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Practitioners of indigenous African religions do not view celibacy in a positive way because it upsets the social and religious order and the necessity to propagate the species. Celibate individuals are treated with contempt along with sterile people because they are unproductive. Among the Yoruba, celibacy is a matter of class and not religion, and celibacy is associated with the need for loyalty, trust, and protection of royal blood.

Synopsis: The chapter describes the creation of a new social order to replace the one based on slavery and the slave trade, with new structures of local leadership setting a new standard. The chapter begins with Garrick Braide in Nigeria's Delta region and continues with revival ferment in Yoruba country, and in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, thanks to the work of the charismatic Harris. Both Catholic and Protestant missions were thereby renewed. The chapter considers African and Islamic models of religion in contrast to missionary and colonial practice. Primal religious ideas and materials in the appropriation of Christianity are investigated in terms of attitudes to the irrational, modern medicine, divination, divine efficacy, salvation, suffering, and divine goodness. The chapter contrasts the appeal of Christianity with opposition to colonial rule, and thus the African acceptance of salvation‐without‐strings with the rejection of conversion by political subjugation.

In Western Africa, practices of clientage were applied to incorporate merchants for as long as they accepted the terms of trade and residence. The establishment of imperial enclaves modified this dependency. Governors and consuls worked for a wider sphere of influence through African allies, treaty states, and stipending chiefs. Reversal of status from the 1870s followed from greater reliance on treaty jurisdiction and use of force against the Asante, some Yoruba states and the Hausa–Fulani emirates. But officials had to come to terms with the chiefdoms and hierarchies they found to meet the obligations of protectorate administration. Chiefs were utilized for judicial and financial purposes as official clients. In each of the colonial states the pattern of over-rule was conditioned by local political structures. Administrative histories provide contrasting examples of the decline of chieftaincy or its empowerment, in the face of elite competition in local government and in state politics during decolonization.

Presents conceptions of secrecy West Africans brought with them to Brazil: the interpretive separation of superficial appearance from “deep knowledge,” the face presented in public (ori ode) versus the inner head (ori inu), the layered nature of knowledge, which is ultimately bottomless, and the secret society of the Ogboni earth cult among the Yoruba. Additionally, the chapter recounts the nineteenth‐century context and motivations for a second historical layer of secrecy generated in response to repressive slave laws and policing, and the construal of Candomblé as illegal sorcery. Candomblé is interpreted as a secret society that was both built upon West African ideals of secrecy and constructed in Brazil as a religion that was seen, but not penetrated, and whose members concealed their affiliations with the orixás. Finally, in a third use of secrecy, the chapter demonstrates how masters with reason to fear it attributed extraordinary powers to exotic Candomblé.

This chapter discusses the attitudes of specific ethnic groups in Nigeria and Africa toward fertility, family size, and abortion. It examines some of the sayings, proverbs, and societal practices to aid our understanding of the general cultural beliefs about what constitutes appropriate family size and actual practices extant in the country. The main focus of this chapter is the cultural tradition of the Yoruba community and the sociocultural factors that influence their ideal of a large family size. One of these factors is the insurance strategy. This is the practice of having more than the desired number of children because of the fear of infant and child mortality, and to ensure survivorship of the sons to continue lineage.

This chapter discusses Wole Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, It explores, first of all, how Soyinka draws on Yoruba mythology and cosmology to emphasise the revolutionary potential of ritual sacrifice. Then, the focus shifts to the politics that the adaptation performs through its ambiguous relation with the Euripedean pre‐text, a relation that is characterised by a dual emphasis on correspondence and difference. In the final part, the cultural politics at play in Soyinka's refiguration of Dionysus and in his theory of ‘Yoruba tragedy’ is considered in relation to Martin Bernal's Black Athena project. The primary intention is to demonstrate how Soyinka does with ‘tragedy’ what Bernal does with ‘Greece’: challenging its conventional definition and destabilising the Eurocentrism that has traditionally inhibited it.

This essay explores the concept of destiny in Yoruba philosophical discourse. It argues that the Yoruba concept of destiny is complex, and that this complexity may be the source of the problems encountered by scholars. References to the concept of destiny in traditional Yoruba philosophy, the problem of choice, interconnectedness of destinies, individual and communal destinies, reincarnation, and the significance of destiny are discussed.

This essay explores the issues involved in determining what it means to be a person within the Yoruba metaphysical context. Yoruba thought is characterized as having tripartite conceptions of persons, and does not fall prey to criticisms that have plagued Western conceptions of persons. Variants of the continuity and persistence theories associated with Kant, Descartes, and Hume are discussed in light of Yoruba conceptions of persons. It is argued that Yoruba conceptual language provides an accurate conception of human existence that is sufficient for clarifying personal identity concerns within Western culture.

Tunde Kelani is Nigeria’s leading film director and the one most naturally approached through auteur criticism. He works independently and his films embody a consistent vision. Kelani gained experience in all of Nollywood’s precursors: the Yoruba traveling theater tradition, Nigerian television, and Nigerian celluloid cinema. He stands apart from Nollywood and from the Yoruba-language film industry but is an inspiration to both. His fierce commitment to preserving Yoruba culture as a living force in the present, his moral commitment, and his progressive, ecumenical vision of Nigeria make him a central figure in contemporary Nigerian culture. His pioneering video film Ti Oluwa Nile was a collaboration with Yoruba traveling theater artists; most subsequent films are based on literary works or collaborations with writers, using actors that evoke a variety of Nigerian cultural sectors. His cinema is a total art form incorporating music, dance, and other African arts.

Cuban dance researcher Graciela Chao Carbonero discusses how the African element penetrates all aspects of Cuban dance. She begins with the African-based danced religions of Cuba, Regla de Ocha or Santería (the religion of the Yoruba orishas), Palo Monte and other Congolese-based sects, Arará, and Abakuá, and how steps from such traditions merge with secular Cuban folk dances such as carnival comparsas and sones miméticos and also influence the dances that descend from European contradanza. Chao delves into contemporary casino and casino rueda and the African underpinnings of such dances and also of Cuban modern dance, with its training technique, técnica cubana, developed by Ramiro Guerra and others, and of Cuban variety dance in clubs and pn television.

Osborne developed an interest in the burgeoning anthropological subdiscipline of medical anthropology and conducted his dissertation research in Nigeria, focusing on traditional African health care systems and their relationship to Western biomedical systems. Osborne studied in the Nigerian village of Ibara Orile and explored how Yoruba villages serve as therapeutic communities for the mentally ill. His research interests brought him back to Nigeria several times, and during one of these visits his Yoruba research consultants made him Chief Adila of Ibara, associating his visits with preserving peace during times of violent unrest.

Does Yoruba culture exist, and if so, where and when is it located in West Africa and the Americas? This is the question posed in the introduction, which argues for a critically reformulated culture concept that accounts for Yoruba-Atlantic trajectories without reifying culture as a fixed tablet of tradition. Yoruba culture should be neither essentialized nor disavowed as the source of its New World manifestations. Rather it can be reformulated as a regenerative framework that was not merely produced by historical actors, but shaped New World Creole societies in significant ways.

This chapter returns to the classic problem of religious syncretism in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé. It reformulates Melville Herskovits’s syncretic paradigm in more dynamic and critical terms, based on the Yoruba hermeneutics of political revision, to argue that the ritual association of African gods with Catholic saints developed less as a psychological mechanism of acculturation, as Herskovits maintained, and more as a strategy of collective empowerment and agency among slaves and free blacks in the Americas. Reanalyzed through the lens of Yoruba ritual organization, the cultural continuities between West African and New World religious “cults” are shown to be much closer than the standard narrative of deracination allows

This chapter provides a polemical counterpoint to “externalist” accounts of Yoruba ethnogenesis, in which the development of Yoruba identity in the late 19th century is attributed to Fulani perspectives on their Oyo neighbors, Christian missionaries and the politics of conversion, as well as to Afro-Brazilian merchants in diaspora reconnecting with their homeland. These externalist perspectives are both complemented and destabilized by focusing on the Yoruba logic of “home” and “house,” relating residence, genealogy and regional identities to their reconstituted ritual frameworks in Cuba and Brazil. Following Barber’s analysis of Yoruba praise-poetry and Verran’s work on Yoruba quantification, the semantics of the category ilé illuminates the racialized dialectics of ritual purity within Lucumí and Nagô houses to provide an “internal” counter-perspective on Yoruba ethnogenesis.