I wrote this following my uncle's funeral for a Nigerian newspaper aimed at Yoruba people. A lot of them were PISSED but I didn't give a fukk.
I just buried my uncle, Chief Adedayo Olugundudu, who spent his life being the vanguard of the Yoruba faith. Installed as the first Araba of the US & Puerto Rico by the former Ooni Sijuwade, he died having published three books on the spiritual aspects of Yoruba and was a world-renowned Babalowo.
Watching the Puerto Rican, African American, Brazilian, and Trinidadian Ifa followers bury my uncle in a traditional Yoruba ceremony with the pomp and pageantry of the old ways was a testament to his work. But for me, it was also a bit of an embarrassment. We as Yorubas run away from that part of us, running away from who we spiritually are and what we as Yorubas created, opting to call it deviltry. I've always had an unease as a Christian, knowing the route taken for this foreign faith we call our own and what my folks had to forego to take it on. Being an Ife prince myself, it makes it all the more unsettling.
So, as I sat there watching folks outside of Yorubaland go so hard carrying traditions and following a faith we as Yorubas distance ourselves from, I felt a sort of way. I encountered guilt. But as a friend of mine said when discussing this with him, the diaspora keep the tradition more as they are hungry for it while we, in our need to be traditional, do not.
So let's celebrate the style and sophistication we saw from the Ijebu people my mom talked to me about as a kid, saying no one parties better or shows out more than them. But let's not be comfortable in only embracing certain aspects of who we are while foregoing other parts. I personally do not have that comfort, knowing that we collectively as Yoruba people cast aside a major part of who we are while the diaspora outside of Nigeria carry it further.
I believe my uncle would have wanted his passing to make us pause and reflect on the work he put in carrying on our spiritual traditions. It’s certainly given me reason.
This is a great article, it would be great if you could DM it to me?
I think something that Africans sometimes miss and would help to adjust in the dialogue about identity and culture, is the perspective towards African Diasporians as knowing “less”.
Africa and The Americas were both being colonized at the same time.
Certain Traditions were preserved in The Americas that weren’t kept in Africa.
Africans even travel to Suriname, Haiti, Cuba and Brazil to recover what was lost on the continent, but was preserved there.
It makes sense because of the history of these countries.
For example.
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Winti from Suriname being the only Diasporian ATR that never syncretized with Christianity to survive, because of its extreme secrecy until 1971, when the ban on its practice was lifted.
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Vodou from Haiti being able to be practiced under own agency and self-determination after their self-liberation in 1804.
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Lucumi / Santería from Cuba being able to be practiced in the heart of Havana and Matanzas.
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Candomblé from Brazil being able to be practiced by large Black communities.
Diasporian ATRs have songs from Ancient times being passed on generation on generation to preserve connections to Africa, down to the Kingdoms they were from.
The highest amount of Africanism in the Americas are not surprisingly found in the Diasporians ATRs and Creole languages.
Ironically, these Africanisms that are a testimony of African identity and African cultural retention in the Americas are the most demonized and under attack from countless directions.
• White ppl, often Christian
• own Black ppl, often Christian
• non-Black ppl of different religious backgrounds
• and the most saddest one of all, Christian and Muslim Africans themselves who they inherited and preserved these traditions from.
At the same time, the most beautiful connections happen between African Diasporians and continental Africans that are open to ATRs too.
How they/we discuss similarities, preservations and adaptations in our ATRs are some of the most wholesome and healing interactions I’ve ever seen and experienced.
and shatters everything Black Americans especially learned in the church. Jesus (you heard that correctly) was not who we should be worshipping, he was a human Nzambi Mpungu spoke through, but learned the Most High can speak through anybody he chooses is worthy. We also learned of Nzambici is the female counterpart. We were taught wrong about the Creator, that's a different entity that below Nzambi Mpungu and Nzambici who is more hands on with what goes on Earth, and then you have the Holy Ancestors. We're communal and in a group like other ATR, it's a closed practice, it opens your third eye to a higher level of consciousness and even go into how there's actually several layers of Heaven and Hell and the spiritual realm is more complex and of course how the "devil" and "Satan" is made up B.S. because ATR doesn't not belief in that, however, there are demonic entities and ancestors (yes, we have those) and the true origins of Black African people and the indigenous people comes from a more higher plane which you have to be initiated to go further than that.