Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism

8: “Afrikan Americans in the U.S.A. Bring Something Different to Ifa”: Indigenizing Yoruba Religious Cultures

271 CHAPTER EIGHT “Afrikan Americans in the U.S.A.Bring Something Different to Ifa” Indigenizing Yoruba Religious Cultures •• I’d jump up dar and den and holler and shout and sing and pat, and dey would all cotch de words and I’d sing it to some old shout song I’d heard ’em sing from Africa, and dey’d all take it up and keep at it, and keep a-addin’ to it. . . . —Narrative of a former slave Beginning in the late 1950s andonto the twenty-firstcentury,African Americans have carved out their own distinct interpretations of the Yoruba world. The North American social context has yielded a surplus of new meanings for African Americans who “keep a-addin’ to” the global Yoruba tradition. As historian Kim D. Butler observes, “Each diaspora has unique historical circumstances,” and its “choices of identity.”1 Although specific ethnic communities might try to confer strictures of orthodoxy and orthopraxy upon the orisa, it is their sinuous, porous, and supple nature that accommodates innovation, resourcefulness, and local indigenizations. In this chapter, indigenizing Yoruba religious culture is defined not so much in terms of primordial origins as it is in terms of the intricate chapter eight 272 processes that bring about ritual, cultural, theological, and literary mechanisms of localization. Peter Hulme’s concept of indigeneity is “an avowal of ethnic distinctiveness and national sovereignty based on the historical claim to be in some sense the descendants of the earliest inhabitants of a particular place.” I use it here to examine the complex paradox that while Yoruba indigeneity occurs in North America, it is the descent from the “particular place” of Africa that bestows authority in these efforts.2 Since the late 1950s, four basic influences have helped to determine the ways Yoruba practice has been indigenized on North American soil. First, Yoruba religion assumed powerful new religious and social meaning within a diasporic American context where identity had long been heavily racialized. Social meanings of blackness and whiteness in North America form relevant subtexts that often define Yoruba religious identity in America. Yoruba religion has allowed ancestral connections to be reestablished , restored, and renewed for native-born black North Americans in a context where racialized identity is multifunctional. Second, the proliferation of religious literatures and texts has influenced the indigenization of African American Yoruba. Most practitioners possess extensive libraries that supplement their religious practice, challenging conventionally held notions of Yoruba religion as an exclusively oral tradition. These libraries provide informational accessibility to the tradition and include volumes on the divinatory stories of Ifa, the personalities and characteristics of the orisa, the complexities of divination, and the fundamentals of Yoruba language and ritual song. Third, the boundaries circumscribing Yoruba American identity often possess an elastic quality that readily accommodates both metaphysical sciences and other global traditions such as Christianity and Eastern practices. As discussed in chapter 7, this permeability has enabled African Americans to create religious systems that fluidly engage Yoruba and other spiritual traditions. Finally, as an important part of their indigenizing efforts, African American Yoruba seek to revere and affirm the legitimacy of the spiritual practices of their ancestors born not only in Africa but in North America. These North American cultivated practices are often embraced within a larger vision of what Baba Medahochi labels Afrikan Spiritual Unity, which celebrates and selectively draws from both African and black diasporic sacred knowledge. Working in tandem with the many efforts to rehumanize the meaning of blackness in this Atlantic basin, African Americans in the final analysis “Afrikan Americans in the U.S.A. . . .” 273 indigenized Yoruba religious practices and kept “a-addin’ to it” in order to accommodate their immediate social, theological, and ritual needs in America. According to Philadelphia priest Oba Sekou Olayinka, the results were an array of innovative, creative contributions to the orisa tradition in North America—what he fittingly terms African Americanisms.3 Yoruba Religion and American Racial Discourse God dreamed of heroes, wise men, and powerful women She sang of genius, sorcerer, and inventress Our Race was born. —John Mason, Orin Orisa4 Often used as a mode of religious and cultural authority, race discourse has shaped the ways that notions of authenticity, legitimacy, orthodoxy, ownership , inclusion, and exclusion are negotiated within American Yoruba identity politics. In the twentieth century, race emerged as a dominant theme in the relationship between African American and Anglo-Cuban devotees. In the twenty...