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.
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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.
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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.
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"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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