KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY H.R.H. OSEIJEMAN ADEFUNMI I, ALASE
OYOTUNJI, AT
To Her Ladyship, the Onisegun, and
to this distinguished assembly of
masters of the mysteries. Greetings,
from the deep south. We bring
you the greetings, of course, of
the chiefs, queens and priests of
Oyotunji. Meanwhile, we would call
your attention to the reading of
the year.
In our reading of the year, which
emphasized so much of 'Oyeku Meji',
the indication is that this is a
period of time in which the
ancestors of every people are
summoning them to preserve and to
resurrect their culture and their
traditions. So we see it
everywhere. We hear terrifying
phrases and words like ethnic
cleansing. We also hear all kinds
of racial epithets. So, there is a
great deal of apprehension as to
just where the world is headed.
Quite naturally, there is going to
be a lunatic fringe who will carry
every movement and every issue too
far. With the result that there is
going to be a great deal of
conflict, controversy and in some cases
even bloodshed, as we see in
certain of the European countries, and
among certain of the Islamic
world. We regret these extremes;
however, in as much as it is such
a period that we are passing
through, it is of importance to
note the degree to which Afrikan
Americans are also participating
in this extraordinary cycle.
So, we find ourselves just
returning from the
where, to our great surprise, the
government has produced a series of
posters, which you will find in
the customs offices, which you will
find in all restaurants,
announcing that
Vodoun", "the cradle of
vodun". Then there is a large image of a
priestess dancing and at the
bottom there is a salutation to
the "vodunsi". The
vodunsi are what we would call, of course, aborisa
or olorisa.
Observing then, that we were
fortunate enough to take a team in
research of the mysteries of Ifa.
We were headed for
after we once visited Whydah, that
frightening sanctuary where so
many of the souls of our ancestors
returned and where so much
suffering occurred, [we discovered
that it] is still very much a
dynamic center of Afrikan
tradition today. So, there is a sense of
defiance, which we do note
throughout that particular country because
directly across from the Roman
Catholic church is the Temple des
Pythons, the Temple of the
Pythons...Directly accross the village
square, standing there in
opposition to the encroachment of that
powerful Western religious system.
So, we visited the chief priest of
the
team and discovered there a way to
go into the bush region where we
found a tiny village smaller than
Oyotunji itself. (On less acreage.)
But, nevertheless, a very dynamic
center for the preservation of Fa,
as it is called by the Fon
speaking people of the former
degree, which is one of the
reasons we were concerned, of course, to
go there; since Dahomey, as it
used to be called, or now the Republic
of Benin, does indeed have a
reputation for maintaining, to the most
ancestral degree and intensity,
the cultural traditions of Afrika.
Among them there is no
embarrassment, nor shame, nor attempt to
conceal their devotion to the
cultural traditions of their ancestors.
We did also make a tour to the
capitol of the Dahomean kings, up to
Abomey, that city of endless walls
where they have preserved the
ancestral shrine for His Royal
Majesty, King Gelele, iba ara t'orun.
There they maintain his couch as
well as a priesthood who daily bring
offerings to him and for him and
praise his name and recite his
exploits. Obviously, it is through
the preservation of those
ancestral figures who really make
our nation and make us who we are
and what we were that we do indeed
receive a special power and
sustenance.
The emphasis, therefore, at
Oyotunji over the years has been on the
resurrection of the ancestral
customs, the ancestral traditions and
the ancestral celebrations. For us
at Oyotunji all power for the
resurrection and the safeguarding
of the Afrikan people comes via the
ancestors. Of supreme importance,
therefore, has been the
resurrection and restoration of
the powerful Egungun worship.
We were fortunate, during our
visit to Whydah to see a very elaborate
Egungun ceremony for some deceased
Ahosi. The Ahosi were those Amazon
warriors, women warriors, who were
the terror of the surrounding
kingdoms of
celebrated there in the Egungun
worship, [as were] a deceased group
of chiefs. A very exciting event
it was, with the participation of
some six Egungun.
It was during that ceremony that
we realized how vitally important it
is to preserve the ancestor cults.
For it is through them that we
gain our morality. For in the
theology developing, emerging and being
produced at Oyotunji, it is not
through the orisa that we receive our
morality, but it is from the
ancestors. They are the ones who decided
what was good and bad. They are
the ones who decided how we should go
about every one of the 'Rites of
Passage' through which all of us
must pass. So, in tracing and
restoring our ancestry there has arisen
a form of nationalism and ethnicity
which perhaps in many cases many
people consider out of place in
the restoration of orisa worship.
However, were it not for those
ancestors, we would know nothing about
orisa today, so we venerate them.
Above all else they are the most
powerful source for our
resurrection and in time our hegemony. So,
that is why we have the motto at
Oyotunji, "Eluju di ipe di eluju
ekun", "in time the
field belongs to the leopard". We look forward to
the resurrection of our cultural
traditions as well as our political
hegemony.
At this time, then, we are
confronted by one of history's great
moments. We are either being asked
or expected to participate in this
historical moment. By our
presences here today, the indication is
that we are all participating in
what is taking place throughout the
Afrikan world. Many arguments, pro
and con, on the issue of the
resurrection of Afrikan traditions
are being shouted and there are a
number of positive as well as
adverse results which emanate from this
period that we are passing
through. So, it is altogether fitting and
proper that we should address
ourselves at this time to that most
important issue so vitally
interesting and acute to the Afrikan
Americans as to who is going to
control, [therefore] decide the
future of Afrikan culture and
tradition and the resurrection of our
people in this hemisphere.
We note that over the centuries,
different schools of Yoruba culture
and religion have emerged. There
is the Brazilian school, there is
the Cuban school, there is the
Trinidadian school, and now the
Afrikan American school of orisa
theology. This is to be expected. It
is not at all inconsistent with
the 'Pagan Intellect'. (We have no
compunction about referring to
ourselves as 'pagan' since the word
does mean 'the worship of nature
or of nature powers'. The powers of
nature. It come from the Latin
word "pagani" which meant "country
people".) So country people,
being closer to nature, were bound to
have a stronger sense of the
relationship and the influence of nature
on their lives. You who went
through the recent
(which we watched on television
from Abijan and the
a difficult time. Despite the
benevolence of the water goddesses,
they also have an aspect which is
destructive, terrifying and beyond
explanation in many cases. The
fact remains that these powers are the
powers of nature, so we have no
reservation about declaring ourselves
heirs of the 'Pagan Intellect'.
We realize at Oyotunji that the
emphasis is on the resurrection of
Afrikan culture and traditions and
that it is not necessarily a
racist nor a negative attitude
which motivates us. We have devoted
ourselves to the rehabilitation of
the Afrikan American people who
had suffered most grievously
during the slave trade. For hardly any
remnant of our ancestral custom,
traditions, holidays nor language
were left to us. We have had to
start from the very beginnings of our
civilization and the thought of
our ancestors. We have tried to
parallel the conditions under which
our ancestors evolved their
theology. So, we have had to
redefine a number of terms in order that
we might be able to more clearly
understand and participate in the
spiritual life of our ancestors.
We've had to redefine 'religion',
for one thing. Religion for us is
not simply a search for a supreme
god or a faith. Nor to have
something to believe in. For us, a
religion is composed of the ethnic
heritage of a particular people.
It is composed of important events
in their cultural and political
history. [It is composed of] those
events and thos philosophies which
they evolved based upon the
environment in which they lived.
So, that is why religion is
essentially an 'ethnic
celebration'. If we study any of the great
religions of the world invariably
their holy land is the place where
they evolved, and their holy and
sacred people are the people who
produced that thought; those
rituals, and who preserve them on a
regular basis.
It is for that reason that the
theologians at Oyotunji do indeed
think of it as mischievous to
export ones culture or ones religion or
to impose it either by force or by
persuasion upon another people.
Because it means that a particular
people will have to relinquish
their own culture, their own
history, the veneration of their own
language, their own cuisine, in
preference for an entirely new
invasive cultural ideal, standards
and patterns of behavior. The
Afrikan Americans have been
terribly victimized by the
proselytization of Middle Eastern
Theology. As we live our lives on a
daily basis and celebrate each one
of the festivals of our ancestors
and the festivals of the orisa, we
have sought in one way or another
to anticipate the coming of a
period when we will have to decide
whether we would vigorously export
Afrikan religion or we should
maintain it as a particularly
ethnic expression.
It is for that reason that we
recognize that, in the Old Testament of
the Jews, the entire treatise is
based on the history of the Jewish
people; their justification for
invading
it is heaven itself which has an
anthropomorphic morality and can
decide, as it were, who is right
and who is wrong. We decided that it
is an abominable thing to teach an
Afrikan child that a Middle
Eastern people are the
"Chosen People" of the greatest force in the
heavens. We think of it also an
abomination to teach that same child
that his own complexion represents
a curse by that particular
anthropomorphic deity. In
consequence, we recognize that each
religion is going to reflect the
philosophies, the prejudices and the
ideas of one particular people.
We have, therefore, the terrible
Adam and Eve myth which presupposes
that the male was created from the
very soil of the earth while the
female was created from a piece of
the male...A piece of his boney
skeleton! Implying, therefore, a
certain inferiority which has
filtered down on the mundane level
to the fact that women in that
Middle Eastern world do not share
the same spiritual heights, nor
power, nor genius as would a male.
Today we have seen a great
refutation of that in the women's
lib movement, which is determined
to prove in defiance of this
chauvinistic god that they too are equal
to the male.
Of course, in the Afrikan
tradition we have no such conflict. In the
first place the first order of the
universe is Olorun, defined by
Araba Ajanaku as the "Owner
of the Mysteries of Heaven". We have
given a great deal of thought to
this, trying to analyze precisely
what he meant. [These arguments
are found in Fela Sowande's little
booklet, Ifa.] There the argument
is, and our conclusion is, that the
First Order of the Universe,
Olorun, is a Universal Energy permeating
everything. This is more than just
a belief. It is a point of fact, a
conclusion arrived at by atomic
scientists. Everything has life,
everything has energy. But this
particular force has no
anthropomorphic characteristics!
It has no human feelings, it has no
likes nor dislikes, it has no
favorite people, it has no cursed
people. Nor does it have any
special day of service or worship.
Rather it is a passive energy,
dictating no laws, nor rules, nor
morality. Indeed, there is no
force in heaven which dictates a
morality.
So, the orisa are not dictators of
morality. It is the ancestors who
have decided how to live on this
planet. It is they who give us the
guidelines for managing and
relating, or attempting to neutralize
certain destructive forces of
nature.
Having learned that, we are very
happy to recall that during the
threat from hurricane Hugo, which
was headed for
after coming up through the
the people of
we heard, and it was difficult to
get out of
Everyone was leaving. So, what the
Otu priests at Oyotunji were
instructed to do was to sacrifice
to Oya, because this was
not 'Hugo', this was Oya who was
on her way! Following our ancestral
traditions, we made the sacrifices
to Oya, chanted and danced her
praises and recited her oriki. One
hour later the report came over
that the hurricane had changed
course. It was no longer headed toward
Beaufort, it was now headed toward
sympathize with those who received
that unhappy news, we,
nevertheless, felt very gratified
that the metaphysics of our
ancestors had once again
triumphed. There, are so many episodes in
the history of Oyotunji where we
have had no other recourse except to
the orisa, or to our ancestors for
the survival of that tiny Yoruba
enclave. So, the ancestors emerge
as the arbiters of morality--and
without them--people will invent
all kinds of new theologies and
reinterpretations.
We know that in the search for
Afrikan religion by Westerners; in as
much as they had already decided
that religion was the worship of
celestial forces, they searched
out only how Afrikans related to
celestial forces. Very often they
ignored or overlooked the worship
of ancestors because it was not a
part of the traditions handed down
from
in those traditions, particularly
the Christian tradition, the
emphasis was on determining that
all morality and all perfection
should reside in a devine figure.
This universality is what has
brought about the idea that one
religion is for everyone, and
everyone has a right to buy it or
shop around for it as one might a
package in a market.
We do know, as we study history,
that both Christianity and Islam
have decided that everyone must
have this package. So, either it was
a hard sell to receive the
Christian package, or it was a physical
assault as in the case of Islam to
compel people to accept the
religious or spiritual package.
Which, of course, meant that the
converted had to give up the
worship and respect of their own
ancestors, and to venerate alien
nations. So, we see tens of
thousands of Afrikans and people
from conquered nations making their
way to Mecca as the center of the
universe and as the 'holy land',
rather than to the heart of
Afrika, or to Egypt or to ancient Kush,
or to Ethiopia. They are making
their way to the countries from which
the imported religions came.
So, obviously, we believe we have
produced a sound argument that
religion is essentially ethnic.
Ethnic to such an extent that today
we see in
Indian culture, and who would
suppress it. That is the main reason
for the burning or destruction of
that particular mosque which
started off the present rioting
and blood shed in
Islamic invasion there had been
the destruction of the
which originally had existed
there, and an Islamic masjid had been
erected on the spot. Now, the
Indians, being imbued with that current
which is passing around the world
for cultural preservations and
ancestral resurrection, decided
they wanted that site back where they
could worship their cosmic
ancestor Siva. So, the result is that one
ethnic culture is being pitted
against another. Those who preserve
their own ethnic culture and their
own ethnic tradition are deciding
that it is in their own country
that their own culture must prevail.
Not at all an arguable issue or
decision.
We Afrikan Americans find that it
is not necessary that we be anti-
white, but it is necessary that we
be very pro-Yoruba, very pro-
Afrikan. It is necessary that we
be supremely Afrikan, indeed. We
must be conscious of who we are.
We are a people who have returned to
the most vital and sensitive
mysteries of the Afrikan genius. We are
able to do this gracefully and
successfully because we are the direct
descendant of the thinkers and
occultists who expounded it. Yet we
have often stood silently by while
another ethnic people have co-
opted, usurped and capitalized on
everything that our ancestors have
discovered or revealed.
Santayana reminds us that,
"Those who do not know history are
condemned to live it over and over
again". So, the lessons of history
have to be remembered. If we are
an intelligent people, history,
which is the worship of the
past--the worship of ancestors--certainly
is going to teach us and guide us
to that successful resurrection
which we so intensely desire. It
is a fact that we all know what is
happening, and we all see what is
happening, but we are often too
obtuse and passive to join
together to beat what is happening. The
question is, is it reasonable that
we should maintain such a
paralysis and suspension of action
when it come to that most vital of
issues: the preservation and
control of our own cultural institutions.
Among the Hindus for example there
have been a great many
mathematical and scientific
inventions and discoveries based upon
facts that came out of their own
pagan traditions. Out of their
religion they have discovered the
very source and foundation of
science. We discovered from our
own ancestors, particularly those who
evolved Ifa, that it is a very
intricate and advanced mathematical
system. Indeed, as we learned from
Baba Epega, Ifa is a binary system
with a base of the number two.
We are concerned, therefore, that
the lessons of Afrikan history
should not be shuffled aside in
the name of "the brotherhood of man".
Especially when this brotherhood
is advocated by a big brother who is
violent. This doctrine of
brotherhood was preached to all of the
Indians of the Caribbean islands,
it was preached to the Indians of
North America, it was preached to
the Egyptians, to the Ethiopian and
to the Chinese after which a
wholesale exploitation, deception,
genocide and confiscation of
property was let loose by the advocates
of world brotherhood. So, we know
that this is a cliche of a
particular imperialist culture or
imperialist doctrine and we,
therefore, cannot mistake it for
the real truth of human life, nor
for the truth of the doctrines of
"common origin" which Marcus Garvey
so eloquently expounded.
So, we must look back then. Where
did this concept or this idea come
from that one religion is for
everyone to grab, to leap into and to
imitate another people? We have to
trace this back then to Asikunder.
Better known as Alexander of
Macedonia, the world's first known
compulsive imperialist. It was he
who spawned what I refer to as
the 'Macedonian syndrome'. The
'Macedonian syndrome' is an aggressive
ambition to use violence to compel
the world to conform to a single
ethnic culture.
In Alexander's case it was the
Hellenic culture which had swept over
the Greeks who were a white people
inhabiting a cluster of islands
along the southeastern coast of
succeeded on a grand scale to
impose his ethnocentrism upon a vast
aggregate of peoples. Even after
death, the idea of cultural
imperialism persisted. It inspired
a young warrior, descended from an
Italian tribe known as the Romans,
to envision the same dream. So, in
time, the 'Macedonian syndrome',
inherited by the Italians, produced
the
Thus the doctrine of an ethnic
superiority spread, and was taught
from northern
ghostly leukoderms of
were forced to worship the Roman
pantheon, speak the Roman dialect
and pay taxes to the agents of
little village along the banks of
conquering world power.
Overcome by this pseudo Hellenism
also was a young Jew born in the
colonial Roman city of
(though he vehemently denies it),
was literally knocked off his seat
when the idea occurred to him that
a persistent Jewish myth about the
coming of a revolutionary Jewish
messiah could serve his dream of
bringing the Hebrew religion out
of its suffocating racism and
ethnocentrism--and more in line
with the Hellenistic ideal of
universalism. So, when the idea was
put to the Judean Essene Society
by Saul, he was assaulted, he was
cursed for blasphemy and only
barely escaped from
name to the more Europeanized
'Paul', proceeded--through his newly
invented Christianity--to initiate
Gentiles into Jewish religion!
I remember distinctly, Queen
Mother Moore, at the time we were
building and developing 'Mount
Addis Ababa', said that she
encountered a Rabbi down in lower
Manhattan and she said, "Rabbi, you
gonna bless me?" He said,
"The religion is for the Jewish people."
What Saul had done, therefore, was
to commence the initiation of
Gentiles into Jewish religion,
never realizing nor imagining that, in
time, the Gentiles would
completely alter his Christianity to fit
their own Greco-Roman form and
practices...Or that they would twist
his carefully edited gospels to
condemn vital Jewish doctrines and
customs: that in point of fact,
they would create from his Christos a
new god and reduce the ancient
Hebrew, Yahwe, to an ill-tempered,
bumbling, old fogey whose
dictates, commandments and curses had to be
reformed, reinterpreted or
rejected completely. Indeed, so
overpowering did the converts to
Jewish religion become that they
began to violently condemn and punish
the Jewish people themselves!
Charging them with deicide. The
killing of a god, which no one has
ever proved--ever existed.
Now the Jews themselves are
hopelessly outnumbered by their converts
to Jewish theology. Their converts
have usurped the authority to
interpret and define Jewish
culture and religion to the world. We
Yoruba Americans face a parallel
possibility unless we move with
great vigor to establish ourselves
and our own as inimitable arbiters
and managers of our own cultural
institutions. For we have seen how
certain of our ancestors, who
lacking foresight or full knowledge of
the nature of the oyinbo, invited
them into their lands, with the
result that in time the
descendants of these oyinbo became masters of
the land and controllers of all
Afrikan affairs. To keep Afrikan
affairs in our own hands we must
learn by our own mistakes just how
far to open the arms of friendship
and how closely we can embrace the
non-Afrikan!
We conclude these remarks by
announcing or pointing out certain of
the rites of passage through which
every Yoruba boy and girl at
Oyotunji must pass. The
'Akinkanju' which takes a young man at
thirteen years old and has him
make his vow for the preservation of
his nation and of its people. So,
to the argument that politics and
religion do not mix, we can only
refer you to all of the nations
around the world who have used
religion as a means of extending their
political power and destroying
other civilizations and cultures.
We will refer you, certainly, to
Maryse Conde's book, Segu, when she
describes the tragedy of a family
separated and torn apart by
conversions to imported cultures
and religions: to the extent that
ultimately the descendants of that
convert destroyed the very city of
his own ancestors declaring that
it was not 'righteous'...by a whole
set of new terms and evaluations
which had nothing to do with the
Afrikan people as a whole.
So, each Yoruba boy and girl,
then, begins each day in school with
the recitation of the oath:
Ni ase
bura igbajumo lai-lai. Nje nko,
l'orunko oba mi, no bura Se
gbogbo'hun l'aagbara mi--mo mu
sise amuba yiyeni olukuluku--fun
alafia Enia Logo ati ipamo ise
dale ati ofin atawadawo ariku baba wa.
Jeki ebi yi koja, ogidiga osa
Afrika
I am compelled by a spiritual
force I cannot resist to swear my
eternal allegiance to the king and
the flag of the Yoruba nation. I
also solemnly swear to do
everything in my power and use every means
conceivable (remember that line?)
for the welfare of my people and
the preservation of the culture
and tradition of my ancestors. So let
it be, oh, ye gods of Afrika.
Each child is reciting this every
morning as class begins in the
is our conviction that every
Afrikan child has a right during his
primary years to be educated by
his own people, in his own culture,
and to venerate all of his
ancestors as sacred people. Then these
initiates, as they progress, are
also to recite that Afrika is
great...or Yoruba is great, and
must come before all else! Yoruba is
Aido Hwedo, "the beginning
and the end". "The King has said that a
nation must be loved by it's
people. That is why he has forbidden his
people to intercourse from one
people to another, because a wanderer
can never have a great love for
his own people. The King has said
that Yoruba is an enemy of all the
world. That, therefore, you must
use as much force in killing an
ant as you would to kill an elephant;
because it is the small things
which bring on the large. The King has
said that the Yoruba are a warrior
people, so it must never come to
pass that a true Yoruba admit
before an enemy that he is vanquished,
because the King does not wish for
another dog to bark louder than
his own. The King has said that
among our people there are those who
are refractory. Who, though they
are rivers; have the will to imitate
the ocean. Such small wholes must
be stopped up...and you must see to
it that from the crown alone the
sun may shine. The King has said
that the chiefs are like the
bellows which iron workers use to make
their fires red. So that if any
chief withholds for himself the air
which is necessary for the fires
of Oyotunji, such a chief should be
used as coal to keep the fires
hot. In closing, the King has said
that those who represent his
power, aught not do evil things. He
forbids the strong to take
advantage of the weak; for this is the way
of the chicken hawk which steals
chicks without asking leave of the
owner of the chicken yard."
So, with these oaths the Afrikan
child is prepared not only to
maintain his own spiritual
identity above all else, but to assume
responsibility for its
preservation, and its protection, and its
settlement.
Therefore, we find that there can
be no separation between politic
and religion. In point of fact,
politics is the highest religion
because it, indeed, preserves the
locus or the location for a people
to worship their particular gods.
And there is no separation between
economics and religion, which is
one of the unfortunate cliches
which have been passed on to the young
Afrikan-American. As the preachers
told us when we were young, "Son,
don't think about money all the
time. Don't go after money. Remember
that you have mansions in
heaven." And yet because those mansion were
in heaven we were unable to occupy
them. And we had to congregate on
the streets of
live. So, if you are planning no
longer to be concerned with life on
earth, we would advise that you do
not reproduce issue who are going
to have to survive on what you did
not leave.
So, every generation is bound to
preserve certain traditions and to
produce a certain legacy, often
economical, for the next generation
to inherit. If every father has
sworn to this and every mother has
sworn to this, then the pursuit of
your own happiness must then be
greatly reduced. For the most part
most people in
pursuing happiness as if it would
never appear or it was going out of
style. They pursue happiness to
the extent that they have neglected
to prepare, or to take care for
the next generation. So, the next
generation has instinctively begun
to organize: through gangs!
We see also, among the Afrikan
people, a great deal of weeping over
what is thought to be the breaking
up of the 'Black family'.
The 'Black family', of course, has
been defined for us by European
theology and philosophy and was
not of our design. It was not an
Afrikan family. So, if we see the
breaking up of the 'Black family',
as it were, it is because it was
predicated on European marriage
ideals. It often began, of course,
without an investigation into the
family in which you were going to
marry, but it began with an animal
attraction! Two persons attracted
to each other, usually long enough
to have sex and produce an
offspring. And then suddenly, the
infatuation had ended and we saw a
break up. But this was not the
Afrikan way. It was not an Afrikan
family. It was based on the Code
Napoleon and British Common Law.
Many people argue about 'Christian
marriage'. And yet there was no
such thing as Christian marriage.
Marriage was disparaged by Paul in
the first place, and in the second
place, the prototype of the
Christos or the Christ never
married! He never had a family. So this
is not the ideal, then, that a man
can follow if he expects to
preserve and to build his nation.
He is going to have to marry. He is
going to have to have children. He
is going to have to learn to
support those children. These are
things, of course, the messiah
never bothered to do. He is going
to have to pay rent or buy a
building or a home where his child
is going to live. He is going to
also have to buy food. Of course,
these are things which no liturgy
in the New Testament provides for.
Let us conclude by saying that
there are a number or a series of new
world cliches to which we are
bound to respond. Well, we have already
responded to the argument that we
are mixing politics with religion
by pointing out that religion
itself is political. The movements or
the activities of any people is
political. 'Don't care what they are
doing. If they are moving and
converging on a river, that in itself
is politics. Whatever they do, if
they fight for their rights, if
they declare that they are going
to overthrow an alien power, that is
political. If they use, as the
Haitians did, the voodoo to do it,
then politics and religion
certainly worked admirably well during
that decent from the Bois Caiman.
So we, therefore, must refute that
cliche.
We have also heard the argument,
and have addressed ourselves to it,
that economics and religion have
no place in the same boat. We have
heard that all humans were created
at Ile Ife...Black, white, red,
yellow...And so, they are all
entitled to know the mysteries of the
ancestors of the Yoruba. Our
response to that is that when one member
of the human family betrays
another through enslavement, or selling
or genocide, then the offended
family may repudiate the offending
member; who by his betrayal of the
family forfeits his right of
inheritance to the family fortune
or the family legacy, or in our
case the family secrets.
The question has also been put to
us, how does Oyotunji appoint
itself the cultural authority to
rule on who has the right to preside
over new world Yoruba revivals.
Our response to that is, firstly by
virtue of primogeniture. Oseijeman
Adedunmi was the first of the
Afrikan Americans to lay claim to
the legacy of his ancestors through
initiation into the priesthood of
Obatala. He was the first known
Afrikan American to return to the
priesthood of Orunmila. The Yoruba
Temple of New York, and the
settlement of Oyotunji were the first
public havens for the reception of
the ancestral gods and goddesses.
The Bale of Oyotunji is the first
Afrikan American to be handed a
sword of state by the reigning
Ooni of Ife, His Divine Majesty
Okunade Sijuwade Olubuse, II, and
to swear allegiance to that king of
the Yoruba nation. Adefunmi I was
the founder of the African
Theological Archministry, John
Mason has a branch of it now. The
first instrument for restoring the
religious institutions of Afrika.
In conclusion, Adefunmi is an
Afrikan himself and he was appointed by
the ancestors in a seance at
Matanzas, Cuba, held in 1960. He was
told that he was "a king sent
to destroy a king!". Thank you.
All Copyrights belonging to Oba Oguntola Adefunmi I.