Thousands of devotees of different African-based religions on Friday flocked to the waterfront of the Uruguayan capital, part of an annual February 2 offering to the Yoruba goddess of fertility and prosperity, Yemanjá.

“Water represents a return to freedom, to native Africa,” said Mother Susana Andrade, known as “Mae Susana de Oxum”, the president of the Afro-Umbandista Federation of Uruguay. “It was a way to escape the horrors of slavery and humanise the natural world.”

Followers of African-based religions are on the rise in South America new data shows, a reflection of how the region’s African heritage is gaining a greater voice beyond Brazil where such traditions are widely recognised.

Surveys on religious beliefs in Argentina and Uruguay point to a rising number of people who identify with African-inspired faiths. Sasha Curti, who was brought up in a predominantly Catholic Uruguayan family had come down to Ramirez beach in Montevideo with members of her Umbanda temple to give thanks to Yemanjá.

“We are no longer hidden,” said Curti, who works as a hair stylist specialising in afro hair, a change she attributed to greater education about their history. “There is still a lot of discrimination and work that needs to be done.”

Along Ramirez beach, groups were digging shallow altars in the sand, laying candles, watermelons and corn as offerings to Yemanjá often called the sea queen to ask for good fortune.

Umbanda, like its sister Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé, was first popularised in northeastern Brazil and has its roots in the transatlantic slave trade. Worshipers blended native Yoruba beliefs from Africa with elements of Catholicism and local Indigenous traditions creating syncretic religions so that they would go undetected by Europeans, according to researchers.

Over two per cent of Uruguayans identify as followers of African-inspired faiths like Umbanda. The small South American nation is home to a greater proportion of believers than in neighbouring Brazil, where the religion has gained greater international recognition through annual New Year’s Eve Yemanjá festivities.

Research by Uruguayan sociologist Victoria Sotelo at the University of the Republic found that the numbers practising an African-based religion in the country have more than doubled in 12 years, to 2.1 per cent of the population in 2020 up from 0.7 per cent recorded in 2008.

In Argentina worshipers are also on the rise, even if from a low base. Non-profit pollster Latinobarómetro found 0.3 per cent of the Argentine population in 2023 said they had practised an Afro-American religion for at least six years, up from 0.1 per cent in 2008.

One possible contributing factor is the increasing recognition of the Afro-descendant cultural identity that has long been silenced in Argentina and Uruguay.

In a sign of the changing perceptions of racial identity, Argentina formally included a question about people of African descent in its 2022 national census, considered a sizeable victory by activists.

That same year Paraguay passed an anti-discrimination law to protect people of African descent. This year Uruguay’s Children of the Diaspora Collective, a group dedicated to the recognition of African-based culture, expects the percentage of those who self-identify as Black or of African descent to far exceed the 8 per cent figure recorded in the 2008 census, when 2023 findings are released.

“Because of our historical process, much of the (Black) population in Argentina doesn’t self-identify as Afro-descendants,” said Greta Pena, former head of Argentina’s National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism (INADI). There is a “founding myth” of a strictly European Argentina she said, which has helped to erase Black culture from the nation’s consciousness.

Devotees of these faiths are not exclusively of African heritage, but the greater adherence to traditional spiritual practices is helping to boost racial awareness more broadly.

While the religions have gained traction, with their relatively liberal social mores and community focus, more work needs to be done to fight stigmatisation, Andrade cautioned. Oral histories and traditions associated with the African-based religions have long been misunderstood or demonised as “witchcraft,” she said.

“We’ve made strides in terms of the laws around practicing our religion, that in theory protect against discrimination,” she said. “But we don’t have tax exemptions like churches and simply aren’t treated the same.”

• A Reuters report