Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism

Conclusion: “What We’re Looking for in Africa Is Already Here”: A Conclusion for the Twenty-first Century

311 Conclusion “What We’re Looking for in Africa Is Already Here” A Conclusion for the Twenty-first Century •• My observation among the practitioners of African religion is that African Americans don’t have enough confidence in ourselves and we always take a backseat for somebody to teach us as though we are blank, a chalkboard that don’t have anything written on it. Anyway, I think the world is waiting on our contribution to it. —Baba Medahochi Kofi Omowale Zannu African american yoruba did not physically return to the Old World of Africa but instead engaged in a “reinterrogation of the meaning of that Old World from the point of view of the New World.”1 Wrestling with questions of meaning, identity, and geosocial location, they, along with their diaspora counterparts, struggled to bring form and substance to the modern human complex Charles H. Long identifies as the “trans-Atlantic African.”2 With this novel identity evolved a new “defining reality,” one that included race, social experience, and dehumanizing resistors as meaningful components of religious reflection.3 More important, Long posits, “The Atlantic world introduces us to the globalization of the conclusion 312 meaning of humanity.”4 For Americans of African descent, their Atlantic world journey began with captivity and dehumanization and culminated in legal chattelization. Given their historical status as nonhuman property, one of the underlying goals of black religious-nationalist movements has been to inevitably find ways to rehumanize black materiality and resist the supremacy and dominance of a sanctioning Anglo imago dei. Approaching the study of African American Yoruba in North America as a religious historian has led me to view the quest for the religious meanings of Africa as acts of rehumanization, reenculturation, and revaluation in the diaspora. Since slavery, African Americans in the United States have used religion to combat moral bankruptcy, resist social brutality, and maintain human integrity. Because of the egregious apparatus of dehumanization visited upon African Americans throughout most of American social history, African Americans have consistently sought resistance strategies to rehumanize their social and spiritual selves. Within the context of Yoruba religion, these strategies included transforming images of Africa; reconfiguring national identity, creating new histories, identifying new origins, rethinking cultural norms; producing textual legacies; and reconstituting religious meaning. In the twentieth century, black religious nationalism became the space in which American social history, redefinitions of humanity, and divine meaning converged. Its theological conundrums were not new, and for diasporic blacks the antecedents rest in a time when, according to Charles H. Long, new orientational questions had to be asked: “To whom does one pray from the bowels of a slave ship? To the gods of Africa? To the gods of the masters of the slave vessels? . . . To whom does one pray?”5 For Long, “From the perspective of religious experience, this was the beginning of African American religion and culture.”6 As active agents in this history and religious culture, African American Yoruba since 1959 have chosen to pray to “the gods of Africa”—not African gods left behind in a perpetual ancient stasis, but transportable African gods who could be summoned to help navigate the “complex ambiguity of the Atlantic world.”7 In many ways Yoruba religion has become a metacultural phenomenon and “can no longer be conceptualized as confined to a provincial ethnic tradition.”8 African Americans in North America have come to represent one of the many communities of global orisa articulations engaging in a “protean improvisation” on Yoruba meaning in the twenty-first century.9 “What We’re Looking for in Africa Is Already Here” 313 They became not simply practitioners of a fixed historic Yoruba but major players in a dynamic contemporary global reorientation of orisa religious traditions. In a tradition that reveres 400+1 orisa divinities, there is continuous room for African American improvisation and perhaps even the contribution of its own North American feminine and warrior orisa (Marie Laveau, Nina Simone, Harriet Tubman, James Baldwin, Nat Turner, and so forth) to the orisa pantheon. For more than five decades, they have developed the orisa tradition in North America into an important repository for the spiritual “repossession of what they deemed their rightful inheritance—Africa.”10 At the same time they have enabled the “socialization” of a new religious order that included America.11 What distinguishs African Americans in the Yoruba tradition is their ability to approach the gods of Africa through...