The Transfiguration of Black Bodies: Divine Embodiments of the Black African Condition in Latin American and West African Art and Literature
I graduated from university in July. This is my dissertation, and it is a 10,000 word snapshot of the evolution and growth of my intellectual and personal interests for the past two years. I haven’t reread it in its entirety since I submitted it in March, but I’m hoping it’s still worth a read.
In the meantime, black liberation is real and God is on our side.
~ Gayraud S. Wilmore
Introduction
What does it mean to be made in the imago dei, the image of God? For many, this notion conjures ideas of divine artistry at hand in the creation of mankind. However, history reveals that for millennia, man has also made God in his own image, and imbued meaning to the Divine in his own likeness. In black civilizations across the world, the relationship between the self and a divine body or set of divine bodies has had not only great personal but also political significance as the globalisation of the world let to the displacement of African peoples from the Continent to the furthest reaches of the globe. Amidst the natural tensions and triumphs of pre-colonial empires such as the Oyo of Western Nigeria and the Dahomey of Southern Benin, and the traumas and mass murders of the Middle Passage in the Americas and Europe, religion and spirituality have remained stitched in the social fabric of many African and diasporic societies. Much scholarship exists surrounding the evolution of African religiosity, particularly West African religiosity on the Continent and the Americas and the advent of syncretic religions such as Candomblé, Santería, and Voudon, which are notable contributions in studies of pre-colonial African religious practice and its influence in the modern world. However, fewer studies have been conducted which examine the interconnectedness of the diverse manifestations of black African and Afrodescendant religiosity across the globe, and across varying religious beliefs as a means of further illuminating the history and spiritual evolution of black African societies over the past five centuries.
This dissertation thus aims to examine three manifestations of black African religion seen through the Afrodescendant cimarron population of Panama, the Yoruba of Nigeria, and the Afrodescendant Yoruba groups in Cuba and Brazil. Through the cimarrones of Panama and their veneration of the icon El Nazareno, this dissertation will explore the relationship between the execution of the Spanish religious colonial project and the formation of an early black soteriology which challenged colonial religious tradition in redefining the image of the Christ as an embodiment of the black African colonised condition. In a similar vein, this study of the Yoruba peoples within the continent of Africa and amongst the diaspora, namely the Nagô of Brazil and the Lucumí of Cuba, situate the Yoruba religion and the orìṣàs(divinities) Olódùmarè and Ògún as fundamental spiritual icons in the formation of civilisations on the Continent and beyond, and as divine embodiments of strength and justice in black liberation pursuits. Ultimately, it is the objective of this dissertation to investigate the expansion of Christendom as well as the transposition of Yoruba religiosity to the Americas through the colonial project in order to initiate a new thread of scholarship which examines the interconnectedness between black religiosity and movements of black liberation and racial equality across a breadth of cultural and spiritual practices.
Undoubtedly, there are many other Christian religious icons, Yoruba orìṣàs, and wider black African spiritual practices that have guided the movements and growth of black African societies throughout history. Elena Fitzpatrick Sifford and her extensive study of the various icons of the black Christ within Latin America from the sixteenth century, and Bolaji Idowu and his milestone study on the Yoruba orìṣàs (divinities) are but a few examples of the important works that have been fundamental in this dissertation’s study of the significance of black African and Afrodescendant religiosity on the Continent and in the Americas. Building upon these works, the first chapter of this dissertation will explore the theological reimagining of the Christ amongst the cimarron population in Panama, while the second and third chapters will explore the history of Yoruba religiosity and its place in the formation of Yoruba societies of the African continent and the Afrodescendant communities in Cuba and Brazil.
Race in colonial Latin America
Racial relations in the Iberian New World were a highly complex network of social, ethnic, and economic interactions, which were determined by notions of ethnic heritage, social class, and religion. 17th-century Peruvian chronicler Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in his Comentarios Reales de los Incas of 1609 detailed the complex nature of race categorisations in the New World, writing of pre-existing terms such as criollos, ‘por decir que son nacidos en Indias’, mulatos referring to ‘[el] hijo de negro y de India o de indio y de negra,’, cholos, a pejorative term which referred to the offspring of indigenous and black African parents, which the Spanish used ‘por infamia y vituperio’ and mestizos ‘por decir que somos mezclados de ambas naciones’ (Vega, 1945 vol. 2: 279). As Garcilaso’s comments demonstrate, by the early seventeenth century, there were established notions of racial identity and hierarchy underlined by categories of indigenous, African, and Spanish heritage amongst the mixed populations of colonial Latin America. Although these racial categorisations differ from the indices used today to organise people groups, these varied terms depict an image of the complex racial hierarchies in the Iberian New World.
While this dissertation will focus on the importance of religious deities and their racialised representations in art and literature as embodiments of black identity and social progress stretching from the pre-colonial period to the present, it would be amiss to posit raza in terms of bodily colour as the primary measure of social status in colonial Latin America. Rather, the methodology of race that was most prevalent was the notion of limpieza de sangre. This concept was based on the antisemitic argument that Jewish blood had a negative impact on one’s morality, despite one’s conversion to Christianity. It was believed that the blood of these Judeo-Christian converts influenced their bodies in such a way that, according to the cristianos viejos, they would continue to behave like ‘immoral Jews’ (Torres 2011:37). However, with the expansion of the Spanish kingdom to the New World, notions of ethnic difference began to form alongside the religious diversity of the indigenous and African populations. This does not mean however that bodily colour was not a consideration in early Iberian Spain. Documents relating to the early Iberian slave trade present slave traders differentiating themselves from black Moors from as early as 1332, one in particular from a Portuguese merchant describing the sale of a ‘moro negro de color e capel crespo’ (Horta 1991 cited in Sweet 1997:150). Thus, to say that there was no notion of skin colour as an indicator of racial and/or ethnic difference prior to the Spanish inquisition of the New World would be inaccurate. Rather, the term limpieza de sangre in colonial Latin America can be understood as having incorporated aspects of Christian religiosity, as well as early notions of biology which led to a ‘somatization of culture’, demonstrative of the ‘paradigm shift from socio-religious to biologically based hierarchies of difference’ (Delgado and Moss 2018:2).
Casta paintings (Figure 1), which grew in prominence in the eighteenth century, are further testament to the legacy of the limpieza de sangre ideology, and how notions of exclusion, inclusion, and personhood were embodied through racial identity. These paintings were some of the most explicit colonial visual objects which demonstrated the outcomes of inter-mixing, resembling family portraits which presented various ‘types’ opposed to named individuals as a means of expressing both the progression and dilution of African, indigenous, and Spanish blood (Leibsohn and Mundy, 2015). Africans and indigenous peoples featured ‘positively’ in these paintings as evidence of their generational assimilation into the colonial societies of the New World. However, indigenous and African groups who remained outside of the Iberian social ideal of interethnic mixing and European cultural assimilation maintained disparaging depictions. In the Ignacio María Barreda casta painting seen in the figure below, the homogenising markers of indigenous and African barbarism such as the native headdress, the loincloths, and the bow and arrows placed these groups and their unacculturated practices at the bottom-most section of the work, highlighting their non-white, non-European cultures and ethnicities.
Using Garcilaso’s commentary and the example of the casta paintings, it therefore becomes clear how proximity to mixed indigenous and African heritage reflected Spain’s anti-indigenous and anti-African colonial sentiment. As Barreda’s painting demonstrates, the Africans and indigenous peoples who were not implicated in ethnic mixing, preserving their racial indigeneity, were seen as existing in the realm of the Aristotelian concept of ‘natural slavery’, destined to a life of subservience due to their non-European traditions and heritages.
The religious visual object
While visual objects such as casta paintings played a significant role in demonstrating racial relationships in the colonial period, religious visual objects also implicitly portrayed the racializing evangelical aims of the colonial project. Christian sacred art had historically been a highly effective mode of conveying religious ideals to a population, particularly as it pertained to prayer, meditation, salvation, and forgiveness (Bray 2009:45). In early communications between the first Spanish conquistadors and the Spanish crown, there was a clear distinction made between the Spanish and other European explorers and the native societies of the New World which was marked by religious difference.[1] The conflation of the Iberian inquisitorial project with Christianity offers insight into the formation of the Spanish colonial self and the fundamentals of its identity and in turn the colonised Other and the basis of their exclusion. While as aforementioned, the notion of race as understood within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is different from notions of raza or more specifically casta during the colonial Latin American period, from the point of arrival of the Spaniards in 1492 with Christopher Columbus, religion came alongside somatic notions of race as a primary indicator of ethnic difference.
[1] In the first letter from Diego Velázquez de Cuellar, conquistador, and first Spanish governor of Cuba to Hernan Cortes in 1518, Velázquez writes of an indio (Indian) ally who alerts him of “seis cristianos cautivos” (Cortés et al, 2014)
The primary visual object central to this section of the dissertation, El Nazareno of Portobelo, offers insight into the nature of the religious visual object and its relationship with black African populations during the colonial period. The history of this sculpture which embodies Christ as non-European (non-white), maps a significant transformation of the Spanish religious object from an ideological spearhead in the violent domination of the colonial project, to a significant sacred object in the spirituality of the black African population. As Kathryn Santner and Helen Melling (2021:180) summarise,
[…] visual objects could operate much as they did for the wider colonial populace, inspiring devotion, transmitting knowledge, spreading propaganda, but the stakes were undeniably higher for subaltern groups who were themselves rarely deemed ‘visualizable’ in conventional art forms.
This dissertation thus aims to further Santner and Melling’s comments in demonstrating how El Nazareno of Portobelo reflects the evolution of the Christian religious object from an indicator of the oppressive Iberian colonial hegemony to its embodiment of the black African condition during the colonial period. While the weaponization of Christianity as a European invention and a Spanish mode of social and ethnic identification posited conversion to the faith as the measure of survival and attaining personhood, the connections between the non-white artistic depictions of Christ and the African population which venerated the sculpture is demonstrative of the crucial role religious deities and icons possessed in the survival and identity in black Africans colonial Latin America. Thus, the reclamation of the Nazarene by markedly black African parishioners reifies the image, experience, and ideology of the crucified Christ as a resonant spiritual tool in the survival and development of new racial theologies for the black Africans of Portobelo from the colonial period to the present day.
El Nazareno as a divine embodiment of the oppressed condition of the cimarrones of Portbelo
The island of Panama was first descended upon by the Spanish explorer Rodrigo de Galván Bastidas in 1501 and then Christopher Columbus in 1502–1503 (Harris 1984:170). The town of Portobelo was established in 1597 by Francisco Velarde y Mercado and became the main Caribbean port of the Spanish for the transportation of Peruvian silver. Apart from the annual fair during which the town’s population rose to more than 10,000 people witnessing the display of the empire’s wealth, Portobelo’s population was predominately enslaved Africans who formed the majority of the town’s colonial labour force. By 1607, there were almost four thousand enslaved Africans in Portobelo, thus firmly establishing the town as an African locality in the New World (Ward 1993:162). Notably, the large presence of enslaved Africans in Portobelo resulted in the emergence of a subgroup population of escaped slaves, known as cimarrones, who settled and formed palenques[2] in the tropical forest of the region (Sifford 2014:209).
[2] Palenques or quilombos (Brazil) were organised communities founded by escaped slaves during the colonisation of the Americas (Camargo 2015:25).
Significantly, the origins of El Nazareno of Portobelo (Figure 2) are somewhat unclear. Elena Fitzpatrick Sifford’s extensive study of Black Christs throughout Latin America provides the most comprehensive account of the origins of the Nazarene. She notes that no contract or records of the origin of the sculpture precede stories of its Spanish arrival, making it difficult to precisely define the origins of the sculpture’s blackness. Sifford goes on to surmise that the fairly late arrival of the Portobelo Christ in the Latin American colonial epoch, most likely around the mid-seventeenth century, suggests that the sculpture may have been ‘deliberately commissioned’ with darker skin. However, contrasting reports concerning the arrival of the sculpture, and more specifically its original destination for the Central American mainland during a period where deliberately black Christs were not popular casts doubt on this speculation. Sifford thus concludes that the Nazarene was most likely painted black deliberately by African Christians at some point following its arrival on the island (Sifford 2014:218).
The wooden sculpture of El Nazareno maintains a uniform dark skin tone, and the elaborate portrayal of Christ robed in scarlet, white and, gold threads is reminiscent of the Biblical narrative of Christ as King.[3] The colour of the visible parts of Christ’s body also possesses a very natural ‘blackness’ in its deep brown hue. This naturalist portrayal of a racialised ‘black’ Christ is also seen in the details on the face and the upper torso of the Christ, which have been marked with sanguine paint strokes, and detailing in the eyes, teeth, lips, and beard (Figure 3). This depiction of the Christ maintains explicit hagiographic references to the bodily violence and trauma of the crucifixion in a way in which unintentionally mirrors the lived traumas of the formerly enslaved cimarron populations and parishioners that the sculpture served. The large cross which the icon of the Christ bears on one shoulder is a further fundamental aspect of the sculpture, which is representative of the memory of the pain and suffering of Christ in the crucifixion. However, the clothing of the icon in regal robes provides a juxtaposition between the crucifixion and resurrection of the Christ, emblematic of the Christian narrative of crucifixion and resurrection. Moreover, in this sculpture, the Christ is reaching out towards onlookers, as if to invite them to identify with him in his suffering and yet join him in his present glory through the resurrection. The golden crown of thorns that sits on the head of the Christ icon culminates this idea of the glory and victory of the black Christ in resurrection as it coexists with his suffering and sacrifice in crucifixion. These naturalist portrayals of the Nazarene sculpture as a racially black religious icon crucified, yet not bound by the cross and now bearing the glory of resurrection, are reflective of the condition of the enslaved population of Portobelo and the development of cimarron communities from the late-sixteenth century.
[3] ‘They stripped off Jesus’ clothes and put a scarlet robe on him. They made a crown out of thorn branches and placed it on his head […]’; ‘The rider wore a robe that was covered with blood, and he was known as “The Word of God.”’; ‘There Christ rules over all forces, authorities, powers, and rulers. He rules over all beings in this world and will rule in the future world as well.’ (The Holy Bible, Matthew 27:28–29; Revelation 19:13,16; Ephesians 1:21)
Beyond the sculpture’s physical representation of the Christ as non-white body, the very process of crucifixion, which occurred mostly to slaves, disgraced soldiers, Christian converts, and foreigners during the Roman period was considered one of the most dehumanising and brutal modes of death (Cilliers and Retief 2003:938). The punishment of the crucifixion during the Roman period is not unlike the penal codes of the colonial period, featured in the Leyes de Indias. For the re-captured cimarrones of Panama in the sixteenth century, death by hanging was the most common form of punishment, having exceeded the limits of unforeseen absence, or having committed serious crimes such as murder. If they were not charged with the death sentence, more often than not, as to not incur an economic loss for the slave owner, they were subject to floggings, the number of which depended on the length of absence and severity of the crime, or even the severing of a limb (Mena García 1984 in Hidalgo Pérez 2018:56). This, again, is not unlike the Roman pre-crucifixion procedure of scourging during which the condemned person was stripped naked, tied upright to a post and then flogged across the back and some scholars suggest, even the front of body. Under Roman law, there was no limit to the extent of flogging, and thus the extent of the scourging was largely dependent upon the inclination of the enacting judicial body (Cilliers and Retief 2003:940). What more appropriate religious visual object therefore to embody the condition of the cimarrones of Portobelo in their oppression, and the colonial violence inflicted upon their non-white bodies than the black Nazareno?
Despite the violent horrors of the colonial period inflicted upon the cimarrones, the town of Portobelo and its enslaved and freed residents relied heavily on charity from the Spanish for the upkeep of the town’s original structures. Following the abolition of slavery by the Spanish monarchy in 1821, Portobelo residents were without a monarch to govern their land. Nonetheless, as Patricia A McGehee (1994:221) contends, the Portobelo population ‘substituted’ the economic and technological resources of the Spanish crown for the supernatural capabilities of El Nazareno. It is believed that the population of Portobelo was miraculously spared while others on the isthmus suffered greatly, endowing even greater salvific meaning unto the Black Christ. Unfortunately, most of the early colonial archives of the town of Portobelo were destroyed in a fire during a raid of the town by Welsh pirate Henry Morgan in 1671 (McGehee, 1994:223). However, the congo [4] festivals birthed during the nineteenth century, with the first recorded celebration unto the Nazarene taking place 21 October 1821 are testament of the relationship between the presence of the black Christ and the formerly enslaved Afrodesendant population of Portobelo.
[1] The term ‘congo’ does not refer to the central African countries, the Congo (Kinkasha) and the Republic of the Congo. Rather it refers to self-liberated free black persons persecuted by Spanish slave masters who now preside in Panama. (Croft 2014:93)
Thus, the Portobelo Christ and its history with the enslaved and liberated Afrodescendant populations of the sixteenth century onwards is suggestive of its unique positioning in the historical realities of survival and liberation amongst the town’s enslaved and free African population. Enslaved Africans had been taught that they would go to hell if they were not obedient, servile, respectful, and loyal to their masters. On the other hand, a guardian angel would protect the obedient and humble slaves from the devil and hell (Franceschi, 1960:96). The sculpture of El Nazareno is thus indicative of the Portobelo townspeople’s reimagination of the Christ as a racialised black body who embodied their brutalised and oppressed physical condition. Following the liberation of the Afrodescendant populace of Portobelo either as escaped cimarrones or manumitted persons in light of the abolition of slavery on the island in 1850, the population continued to reconfigure the Christian belief system, conflating the Spanish with immorality, and maintaining an acute focus on the exploitative nature of the Spanish colonial project. One song, performed as part of the annual Afrodescendant congo carnival encapsulates this reworking of the Spanish colonial religious ideology, stating:
Los blancos no irán al cielo
por una solita maña
les gusta comer panela
sin haber sembrado caña
(Franceschi, 1960:96)
Thus, it becomes evident that the religious and ethnic reformulation of the Africans and Afrodescendants of Portobelo subverted notions of Spanish lineage and whiteness as the paradigms of religious and social excellence. By situating the Spanish as racially white and sinful, underlined by their exclusion from heaven, and reclaiming the image of the resurrected Christ as a black body, the townspeople of Portobelo reformulated the erstwhile racial and ethnic categorisations of the colonial period that hailed the purity of Spanish blood. Moreover, the worshipping of the indisputably racially black Nazarene by an unequivocally black Afrodescendant population challenged the system of classification that reigned in the Iberian New World which situated Christianity as the epistemological bedrock from which white supremacist notions of racial superiority and inferiority, salvation and damnation were based. Black American historian and writer Gayraud S. Wilmore (2004:142) in his study of the Christian faith through an Afrocentric lens suggests that,
To speak of the Messiah figure in terms of the ontological significance of the color black is to provide both black and other people with a way of understanding the relevance of the Person and Work of Christ for existence under the conditions of humiliation, subjugation, and subordination.
Thus, the veneration of El Nazareno of Portobelo is suggestive of an early birth of black theology during the colonial Latin American period, which centred the reframing of the Christ as a subject that shared in the historical traumas and suffering of oppressed groups such as the enslaved Africans of Portobelo but equally reflected the glory of their overcoming as escaped cimarrones and freed peoples. This theology, wrought from the liberatory colonial experience of the cimarrones of Portobelo and formerly enslaved Africans of the town was, therefore, a spiritual ideology of survival as it sought to ‘[re]interpret’ the theological significance of the black body as a nonbeing, whose existence was threatened by the colonial ideologies of whiteness and purity of blood (Cone 1974:43).
The presence of El Nazareno of Portobelo, and its veneration by a markedly black African population, signals a transfiguration of the black body and attitudes towards it during the colonial Latin American period. Undoubtedly, African and indigenous religiosity had faced severe prohibition and demonisation during the colonial period by the Iberian Catholic social monopoly, with the charge against African religious practice as brujería extending as far back as the fifteenth century and the inception of papal sanctions for the enslaving of Africans (Germeten 2011:374). However, El Nazareno represents a renegotiation of expressions of black piety and its evolution throughout colonial history which extends beyond the sphere of religious syncretism or clandestine worship practices. Notably, the recreation of a racial theology accompanied the veneration of the black Christ as a reversal of the colonial methodology of racial mixing which situated blackness at the bottom of the social ladder. Moreover, the aesthetic features of the sculpture in its dark brown flesh tone and focus on the physical suffering as well as the resurrected glory of the crucified Christ through its painted artistic detail, embody the lived traumas and history of the formerly enslaved populations of Portobelo, albeit displaced into a Biblical history. Today, the annual festival and procession of El Nazareno continues to be the focal point of the town of Portobelo, with religious pilgrims from all over South and Central America joining in the celebration of this black Christ. [5] The image of El Nazareno is therefore a key example of the vital role of spirituality, and the different modes it can take, as an intrinsic part of the formation of a liberated black African identity and moral consciousness in Latin America, during and following the colonial period.
[5] One example of the contemporary influence of El Nazareno ois Ismael ‘Maelo’ Rivera’s 1975 song El Nazarenowhich was written following the black Puerto-Rican artist’s pilgrimage to Portobelo in the 60s. In the song Rivera sings: ‘El Nazareno me dijo/Que cuidará a mis amigos/Me dijo, me dijo que había mucho bueno conmigo’. Rivera claims that he miraculously overcame his drug addiction following his encounter with El Nazareno (Carrasquillo, 2015:242–243)
The Portobelo Nazarene and its veneration by Afrodescendant populations is just one of several demonstrations of black spirituality that have coincided with historical narratives of black liberation. To speak of blackness and African spirituality without an exploration of African indigenous religions and their evolution from the pre-colonial period to the present would be a great oversight in the exploration of the position of religion and spirituality as intrinsic in histories and present realities of black liberation. This dissertation will now turn to the Yoruba religion and the role of the Supreme deity Olódùmarè in particular, and another primordial deity, Ògún, in the cultural and religious consciousness of the Yoruba from the African continent to the Latin American diaspora.
Introduction to the Yoruba: Ògún & Olódùmarè
The term Yoruba refers to a linguistic, ethnic, and religious group found throughout West Africa, particularly in the modern-day nations of Nigeria and Benin [6], spreading all the way to countries in Latin America including the Lucumí in Cuba, as well as the Nagô in Brazil amongst other Latin American and Caribbean diasporic groups. There is a wealth of information on the early settlements of the Yoruba people that trace back to as early as 800 AD, however, the specific origins of the Yoruba are less clear (Usman and Falola, 2019:49.) One legend claims that the Yoruba inherited their present-day territory at an immemorial point in history, as a gift endowed by the supreme Yoruba God, Olódùmarè who led the first Yoruba progenitor Odùdúwà from heaven to create the solid earth and the human race (Usman and Falola 2019:1). Another origin myth suggests that Odùdúwà led the people group to their modern location after migrating from the East due to political unrest following the expansion of Islam (Atanda 1991 in Usman and Falola 1980:1). While the exact origins of the Yoruba people vary, these two origin legends begin to depict the nature of Yoruba history and its inextricability from religious belief. As Yoruba religious scholar Bolaji Idowu notes, the true keynote of the life of the Yoruba is not found in noble ancestry or past heroic deeds, but rather ‘the keynote of their life is their religion’ (Idowu 1962:5). Thus, that there can be no understanding of the Yoruba that is separate from the religiosity which lies not only at the centre of the culture’s origin myths, but as this dissertation will go on to explore, the very acts of survival, liberation, and nation-building for the Yoruba on the African continent and in the wider diaspora of the Americas.
[6] See Appendix A (map of Yoruba cultural groups within Nigeria, Benin, Togo)
In Yoruba cosmology Olódùmarè is the chief deity or orìṣà and is the creator of all beings, including the other Yoruba orìṣàs. Olódùmarè is also known by the title Ọlọ́fin as well as the name Ọlọ́run. Ọlọ́run is the title for Olódùmarè that is typically used in colloquial language, while title Ọlọ́fin-Ọ̀run occurs frequently in the liturgies and Odù corpus of the Yoruba as a supplementary title or alternative to Olódùmarè, and it signifies the high office of Olódùmarè as the ‘Supreme Sovereign Ruler’ in heaven (Idowu 1962:36). The other orìṣàs of the Yoruba pantheon can be divided into three main groups: the primordial orìṣàs associated with heaven and believed to have been with Olódùmarè from the creation of the world, the revered ancestral orìṣàs who are best described as extraordinary human beings who lived on earth and carried out great works who were deified after their deaths, and lastly but by no means insignificantly, the orìṣàs who personify natural forces and features (Usman and Falola 2019:273). Ṣàngó and Ògún as some of the most famed orìṣàswithin the Yoruba diaspora are amongst this first group of primeval deities, and Ògún in particular is of significance in this research as not only the ‘most indispensable divinity’ as Idowu describes, but ‘the pioneer divinity’ as he is attributed with preparing the way for other divinities as Yoruba mythological history recounts (1962:85–86). It is important to note that the orìṣàs are to worshippers more than just a means to an end, the end being the restoring of harmonious balance in the life of the individual or the interpretation of current and future events through ritual, sacrifice, and prayer facilitated by the babaláwo or Yoruba priest (Epega et al 1995:xvii). Rather, the orìṣàs and their veneration are in many cases the ends themselves (Idowu 1962:63).
Thus, as this dissertation will go on to discuss, when exploring the role of religion in the lives of black Yoruba peoples from the continent and in the Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban diasporas, the orìṣàs should be seen as divine embodiments of the history and conditions of the populations which worshipped them. Similar to the Portobelo Christ and its parishioners, the Yoruba orìṣàs are embodiments of black African spirituality which was grounded in the realities that their worshippers faced. Be it a need for Ògún’s strength and iron weaponry during periods of regional war such as that between the Ọ̀yọ́ Empire and the kingdom of Dahomey in the eighteenth century, or the resonance of his ability to forge new paths for the orìṣàs in Yoruba mythology, Ògún was and continues to be a central deity in the establishment, survival, and growth of black African populations on the Continent and in the Diaspora. Likewise, the Supreme God Olódùmarè maintains an important place in the religiosity of the Yoruba people both in West African religious antiquity and in the more recent nineteenth and twentieth Yoruba-descendant Latin American social consciousness. Olódùmarè as this dissertation will go on to discuss, appears in the works of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian poets such as Georgina Herrera and Solano Trindade as a god of justice that redeems His people from the violence and abuses inflicted upon enslaved Yoruba populations by colonial hegemony. In other words, Olódùmarè and Ògún embody the condition and status of Yoruba peoples from the African continent and in the Americas as warriors, pioneers, victims and in more recent centuries, advocates of social justice that seek to transfigure the black body from a place of enslavement and servitude to liberation and a wholeness of personhood.
Ògún and Olódùmarè as divine embodiments of empire, and justice within the Yoruba social and cultural sphere
In Yoruba religious mythology, Ògún is the deity known for clearing a path blocked by large trees, heavy bramble, and thorns in order that he and the other orìṣàs could carry out the work set forth by Olódùmarè. In Yoruba cultural history, Ògún maintains his reputation as a deity of conquest and military effort due to his lordship over iron and steel. The Ọ̀yọ́ kingdom was the largest of the states of Yorubaland between 1400 and 1700. The expansion of this empire, alongside several other empires such as the Edo Kingdom of Benin and the Fon Kingdom of Dahomey was due to its well organised and heavily equipped army whose militant efforts were characterised by highly developed iron technology. This has led scholars to conclude that the symbolic complex of iron, warfare, and empire-building that functioned in the establishment and growth of these polities possessed Ògún at their very core (Barnes 1997:39). Notably, Ògún’s prominence amongst early Yoruba states is contentious amongst scholars of Yoruba history. Some scholars such as Denis Williams in his study of sacred and secular forms of African classical art attribute the rise in of Ògún veneration due to periods in the sixteenth century when there was an increase in the supply iron and expansion of warfare (Williams 1974:83). Others such as Sandra Barnes in her study of Ògún representations on the African continent and the New World suggest that public devotion to Ògún can be dated back to as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with evidence of annual ceremonies featuring ritual battles and sacrifices which are comparable to contemporary ceremonies only appropriate for Ògún veneration. In light of the indeterminate nature of Ògún’s beginnings, it is most apt to understand the ideas reflected by the deity or the concepts of which he was attributed as a ‘cultural assemblage’. This ‘bricoleur idiom’ of Ògún’s origins as Barnes pens it, demonstrates how various notions of warfare, iron weaponry and empire-building merged to form a cult group with Ògún as its divine figurehead (Barnes 1997:7). Therefore, the Yoruba deity Ògún can be understood to be a divine embodiment of the socio-political demands of the growing empires of Yorubaland between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.
In the Ifà Odù corpus which compiles the 256 holy verses that guide Yoruba divination which have been passed down through the oral tradition of the Yoruba over thousands of years, Ògún maintains his reputation as the deity associated with warfare and victory in times of tumult (Epega et al. 1995:xvii). Notably, in Oracle 9.1 and 9.3, Ògúndáméjì, details about the relationship between Ògún and his iron machete as his most recognisable feature are featured. This oracle also illuminates the Yoruba religious understanding of the role of Ògún in the lives of mankind throughout history, functioning as a prophecy of how Ògún would be received by mankind. The oracle begins:
Ifá ni: Agàdá yẹn ni Ògún maa fiṣe
Iṣẹ Ọrọ ki o maa muu l’ọwọ́ Kaakiri
[Ifá said the cutlass would be the key to Ogun’s prosperity.
He must always walk around with it.]
(Ògúndáméjì 9.1)
Then, in the third part of the verse, continues:
Gbogbo ayé li o miamaa bẹẹ pe:
Kio ba wọn tún iwa wọn ṣe
[The whole world would always request him to help them repair their way of life.]
(Ògúndáméjì 9.3)
These two odùs (verses) present Ògún as being aligned with the iron weapon, the agàdá (cutlass), and as is made explicit here, Ògún is presented as a deity that would be known all over the world and appealed to in moments of tumult or confrontation. Traditional Yoruba religious art maintains this focus on the iron element and weaponry associated Ògún (Figures 4 and 5).
In another Yoruba religious cantation, Ògún is presented as a protector of those who have been wounded. This prayer, sung by worshippers in Ibadan in Oyo State during the annual ceremony to celebrate Ògún recites:
Ògún àwóò, aláká ayé,
Ọ̀sanyin imọle.
Ègbè lẹ́hin ẹni a ndá lóró
Ògún gbé mí o.
[Ògún, the powerful one, the strong one of
the earth, the great one of the other world.
The protector of those who are being injured.
Ògún support me.]
(Simpson 1980:31)
Notably, this prayer situates Ògún as a divinity deeply involved with the protection of those who suffer mistreatment at the hands of another. In this regard, the important positioning of Ògún in Yoruba socio-religious context becomes clear. Ògún occupies the role of pioneer amongst heavenly bodies, forging new paths and creating new possibilities, but he also possesses the ability to aid in conquest and battle, simultaneously being presented as both destroyer and creator. Worshippers view Ògún as a deity upon which they can call for personal grievances and moments of strife, but as historical accounts depict, he is also a deity associated with the larger social conflicts between neighbouring kingdoms throughout Yoruba land. As Barnes notes, Ògún’s qualities resemble the two sides of an equation: ‘destroyer = creator, or the obverse creator= destroyer’ (Barnes 1997:17).
Turning the attention back to the Yoruba Supreme deity, Olódùmarè, on the other hand, has historically occupied a less immediately involved position in the lives of practitioners. Although Olódùmarè is credited with being the all-powerful creator, he receives no annual ceremony as the other divinities do, possesses no shrines, is not offered sacrifices and is not represented in religious visual objects such as the sculptures of Ògún seen above. Rather, Olódùmarè is worshipped through the orìṣàs. (Simpson 1980:2). Nonetheless, Olódùmarè possesses a ubiquitous presence in the lives of the Yoruba and is He ever far from the minds of practitioners. While devotion to the other orìṣàs appears to eclipse their religious practice, undercutting all of their acts of worship is ‘the deep consciousness that Olódùmarè is above all and ultimately controls all issues’ (Idowu 1962:50).
Evidence of Olódùmarè’s involvement in the theological framework of the Yoruba is seen in Oracle 200, Òfún’Kọ̀nràn, when Olódùmarè is said to perform a sacrifice on behalf of mankind, having seen the injustice acts of those with power on earth against the weak. The verse states:
Òfún’Kọ̀nràn! A dífá f’Olódùmarè nigbi Olódùmarè maa ran
ènìyàn wa s’ode ayé,
wọ́n ni Olódùmarè nro ti iya ti àwọn alagbára maafi maajẹ
àwọn alailagbára, iya ti Ọba ati Ijoye ati àwọn Olówó yoo fi
maa jẹ àwọn olùpónjú. Orí awon Koṣẹkoro ti wòn npa l’ayé ti
wọn nfi’ya jẹ; ki ohun le maajà fún wọn, àwọn ti aráyé nṣe
ni’ka tikoletikarawọn san fún àwọn ọ̀ta wọn.
A niki Olódùmarè rúbọ (…)
A niki o da wọn sil’ l’ode ayé.
Ó gbọ́ ó rú.
[Òfún’Kọ̀nràn was divined for Olódùmarè when he was
preparing to send people to earth.
They said Olódùmarè was reflecting on the punishment
that powerful people would inflict on the weak, the punish-
ment that kings and chiefs would inflict on people who were
destitute or in distress. He saw innocent people being killed
on earth and wanted to defend those who would have no
chance for revenge.
He was asked to sacrifice (…).
If he sacrificed, he could leave them free on earth.
He heard and sacrificed.]
(Òfún’Kọ̀nràn 200)
It, therefore, becomes clear that although Olódùmarè generally maintains a position of lofty omnipotence within the Yoruba religious framework, the deity is not entirely removed from the happenings on earth. Significantly, while Olódùmarè is presented as performing a sacrifice here, this should not be understood as His subjectivity to a power greater than Himself. Rather, this oracle should be interpreted as evidence of the divinity’s role as the ‘Author and Disposer’ of human fate, involved in the necessary religious proceedings that aid in shaping man’s destiny (Idowu 1962:53).
Within the Yoruba socio-religious sphere, the roles of Ògún and Olódùmarè as divine embodiments of empire-building and justice, therefore become clear. The sacred Odú and ancient Yoruba religious art evidence the theological significance of these deities, as they coincide with Yoruba religious myth and social history. However, the significance of the orìṣàs expands beyond the Continental Yoruba sphere, and this concept of the Yoruba divinities as embodiments of black empire-building can be seen in prominent Yoruba diasporic group in Latin America, particularly the Lucumí of Cuba and the Nagô of Brazil.
Olódùmarè as a divine embodiment of black identity, liberation, and justice amongst the Lucumí in Cuba
Historians estimate that between 1529–1850, over 12 million Africans were forced to embark on the journey of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean. West Central Africa was the main labour source, with 45 percent of the overall volume of enslaved African peoples taken to the New World. [7] Notably, scholars believe that between 1817 and 1860 the Yoruba of from West Africa comprised the single largest proportion, at least 30 percent of the slaves imported to Cuba (Castellanos and Castellanos 1977 in Falola et al. 2004:115). In Cuba, the advancing sugar industry of the colonial period was fuelled by African slaves and these Yoruba descendants in the New World were known as the Lucumí. The majority of the Yorubas imported during the early decades of the nineteenth century Cuba amongst other Latin American nations is believed to have been young male adults who had had experience as warriors during the Ọ̀yọ́ Empire. The Ọ̀yọ́ Empire was Yorubaland’s most powerful northern state between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries but following a series of attacks from the kingdom of Dahomey, the empire collapsed in the early 1800s, rendering the people of the empire vulnerable to the increased European demand for slaves. Yet, even as they forcibly embarked on the journey of the Middle Passage, these enslaved Yoruba warriors maintained the religious ideology that was central to their way of life and upheld acute devotion to their primordial Yoruba deities, particularly the warlike orìṣàs Ṣàngó — the god of lightning seen as the manifestation of the wrath of Olódùmarè — and Ògún — master artist, and god of iron and steel (Falola et al, 2004:114–115; Idowu 1962:86).
[7] See Appendices B, C and D for tables detailing number of Africans enslaved and taken to the New World
Notably, scholars suggest that slave trade from West Central Africa to Cuba continued clandestinely, post the nation’s 1886 abolition of slavery. Thus, the influence of the Yoruba in the Afro-Cuban cultural context possessed a unique preservation which enabled the continued proliferation of many Yoruba cultural practices (Falola et al. 2004:115). The formation of cabildos de nación or cabildos africanos, civil institutions that aided in Africans adapting to their new environment, were in the early period of the colonial epoch spaces for the preservation of African heritage. The birth of the syncretic religion Santería within these cabildos, which combined Yoruba religion with Iberian Roman Catholicism is evidence of the plight of the Lucumí to maintain their African religiosity as a means of preserving their identities and culture as enslaved peoples (Chryssides 2011:305). However, by the late nineteenth century, these cabildos and their preservation of African religious traditions such as masquerades and dancing were seen as ‘anachronistic vestiges of slavery’, deemed regressive in a modernising nation according to the newly independent nation policy. Nonetheless, African religiosity did not fade away but spread more widely between the population, with the formation of formal religious institutions such the ilé ocha (house[s] of the orìṣàs), where blacks, mulattoes, and even whites could assume a Lucumí identity through initiation (Falola et al., 2004:210).
While the Cuban War of Independence from 1895 to 1898 allowed Afro-Cubans to gain greater recognition as members of the nation due to their crucial participation as soldiers in the war, they faced much oppression in the early twentieth century (Moore 1998:21). The 1912 massacre of three thousand Afro-Cuban supporters of the Partido Independiente de Color which championed the rights of black people in the nation is just one example. Over the next half-century, race-based political organisations would be prohibited until the early 1960s following the Cuban revolution and the advent of Castro’s government (Schmidt 2008:161). The development of the Cuban communist state and the focus on the reduction of anti-black racial prejudice as it did not align with the principles of equality promoted by the Revolution attempted to better the condition of Afro-Cubans in the country. However, Afro-Cubans continued the uphill climb for social equality post-Revolution and prioritised the celebration of their blackness and Yoruba heritage beyond the political sphere.[8]
[8] In his Discurso in the Plaza Cívica on 8 May 1959, Castro admitted that “La Revolución, más allá de los derechos y garantías alcanzados para todos los ciudadanos de cualquier etnia y origen, no ha logrado el mismo éxito en la lucha por erradicar las diferencias en el estatus social y económico de la población negra del país, aun cuando en numerosas áreas de gran trascendencia, entre ellas la educación y la salud, desempeñan un importante papel.” (Castro, F., 1959, Plaza de la Revolución, Cuba.)
Evidence of the celebration of Afro-Cuban identity and blackness through influence Yoruba through religiosity is seen throughout the works of Afro-Cuban authors and artists such as Georgina Herrera. Herrera (1936–2021) used her poetry and writing to address various themes through an Afrocentric perspective. While Herrera was a member of the Novación Literaria during the Cuban revolution, her work was most closely implicated in notions of race, gender, and religion. Notably, Herrera was never affiliated with any political party and following the exile of many of her literary companions from her early career group El Puente, Herrera’s work took a markedly subjective approach, writing from the ‘I’ of the Afro-Cuban female subject (Collado Cabrera 2011:76,78). Herrera’s familial history in which there was great pride shared in the purity of black African racial pedigree underscores her poems, and through adopting a markedly pro-African position, Herrera’s poems embody the significance of Yoruba religious heritage and culture in the progress and revolution of black bodies from enslaved peoples to liberated individuals in twentieth century Cuba and beyond (Herrera et al. 2014). In her poem, Al palacio real llegan mensajes, Herrera denounces the veneration of la Reina Madre, who is emblematic of the Virgin Mary. Comparable to the song of the congo carnival song recited by the Afro-Panamians of Portobelo, Herrera’s speaker condemns the exploitative practice of the colonisers who ‘queriendo oro,/sin ir/con pies y manos propias a buscarlos,’ beat and mistreated the forcibly enslaved Africans. Speaking in false reverence to ‘la heredera al trono’ of the la Reina Madre, understood to be the remnant Catholic religious hegemony of the colonial project, Herrera challenges the Christian deity of the colonisers and his supposed complicity in ‘no da la cara,/no asoma la cabeza’. She warns of the Yoruba divinity Olódùmarè — named here as Olofi (Ọlọ́fin) — who will not turn a blind eye to the horrors committed against her people, the Lucumí people. Rather, in all of Olofin’s strength as the Supreme Yoruba deity, he exposes the redolent horrors that still cling to the societies of former colonial empires.
(…)
Ya ves, estos son los prodigios,
mi princesa, de papá Olofi.
Al cabo de los siglos baja
su dedo índice,
oscuro, fuerte, limpio,
es quien señala
cómo aún
la sangre de los míos cuelga de tus orejas.
(Herrera et al. 2014:80–82)
Consistent with the Yoruba religious belief of Olódùmarè as the Supreme deity in the heavenly realms who advocates for justice on earth, Herrera’s poem situates Olódùmarè as the primordial divine figure in the recognition and justice of the Lucumí people. She humanises the divinity through highlighting a bodily feature, ‘su dedo’, in a way in which implicates him further in the plight of the Yoruba people. This juxtaposes the position of the European colonist’s God who is portrayed as maintaining an obdurate neglection of the condition of the Yoruba people throughout the colonial period. Similarly, in her poem, África, Herrera further aligns the Yoruba orìṣàs with her Afro-Cuban Lucumí identity, aligning the triumphs and trials of the divinities with the histories of love and war in her own life. She writes:
(…)
Amo esos dioses
con historias así, como las mías,
yendo y viniendo
de la guerra al amor o lo contrario.
(…)
Herrera thus situates the divinities of the Yoruba religion as being aligned with the personal conflicts and triumphs of her identity as an Afro-Cuban female poet. The gods of the Yoruba from Africa are the deities amongst whom Herrera identifies most closely with, divorcing from even the syncretic forms of religious survival portrayed in the practice of the Santería which has often categorised Afro-Cuban spirituality. The defence of the Afro-Cuban identity and love of her Lucumí culture are for Herrera most clearly embodied in the Yoruba divinities. Therefore, through Herrera’s poetry, the significance of divine beings as embodiments of the lived history of black African and Afrodescendant populations in the New World is further illuminated. Just as the sculpture of Portobelo Nazarene illustrated the black theology of suffering and liberation as embodied in the crucifixion and resurrection of the Christ, Herrera’s poems depict the significance of the Yoruba gods as engaged in not only the histories of conflict and triumph, but the plight of twentieth-century Afro-Cubans towards social equality and discrimination.
Olódùmarè (Olorum) as a divine embodiment of nation-building and redemption amongst the Nagô of Brazil
Beyond the Lucumí in Cuba, Yoruba religious influence is best exemplified through the religious practice of Afro-Brazilians in the region of Bahia. Bahia, the first capital of Brazil is home to some of the most preserved traditions of the enslaved Yoruba people who were brought to the Americas during the Transatlantic slave trade due to the boom of sugar plantations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Gordon 1979:237). Notably, the descendants of the Yoruba and practitioners of the religion are known as Nagô in Brazil (Cohen 2002:6).
The first enslaved black Africans arrived in Brazil in the middle of the sixteenth century, and although practising one’s African religion was often deemed a threat under the colonial administration, many enslaved Africans in rural areas practised their religions clandestinely under the guise of weekly entertainment encouraged by slaveowners (Hopkins et al. 2014:300; Gordon 1979:238). Notably, in urban areas, African religious practice was not subject to the same repression and the presence of African religiosity aided in differentiating between the enslaved Africans and the rest of the populace (Gordon 1979:238). While Brazil’s status as the last Latin American state to abolish slavery, in 1888, seemed to hail a shift in the social positioning of the Nagô people, prejudices against the population still remained. Following the abolition of slavery, Africans and their descendants transitioned from a life of chattel slavery to dire social and economic conditions marked by stark inequality. They were now socially isolated not by their enslaved condition but by the stigma of their black skin. Thus, to foster one’s social mobility, it was necessary to assimilate to the practices of the more economically advantaged populace and this included religion. As Roman Catholicism was seen as the normative religion in nineteenth century Brazil, it became vital for the former slaves to adopt a Roman Catholic status above all else (Hopkins and Faraon, 2014:302). However, the adoption of Catholicism by the formerly enslaved Nagô did not result in the erasure of their Yoruba religiosity. Rather, a religious syncretism was born which merged the elements of Yoruba religiosity particularly as it pertained to the worship of the orìṣàs with the veneration of Catholic saints. This new religion became known as Candomblé. The presence of the Candomblé religion is considered to be of the clearest manifestations of the Yoruba influence in Bahia and wider Afro-Brazilian culture today (Gordon 1979:237).
In the 1930s, Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas made nationalism, including cultural nationalism, a priority in his plan to unify the country. This led to the repression of African-influenced religions as they fell outside the parameters of what Vargas considered admissible within the Brazilian cultural nationalist project. Under his dictatorship, police regularly confiscated sacred religious objects and artwork from the Afro-Brazilian religious communities and even jailed worshippers, mandating permits for the practice of their religions (Cleveland 2013:1). Afro-Brazilians faced continual overt police persecution until the second half century, despite political attempts to create a façade of nationalist religious unity (Hartikainen 2008:90). Under the Vargas regime, many policies were promulgated to monitor and suppress the ‘mystery cults’ of the nation who engaged in the practice of illegal medicine, sorcery, and curandeirismo (popular forms of curing) as outlined by the earlier Penal Code of 1890 which forbade spiritism practices and the use of talismans or cartomancy (Maggie 1992 in Johnson 2001:28). Since the Yoruba religion is a practice of divination for the interpretation of foreign and future events, these prohibitions directly infringed upon the basic religious rites of the Nagô. Moreover, all religious terreiros [9] were forced to register with the state and thus became subject to official police regulation. In 1934, the Polícia de Costumes was instituted to carry out the regulation said ‘mystery cults’, and despite the declaration of the Penal Code of 1940 article 208 which claimed to further protect the terreiros and criminalised the disturbance or insult of religious acts and objects, most terreiros of Candomblé amongst other smaller Afro-Brazilian religions were not granted legal status to be seen as traditional or religious practices worthy of state protection. Notably, until 1974, terreiros still had to register with the Department of Customs, underlining the religious scrutiny Afro-Brazilian groups faced for the majority of the twentieth century (Johnson 2001:28–29). This over-vigilance of the Nagô and the religiosity of Afro-Brazilians within twentieth century Brazilian society maintained a ‘christofascist’ politic (Miranda 2020:1).
[9] Terreiro: a religious sacred space in Afro-Brazilian religious tradition (Miranda, 2020:3)
Nonetheless, over the next four decades, Afro-Brazilians continued to advocate for the full freedom and diversity within the political and artistic spheres Brazilian society. Afro-Brazilian poet and activist Solano Trindade (1908–1974) is one figure of the period who through his poetry employed Yoruba religious history to advocate for the recognition of the marginalised racial category of Afro-Brazilians. Trindade participated in the two Afro-Brazilian Congresses of 1934 and 1937 in Recife and Salvador and contributed to the foundation of the Afro-Brazilian Cultural Centre and the Pernambuco Black Front in 1936 (Souza 2004:283). Notably, his poems ‘recover stories that refuse to repeat stereotypes of passivity and submission’ challenging the Brazilian political hegemony of the mid-twentieth century (Souza 2004:286.)
The presence of the orìṣàs in a number of his artistic and literary works is evidence of Trindade’s disavowal of Brazilian politics, which denied the presence of Afro-Brazilian history and religiosity. Notably, the poet appeals to the Supreme deity Olódùmarè, here named as Olorum (Ọlọ́run) to embody the spirit of black Brazilian liberation in mid-twentieth century Brazil. In his lyrical poem Olorum Ekê published in 1961, Trindade writes:
Olorum Ekê
Eu sou poeta do povo
Olorum Ekê
A minha bandeira
É de cor de sangue
Olorum Ekê
Olorum Ekê
Da cor da revolução
Olorum Ekê
Meus avós foram escravos
Olorum Ekê
Olorum Ekê
Eu ainda escravo sou
Olorum Ekê
Olorum Ekê
Os meus filhos não serão
Olorum Ekê
Olorum Ekê
(Trindade and Campos Reis 2021:81)
This poem while short and simple in its use of literary device is endowed with profound religious and social meaning. The repetition of the title Olorum Ekê[10] serves as a liturgy of the deity, appealing to the inherent orality of the Yoruba religious tradition. However, Trindade like Herrera, also uses his poem to challenge the reigning racial as well as religious hegemonies of the period. As aforementioned, Afro-Brazilians faced distinct religious persecution for the first half of the twentieth century. However, the social situations of Afro-Brazilians as it was related to labour and citizenship were also heavily problematised during the period. In the social charter of the 1934 constitution, certain occupations received citizenship guarantees while others, particularly rural labour and other urban occupational categories were omitted. This essentially resulted in a hierarchy of citizenship categories based on occupational prestige which inevitably disenfranchised Afro-Brazil populations who less than five decades earlier had still been subject to slave labour (Mitchell and Wood 1999:1005). Trindade alludes to these inequalities in his poem in naming himself as well as his avós as slaves, delineating the continuity between the unjust labour policies that affected the nineteenth century enslaved generations and the early twentieth century ‘free’ but working-class Afro-Brazilian populace. Trindade’s hopes are reserved for the next generation, and through appealing to Olódùmarè in his aspiration towards social and political equality, the alliance between Afro-Brazilian social progress and Yoruba spirituality is clear. Olódùmarè continues to embody a spiritual force that as seen in the Yoruba odùs, and in Herrera’s poem is deeply implicated in the redemption of the Yoruba population and its descendants in the Afro-Latin social sphere.
[10] The exact translation of Ekê from the Portuguese to the Yoruba is somewhat contentious, with some sources contending that this title means ‘people of the holy warrior’ in the Yoruba language. There are no similar definitions of the word eke and its tonal variations in Yoruba, thus it is more probable that the word ekê in this poem comes from the Igbo language, a neighbouring ethnic group of the Yoruba people. In Igbo cosmology, the Supreme deity Chukwu possesses three chief names, Chinèkè, being the most widely-used, meaning ‘the Spirit that creates’; the prefix Chi referring specifically to the ‘unique personal life-force and the principle that determines each individual’s destiny’, while eke (ekè) means deliberateness or intention (Okafor, 2016:151; Igwe 1999:152).
In another poem, Tristes maracatus, Trindade similarly to Herrera, elevates Olódùmarè above all other deities as ‘O mais tolerante dos deuses/ O mais pacífico/ Dos criadores/O mais estético/Dos chefes de raça’, challenging the false Brazilian political pretence of religious harmony and unity which as aforementioned, worked to suppress Afro-Brazilian religion (Trindade and Campos Reis 2021:89). Trindade’s poetry thus attempts to rescue the historical experience of the black identity using poetry as a weapon against oppression as understood through the Judeo-Christian religious framework (Machado 2010:45).
Olódùmarè thus functions as a divine embodiment of the formation and equality of the Nagô in Brazil. Akin to the deity’s portrayal in the Yoruba religious corpus as well as his adaptation as Olofi in the poetry of Herrera, Olódùmarè as Olorum in Trindade’s poetry is intertwined in the aspiration towards the equality and religious freedom of Afro-Brazilians in the twentieth century. Just as El Nazareno embodied the suffering and glory of the Afrodescendant slaves and cimarrones of Portobelo, becoming central in the creation of an early black theology of suffering and glory, Olódùmarè in the Yoruba religious framework as manifested in Trindade’s poetry embodies similar notions of justice and redemption. While Trindade may not have been able to witness the evolution of responses to Afro-Brazilian religiosity in his lifetime, the contemporary artistic interpretations of the Yoruba religion in the wider Brazilian social sphere are testament of the continued transfiguration of Afro-Brazilian religious identity in the modern day. Afro-Brazilian artists such as Abdias do Nascimiento (1914–2011) who formed the Black National Theatre alongside Trindade in 1945, as well as non-black Candomblé-initiated artists such as Héctor Julio Páride Bernabó (1911–1997), known as Carybé, portray the contemporary understandings of the Yoruba orìṣà in Afro-Brazilian religious culture (See Figure 6 for Abdias do Nascimiento art and figures 7 and 8 Carybé bas-relief mural).
Conclusion
This study began with a quote from Gayraud S. Wilmore, whose literary and activist work championed an Afrocentric approach to Western Christianity during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. This dissertation has followed suit, in exploring the racialised reworkings of the Christian faith as seen through El Nazareno of Portobelo and has further challenged the colonial Christian project and examined the heralding of pre-colonial West African religiosity through the Yoruba religious framework and its echoes in the poetic works of Georgina Herrera and Solano Trindade. The aim of this work has been to draw a line of continuity between black African religious practice from the pre-colonial period to the present, and from western African to black civilisations in the Americas to demonstrate the significance of black piety in endeavours towards the expression of black African identity during and the colonial era. The Portobelo Nazarene evidences the liberatory potentialities of Christian religious tradition when divorced from the colonial ideologies of impurity, and racial inferiority, which spearheaded the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The artistic depiction of the icon of the Christ functioned as a divine embodiment of the enslaved African condition in Panama and within the wider colonial Latin American context, illustrating the violence and trauma of forced displacement due to Iberian colonialism as well as the aspirations towards the liberation of black African identity in the New World. Similarly, the Yoruba orìṣàs Olódùmarè and Ògún have functioned as divine embodiments of the black condition not only within the Continent but within the Latin American diaspora, catalysing black-Latinx movements towards racial justice and religious freedom in the twentieth century. In this way, this study has moved away from discussions of African religiosity and the focus on syncretism as a means of cultural cohesion during the colonial period and has rather sought to illuminate the importance of black spirituality and physicality in artistic and literary modes as they have coincided with the establishment and growth of black societies in the Continent and beyond. These religious and geographical case studies are but departure points in the study of black religion on a global scale, providing a genesis from which further research concerning the transnational relationship between black African and Afrodescendant religious art and literature and movements of black liberation and racial equality can occur.
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Appendix D
