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“The leaders of most of these movements had been enslaved in or around Oyo and had almost certainly been sent to Bahia and Cuba from one of the busy ports of the Slave Coast (i.e., Whydah, Porto Novo, Badagry, and Lagos). The men, women, and children who were sent to Bahia and Cuba from these ports in the first half of the nineteenth century had the same or similar ethno-cultural backgrounds. They were, to put it in simple terms, victims of warfare and slave raiding in the region that stretches from the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast in the south to the limits of the Sahara desert in the north. They were Hausa-speakers and Bariba, Nupe, and Borno, and many of them were Yoruba-speakers who had been enslaved during the Fulani-led jihador the Owu wars in the late 1810s and early 1820s, during the looting and pillaging of the new settlements in Egbado and Egbaland in the 1820s and early 1830s, and during the wars that led to the ultimate collapse of Old Oyo in the mid-1830s and the final defeat of the Fulani invaders at the battle of Osogbo in c. 1838.
These men, women, and children, whether they were taken to Bahia or to Cuba, all had several things in common. Firstly, and most importantly, they were all well acquainted with war, regardless of whether they had been soldiers themselves or not. As a matter of fact, a large number of them had been enslaved precisely during the above-mentioned wars. Other cultural traits that identified them either totally or partially included their familiarity with Islam—some practiced it, some resisted it—and with local animist religions. For the Yoruba-speaking, most of whom considered themselves descendants of the mythical Oduduwa, the orishas or orixás had the power over all things on earth. The might of some of these orishas, like Ogun and Shango, extended to neighboring states like Dahomey. Another exceptionally important cultural feature that they all shared was their knowledge of the Yoruba language, which allowed them to understand each other, despite the existence of a number of different linguistic subgrops in the region.
These shared cultural features were taken across the Atlantic and reproduced and developed in the New World societies they were forced to move to and live in. The behavior they exhibited in West Africa was to a large extent also displayed in Bahia and western Cuba. Their presence meant that two chronologically near simultaneous, remarkably similar processes of Africanization of the manifestations of slave resistance, and particularly of slave rebellion, were observed in both places. Bahia saw the Hausa slaves take arms in 1807—just three years after Uthman Dan Fodio had begun his rebellion against Gobir—and by 1835 when a combination of Nagô and Hausa slaves and freedmen took the streets of Salvador the repetition of African-led armed uprisings in the city and its hinterland was a regular occurrence. Whilst Cuba had to wait until 1825 to see the first major African-led insurrection, what came after left no doubt of the role played by the Lucumi and their neighbors in almost all of the more than 40 movements that followed and that only came to a halt in 1844.”
-Manuel Barcia, West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba
