In August 2002, Nigerian National Television broadcasted live coverage of the second Black Heritage Festival, which the Nigerian state organized to "reconcile Africans in diaspora with their lost roots." The attendees were mostly comprised of African Americans from the United States. They converged on the former slave port of Badagry in Lagos State to attend lectures, music and dance performances, and other events organized to pay tribute to ancestors lost to the transatlantic slave trade, as well as to welcome home the self-designated descendents of those ancestors. Footage of black Americans wearing traditional Yoruba clothing, dancing to Yoruba drumming, and attending lectures on the Yoruba orisa religion appeared on television.
In the weeks following the broadcast, many of my Nigerian friends, especially those who I was working with on my research on Yoruba Christian transnational networks, asked if I had seen the broadcast. They wanted to know about the Americans who were in attendance. For many of them, the fact that Yoruba traditional religion was practiced in locales distant from Nigeria was a source of cultural pride and evidence of the strength of their heritage, even though they had rejected such religious practices in exchange for Christianity. But several questions lurked in their minds: How had the Americans learned about Yoruba traditional religion and how did they know how to practice it? And most crucially, why were they embracing a "pagan" religion which most Yoruba Christians recognized as dangerous and "backwards"?
Mapping Yoruba Networks, by Kamari Maxine Clarke, goes a long way towards answering the nagging questions posed by my Nigerian friends. Clarke's ethnography focuses on Oyotunji Village in South Carolina, a community of Yoruba revivalists who not only practice Yoruba orisa religion, but also shape their lives around traditional Yoruba political and domestic conventions. However, Clarke attempts go beyond explaining the how and why of Yoruba revivalism. She is especially interested in understanding Oyotunji as a link in a transnational religious network, and the book is based on multisited field research, which took her from Yoruba revivalist communities in the Bronx and South Carolina, to Yoruba towns in Nigeria, to archives in Ibadan, London, and Berkeley. Her ethnography is a model for practicing transnational anthropology and forms a significant contribution to studies of religion in the African diaspora.
The first part of the book describes the origin and history of Yoruba religion practiced by African Americans. Clarke traces the movement of orisa religious practices from the collapse of the Oyo empire in precolonial Nigeria, and the ensuing inter-Yoruba wars of the nineteenth century through which people from southwestern Nigeria were sold into transatlantic slavery. She describes how slaves brought their religious practices with them, and how these practices were transformed into hybrid religions such as Santeria on plantations in Cuba. In the 1970s, Cubans and African Americans interacted in U.S. cities, most notably in New York City, producing another transformation in orisa worship, as groups of Black nationalists embraced certain aspects of Santeria, and produced a new religious form that they called orisa voodoo. The Yoruba Temple in New York City and later Oyotunji Village in South Carolina were the products of this most recent transformation of Yoruba religious practices.
Clarke connects this religious history to the twentieth-century transformation of African American racial imaginaries from those based on biological and slave-based narratives to narratives based on African nobility and heritage, with the idea of the African continent as homeland central. Describing the development of Black nationalist projects (Garveyism, Pan-Africanism, and other Back-to-African movements), the depiction of African heritage in television programs such as Roots or Henry Louis Gates' program on African Civilizations, and the commercialization of black heritage through practices such as Kwanzaa, Clarke describes how academic and popular representations of blackness in the United States changed over time. These changes in turn were influential for the shift to a more self-consciously African identity for many African-Americans. Clarke observes that this was the case for Serge King, who, upon founding Oyotunji Village, changed his name to Oba Adefunmi I. He currently rules there as its king.
The question of how Oyotunji community members came to not only practice orisa religion, but more importantly to recognize themselves as descendents of Yoruba noble ancestors is one of the more interesting problems focused on in the book. Most historians of transatlantic slavery agree that the majority of enslaved Yorubas were brought to the Caribbean and South America, not the United States. Clarke describes the logics and practices used by Oyotunji practitioners to construct their Yoruba roots, which have been central to their effort to resignify the shame of slavery into black empowerment and redemption. One of the most interesting ways in which this is done by Oyotunji practitioners is through the practice of "roots readings." Clarke observed more than one hundred of these divinatory sessions, in which African Americans visit the Oyotunji community in search of religious advice and new spiritual possibilities through which they can escape the racism they encounter in the United States. Clarke describes the ways in which Oyotunji priests draw on Yoruba linguistic and ritual forms in order to produce a form of sacred and legal authority that transforms the client from a victim of slavery to a descendant of African nobility.
Clarke's conclusion about the ways in which Oyotunji practitioners use Yoruba religion as a form of resistance to United States racism is provocative. The final chapter of Mapping Yoruba Networks, which examines Oyotunji conceptions of gender as articulated through familial and legal hierarchical institutions, concludes with a claim that Yoruba revivalism as practiced in Oyotunji village is an attempt to "render the invisible visible;" a description of the a means through which African Americans struggle with injustices such as slavery, racism and colonization through an insistence on ancestral connections (to Yoruba religious and legal organization) over national or state-based connections (to those of the United States).
While Clarke accomplishes a monumental job of connecting the various strands that make up the transnational network of Yoruba orisa practitioners, her analysis of the Nigerian side of the equation could be deeper. She says little, for example, about the motivations of the Nigerian state in organizing a festival for black heritage travelers. While many Nigerians would welcome Oyotunji visitors, and go out of their way to teach them about Yoruba practices in the hopes of a financial return, most Nigerians would have a cynical view of Oyotunji claims to being the true claimants to the Oyo Empire, especially given that it is their US passports that allow Oyotunji community members to travel easily to Nigeria to learn about their "heritage" in the first place. Indeed, in many ways the essentialist racial and gender politics practiced in Oyotunji village reintrenches divides and reinscribes certain stereotypes in black hierarchies.
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Mapping Yoruba Networks is a welcome contribution to the study of the cultural and religious forms produced in the Black Atlantic. Wonderful photographs and detailed ritual and religious texts add to the ethnographic richness of Clarke's account. While the theoretical and academic language of the text may challenge general readers, those who read it will be rewarded with a nuanced and unique understanding of the ways in which Yoruba traditional religion came to be put to use for the purposes of a new form of racial identity in the United States.
Vicki L. Brennan is a Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute and a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is currently completing her dissertation entitled "Singing the Same Song": Music, Migration and Translocality in Yoruba Churches, on Yoruba Christian church music and its connection to transnational religious and economic circuits.
