N.
625 N Nago SomeYoruba-speaking peoples are known as Nago. In French historical sources, this word was spelt “Nagot,” the French having sourced the term from Dahomey, which became one of the main French slave-trading regions in West Africa. The term then became used in transatlantic locations, among them Brazil and Jamaica. The word is an abbreviation of Anago, an omnibus ascription for the Ipokiya, Ifonyin, and Awori/Ahori subgroups of Yoruba-speaking peoples in what was once known as the Abeokuta province of Yorubaland, in today’s southwestern Nigeria. As such, the Nago come from the southwesterly edges of the Yoruba-speaking area of West Africa, and because of their frontier position alongside the former kingdom of Dahomey, they are also to be found among the Ewe-Fon peoples of southeastern Benin Republic (the former state of Dahomey). The designation Nago is not well recognized in present-day Jamaica, as the Yoruba seem to have constituted a very small portion of the enslaved and postslavery African population. The fact that a coastal area in the southerly Saint Catherine parish of the island bears the name Nago Head, or Nago’s Head, suggests that there may once have been a settlement of these people on a headland there. But the name is residually used self-ascriptively among third-generation remnants of small communities in the southwesterly parish of Westmoreland. These are the neighboring communities of Abekita atop a rocky mountain , and at its foothills are the villages of Waterworks and Dean’s Valley. The name Abekita is a reflex of the name Abeokuta associated with the main geological feature of southwestern Yorubaland, the massive rock inselberg that gave shelter to southward-fleeing factions in the Yoruba civil wars of the early nineteenth century. The rock provided a defensive refuge, and the town that grew up around it was called Abeokuta , which means “under the rock.” The Nago of Westmoreland revived their historical traditions by their choice of site and its related place-name. But these community founders also used the terms Yooba and Jesha as identificatory labels, indicating that not all their members originated in southern Yorubaland. Jesha was also a self-ascription used among some settlers in the hinterland of Port Maria in Saint Mary parish in northeastern Jamaica. Albion Mountain in this vicinity was one such site of Yoruba settlement. The Ijesha/ Jesha came from forested east-central Yorubaland, north of Ife, the empire’s spiritual center (compare Iyessá), while the Yoruba/Yooba hailed from the northern savanna-lands in which the political metropoles were located. The political importance of this group led to their label being adopted by Europeans to designate the entire constellation of peoples speaking various regional dialects of the same language. Other western Jamaica groups of Yoruba-speaking descendants call themselves Etu (usually spelt “ettu”), which is derived from the name of the ancestor commemoration held from time to time for wedding and funerary rites. Etu means “appeasement (for the ancestors),” and is the abbreviated form of eetu, which in its turn is a syncopation of etutu. These groups live in Hanover Parish, at villages such as Dias, Kingsvale, and Grange. The purpose and format of the etu ceremony bears comparison with the saraka practiced in the eastern Caribbean among Yoruba, Hausa, and other Africadescended groups as an annual remembrance for dead relatives of a family (see Rada; Rada—Saraka Ceremony Carriacou ). Drumming, song, and dance are elements in etu, while saltless food and goat sacrifices are offered to the spirits of the departed. During etu, a small mark in the shape of an “x” is traced with the blood of the slain animal on the forehead of the feast’s participants. A concluding rite is the serving of dried and grated kola nut, called by the Ewe term bizi. Among the identifiably Yoruba, cultural retentions of these groups are the ritual use of a few short songs and some seventyodd lexical items collected from various individuals in the late twentieth century. In addition, traditional foods include agidi (corn porridge), akara (bean fritter), gbegiri (bean stew), gusi (melon-seed stew), fufu (pounded boiled cassava, yam, or breadfruit), and ka (steamed cassava flour). The music of both the western and eastern Yoruba groups in Jamaica is characterized by the use of tin drums. These make a clattering noise and may thus be said to recapture the effect of the skekere or large beaded calabashes that are typical of the music of the coastal western...
OR
