Yoruba Americans Explained

Group:Yoruba

Americans

Pop:196,000 (estimate) [1]
Popplace:Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston and Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Florida, Louisiana, California and most Southern States.
Langs:English (American English), Yoruba, Nigerian English), French, Spanish and Nigerian Pidgin.
Rels:Christianity, Islam, and Yoruba religion
Related:African Americans, Beninese Americans, Black Canadians, Nigerian Americans, Nigerian Canadians, Yoruba Canadians, Yoruba people

Yoruba Americans () are Americans of Yoruba descent. The Yoruba people are a West African ethnic group that predominantly inhabits southwestern Nigeria, with smaller indigenous communities in Benin and Togo.

History

The first Yoruba people who arrived to the United States were imported as slaves from Nigeria and Benin during the Atlantic slave trade.[2] [3] This ethnicity of the slaves was one of the main origins of present-day Nigerians who arrived to the United States, along with the Igbo. In addition, native slaves of current Benin hailed from peoples such as Nago, Ewe, Fon, and Gen. Many of the slaves imported to the modern United States from Benin were sold by the King of Dahomey, in Whydah.[4]

The slaves brought with them their cultural practices, languages, cuisine[5] and religious beliefs rooted in spirit and ancestor worship.[6] So, the manners of the Yoruba, Fon, Gen and Ewe of Benin were key elements of Louisiana Voodoo.[7] Also Haitians, who migrated to Louisiana in the late nineteenth century and also contributed to Voodoo of this state, have the Yoruba,[8] Fon, and Ewe among their main origins.

Cuban immigrants brought with them the Santería religion, a child of the Yoruba religion and Catholicism. In New York City Santería was founded by . Born in 1903 in Cuba, he immigrated to NYC in 1946, took the name Padrino, and began practicing as a babalawo.

On May 23, 1980, the city's animal health authorities raided the apartment of one of Padrino's followers on East 146th Street in the Bronx. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) had complained about Santería's practices of animal sacrifice. Three goats and eighteen chickens were removed from the dwelling.[9]

In the colonies, masters tried to dissuade the practice of tribal customs. They also sometimes mixed people of different ethnic groups to make it more difficult for them to communicate and bond together in rebellion.[10] Today, many African Americans share ancestry with the Yoruba people.[11] [12]

After the slavery abolition in 1865, many modern Nigerian immigrants of Yoruba ancestry have come to the United States starting in the mid-twentieth century to pursue educational opportunities in undergraduate and post-graduate institutions. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which allowed for a significant number of Nigerians of Yoruba ancestry to immigrate to the United States. During the 1960s and 1970s, after the Nigerian-Biafran War, Nigeria's government funded scholarships for Nigerian students, and many of them were admitted to American universities. While this was happening, there were several military coups and brief periods of civilian rule. All this caused many Nigerians to emigrate.[13] Most of these Nigerian immigrants are of Yoruba, Igbo and Ibibio origins.

Yoruba have often found American habits of pet keeping very strange, culturally unfamiliar.[14]

List of Yoruba Americans

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Yoruba Language | Joshua Project.
  2. Book: God is Not One. Stephen Prothero. 278. ReadHowYouWant.com. 2010. 978-1-45-9602-57-1.
  3. Book: Africanisms in American Culture (Blacks in the diaspora). Joseph E. Holloway. Indiana University Press. 2005. 250. 978-0-253-2174-93.
  4. "Question of the Month: Cudjo Lewis: Last African Slave in the U.S.?", by David Pilgrim, Curator, Jim Crow Museum, July 2005, webpage:Ferris-Clotilde.
  5. Book: New Orleans. registration. Pableaux Johnson. 26. Charmaine O'Brien. Lonely Planet (World Food). 2000. 978-1-864-5011-00.
  6. Book: The A to Z of Slavery and Abolition (Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series). Issue 40 of Historical dictionaries of religions, philosophies, and movements. Martin A. Klein . Martin A. Klein . Scarecrow Press (Pennsylvania State University). 2002. 978-0-810-8455-96.
  7. Book: Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo . Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

    . Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. 1995 . Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century . Louisiana State University Press . 58.

  8. Web site: Shotgun Houses. National Park Service: African American Heritage & Ethnography. December 3, 2014.
  9. Book: Jackson . Kenneth T. . New-York Historical Society . New-York Historical Society . The Encyclopedia of New York City . . New Haven, Connecticut, US . 2010 . 978-0-300-18257-6 . 842264684 . xix+1561.
  10. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3172026 "Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: 'Lucumi' and 'Nago' as Ethnonyms in West Africa"
  11. Characterizing the admixed African ancestry of African Americans. Fouad Zakharia. Analabha Basu. Devin Absher. Themistocles L. Assimes. Alan S. Go. Mark A. Hlatky . Carlos Iribarren. Joshua W. Knowles. Jun Li. Balasubramanian Narasimhan. Stephen Sydney. Audrey Southwick. Richard M. Myers. Thomas Quertermous. Neil Risch. Hua Tang. December 22, 2009. Genome Biology. 10. 12. 10.1186/gb-2009-10-12-r141. Stanford University School of Medicine and the University of California, San Francisco. April 13, 2015. 20025784. 2812948. R141 . free .
  12. Web site: Complex genetic ancestry of Americans uncovered. March 24, 2015. Phys.org. Science X Network. April 13, 2015.
  13. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/891.html Encyclopedia of Chicago: Nigerians in Chicago
  14. Book: Agwuele, Augustine. The Symbolism and Communicative Contents of Dreadlocks in Yorubaland. 978-3-319-30186-0. 10.1007/978-3-319-30186-0. . 2016937716. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. ix+210.

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