Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism

Tracey E. Hucks, Davíd Carrasco

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780826350756
• eBook ISBN: 9780826350770
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: History of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring the Yoruba tradition in the United States, Hucks begins with the story of Nana Oseijeman Adefunmi’s personal search for identity and meaning as a young man in Detroit in the 1930s and 1940s. She traces his development as an artist, religious leader, and founder of several African-influenced religio-cultural projects in Harlem and later in the South. Adefunmi was part of a generation of young migrants attracted to the bohemian lifestyle of New York City and the black nationalist fervor of Harlem. Cofounding Shango Temple in 1959, Yoruba Temple in 1960, and Oyotunji African Village in 1970, Adefunmi and other African Americans in that period renamed themselves “Yorubas” and engaged in the task of transforming Cuban Santer'a into a new religious expression that satisfied their racial and nationalist leanings and eventually helped to place African Americans on a global religious schema alongside other Yoruba practitioners in Africa and the diaspora.

Alongside the story of Adefunmi, Hucks weaves historical and sociological analyses of the relationship between black cultural nationalism and reinterpretations of the meaning of Africa from within the African American community.

Part One: The Harlem Years

Chapter I: “We Have as Much Right … to Believe that God Is a Negro”

Religious Nationalism and the Rehumanization of Blackness

Described as the “vociferous and controversial bishop” of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Henry McNeal Turner asked on February 1, 1898, “Why should not the Negro believe that he resembles God as much as other people?”1 In the late nineteenth century, Turner believed that African Americans had “as much right … to believe that God is a Negro” as “buckra or white people have to believe that God is a fine looking, … ornamented white man.”2 Severely criticizing “all the fool Negroes” who believed that God was a “white-skinned, blue-eyed, straight-haired” and “finely robed white gentlemen,” Turner thought it debilitating to the psyche of African Americans not to believe that the image of God was in fact “symbolized in themselves.”3 He was decisive in his position: “We certainly protest against God being white at all.”4 Turner argued for an implicit ontological and anthropological correspondence between the image of God and the humanity of black people. This correspondence subversively undermined Western legacies of racial cosmogony that for centuries had considered black people aberrations and negations of the divine Godhead.

For Turner, bridging the inherited dichotomy between black materiality and divine essence was as much about religious identification as it was about geographical location. He believed America to be a country where “white represents God, and black the devil”; thus African Americans inevitably inherited a socialized ontological deficiency and would remain “obsequious believers in their own inferiority.”5 He reasoned that as long as the Negro remained among whites in America, “the Negro will believe that the devil is black and that he (the Negro) favors the devil, and that God is white and that he (the Negro) bears no resemblance to Him.”6 As a consequence, Turner staunchly advocated voluntary emigrations to Africa, viewing the “home” continent as “the one place that offers … manhood and freedom” for African Americans.7

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Turner believed that African Americans harbored a collective need to “find a domain” that rejected the demonization of blackness and precluded its “contemptuous and degrading” effects upon the black soul.8 Black liberation theologian James H. Cone supportively argues that “in a society where blacks have been enslaved and segregated for nearly four centuries by whites because of their color and where evil has been portrayed as ‘black’ and good as ‘white’ in religious and cultural values, the idea that ‘God is black’ is not only theologically defensible, but is a necessary corrective against the power of domination.”9 This sentiment would carry over into African American Yoruba theology when more than one hundred years after Turner, Baba Akinkugbe Karade would similarly declare, “We Africans must see the Creator and the angelic forces in our image just like any other culture.”10 For African Americans like Karade, Yoruba expression not only provides a reifying of blackness within the realm of the sacred but also what he calls a “deifying” of African American experience in light of its slave past.11

More than a century preceding African American Yoruba, Turner helped to lay the groundwork for a tridimensional nationalism that solidly placed religious reflection alongside the dual traditional nationalist goals of sociopolitical autonomy and sovereign nationhood. Therefore, while black-nationalist advocates like Turner were more commonly political in their agenda, scope, and orientation, they also readily employed religious and theological approaches as necessary strategies for rehumanizing pejorative impressions of blackness. Within the early nationalist context of Bishop Turner and later within the twentieth-century context of the African American Yoruba movement, religion functioned as an important stratum for confronting the historical ways that blackness figuratively presaged evil and human negation. With religious appeals to an African God, the Yoruba movement six decades after Turner similarly countered and encountered challenges of the sociopolitical invisibility of African Americans, the internalization of black inferiority, and, most acutely, the heathenization, pathologization, and demonization of blackness.

Within nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America, black-nationalist discourses circuitously responded to religious debates several centuries old that equated the blackness of Africans to evil and to incarnations in Satan or the devil. Within these debates religion was almost always the source of these perverse racial ruminations. Even more striking is that this early conundrum of religion and insidious racialization was so enduring that it required African Americans to defend the beauty of blackness and protect the integrity of Africa well into the 1960s. In general, Yoruba Americans, like their nationalist predecessors and other black social movement groups, used religious symbolism and language in their struggle “to escape the biologization of their socially and politically constructed subordination” as determined through their designated and marked blackness.12

Scholars such as Winthrop Jordan, Joseph Washington, Robert Hood, David Goldberg, and Sylvester Johnson document the prevailing association of blackness with evil, the sinister, the fearful, the diabolic, the licentious, and the morally degenerate within English and English-American religious lore.13 If traced along an exegetical biblical trajectory, scholars such as David M. Goldenberg in his The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and Sylvester A. Johnson in The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God periodize this blackness-as-evil paradigm beginning in early antiquity and extending well into the modern periods in Europe and America. According to Johnson, Europeans and their descendants in America designated the descendants of Africa “as (questionably) human beings of a different kind.”14 European and European Americans developed a complex relationship of “negrophilia” that “primitivized,” subhumanized, and imprisoned African subjectivity in a “complex semiology” of racial and religious signs and symbols.15 As James W. Perkinson argues, Europeans were able to “conjure” demons, terror, and evil by mapping these on to a racial blackness while at the same time shielding whiteness from all inflections of deviance.16

A Western portfolio of anti-blackness emerged throughout Europe and America that historian of religion Joseph R. Washington persuasively argues “can only be understood as a religion.”17 According to Washington, “When the Devil and black people are equated or related and thus condemned, anti-blackness is anti-Blackness personified. I define anti-Blackness as a religion because that is what [it] is; religion is the greatest power of humankind for evil and/or good, but, it is not, like the religion of anti-Blackness, an unmitigated evil.”18 Washington maintains that the intense “spirit of malevolence” with which blackness was brutally negated in the Western world can best be equated to the passion of religious fervor. For Washington, “anti-Blackness” as it relates to African-descended people became “a learned response embellished with religion” that would then “recede into the permanent condition of anti-blackness [an ancient, historical primordial frame of reference], correspondent with the laws of nature, only through the process of unlearning combined with dereligionization.”19 As such, “anti-Blackness” results in “an anti-people religious spirit, or a spirited religion, antiblackness,” where it can become “most dehumanizing.”20 In other words, this occurs when historical signifiers of blackness as evil (anti-Blackness) evolve into direct human associations with a particular racial or ethnic group.

Some twenty years after Washington, Sylvester A. Johnson’s work would revisit this religio-racial analysis with even more precision. According to Johnson, “nineteenth-century American race discourse, whether religious or scientific, was persistently theological. Race ideas bore immediate implications for claims about the deity and about human access to divine knowledge and divine identity” and “the most enduring renditions of these claims identified the white race as first peoples who had first knowledge of the one true God.”21 Johnson concluded what was at stake theologically “was not a mere association between white identity and the Christian religion.” At stake was something more profoundly significant, what Johnson insightfully calls “the race-ing of divinity.”22

African American nationalists like Henry McNeal Turner, Marcus Garvey, and decades later, African American Yoruba leader Oseijeman Adefunmi felt compelled, as a consequence, to counter-race the divinity making God Negro in the nineteenth century, Black in the early twentieth century, and African in the mid-twentieth century. This need to counter-race the divinity, I argue, emerged in direct response to the demonic and pejorative “race-ing” of black existence by many Europeans and Euro-Americans who categorically severed black humanity and personhood from ultimate Divinity.23 Within this quasi-theological world view, negative tropes of blackness were mutable within early Christianity and later became easily equated with raced black corporeal beings by large populations of European Christians, a trend intensified with the onset of the transatlantic slave trade. Johnson argues, more specifically, that Anglo religious identity in early America cannot be distinguished from the “confluence between the religious and the racial” and that “ultimately, it confounded attempts to image/perceive the humanity of the Negro, and it bred incredible mythologies of ontological whiteness.” The confluence of race and biblical narrative, in other words, is rightly viewed as an anthropological concern because it principally regards the question of which people are treated as human beings and which are not.24 Collectively, Washington’s notion of the “religious” and Johnson’s notion of the “theological” capture the religio-racial complexities that were quick to correlate “dark bodies with ontological evil, human depravity, and existential abasement.”25

As scholars of religion and black nationalism in the North American historical context address the ever-persistent quandary of black “ontological evil” and “existential abasement,” it will become clear that although, as Eddie Glaude Jr.’s work points out, “most traditional histories of black nationalisms tend to focus only on the politics as they related to the state,” black nationalism was never exclusively about seeking self-determination and territorial autonomy.26 Eclipsed in many understandings of black nationalism, I argue, is the inherent resistance to social definitions of blackness as a “negatively marked reference” and the accompanying counterforms of religious nationalism adopted in order to reclaim ultimate human worth, meaning, and transubstantiality with the divine.27 Therefore, a call for religious analysis and reflection within the discourse of black nationalism should begin not at its goals of racial unity and ...

Table of contents

• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• The Harlem Window: An Introduction
• Part One: The Harlem Years
• Part Two: African American Yoruba Since 1970
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index