Brazil, a high-stakes election and Yoruba diaspora in the Americas
October 15, 2022 Danlami Nmodu
By Osmund Agbo
When on Sunday, September 22 of 2019, the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Enitan, in an interview with Daily Trust and on the sideline of the Brazilian Consulate exhibition of Ife artifacts, stated that there are more Yoruba people in Brazil than in Nigeria, many believed that His Royalty Majesty grossly exaggerated the facts and so stretched the truth way beyond its elastic limit. But at any rate, there is no denying that Orisha and other aspects of Yoruba cultures and religion, continues to define the everyday identities of many Afro-descendants in the old Portuguese colony and beyond. Today, you will find many worshipers of Yoruba diasporic religion in Brazil where it goes by the name, Candomblé or in the former Spanish colonies of Cuba, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico where it’s referred to as Santería.
Once upon a time, the old Oyo empire was a powerful kingdom comprising the Yoruba states in present day South-West Nigeria. It was connected with the Kingdom of Dahomey of what is today the southern part of the central Republic of Benin. Although the then Oyo kingdom was far more powerful and its army compelled Dahomey to pay tribute to it from the 1730’s up until 1819, the two were both great kingdoms and important regional powers that had an organized domestic economy built on conquest and slave labor. The late Nigerian historian and former Head of the Department of history, Obafemi Awolowo University, Professor Isaac Akinjogbin, once referred to the pair as the “Aja-Yoruba commonwealth”.
Ouidah, a southern city in today’s Republic of Benin, is known for its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Oyo empire relied upon Ouidah port which was within the control of the Kingdom of Dahomey for access to European trade. From Ouidah alone, more than one million Africans were exported out before closing its trade in the 1860s. In the late eighteenth century, the Oyo empire came to rely heavily on slave sales to Europeans for its sustenance. When the trade eventually ended, income dried up and power steadily declined, Oyo eventually fell to the superior forces of the Fulani Empire in 1835. The Slave Route, a track down which slaves were taken to the ships from Ouidah, and leads to the Door of No Return represented by a memorial arch, still exists today as a monument of that inglorious era. But I digress.
According to a 2010 Census, Brazil has 14 million Black people. Funny enough, of Black Brazilians, only about 10% identify as being of African origin (afrodescendente) while the majority claim to be of “Brazilian origin”, whatever that means. But by far, one of the most celebrated Afro-Brazilians in history today is Edson Arantes do Nascimento, popularly known all over the world simply as Pelé.
More:
https://newsdiaryonline.com/brazil-a-high-stakes-election-and-yoruba-diaspora-in-the-americas/