Santo Daime Churches in Africa

This article contains information about all known Santo Daime activity in Africa. There is very little known Santo Daime activity anywhere in Africa. The continent is overall exploding with population growth as well as new religious movements, however mostly in the area of Protestant Christianity.

North Africa and the Horn of Africa are predominantly Muslim with groups of Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox Christians present throughout. There is no known Santo Daime activity to ever occur here.

Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the few countries in the world where Christianity is increasing in growth, particularly with “Mainline Protestant” groups. There are many Mainline Protestant groups such as Anglicans, Methodists, Anabaptists and Presbyterians on the rise. This is very peculiar because in other continents such as the Americas, the “Evangelical” Christians are the only ones with rising numbers and more neutral Mainline Protestant groups (such as the aforementioned ones) are falling in numbers, and their members are converting to become Evangelicals.

In Africa, there is a climate that can sustain the cultivation of Jagube and Rainha, so we certainly do believe it is possible for self-sufficient Santo Daime groups to emerge and start holding their own works and feitios – it just hasn’t happened yet.

Santo Daime in South Africa

South Africa is the only country ever known to have had any presence of Santo Daime, however it is believed that currently there are no works held there today.

Our source for this lies in only in two published accounts.

The first account was an academic paper published in 2013 titled “An account of healing depression using ayahuasca plant teacher medicine in a Santo Daime ritual” by Jean-Francois Sobiecki.

In this paper, Sobiecki talks about his experience drinking Daime in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a native of this city, and sought out the medicine in hopes to work with healing his depression – of which he reports it succeeded in doing so. Sobiecki is an ethnobotanist with university training in botany and medical anthropology and is training in traditional practices of South Africa. This account of the ceremony supposedly happened in October 2011.

The second account was published by Terrence Moon also in 2013 and is titled “Drinking the Spirit“. 

Moon talks about a work that happened near Cape Town, which is pretty far away from Johannesburg in distance. The article was posted and showed up in Google search results for people searching to drink the Daime or Ayahuasca in South Africa and got over 78 comments before the webpage was taken down forever.

On January 23rd 2018 a non-profit legal organization titled “SANTO DAIME SOUTH AFRICA” was opened up, but was deregistered due to lack of activity. 

It is speculated that this group has ceased all activity and there are currently no Santo Daime works happening in Africa, but we are uncertain.

We have absolutely no connection to any Daime group in South Africa and do not know these people, this expository article is for educational purposes only, and we unfortunately cannot help any African get in touch with any church.

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