Return Circulation: Agudas, Pilgrimage, and Diaspora Demand

The Atlantic route did not close when the slave trade ended. Free Africans and Afro-Brazilians travelled it commercially and religiously for the next century and a half, and the traffic is why Bahia, Havana and Lagos were never really separated. This file follows the return leg: who came back, what they built, what moved in each direction through the twentieth century, and what the current flow of money and people is doing to practice in Nigeria.

The Agùdà and the Amaro

From the 1830s, Brazilian returnees began arriving in West Africa, some following the 1835 Malê revolt in Bahia which prompted deportations of Africans, and many more after Brazilian abolition in 1888 1. In Lagos they were called Agùdà; in Porto-Novo and along the Francophone coast Amaro and Agouda; Pierre Verger preferred the term revenants brésiliens, Brazilian returnees 2.

They were not a homogeneous group and should not be described as one. Some had been born in Africa and taken as captives; many were born in Brazil. Some were Catholic and built churches, some Muslim and built mosques, some òrìṣà worshippers, and many households contained all three. They were often skilled: masons, carpenters, cabinetmakers, tailors, traders. They arrived with capital, with Portuguese, and with commercial contacts in Bahia.

In Lagos they concentrated in Pópó Agùdà, the Brazilian Quarter on Lagos Island, and built in a Portuguese-Brazilian idiom that is still the most distinctive architectural signature of old Lagos: arched windows, stuccoed and painted façades, ornamental mouldings, iron balconies, high stoops 3. Their public buildings include the Holy Cross Cathedral and the Shitta-Bey Mosque, the latter a returnee-built mosque of considerable architectural ambition. The same idiom appears in Abẹ́òkúta and in Porto-Novo, where the Great Mosque was built by returnees on a Brazilian church model.

Their commercial role is the part that matters most for this section. Many Agùdà made fortunes trading between Brazil and Nigeria, and many travelled back and forth repeatedly rather than settling once 3. That regular movement, in both directions, sustained by families with branches on both sides of the Atlantic, is the physical infrastructure of Matory's argument. It carried goods, letters, people, ritual materials and religious knowledge.

The Sàró, Yoruba liberated at Freetown and returning from the 1830s, are the parallel and larger return stream, and they are treated in 03-history because their principal effect was on Yoruba literacy, Christianity and self-description rather than on the diaspora religions 4. But the two returnee populations overlapped in Lagos, intermarried and formed together the Lagos elite whose cultural nationalism Matory identifies as reaching Bahia.

The traffic in religious knowledge

The best-documented individual instances all involve people crossing to learn.

Martiniano Eliseu do Bonfim (c. 1859 to 1943) is the central case. Born in Bahia to African parents, sent to Lagos as a young man for schooling, returning to Salvador with English literacy and with Ifá training obtained in Africa. He became the most cited authority on African tradition in Bahia, worked with Nina Rodrigues, and advised Mãe Aninha at Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, where in 1937 the twelve Obás de Xangô were instituted on an Ọ̀yọ́ model he supplied 5. A Bahian institution now regarded as ancestral was installed in the twentieth century on advice brought from Lagos.

Pierre Verger (1902 to 1996) is the case that runs the other way and then back again. A French photographer and self-taught ethnographer who settled in Bahia, was initiated into Ifá in Kétu as Fatumbi, and spent decades travelling between Bahia and the Bight of Benin 26. His Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le golfe de Bénin et Bahia de Todos os Santos, published in 1968, remains the foundational study of the two-way traffic and was itself an instrument of it: Verger carried messages, ritual objects, genealogical information and introductions between Bahian houses and West African families, and Bahian priests used his findings to establish or confirm African connections 26. He is an unusual figure to cite because he was simultaneously the principal scholar of the circulation and one of its most active agents.

Bahian priestesses travelled to Africa through the twentieth century to authenticate their houses, in some cases with Brazilian state facilitation once Afro-Brazilian culture had been adopted as national symbol 5. Nigerian and Beninese figures travelled to Brazil and Cuba. The traffic was never large in absolute numbers and was decisive in effect, because it was specialists moving, and specialists carry institutions.

Abimbola and the formalisation

The single most consequential twentieth-century development in the return circulation is the creation of a Nigerian office facing the diaspora.

Wándé Abímbọ́lá was installed as Àwísẹ Awo Àgbáyé in 1981 by the Ọ̀ọ̀ni of Ifẹ̀, on the recommendation of a conclave of babaláwo of Yorubaland 7. The title translates as spokesperson for Ifá and Yoruba religion in the world. He has served as President of the International Congress of Orisa Tradition and Culture since its founding in 1981 7. His career runs alongside it: professor of Yoruba language and literature, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ifẹ̀, now Obafemi Awolowo University, from 1982 to 1989, Senate Majority Leader of the Federal Republic from 1992 to 1993, and Special Adviser on Cultural Affairs and Traditional Matters to the President from 2003 to 2005 7.

Two things about the office are worth noticing. It was created, in the sense that no such world-facing role existed before 1981, and it was created at exactly the moment a global òrìṣà constituency needed a Nigerian address. Abimbola's scholarly work on the Ifá corpus, which is among the most substantial transcription and translation projects ever undertaken on Yoruba oral literature, gave the office academic authority that a purely traditional title would not have carried abroad.

His interventions have real effects on diaspora practice. His public support for the initiation of women into Ifá as ìyánífá is the clearest instance: it puts Nigerian authority behind a practice that Cuban Ifá excludes absolutely, and it has become a defining fault line in the transnational field. Nigerian babaláwo have initiated American and European women as ìyánífá; Cuban and Cuban-American babalawos widely hold those initiations invalid; each side can point to authority.

What moves now, and in which direction

Four flows currently run, and their volumes are very different.

People travelling to Nigeria for initiation. Americans, Brazilians, Europeans and increasingly Latin Americans travel to Ọ̀yọ́, Ifẹ̀, Ọ̀ṣogbo, Abẹ́òkúta and Ilé-Ifẹ̀ for Ifá and òrìṣà initiations. This is now a substantial and organised traffic with brokers, package arrangements, and a price structure denominated in dollars.

Nigerian priests travelling out. Babaláwo and òrìṣà priests resident in or regularly visiting the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Spain and elsewhere, initiating locally, which removes the travel cost for clients and increases the volume considerably.

Pilgrimage and festival tourism. The Ọ̀ṣun-Òṣogbo festival, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove in 2005, draws a large annual international attendance including substantial Brazilian, Cuban and African American contingents. Ilé-Ifẹ̀ receives heritage travellers year-round. Benin's Ouidah Vodún festival on 10 January operates on the same model on the Beninese side.

Knowledge moving back the other way. Cuban ritual protocol, Brazilian song repertoires and diaspora scholarship circulate into Nigeria, and this is the flow least often acknowledged. Nigerian practitioners read the diaspora literature, watch diaspora ceremonies online, and in some cases adopt diaspora practices. Where a Nigerian house adopts an elaboration developed in Havana, that is the two-way Atlantic still operating.

The economics, stated plainly

Diaspora demand has made òrìṣà religion a source of foreign currency in Nigeria, and this has consequences that neither romanticising nor condemnation describes well.

The demand side is a population of foreign practitioners, many of them relatively wealthy by Nigerian standards, seeking a good that only Nigeria is understood to supply: original authority. The supply side is a Nigerian priesthood whose domestic position has been weakened by more than a century of Christian and Muslim expansion, whose practitioners are frequently poor, and for whom foreign initiation fees can represent a transformative income.

Predictable consequences follow. Initiation prices for foreigners are set at levels unrelated to local prices. Competition between lineages and towns for foreign clients is real. Compressed ceremonies are offered to fit tourist schedules, where the traditional sequence takes far longer. Some brokers operate with no lineage standing at all. And the definition of authenticity is inevitably shaped by what a paying market recognises as authentic, which is not always what a Nigerian lineage would have emphasised on its own.

Against this, three things should also be said. The money has kept lineages alive that were failing under domestic pressure. The demand has raised the domestic status of a practice that Nigerian Christians and Muslims had made shameful, which is a real reversal. And the traffic has produced genuine scholarly and liturgical recovery, including recorded Ifá corpora, published texts and language teaching that exists because there was a market for it.

The Nigerian state and the Ọ̀ṣun State government in particular have promoted heritage tourism deliberately, which puts an official interest behind the festival economy. Whether that constitutes support for traditional religion or its conversion into a spectacle is argued by Nigerian practitioners themselves, and the argument is not settled.

How to read this

The return circulation dissolves the frame in which Africa is the source and the diaspora is the copy. It has been a circuit since the 1830s, with money, people, texts and authority moving in both directions, and the current asymmetry, in which Nigeria supplies authenticity and the diaspora supplies money, is a recent configuration rather than a natural order.

It also means that a Yoruba person in Lagos today encountering òrìṣà religion is not necessarily encountering something that has waited unchanged for them. They may be encountering a practice that has been shaped in part by Havana, Salvador and South Carolina, and that is not a corruption of it. It is what a living Atlantic tradition is.