Callaloo

In this remarkable study, Tracey E. Hucks provides a vivid portrait of an understudied aspect of African American religious life in the twentieth century, namely that of the communities of worshippers of traditional Yoruba practices here in the United States. She centers her analysis on the figure of Oseijeman Adefunmi (1928–2005), a man at the heart of this mid-twentieth century movement to expand the worship of Yoruba entities from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean communities of New York City to African Americans. This text provides an extensive history of these religious practices, beginning with the late-nineteenth-century writings of Henry McNeal Turner and their influence on a young Walter King to the present day Oyotunji Village, the community he founded in South Carolina.

Hucks divides her extensive analysis into two parts, “The Harlem Years” and “African American Yoruba since 1970.” In her introduction, “The Harlem Window,” Hucks makes clear the terms of her study: “Overall, this text is less concerned with measuring the orthodoxy or authenticity of African American Yoruba religiosity than with examining it as one of many locally expressive Yoruba cultural sites across the globe” (4). Whereas scholars have examined precepts of Yoruba worship in Cuba (where it is known as Regla de Ocha / Lucumí / or Santería), Brazil (where it is known as Candomblé Nagô), and in the Spanish Caribbean communities in the United States, the histories of the practice of these religions have not been written, for the most part. Hucks’s study is the first, to my knowledge, to focus exclusively on Yoruba worship by African American practitioners. [End Page 234]

In the first chapter, “’We Have as Much Right . . . to Believe that God Is a Negro’: Religious Nationalism and the Rehumanization of Blackness,” Hucks offers a historical context whereby the reader learns of efforts by late-nineteenth-century African American preachers such as Henry McNeal Turner to infuse depictions of the divine with images of Blackness. After offering a genealogy of the insidious discourse of Africa and Blackness as symbols of savagery in Western Europe and is colonies, she writes of a Black religious nationalism here in the United States that rescues Africa. In place of primitivism, Africa comes to be considered “a powerful sociocultural and religious metaphor of self-designation, legitimacy, and ancestral homeland and territoriality” (37).

She follows this with her second chapter, “’Here I Is Where I Has Longed to Be’: Racial Agency, Urban Religion, and the Early Years of Walter Eugene King.” In the person of Walter King, Hucks identifies a man who comes to symbolize a variety of Black nationalist movements of the twentieth century in the United States, who in his very person unites these seemingly disparate threads woven together in spite of different languages. It is in this chapter that the reader comes to understand the breadth of Hucks’s research, as her interviews with King, later known as Oseijeman Adefunmi, come to the fore. In addition to more well-known influences such as Marcus Garvey, he cites the writings of J. A. Rogers, a popular journalist and Black nationalist; George Washington Williams, author of History of the Negro Race in American from 1619 to 1880; and Mbonu Ojike, author of My Africa, as inspiring him to seek an African God. Hucks then reminds her reader of the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA) as well as the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) as movements that nourished her subject in his spiritual search for the Black divine. She ends the chapter by bringing together Katherine Dunham’s Dance Company, which staged dances of African Diasporic religions such as Vodoun, Santería, and Candomblé, with the newly emergent Cuban exile community in New York City in the early 1960s.

In the third chapter, “Harlem Yoruba, Orisha-Vodu, and the Making of ‘New Oyo,’” Hucks explores how Adefunmi and others like him transformed Cuban Santería, the syncretized religion that blends Catholicism with the traditional Yoruba religion, into the African American Yoruba...