# African nations as markers of religious identities  
As an echo or an embedded memory of the slave colonial past, many contemporary Afro-Brazilian religious congregations, particularly those proud of their alleged African roots, continue to resort to the idiom of nations to identify themselves. The expression 'religious congregation' is used here to refer to a group of devotees initiated in the same 'temple', and translates local terms such as terreiro, candomblé, casa, ilé - names which also designate the sacred space they occupy. On the other hand, the 'religious community' would be the wider network of congregations or terreiros. Anyhow, religious congregations identify as belonging to the Angola, Congo, Nagô, Jeje or other African nations. As noted by anthropologist Vivaldo da Costa Lima, the term 'nation' gradually 'lost its political connotation to become a concept almost exclusively theological. Thus, nation became the ideological and ritual model of the Bahian Candomblé terreiros'. In other words, the self-attribution of a nation ceased to mark ethnic ancestry and came to designate a 'ritual model', or an 'organizational form defined according to a religious basis' (Lima, 2003, p. 29).  
A similar process is reproduced in other Atlantic contexts where ritual variation is expressed by the idiom of nations and African political entities. In Haiti, for instance, the Vodou temples (bunfo) are said to belong to the Pweto nachon (nation) or the Rada nachon, Rada being a phonetic evolution of Allada, the dominant African kingdom on the seventeenth-century Slave Coast. Similarly, Afro-Cuban religious practices are divided into different reglas (normative models) such as the regla de Arara (from Allada) and the regla de Ocha (from orisha), also referred to as regla Lucumi, the name given in Cuba to the Yoruba-speaking people, known as Nagô in Brazil. The regla Conga or regla de Palo (Palo Monte, Palo Mayombé etc.) is the one that allegedly has stronger West Central African or Bantu influences.