God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (33 page)

Yoruba religion is by no means confined to its African homeland, however. Yoruba-derived religions are also scattered across the African diaspora created by the transatlantic slave trade—in Brazil and Cuba, Colombia and Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Grenada, St. Kitts and St. Vincent, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, Uruguay and Trinidad and Tobago. Yoruba slaves arrived by the millions in South America, the Caribbean, and the United States, as civil wars beset Yorubaland during the nineteenth century and victors sold off their spoils into slavery. These slaves had a huge impact on economic, cultural, and religious life in the Americas. “No African group,” writes the pioneering Yoruba scholar William Bascom, “has had greater influence on New World culture than the Yoruba.”
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In the New World, traditional African religions were denounced as “heathen” and often outlawed. Even drumming was prohibited in the seventeenth century in Haiti and severely restricted in later centuries in Brazil and Cuba. So Yoruba practitioners did what the Yoruba have been doing ever since their orisha of iron, Ogun, forged a path for the gods from heaven to earth: they adapted to difficult circumstances with courage and creativity. This was hard going in the United States, where the ratio of slaves to whites was low, the ratio of American-born to African-born slaves was high, and Protestant slave masters ruthlessly prohibited slave gatherings of any sort. But in Brazil and Cuba, which saw large numbers of Yoruba high priests, frequent arrivals of new slaves from the Old World, a high ratio of slaves to whites, a lingering slave trade (until the 1850s in Brazil and the 1860s in Cuba), and less slave owner opposition to dancing and drumming, Yoruba practitioners kept their religious traditions alive by marrying them to Catholicism. When ordered to cease and desist from the beliefs and practices of their ancestors, Yoruba slaves took their orishas underground and then resurrected them in the guise of the saints: Ogun as St. Peter; Yemoja as Our Lady of Regla; and Oya as St. Theresa. So things changed, and remained the same. Praise songs to these orishas continued to be sung in the Yoruba language and to Yoruba rhythms, but for the most part devotion now went forward in the idioms of Catholicism and the grammars of Spanish, French, and Portuguese. The overall tale, however, is one of continuity. The list of elements of Yoruba religion that survived the horrors of the Middle Passage and slavery runs to divination, spirit/body possession, drumming, dance, initiation, reincarnation, spiritual healing, sacrifice, and, of course, orisha devotion itself.

Were slaves self-consciously conning religious and political authorities by cross-dressing the orishas as Catholic saints and then celebrating their exploits on these saints’ feast days? Yes, says Soyinka. Their strategy was to “co-opt the roman catholic deities into the service of Yorùbá deities; then genuflect before them.”
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Some slaves may have been just that strategic, pretending to worship St. Peter when they were actually worshipping Ogun. But it is also possible that Santeria, Candomble, and their Yoruba-derived kin evolved in fits and starts, a marriage more of convenience than of cunning and camouflage. Though many practitioners today see the saints as masks put on the faces of orishas, others see orisha and saint alike as manifestations of the divinity that underlies and infuses each.

100 Million?

Today descendants of these slaves continue to preserve and practice the ways of their forebears under a variety of (dis)guises, including Santeria (literally “the way of the saints,” also known as Lukumi and La Regla De Ocha) in Cuba; Candomble, Umbanda, and Macumba in Brazil; the Orisha Movement (aka Shango) in Trinidad and Tobago; Kele in St. Lucia; and, to a lesser extent, Vodun in Haiti.
³¹
Many whites and Hispanics without any blood ties to Yorubaland also participate in these traditions, and orisha devotees, who were once almost entirely poor, can now be found among the middle classes. What these traditions share is a marriage to Catholicism plus fidelity to core techniques of orisha devotion such as divination, spirit/body possession, and sacrifice. This marriage has lasted because of the striking similarities between Roman Catholicism and Yoruba religion. Both operate in a cosmos with a Supreme Being at the top, human beings at the bottom, and a host of specialized intermediaries in between facilitating communication and exchange across the divine/human divide. And while intellectuals in both speculate about the afterlife, each is heavily invested at the popular level in everyday life. It is not beneath the orishas (or the saints) to care about our toothaches, our children, our promotions, or our lovers.

Because there are no central organizations of any sort for Candomble, Santeria, or their kin, there are no official numbers for adherents to Yoruba-derived religious traditions in the diaspora. The Yoruba penchant for secrecy makes even unofficial numbers elusive, and the stigma that these traditions are “primitive” and even “Satanic” keeps many practitioners under cover. Further complicating matters (and challenging deeply ingrained notions of how religion is supposed to work) is the fact that New World orisha devotees do not feel the need to choose between an identity as a Catholic and an identity as a practitioner of Candomble or Umbanda or Macumba or Santeria.

And then there is that small matter of what exactly we are trying to count. Those who have undergone initiations and had an orisha placed in their ori? If so, the numbers are admittedly quite small. Or those who have gone to diviners on matters of health, work, and love? If so, the numbers are quite large. Joseph Murphy, a professor in Georgetown’s Department of Theology, writes that he has “yet to meet a Cuban of any social class or racial category who has not at least once consulted (or, more circumspectly, ‘been taken to consult’) an
orisha
priest/ess about some problem.”
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This distinction may help make sense of the huge gap between census numbers for orisha devotion in Brazil and estimates thrown around by scholars. Yoruba religious traditions are particularly strong in Brazil, which saw the largest slave migrations of anywhere in the New World (about four million between the 1530s and the 1850s) and some of the largest ratios of slaves to free people. As the slave trade ended in the middle of the nineteenth century, slaves accounted for more than a third of Brazil’s total population and enjoyed majorities in cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia. So orisha devotion in Brazil is “very pervasive”—“part of the popular culture, and the Brazilian way of life.”
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Yet Brazil’s 2000 census found only 128,000 people who self-identified as practitioners of Candomble and 397,000 who self-identified as practitioners of Umbanda.
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How to reconcile these modest numbers with books that speak routinely of tens of millions of adherents
each
for Candomble and Umbanda? Perhaps the census figures reflect those who practice Afro-Brazilian traditions quite apart from any Catholic identity, while the more generous estimates account for people with multiple religious identities—those who, while still on the Catholic rolls, nonetheless attend orisha festivals, consult orisha diviners, and “make ebo” (sacrifice).

Happily, there is some good data about the institutional dimension of Candomble, which is the earliest, most resolutely African, and (census figures notwithstanding) most popular of the Yoruba-derived religions of Brazil. This data is particularly helpful in the northeastern state of Bahia, where orisha devotion is at least the equal of Catholic faith and probably its superior. Salvador da Bahia, this state’s capital, has been called the “Black Rome” because of its Afro-Brazilian population and its Catholic piety. It is said that there are 365 churches in the city, one for every day of the year. Though this makes a good story, the figure is likely exaggerated. Either way, Candomble terreiros far outnumber Catholic churches. Statewide, total terreiros skyrocketed from 67 in the 1940s to 480 in the 1960s to 1854 in 1989.
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Today there are well over two thousand, and not all of them of the storefront variety. In fact, some resemble evangelical megachurches. Ile Axe Opo Afonja, a terreiro founded in 1910 and run in the early twenty-first century by the charismatic Mãe Stella de Oxóssi, includes “a school, a daycare center, craft workshops, a clinic, and a museum spread across a multi-acre campus.”
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It attracts not just the down-and-out often associated with Afro-Brazilian religions but also prominent and well-to-do leaders in politics, business, education, and the arts.

One hundred million is the most commonly printed estimate for Yoruba practitioners worldwide, but total adherents—people who seek help from the orishas in some manner—probably top out at eight figures rather than nine. If Olupona and Rey are right, there are 25 million adherents in West Africa, making Yoruba religion the most widely practiced religious tradition on that continent after Islam and Christianity. Brazil, whose total population was 187 million in 2009, is home to at least another 10 to 25 million; Cuba (population 11 million) is home to at least two or three million more; and the United States has a few hundred thousand. Even by these conservative estimates, there are more adherents to Yoruba religion than there are Jews, Sikhs, Jains, or Zoroastrians, placing this tradition, on numbers alone, securely among the world’s top six religions.
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Yoruba religion is not only great in terms of numbers and geographic reach, however. It is also great in the sense of ancient and monumental. In ancient Africa, the Yoruba, who organized themselves in towns run by a ruler (
oba
) who also served as a religious head, were among the most urbanized of peoples. By the ninth century
C.E.
, their sacred capital of Ile-Ife was a thriving metropolis, and over the next few centuries Yoruba artists were creating objects of beauty out of terracotta and bronze that, according to Thompson, were the wonder of the West. Yoruba culture suffered through the rise of modernity under a combination of internal and external pressures, including foreign missions, colonialism, and civil war. Yet the Yoruba remain, according to Thompson, “creators of one of the premier cultures of the world.”
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And, I would add, of one of its premier religions. Just as the Bible has inspired the art of Bach, El Greco, and Toni Morrison, stories of the orishas have for centuries moved the hands and hearts of dancers, singers, novelists, painters, and poets in West Africa and beyond, including Morrison herself, whose 1998 novel
Paradise
features a Candomble priestess and a goddess reminiscent of the Candomble water orisha Yemanja (Yemoja in Yorubaland).

Mãe Stella, Oyotunji, and Africanization

Not everyone is happy with this diffusion of the Yoruba religious impulse across the New World, of course. Many evangelicals and Pentecostals denounce orisha devotion as witchcraft, sorcery, and demon worship. Many Catholic priests see Santeria and Candomble as bastardizations of the true faith. A lawyer who tried to shut down a Santeria center in Miami called Santeria “a cannibalistic, voodoo-like sect which attracts the worst elements of society.”
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Some Yoruba practitioners themselves see Santeria and Candomble as bastardizations. But rather than trying to purify their tradition of African superstitions, they are trying to decatholicize it. Like the Puritans of seventeenth-century England and New England, these reformers are intent on divorcing themselves from Catholic influences. But rather than looking to the Bible and the early Christian movement for models, they seek to restore the pristine traditions of the ancient Yoruba kingdoms.

In Brazil, the popular and powerful Bahian priestess Mãe Stella has challenged all Candomble practitioners to take off the fig leaf of the Catholic saints and worship African orishas in the open, without apology, guilt, or fear. Catholicism is no longer required, and Candomble is no longer outlawed, Stella reasons, so “the saints should be dumped, like a mask after Carnaval.”
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Another effort to take orisha devotion “back to Africa” is Oyotunji African Village, which aims to re-create what it imagines to be a precolonial Yoruba kingdom in the contemporary American South. Located near Sheldon in rural Beaufort County, South Carolina, Oyotunji (the name means “Oyo Rises Again”) was founded in 1970, but its roots go back to New York and the 1950s. Its founder, His Royal Highness Efuntola Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi (aka Walter King, 1928–2005), established the Order of Damballah Hwedo Ancestor Priests in 1956 and the Shango Temple (later renamed the Yoruba Temple) in 1959, both as refuges for African Americans interested in wearing African clothes, taking African names, and living an African lifestyle.

Adefunmi, who was raised on the teachings and institutions of the pioneering black nationalist Marcus Garvey, encountered various forms of African religion on trips he took as a young man to Egypt and Haiti. In 1959 in Cuba he was initiated into the Santeria priesthood of Obatala. But in keeping with his “back to Africa” commitments, his community aimed to purify itself of New World influences. To that end, Adefunmi was initiated into the Ifa priesthood in Nigeria in 1972. On a later trip to Nigeria he was coronated an oba in Ile-Ife in 1981. Despite efforts to strip Catholic (and Protestant) masks off New World Yoruba practice, many influences from Santeria remain at Oyotunji. However, life at this twenty-seven-acre community has diverted from Cuban practice on the gender front, where since the 1990s women had access to the Ifa priesthood, a responsibility out of reach for them in Havana and its environs.