Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism

5: “This Religion Comes from Cuba!”: Race, Religion, and Contested Geographies

142 CHAPTER FIVE “This Religion Comes from Cuba!” Race, Religion, and Contested Geographies •• Why are we trying to recapture our experience by going through the Caribbean? The only link that we have through anything African is directly straight across the water to Africa. —Chief Adenibi Edubi Ifamyiwa Ajamu As late as the mid-1990s, words still echoed in Oseijeman Adefunmi’s head that were spoken to him some thirty years ago at a bembe drum ceremony. He and another African American devotee found themselves in conversation with a Cuban santera regarding the origins of the tradition Adefunmi called Yoruba. Adorned in a dashiki (an African-patterned multicolored shirt commonly worn in the 1960s), Adefunmi was approached by the Cuban santera, who inquired, “Why are you dressed like that?” Coming from a tradition where Cuban male santeros customarily wore white, European-style shirts, pants, and head coverings and female santeras wore white skirts, blouses, dresses, and head wraps, this Cuban santera considered Adefunmi rather oddly attired for the sacred ritual occasion. Adefunmi’s response must have seemed equally perplexing: “Well, this “This Religion Comes from Cuba!” 143 is the way that they dress in Africa.” To which the santera immediately responded, “Africa has nothing to do with this.” Adefunmi then explained, “But the gods and goddesses are all Africans.” Overhearing the exchange, another devotee interjected, “Well, you know the religion comes from Africa.” The Cuban santera immediately brought the conversation to a screeching halt, emphatically pronouncing, “What are you talking about? This religion comes from Cuba!”1 Cuban immigrants brought to America distinct interpretations of Yoruba religion that had been cultivated in the social, cultural, and political milieu of Cuba. African Americans, by contrast, wanted to emphasize their ancestral claims to Africa as well as their distinct national and racial interpretations of the religion as informed by their immediate U.S. context . Rather than debate the harrowing intricacies of authentication, I seek to unveil the growing sectarianism that resulted from the diverse ways in which the African American and Cuban communities sought to legitimize their claims to the orisa tradition.2 In the end, religious authority in North America was established not from a single transliteration of Yoruba religion but through ethnically competing discourses. From1960to1970,incidentsofconvergenceaswellasofconflictemerged betweenAfricanAmericanandCubanorisacommunitiesinNewYorkCity.3 This was the formative decade that produced a distinct African American imprint within the North American Yoruba movement, beginning with the establishment of Yoruba Temple in Harlem and culminating with the formation of Oyotunji African Village in South Carolina. During this decade, the two communities’ divergent cultural heritages created what Aina Olomo called “a chasm of alienation.”4 One major cause of this chasm was the infusion of black-nationalist politics into the religion and in Adefunmi’s case through his affiliations with black territorial nationalist groups such as the Republic of New Africa. Other areas of contestation between the two groups centeredontheuseofrepresentationaliconographyfromRomanCatholicism and Yoruba Temple’s very public display of orisa sacred ceremonies. At the very core of these religious tensions lay an inability of both groups to agree on how best to localize interpretations of Yoruba religion in the United States and at the same time maintain standardized criteria for religious authority. According to Beatriz Morales, “Cuban priests and priestesses resented the movement not only because it played down the role of the Catholic saints but also because it questioned the legitimacy of Christian influences.”5 chapter five 144 In this chapter, I seek not to simply iterate a narrative of religious conflict between African American and Cuban communities in the United States. As Babalosa John Mason, an active participant in this early Yoruba American history, cautions both scholars and practitioners, one should not rigidly polarize the relationship between the two communities, for, as Steven Gregory observes, their “ethnic differences were mitigated, to a large extent, by the complex relations of ritual kinship that bind practitioners together in culturally active religious groups.”6 Instead, this chapter examines an outgrowth of this ambiguous relationship of cooperation and conflict: the assertion of a “self-determined legitimacy” on the part of African Americans.7 With a growing yet precarious reliance on their own sense of agency, African Americans reshaped religious standards of orthodoxy and authority while adopting racial identity as a legitimate lens for meaning making within the tradition. Cubans and African Americans shared social and religious space in Harlem, New York. Yet what they did not share was a unified vision...