American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World (28 page)

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Authors: Rod Davis

Tags: #Body; Mind & Spirit, #General, #Religion, #Ethnic & Tribal, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies, #test

BOOK: American Voudou: Journey Into a Hidden World
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Page 178
uncontrollable rear-end skid toward the lip of a deep rain gulley. Only because my fires found some small salvation of traction did I right the wheels and pop into the side road inches ahead of the semi's massive oncoming chrome grille. The passing air horn was deafening, and righteous.
My hand had knotted on the gear shift knob so tightly it hurt to loosen up. I was okay, though after I had taken a few deep breaths and moved down the rutted lane I had been seeking, I was still trembling from the adrenalin. Perhaps that heightened my next impression, the gradual transformation, as I drove, of the curtain of semitropical forest I had seen from the highway into a living tunnel of vines and trees, an unsettling, ambush-quality density of every hue and shape of green. Then, abruptly, I rounded a curve and the foliage parted. In the clearing before me was an almost unbelievable tableau that had changed little over the years.
Road coming into Oyotunji village.

 

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I paused at the untended and mostly symbolic sentry gate, where a half-fallen sign warned, "You Are Now Leaving the United States," and parked in a grassy clearing just outside. I could see up ahead several young boys, clad only in red waist-wraps, running down one of the dusty trails that laced the compound. A woman in white robes and white head scarf followed them, shouting something I couldn't make out in the Yoruba languagelikely a scolding.
The air was wet and thick as in New Orleans. I was already sweating as I walked through the gate and angled over to a shady patio within a quadrangle, or bazaar, of five or six stalls offering African clothing, jewelry, potions and wood carvings. Beyond the bazaar, Oyotunji stretched out for several hundred yards in every direction. The living quarters, open-air temples, dancing pavilions and shrines were off to the left. To the right, past an Elegba altar and a wake-up drum fashioned from an oil barrel, rose the walled enclosure known as the Afinthe royal compound. Within the Afin were the homes of the king and some of his wives and a half-dozen or more individual altars to all the major orisha. Everything had been built by hand, over the years, exactly as it would have been done in Nigeria or Dahomey.
To my surprise, no one was out. I walked into the main crossroads at the center of the village, then back to the patio and plopped into one of the molded plastic chairs. Not a soul. I thought about the afternoon when I'd first seen the place. I'd only stayed a few hours, just enough time for a quick tour, a visit with the king, and a cowrie shell reading by a haughty female Shango priestess. But the memory had stayed with me, like a glimpse of Xanadu, and I knew even then I would someday be back.
"It's a curious feeling just coming in here," the man who ruled the ten-acre medieval compound had told me. "You leave the highway and you twist and turn down a dirt road and then suddenly, you're here, in another context altogether. Everything

 

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Oyotunji village children.
is very different. Then you go back on the highway. You wonder if you were really there."
The heat made me drowsy and I nodded off for a half hour or more, awaking to the voice of a young girl, about nine or ten, who wanted to know if she could help me. On her forehead were three parallel scarsthe sign of a member of the royal family. I told her I was the man who had called the Obathe kingabout staying in the village for awhile.
The Oba wasn't there right now, she said, he had gone to town with her mother, Iya Orite. She said I was welcome to wait and that she'd tell the king I was there as soon as he got back. I could get something to drink at The Horseman, the girl said, and pointed to a small hut that served as the village's Carib-

 

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Oyotunji village Elegba shrine.
bean-style bistro. Then she excused herself to get ready for the festival. Of course. That's where everyone else was, too.
Throughout the year, the village honored the various orisha in rituals ranging from a day to more than a week. Last month's celebration had been for Shango. This month the honoree was Yemonja. A heavy schedule of events would play out all weeka walkabout to all the shrines of the village for Elegba, then an even larger parade for the egun, the dead ancestors, and then a procession and dances for Yemonja, to be followed by a trip to the beach at Hunting Island to present the goddess to the sea. The public was invited to watch some eventstourists and education were important sources of incomebut other ceremonies, particularly the sacrifices, were closed to strangers.
No one was in The Horseman to sell me a coke, so I went back to the bazaar and waited. As usual in the village, things seemed to be running late. But I didn't mind. In truth, my presence for the Yemonja festival was coincidental. I hadn't known

 

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of its timing until I had called the king from my R&R in Savannah several days earlier. I stretched back in my chair and relaxed. I had nowhere to go, nobody to badger. I was where I needed to be.
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Although the culture of the orisha in America has survived and in some places today thrives anew, nowhere else has it been so devoutly and comprehensively preserved as in Oyotunji. Life is an African voudou village from dress to manners to food to laws. Yet Oyotunji is not an African village, for Oyotunji is not a place that grew in Africa. It is a place in which Africa grows. ''Oyo" is a Yoruba word for horseman and also for a famous Yoruba city. "Tunji" means return. Oyo-tunji is the return of the horseman, the return of African civilizationin America.
It is also the result of the vision, perhaps the obsession, of the man I was waiting to see again. And I finally did, as the afternoon stretched out and a late model gray Nissan sedan emerged from the blind turn of thick trees up the lane. "It's the Oba," said one of the teenage boys I'd seen earlier, this time not being chased, but hurrying through the patio carrying a ceremonial conga drum.
As the car reached the sentry port, I could see the boy was right. Oba Oseijeman Adefumni I, formerly Walter "Serge" King of Detroit, a Harlem artist who had virtually reintroduced orisha voudou to black Americans and was now the country's preeminent African-American priest, eased the car to a stop and rolled down the driver's side window. His currently favored wife, Iya Orite, dressed in wrap-around lapa, coiffed with powdered gray dreadlocks, sat in the passenger seat. She looked good and so did he, although he was more than twice her age. At sixty-two, the Oba was still virile and handsomegoateed, strong, square-jawed, light-toned face and solid body under his brown dashiki. He had taken five wives altogether, who had born him twenty-

 

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one children and grandchildren, all of them consecrated to the orisha.
Miwa, the king's twenty-year-old daughter by Iya Orite, emerged from the Office of Tourismthe thatched roof hut used to distribute books, pamphlets and guide materials to the all-too-few visitors. When she got to the driver's side window, the Oba gave her a Burger King sack. He and his wife drove away before I could catch his eye.
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You only had to think about the incredibleness of Oyotunji to understand the scope of what the Oba had accomplishedthe creation of an American mecca for the worship, study and contemporary living of orisha voudou culture. Before Oyotunji, any black Americans interested in the religion had to learn the mysteries and rituals in much the manner Lorita Mitchell and Serge King had been forced to dothrough Cubans, through the half-remembered distortions of hoodoo. Oyotunji changed everything. Its emphasis on strict adherence to Yoruba ritual and the exclusion of Catholic syncretizationvoudou without Christianityshook the American voudou community to its core and separated it, not always happily, from its Cuban mentors.
By the time Serge King, who had changed his name to Efuntola and become a priest of Obatala, journeyed to Ife, Nigeria in 1981, the purposefully distinct identity of Oyotunji as an African bastion was well entrenched. In Ife, an ancient and holy city of the orisha, Efuntola was invested with royal lineage and instructed by the King of Ife to return to North America to perpetuate a true voudou kingdom. He took the royal title, Oba, by which he is known even to rivals in the santeria community.
When the Oba began his singular journey toward the African grail, however, he had little more in mind than finding out more about his own roots. Trying to make a living as an artist and dancer in Harlem in the fifties, he began to run in circles

 

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which included Cubans who had come to New York in the pre-Revolutionary decades when the trade routes of art and commerce to Havana were vibrant and well-plied. Some of the Cubans he met were especially fascinating. They bore more than a foreign tongue and nationality. They bore foreign gods. The young King wasn't sure at first what he thought of santeria, but he was excited about its overwhelming African content. He began attending ceremonies.
In 1959, King and artist Chris Oliana journeyed to Matanzas, Cuba, to become, or so it is believed, the first African Americans in recent memory to be fully initiated in African voudou, even though it was technically santeria. King returned a priest of Obatala, and Africanized his name to Baba Oseijeman Efuntola. Oliana became a priest of Shango.
Returning to New York, the two pilgrims opened the Shango Temple on East 125th Street in Harlem. During the next decade, Efuntola began to develop not only his own expertise as a priest, but his idea for an African-American renaissance of orisha voudou. He was sidetracked in the sixties by politics, and for a time served as minister of culture to the Republic of New Afrika party, a black separatist organization. But Efuntola didn't believe the solution to the cultural dislocation of African Americans could be resolved through politics. It went deeper than that. It went straight into the loss of the soul. The loss of soul came from the loss of voudou.
By 1970, he was ready to leave New York. Quarrels had been increasing between the Cubans and the African Americans. The Cubans demanded too much; for instance, that the Americans worship African deities through Spanish names, calling Elegba down as Elleggua, Yemonja as Yemaya, Shango as Changó and Ifa by an altogether different name, Orunmila. It wasn't that Efuntola and the group which gathered around him were anti-Cuban. They knew that had it not been for the Africans in Cuba, powerful secrets, especially Ifa divination, might have been lost

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