The Hope of Liberation in World Religions

12: Orisha Traditions in the West

239 pinpointing exactly where the orisha chose to rest their pots in the Americas and the Caribbean is no easy task. They have danced and exchanged raffia with so many other gods commencing on Africa’s soil and abiding across the Atlantic to slave settlements in the African diaspora.1 Today, in the Black Atlantic world, beyond traditions claiming the orisha appellative, we see traces of them in religious cultures such as Vodou, Winti, Comfa, Kumina, and Spiritualist and Sanctified Black Christian traditions. The orisha can be examined as archetypes, principles, personalities, divinities, forces, energies, elements, and nature. In some senses, the orisha are as old as time, encompassing and surpassing all of creation. from a cultural slant, the orisha have come to rest in customs that comprise institutional religion and a spiritual orientation that now nurtures approximately thirty million people who pay homage to these illustrious and elusive entities. An estimated five million of these devotees make their homes in locations such as Salvador, Matanzas, Caracas, Tegucigalpa, panama City, port of Spain, Loiza, New York, South Carolina, Toronto, and Birmingham.2 Scholarly efforts to chronicle the dispersal of African religions throughout the Western hemisphere unveil a tangled and enduring history of the multidirectional movement of African peoples across and around the Atlantic under circumstances as varied as diplomatic missions, global expeditions, commercial ventures, human trafficking , indentured labor programs, evangelical enterprises, military conscription, back-to-Africa emigration schemes, exiting-Africa 12 oRIshatRaDItIons In the West —Dianne M. Stewart 240 — Dianne M. Stewart immigration schemes, and diaspora-inspired ancestral pilgrimages to the “Motherland.”3 Across these landscapes of encounter, the Yorubabased orisha tradition has mushroomed into present-day movements and spiritual families of omorisa (orisha initiates). Although it would be premature and in some circumstances incorrect to conclude that orisha traditions have roots as primitive as the auction blocks where the enslaved were portioned out to the highest bidders, at present, orisha is arguably the most celebrated African-derived religion in the West. In some regions across the Black Atlantic, orisha traditions have even furnished the wider society with defining cultural scripts, templates for African consciousness, and a metalanguage for African spirituality: consider how the names of oshun and Yemaya, feminine archetypes of beauty and power, ooze from the jazzed spoken word of Larenz Tate on the Love Jones soundtrack;4 cowrie shells mean something more than decorative adornment to Santeros in the streets of havana; and the term “ashe” has almost replaced “amen” in countless sanctuaries across the black world. orisha traditions, like other mainstream religions, broker today not just the secularization of the spiritual but also the consecration of the profane. If this is not enough to warrant a place for orisha among the established “world religions,” since the last decades of the twentieth century , orisha devotees worldwide have embraced a global awareness of Yoruba civilization and its theological import across local communities in Africa and the African diaspora. organizing under the comprehensive umbrella of the International Congress of orisa Tradition and Culture (orisa World Congress), practitioners and scholars of African -derived religions, especially orisha-inspired traditions, have been holding global meetings toward the formal recognition and official documentation of orisha as a world religion.5 As a result, efforts at centralization and institutionalization complement attempts to protect the legitimacy of local orisha expressions across the globe. This essay offers an elaboration of liberation theological motifs in orisha traditions in the West and is indebted to the mounting literature in this area, much of which is conceptually framed by theories of African retention and religious syncretism. To begin such a task,we cannot attribute to African religion any foundational liberation theological agenda as we find for example in the protest theologies of African North America and Latin America.6 African religion is not primarily oriented toward responding to social suffering. on the other hand, African religion has all the ingredients for liberation thought orisha Traditions in the West — 241 and praxis. In east Africa Nyabingi and Mau Mau rebels7 shrouded their skins and political convictions with African religion and the latter “saved our country from white rule and exploitation,” my Christian -identified Kenyan classmate once remarked with pride during a seminar discussion on African theology. We can consider a number of examples across Africa, from Queen Ya Asantewa’s military protest against British colonial occupation of the Gold Coast, to the Igbo women’s rebellion at Aba...