This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Beginning with the secession of Ilorin in 1817, the Oyo Empire in what is now southwestern Nigeria fell into a fragmentation that civil war and repeated raids by Dahomey and the Sokoto Caliphate deepened through the 1820s and 1830s. The empire's capital, Oyo-Ile, was destroyed in 1835, and the empire is traditionally reckoned to have ended in 1836. Two decades of internal war fed a massive wave of Yoruba captives into the Atlantic slave trade at exactly the period when Cuba, still importing enslaved people as late as 1867, decades after most nations had formally banned the trade, was drawing heavily on West African labor.
Yoruba speakers who reached Cuba in these years became known there as Lucumi, from a Yoruba phrase meaning my friend. Enslaved in overwhelming numbers alongside Kongo and Fon-speaking Arara communities, and permitted only Roman Catholicism as their legal religion, Cuba's Lucumi carried their own orisha veneration across the ocean rather than abandoning it.
What the Oyo collapse changed for the tradition's spread was origin itself: displaced Yoruba religion took root on Cuban soil, and Lucumi practitioners went on to syncretize orisha worship with Catholic saint devotion and Spiritism into what crystallized by the late nineteenth century as Santeria, also called Regla de Ocha, a new world tradition born directly out of a West African empire's destruction.