Oduduwa's Chain: Locations of Culture in the Yoruba-Atlantic

Oduduwa’s Chain

Oduduwa’s Chain

Locations of Culture in the Yoruba-Atlantic

ANDREW APTER

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-50638-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-50641-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-50655-5 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226506555.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Apter, Andrew H. (Andrew Herman), author.

Title: Oduduwa’s chain : locations of culture in the Yoruba-Atlantic / Andrew Apter.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017018047 | ISBN 9780226506388 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226506418 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226506555 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Yoruba (African people)—Atlantic Ocean Region—Religion. | African diaspora. | Cults—Atlantic Ocean Region. | Orisha religion—Atlantic Ocean Region. | Atlantic Ocean Region—Religion. | Nigeria, Southwest—Religion.

Classification: LCC BL2480.Y6 A78 2018 | DDC 299.6/8333—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

ONE / Herskovits’s Heritage

TWO / Creolization and Connaissance

THREE / Notes from Ekitiland

FOUR / The Blood of Mothers

FIVE / Ethnogenesis from Within

Afterword: Beyond the Mirror of Narcissus

Notes

References

Index

PREFACE

Even the maestro-critic Paul de Man insisted that however negative it may sound, deconstruction implies the possibility of rebuilding (1983, 140), and it is in this spirit of critical reconstruction that I have reassembled the five essays of the present volume. Written and published between 1991 and 2013, they represent the working through of a particular problematic in African Diaspora and Black Atlantic studies on the basis of my first extended foray into Yoruba ritual and politics and the hermeneutics of power (Apter 1992) that I encountered in Nigeria. Although I focused exclusively on Africa at the time, my subsequent explorations of the Afro-Atlantic world through a self-consciously Yoruba lens have brought previously unacknowledged patterns into view, pertaining to dominant paradigms in the African Diaspora literature, the complex dynamics of Afro-Caribbean religions, and their historical trajectories as sociopolitical communities with variable forms and degrees of self-consciousness. As I mention in the introduction, I did not set out with this broader purview in mind, but after the dust of fieldwork settled and my own understanding of Yoruba critical frameworks coalesced, I couldn’t help seeing what I saw, in various locations of what I am calling the Yoruba-Atlantic.

Which brings me back to Paul de Man and the blindness of whatever insights I may have to offer in these pages. As a Yale undergraduate in the 1970s, I was caught up in the first wave of deconstruction in the United States, when the Yale Critics and their followers were coming into being. And Gayatri Spivak’s translator’s preface to Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology provided the intellectual looking glass though which a new generation of acolytes ventured, intent on bringing down the Old Order by tracking tropes and demystifying texts as we marched through Frederic Jameson’s prison house of language to the inaugural Lit-Z cotaught by Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, mingling with visiting luminaries such as Umberto Eco and Jacques Derrida along the way. As a philosophy major, I wrote my senior thesis on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, arguing that Kant’s deletion of the subjective deduction in the B edition, and his recasting of transcendental synthesis in the figure of synthetic unity, represented a futile attempt to disguise the rhetorical function of metaphorical substitution at the core of his critical philosophy. The good old days, to be sure, and useful training for the textual turn in the postmodern anthropology of the 1980s and early 1990s that followed.

Thus I was, and remain, no stranger to deconstructive criticism, and I have no difficulty appreciating its relevance to diasporic frameworks predicated on rhetorics of displacement from an originary Africa. Indeed, I take those truths to be self-evident, part and parcel of the negative dialectic of creative remaking, or rebuilding, as de Man would have it. But the negation of Africa as the figural ground of cultural dissemination works best in transition or transformation, as a place from which to proceed rather than permanently dwell. And over the years I have found myself arguing against the dwellers, those critics who, in the name of decolonizing knowledge, insist on disavowing Africa as a locus of insight into its Atlantic cultural legacies, relegating it instead to the mystifying margins of the European imagination and its inscription devices. Against this enduring trend with its impressive iterations, I offer a range of counterperspectives that attempt to rebuild an Afrocentric point of departure—not by retreating into precritical scholarship but by sifting through the rubble of its decolonized remains. The rebuilding I have in mind involves three related forms of critical recuperation discussed in the introduction: of Africa as a viable locus of Atlantic historical and cultural interpretation; of culture as a viable conceptual framework for illuminating Atlantic historical trajectories; and of Afrocentric (as opposed to Eurocentric) critical paradigms as powerful shapers of Afro-Atlantic history. The overall thrust of the essays that follow is that Yoruba revisionary and generative schemes—and their deconstructive and reconstructive ritual strategies—illuminate both highly specific pathways of religious syncretism and cultural creolization in the Americas and more general strategies of apprehending Africa throughout the Black Atlantic.

This slippage between specific and general goals is principled but may cause some confusion. I am not implying that the Yoruba-Atlantic derived exclusively from a Yorubaland bounded by territory, shared language and beliefs, and common religious forms and kinship norms à la tribal society of old-school ethnography, and which came to predominate over other African legacies in the diaspora—although on this point I am bound to be mischaracterized. In some cases, specific identifications are indeed interesting and appropriate, such as New World remappings of Yoruba sacred geographies with their diagnostic toponyms. But in many other cases, the Yoruba cultural lens that I deploy highlights significant affinities with a wider West African cultural geography, including Fon-Dahomean legacies in Haiti and Brazil, or related Igbo gender constructions in the North American Lowcountry, precisely because such West African commonalities belong to broader regional similarities and levels of cultural abstraction. Frankly, I am not particularly interested in claiming specifically Yoruba origins throughout the Yoruba-Atlantic, but I am interested in using Yoruba cultural frames when they illuminate broader West African regional similarities in the Americas. Nor is such slippage merely methodological but rather belongs part and parcel to the history of Afro-Atlantic ethnogenesis. As I discuss in both the introduction and the afterword, the very category Yoruba as proper name and self-conscious ethnicity contains such referential and historic instabilities, but these pose no problem when appropriately located, and illuminate trajectories of re-Africanization as well. My broader goal is not to champion Yoruba contributions as such throughout the Black Atlantic, but to provide a critical method for future argument and research. When I do push the Yoruba connections as far as I can, as in chapters 4 and 5, it is more in the spirit of a hypothesis than in making particular empirical claims: that is, how much can we see through a revisionary Yoruba lens that we wouldn’t see otherwise, and what do these insights add to our historical interpretations? I invite others to make similar interventions through comparative Afrocentric critical frames.

As for acknowledging ancestors, elders, friends, teachers, colleagues, students, and fellow-travelers who have offered guidance and support throughout these Atlantic crossings, including the spirited interlocutors whom I engage in these pages, you are far too numerous to name, but I am forever in your debt. Two who must stand out, however, are T. David Brent, editor extraordinaire at the University of Chicago Press, who back in the day took a chance on publishing the first book of an unknown aspiring Africanist fresh out of graduate school and has stayed with me ever since; and to Robin Derby, partner extraordinaire, who back in the day took a chance on marrying an aspiring assistant professor, took me to the Caribbean, and has also stayed with me ever since: J k’ọw yin á máa lọ síwájú oo!

Earlier versions of chapters 1–5 appeared in the following journals: Herskovits’s Heritage: Rethinking Syncretism in the African Diaspora, Diaspora 1, no. 3 (1991): 235–60; "On African Origins: Creolization and Connaissance in Haitian Vodou," American Ethnologist 29, no. 2 (2002): 233–60; Notes on Orisha Cults in the Ekiti Yoruba Highlands: A Tribute to Pierre Verger, Cahiers d’études africaines 35, cahier 138–39 (1995): 369–401; The Blood of Mothers: Women, Money and Markets in Yoruba-Atlantic Perspective, Journal of African American History 98, no. 1 (2013): 72–98; and Yoruba Ethnogenesis from Within, Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 2 (2013): 356–87. Revisions, particularly of the earlier essays, are mainly limited to relating my arguments to new debates and extensive relevant publications, mostly in the endnotes, and updating spellings (e.g., Vodou). Permission to reprint them is gratefully acknowledged.

INTRODUCTION

When I first set out to study Yoruba orisha worship in the autumn of 1982, my focus was exclusively on southwest Nigeria; more specifically that subregion of the Ekiti Yoruba that posed particular problems of variation and change. To this day, the classic Yoruba kingdoms of Ancient Ife and Old Oyo have claimed the lion’s share of scholarly attention: hitting the map when Hugh Clapperton and Richard Lander visited Katunga (Old Oyo) in 1826, beginning in earnest with Samuel Ajayi Johnson’s monumental History of the Yorubas, enshrining Oyo as the model of a developing Yoruba identity at the end of the nineteenth century, and with the predatory archeology of Leo Frobenius in the sacred groves of Ile-Ife at the turn of the twentieth—all paving the way for the histories, art histories, and ethnographies that have followed in their wake.¹ Indeed, as I would later argue, there are historical reasons why Yoruba oral traditions have coalesced around two ritual fields, one associated with the rise of the Oyo empire in the eighteenth century until its demise circa 1836, the other focused on Ife as an ideological foil to Oyo’s hegemonic claims, and which together sustain two competing corpora of Yoruba origins in dynamic performative tension (Apter 1987a). But I am jumping ahead of myself. In the early 1980s, my goals were more simply and narrowly defined as the placing of orisha worship in its relevant political contexts—the historic or traditional kingdoms ruled by sacred kings, and segmented into quarters (àdúgbò) ruled by chiefs and elders. Doing so, my instincts told me (and my hypothesis overconfidently stated), would explain the otherwise bewildering variety of priestly hierarchies and rival pantheons that rendered orisha worship so difficult to pin down. What were the political factors that controlled its mercurial frameworks and forms, both regionally in space and historically over time?

I pursued this problem in Ekitiland, the northeast Yoruba periphery of southwest Nigeria, for all the wrong reasons that a more critical anthropology has since brought to light. Because Ekitiland was relatively rural, less developed, and thus more traditional than the cosmopolitan centers of Lagos, Ibadan, or even Ife itself, the orisha cult system (and, yes, I used the word cult, and still do in its nonsectarian sense) would be more active and intact. Furthermore, controlled comparison between its systematic variations would be easier, because of the close proximity of the characteristic ministates (Obayemi 1971) that developed as defensive enclaves against eighteenth-century Oyo expansionism (Law 1977), the nineteenth-century military campaigns of the Ibadans from the west (Ajayi and Smith 1964; Akintoye 1971), and the Nupe slave raiders from the Niger-Benue confluence (Mason 1970). Following the advice of the late Jacob Ade Ajayi, whose hometown of Ikole was just miles away, I set up in the historic kingdom of Ayede, founded in the 1840s as a centralized military autocracy in contrast to the decentralized polities surrounding it. Here I could compare the centralized kingdom and its associated orisha cults with the more decentralized village-clusters of Ishan and Itaji, tracking change and variation over time and space. What I concluded was that the orisha not only mediated the negotiation of political authority though the cosmological renewal of its annual festivals, but also destabilized and transformed the polity by mobilizing dynastic factions and political constituencies. This transformative power of ritual was real, I argued, which is why, through its idioms and deep knowledge claims, it was, and remains, such a serious concern.

My dissertation changed emphasis when substantially revised to address what I called the hermeneutics of power, accounting for the revisionary strategies of deep ritual knowledge (imọ jinl ) in political and discursive terms (Apter 1992). Gender, colonialism, Christianity, Islam, and the postcolonial state—both civilian and military—also gained greater attention as important dimensions refracted through ritual. Furthermore, anthropology had started to critically question its objects of knowledge, including the invention of Africa by the colonial library (Mudimbe 1988), all of which influenced my subsequent research and thinking. I mention this not just to rehash my past, but to acknowledge that my initial interests and research problematic had nothing to do with the Yoruba diaspora in the Atlantic world (Falola and Childs 2004). In fact, my dissertation adviser, M. G. Smith, who had worked extensively in both northern Nigeria and the British West Indies and was no stranger to the orisha in Grenada and Carriacou, was resolutely skeptical of the whole idea of Africanisms in the Americas, undermining the cultural trajectories of Herskovits’s New World Negro with a methodologically prescribed battery of conditions (Smith 1957, 45) virtually guaranteeing that no imputed transatlantic continuities would survive the test.² The last thing on my mind as I struggled to make sense of my Yoruba material was how it played out in the African diaspora.

Thus, at the outset I had no explicit stake in the back-to-Africa debates of the New World scholarship, whether endorsing Herskovits’s baseline cultures, deconstructing the tropes of diasporic narratives, or shifting the entire paradigm from precolonial roots to the triangulated routes of Atlantic slavery and the commercial flows that followed (Gilroy 1993). In fact, I was woefully ignorant of the massive plantation society literature that established the historical conditions of the variable Africanities that developed in the black Americas; and, unlike most of the stakeholders in these debates who worked in the diaspora, I was first and foremost an Africanist, my blood, sweat, tears, laughter, and intellectual energies—not to mention gifts and cash—primarily invested in Nigeria. To be honest, although I knew the titles of Herskovits’s most famous books and collections of essays, particularly his two-volume Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom, first published in 1938, which contained Yoruba-related material on politics and ritual, and his more famous Myth of the Negro Past ([1941] 1958) and The New World Negro (1966), which did so much to establish Afro-American studies at Northwestern University and in the US academy more broadly, I had not actually read them! Assuming that his studies of Africanisms were deeply compromised by the ideological essentialisms of the colonial era, I was not expecting too much when I finally took the plunge, preparing for a new undergraduate lecture class I developed on rethinking the black diaspora at the University of Chicago. Working my way through Herskovits’s syncretic paradigm for analyzing the African heritage in the Americas, however, I was struck by how it resonated with my revisionary model of Yoruba hermeneutics, subject to major updates of his key terms and concepts. But when I published an article (reprinted here as chapter 1) that critically reformulated his syncretic paradigm along these lines, I nearly lost my job.

Immediately branded as a neo-Herskovitsian, I caught it from both sides. It was bad enough that the critical vanguard (of which I thought I was a card-carrying member) established my guilt by association with the tribal essentialisms and genealogical fictions that I thought I had taken pains to deconstruct and reconstruct. It appeared that reconstruction was the wrong way to go, whatever the overt qualifiers and interpretive results. But even worse was the reaction of the committee of tyrants that ruled Chicago’s anthropology department and ruled over my fate as an aspiring assistant professor. With the exception of Jim Fernandez, who had been a Herskovits student and liked my piece (and as a result, didn’t really weigh in as a tyrant), I had clearly hit a sensitive nerve. If the antipathy toward Herskovits was primarily intellectual, directed against his impressionistic culturalism and sociological naïveté, I also felt a submerged institutional memory at play, pushing against the imperious personality who had dominated African studies up the road in Evanston. In any case, things hit rock bottom when, in preparation for my third-year review, the chair suggested that it might be prudent to publish an article with at least a footnote disavowing my prior take on Herskovits’s heritage. Needless to say, I refused and prevailed, but it was hard out there being a neo-Herskovitsian, particularly since I didn’t self-identify as such.

In the quarter century that has followed my baptism by fire into this dynamic field of intellectual production, the field itself has dramatically shifted from diasporic dispersals of the Middle Passage to Deleuzian models of rhizomatic circulation associated with Atlantic slavery, merchant capitalism, and the neoliberal ethnoscapes of globalization.³ Emphasis on African origins had already shifted away from the terra firma of West and Central Africa to the new social frameworks (Bastide [1960] 1978) and the creolizing contexts (Mintz and Price [1976] 1992) of slave ships and New World plantation societies, where neo-African identities and homelands, more produced than recovered, destabilized (if not altogether undermined) transatlantic cultural origins and continuities. Attention also shifted to how Afro-Caribbean cultural genealogies were further appropriated and mythologized by postindependence nationalist projects, as in Papa Doc’s noirisme (Dayan 1998 Nicholls 1979), Brazil’s so-called racial democracy (Afolabi 2009; Skidmore [1974] 1993), or the folkloric soup (ajiaco) of Fernando Ortiz (1940; see also Moore 1994; Palmié 2013, 78–112). Today, the very idea of establishing African origins in other than ideological terms seems quaint and naive if not perniciously misguided (Scott 1991, 1999), with the more exciting work focusing on coterminous Atlantic trajectories (Palmié 2002, 2010), the transatlantic circuits of Brazilian or Cuban returnees to Lagos (Matory 2005; Otero 2010), re-Africanization in diaspora (Capone [1999] 2010; P. Johnson 2007), the intellectual and dialogical production of Afro-Atlantic objects of knowledge and value (Matory 2006; Palmié 2013; Sansi 2007; Yelvington 2006a, 2006b), the metalinguistic framing of African-derived ritual languages (Wirtz 2007, 2008, 2014), or the transnational networks of Yoruba community as the orisha go global (Argyriadis and Capone 2011; Clarke 2004; Capone 2005, 2016a; Palmié 2005) and Santería goes electric (Beliso-De Jesús 2015). Why bother with an outdated if not fallacious problematic—a critical reappraisal of Yoruba origins—when Afro-Atlantic studies have clearly moved on in such interesting new directions?⁴ Why insist that, despite the distortions of baseline genealogies and associated myths of tribal purity, West African cultural frameworks—when critically reformulated—illuminate important Atlantic historical trajectories? The problem has been on my mind for a long time. But to help frame the answer to this question, I begin with a surprising phone call that I received in September 2015.

An Unusual Request

When Olu Ibitoye called from his home in Chicago, I hadn’t heard from him in several years, but that doesn’t matter with an ọmọ ìyá (child of the same mother), whose actual mother—the commanding Shango priestess in Ayede—had taken me under her wing and backed my efforts to gain some level of access to the major orisha cults when others had viewed me with suspicion and distrust. In an instant, Olu and I were back together, laughing at the feeling of space-time compression as our lives collapsed into the intimacy of our collaborative selves. After the formulaic pleasantries, Olu announced that he had a very big favor to ask, and would I please oblige. Of course, certainly, anything, no problem, I replied, hoping that I had not committed myself to a herculean labor of exorbitant costs and proportions. It turned out that with a new ọba (king) recently installed in Ayede, less hostile to paganism than his Pentecostal predecessor, the orisha cults were getting a new lease on life, enjoying something of renaissance as a valued form of cultural patrimony.⁵ But there was a problem. The master drummer Ajayi was getting old and could no longer perform up to speed. Young initiates were being called, but questions of procedure and precedent were coming up. Could I please digitize all the videotapes and audio recordings that I had made during fieldwork, representing festival cycles in 1983, 1984, 1990, and 1993? Could I please burn them onto DVDs and Olu would take them back, providing a record of past festival performances and settling some issues of correct ritual protocols? Or even better, would I please go back with him and receive a chieftaincy title that the new ọba was proffering?

The implications and ramifications of such a request are frankly astonishing, for many reasons ranging from the personal and ethical to the political and methodological. Most immediate was the ironic reversal of positions that had structured my apprenticeship in the field, captured so succinctly by one local chief who had stated in no uncertain terms, No matter how many years you work with the priestesses, they will never give you anything; they will never leak their secrets! Indeed, the social organization of secrecy became one of the guiding threads of my research precisely because I had such limited access to its labile contents, and although the chief had a point, his was certainly not the last word on the subject. Nonetheless, I could not help being struck by the momentous shift in relations of access, as the priestesses were coming to me for material, even if they still knew better than I what to do with it. More important, I was deeply honored to oblige, not only on the personal grounds of giving something meaningful back to the those who helped me launch my career, but also professionally, as the nightmarish weight of dead colonial officers was slightly alleviated from my anthropological brain. Most of my generation of Africanists has struggled with the politics of the colonial library (Mudimbe 1988), and with a discipline that emerged with European empire and overrule, and even if I have worked out certain positions that take these conditions of genesis into account without sacrificing the discipline tout court (Apter 1999; 2007, 1–14), one never rests easy with anthropology’s heart of darkness. Thus the fact that the priestesses (and a few priests too) were coming to me for assistance in their work felt politically liberating, showing that our anthropological projects can be valuable to those whom we study, on terms that remain theirs.

Neither were the postmodern lessons lost on me, as I risked becoming a Vargas-Llosaian storyteller, rescripting through my camerawork the very ritual performances I have sought to represent, exemplifying the anthropologist’s invention of culture and tradition if not the more dialectically nuanced ethnographic interface (Palmié 2013, 49–54), replete with looping effects, converging agendas, and objectifying correlates. Many of us working in Nigeria or Cuba have had similar experiences of interviewing diviners and priests who, at the end of a session, reveal the sacred document that tells it all, whether a dog-eared photocopy of Bascom’s Ifa Divination or the tattered text of Samuel Ajayi Johnson’s History of the Yorubas, tucked away in their shrines. Was the priestesses’ request not just a more contemporary iteration of this feedback loop, similar to the circulating videotapes possessing the past so brilliantly analyzed in Beliso-De Jesús’s Electric Santería? Am I now, more than ever, deeply implicated in the construction of a sacred tradition?

Contra the prevailing winds of current scholarship, but without recommending a great leap backward, I want to pursue a different course, one that acknowledges the social networks, dialogical pathways, textual relations, working conditions, political agendas, and historic inequalities that have produced an original Yoruba culture both in Nigeria and in diaspora but which still endorses a relatively objective something else that exists over and above its multiply mediated actors and formats, at different levels of scale and abstraction, that we can call, invoking Kant’s critical philosophy, the anthropological object (culture) = x.⁶ Just as Kant sought the limits of pure reason in his first Critique by building a prior framework of object-constitution to gain experience and objective knowledge, he also posited an ontological ground, beyond his framework, where things existed in themselves. I mention this distinction (between phenomena and noumena) because, when relativized in historical and cultural (and thus Weberian) terms, it helps us see how epistemology and ontology can both improve and impair our vision.⁷

Briefly stated, if our (hegemonic and ideological) anthropological apparatus of theories, concepts, discourses, notebooks, networks, professional organizations, laptops, tape recorders, and yes, video cameras—all part of the inscription devices (Latour and Woolgar 1979, 51) that generate ethnographic facts—can be taken as the prior framework of anthropological object-constitution, including the objectification of other cultures, there nonetheless remains (as Jean Comaroff used