa. This is where the real tension emerges. Contemporary Kimbanda initiations are often presented as ancient survivals. They are not. Even within Candomblé Angola, practice has changed significantly since its establishment in Brazil. Anthropologists have long noted a process often described as Yorubanisation. Whether this resulted from social pressure, intercultural exchange, or institutional survival strategies remains debated.

Traditional Bantu cosmology does not place its primary ritual emphasis on the head. That is a Yoruba focus. Bantu religious attention centres on the heart. “It is the heart that calls for God” is not metaphor but cosmological principle. Yet many Candomblé Angola houses shifted initiatory emphasis upwards, mirroring Yoruba forms. Practices such as curas, ritual cuts into which herbs or powders are rubbed, survive today largely as optional additions rather than central rites.

Candomblé Angola matters here because much of what Kimbanda uses - its prayers, cosmology, and core concepts - comes directly from it. The understanding of Exu and Pomba Gira as spirits of the dead is entirely Bantu in origin. We also know that not every African brought to Brazil founded a terreiro. João do Rio describes a wide landscape of informal domestic and street level practices in early twentieth century Rio de Janeiro. Similar diversity existed throughout Brazil. And much of what we read outside of “legitimised” anthropology has very distinct Bantu features.

Modern Kimbanda initiations are, in large part, inventions. One could debate endlessly whether the spirits themselves guide these developments - and that debate is legitimate because it is a spirit-led tradition. But historically, these initiations are not African. At best, they are condensed adaptations of older rites. At worst, they are creative constructions of people. In typically Brazilian fashion, if it works, it is kept. If it does not, it is changed. This stands in sharp contrast to Anglo-Saxon puritanism, with its fixation on purity, origin, and correctness. Brazil, and Bantu spirituality, doesn’t quite work like that. The relationship between the person and their spirits matters more than the right words, gestures, prayers or ingredients used in ritual.

Despite countless online claims, there are no genuinely traditional Kimbanda houses in the sense people usually imagine. Nothing currently practised is older than about eighty years at best. Some houses may claim descent from Roberto Reis, but the ceremonies and initiations he performed bear little resemblance to what is done today. Having been involved with Kimbanda for over twenty years, and having close ties to the Bate Folha lineage, I can say this with confidence.

This process is not unique to Brazil, nor is it a symptom of diaspora rupture. A useful comparison can be found in Tron Vodou in Ghana. Tron is a relatively recent ritual formation that reorganised older Vodun spirits and practices into a new religious configuration. It emerged in the 1960s. The spirits themselves were not new. What changed was how they were approached, grouped, and worked with in response to shifting social realities. Tron is not dismissed as illegitimate because it lacks an ancient frozen form. Its authority rests, as Vodun traditions always have, on spirit efficacy, obligation, and consequence. No serious practitioner would argue that Tron is invalid because it adapted. That same logic must be applied consistently elsewhere.

The pattern is not unique, nor is it limited to Brazil or to Bantu derived traditions. Other African diasporic religions that are now widely treated as established and orthodox have undergone equally significant restructuring. Santería itself has changed profoundly over time. David H. Brown’s Santería Enthroned documents how initiation practices evolved in response to migration, urbanisation, and internal negotiation rather than being transmitted as a fixed inheritance. Nicolás Valentín Angarica, author of the widely known Manual de Orihaté: Religión Lucumí, reshaped how Orishas are prepared and given, altering ritual practice in ways now treated as timeless, traditional and unquestionable.

Haitian Vodou offers a similar example. The Ason lineage, frequently presented as ancient, definitive, and the only valid practice of Haitian Vodou, only emerged in the 1920s. While legend attributes its formation to Loko himself appearing in the streets of Port-au-Prince, it is far more plausibly understood as a response to migration, consolidation, and the pressures of urban religious life.

In each of these cases, the spirits themselves did not change. What changed was how human communities organised their relationship with them.

At this point, many readers become uneasy. If Kimbanda is recent in form, adaptive in practice, and spirit led in development, does that mean anything goes? The answer is no, and understanding why requires recognising what kind of practice Kimbanda actually is.

Kimbanda is not only African in origin. It is Bantu in structure, logic, and worldview. Bantu religions do not establish legitimacy through frozen forms, written canons, or identical ritual replication. Authority is not stored in archives or lineage charts. Authority lives in relationship, specifically relationship with the dead, with spirits, with land, and with consequence.

Spirits in Bantu cosmology are not passive recipients of ritual correctness. They are active agents. They instruct, demand, refuse, withdraw, correct, and sometimes dismantle houses that lose coherence. Practice is adaptive, but not arbitrary. Change is not evidence of corruption. It is often evidence of ongoing negotiation with the dead.

Spirit led does not mean unbounded. Spirits do not validate everything a medium imagines. They validate what works within their cosmological logic. A practice may be new and still legitimate. A practice may be old and spiritually dead. Age alone carries no authority. What matters is whether a practice produces stable relationships, meaningful obligations, and long term consequences that make sense within a Bantu understanding of the dead.

This is why effectiveness matters so deeply in Brazilian spirit culture. Not because practitioners are crude or unreflective, but because efficacy is evidence of relationship. Results include protection, correction, illness, dreams, warnings, and the reshaping of a medium’s life over time. A house that consistently produces imbalance, fear, theatrical excess, or spiritual inflation is eventually corrected. Sometimes gently. Sometimes brutally.

This also explains why European demonology sits so awkwardly within Kimbanda. It employs a strange type of "Goetic Syncretism" where Exu is presented as the mask of a demon. Demonological systems introduce moral melodrama where Bantu cosmology expects reciprocity. They frame spirits as rebels rather than ancestors and moral agents. When that logic is violated and the cosmological foundation changed, things may appear to work briefly. But they rarely endure.

Historically, Kimbanda was not a standalone entry point into African derived religion. For most of the twentieth century, people entered through Umbanda or Candomblé. Kimbanda was something one practised, not something one formally joined. The idea that one could be only Kimbandeiro, without grounding elsewhere, is largely a modern and often diasporic development.

That shift has consequences. It removes older systems of correction and balance. It also encourages formalisation, systematisation, and myth making to replace what has been lost. Claims of ancient lineage often arise here, not as deliberate deception, but as compensation. Claims of underground currents that weave in and out of existence simply raise eyebrows.

Kimbanda does not need those myths.Its strength lies in its Bantu understanding of the dead as active moral agents, in its refusal to sanitise spirit power, and in its emphasis on relationship over purity, consequence over belief, and obligation over identity. These values do not sit comfortably with modern spiritual consumerism. They demand accountability rather than affirmation.

Not everything that calls itself Kimbanda is legitimate. Not because it is new, but because it fails to align with the cosmology it claims to represent. The question is not whether a ritual existed in Africa. The question is whether it makes sense to the dead, whether it brings results, and whether it has a positive impact on the physical and emotional health of the practitioner.

That is a far more demanding standard than lineage charts. It cannot be faked easily. It cannot be maintained through branding. And it cannot be defended without lived consequence.

Kimbanda is not an ancient fossil. It is a living Bantu practice shaped by history, violence, adaptation, and spirit agency. Pretending otherwise weakens it. Understanding it on its own terms makes it stronger, even if that understanding is uncomfortable.

That discomfort is not a flaw. It is the price of honesty. And it holds its own power.


ROOTS AND ROADS - A History and Practice of Quimbanda