Reclamation Across the Atlantic

This man from Grindr with the invite had also never been to a candomblé worship. However, he did share some strict instructions on clothing. First, I had to be clothed in white. Second, I could not wear ‘hoochie mama’ shorts.

These instructions presented a dilemma: I had absolutely zero items of white clothing on my person. For context, I was backpacking within Brazil, and I was at my first point of call within the north of the country (Salvador in the state of Bahia). As a traveller, I was more likely to pack a pair of hoochie mama shorts than a white outfit. So, I had to find a full candomblé-worthy outfit that met the criteria within five hours, in a city that felt both deeply familiar and completely unknown to me. This familiarity was new.

It was my first time setting foot on the South American continent, I did not speak a lick of Brazilian Portuguese. However, the people looked familiar; they looked like they could be my aunts, uncles or nephew. There was a certain familiarity with which they moved their body that appealed to me and allowed my body to be at ease. Even the vegetation was surprisingly familiar, the greenery and weeds growing by the wayside, the abandoned plots left to grow wild could have been a direct transplant from certain parts of southern Nigeria.

I had five hours in this somewhat familiar terrain. But I love a good spatial challenge, so I immediately hit the streets. Within a short period, I managed to string a couple of second-hand items on a budget (₦10,000) that did not comprise of hoochie-mama shorts. In retrospect, I wish I had taken a photo. As the saying goes, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’

So, here’s a thousand words instead.

Picture this: white boot-cut jeans, the type that is skintight at the hip and buttocks. They had no pockets, because most women’s clothing offers little use for pockets, and a massive, almost ridiculous, flair at the bottom. To be honest, not really my style. But I can work with any aesthetic that makes you think hmmm… interesting, questionable, but undeniably deliberate. The top half of the outfit was a very loose-fitting blousy situation in a material that south-western Nigerians (of Yoruba origin) would call a dry lace. It had a low cut-out at the collar, the kind of blouse that never sits right on a body and hangs onto your shoulders for structural support.

I was excited. I rushed back to my lodging, showered and prayed briefly to the gods of scabies to spare me for not washing a second-hand outfit before donning it. (A couple of weeks on, it seems they answered, no itching so far.)

Grindr man picked me up, not in his arms, but in a moving box of steel, and we headed to the ceremony. It was in a part of town I had never seen. The houses looked nondescript; the streets were no different from others. The entrance lay midway up a steep street, the kind that would make a rookie stick-shift driver quiver.

The entrance to the building was painted a bleached white; the floor was covered in unremarkable tiles. A room was curtained off just inside. Through the opening, I could see a sort of highchair beside a low table crowded with objects: coconut shells, cowrie shells and feathers strewn about. The arrangement felt both casual and a bit consecrated. A narrow path curved around this space. From the bend, a courtyard became visible below. Its concrete floor was strewn with palm fronds, white beach sand, beads, strings, leaves and flowers, and filled with Black bodies clothed in white, all alive with the beautiful sing-song of Brazilian Portuguese. We gathered in the courtyard, forming an organic semi-circle. The ceremony started. The drums went hard. A mix of men, donned in white and of varying ages, hit the hides in a hard and consistent rhythm; a rhythm that caught you in a spell.

I did not exactly end up at this ceremony by chance. Fair enough, it was a chance Grindr encounter that led me here; however, I was consciously receptive and open to this sort of opportunity.

Growing up in Lagos with Yoruba parents, religion has always been a big part of my life. My grandparents were Muslim. My uncles, aunts and friends were a mix of Christians and Muslims. In my model secondary school, I had to say prayers to both Jesus and Prophet Muhammad.

My parents were part of the large wave of Muslim-to-Christian converts in Nigeria in the 1990s, a period shaped by the expansion of Pentecostal evangelism and mass-crusade Christianity. A moment fuelled by transnational evangelical figures and organizations; most visibly, Western and American Pentecostal networks like Dr Reinhard Bonnke and Christ for All Nations, whose crusades normalized public, binary declarations of belief. The subtext of my upbringing was simple: you had to believe in something, and that something was binary; either Christianity or Islam. There was no third position, no neutral ground. The repercussions of not participating were unforgiving and brutal, sometimes leading to a loss of community, livelihood or even one’s life. This absolute binary was itself an import.

Both religions were foreign. Islam arrived earlier, through North African trade and political expansion, and captured my grandparents’ generation. That made them chief imams. Christianity came through organized missionary infrastructure and later Pentecostal revivalism. That made my parents pastors. What this meant for me was a near-total estrangement from any indigenous Yoruba religious system; despite growing up in a Yoruba-majority state in Nigeria, speaking the language fluently and understanding most of its social codes.

However, if I say I had ‘no interaction’ with Yoruba indigenous religions, that’s not entirely true. I encountered it constantly, but almost exclusively through film and media. Nollywood, especially from the 1990s onward, repeatedly cast indigenous belief systems as evil: witchcraft, occultism, demonic inheritance. (Who could ever forget Karashika!)

The very idea of the ‘witch’ was a colonial invention. Terms such as ‘witch’ and ‘witchcraft’ in Yorubaland materialized from colonial administrations and Western scholars. Their work framed the core of Yoruba cosmology, painting the òrìṣàs (idolized ancestors turned deities) and the primordial mothers (awọn Ìyá ńlá) as demons. This colonial framing then corrupted the language itself. In Yoruba, a tonal language where meaning is carried by sound, colonial writing flattened vital distinctions. It collapsed Ajé (goddess of wealth) into Àjẹ́ (witchcraft). The consequence was a spiritual and social reversal. Female divinities once associated with wealth, protection and balance were recoded as witches. Missionaries informed us that our primordial mothers were not sources of power; they were witches. Maternal power was rendered suspect, playing strongly into a new patriarchy. This was not just theology; it was an ontology of self-hatred.

The message was a deep spiritual negation that framed our ancestors not as guides, but as demons that needed to be bound and cast away by the holy ghost. This subliminal hatred of one’s ancestors was the first step towards a hatred of the self. A lesson that Nollywood and Pentecostal deliverance theology would later amplify.

A DECOLONIAL RECLAMATION

Now, back to that courtyard in Salvador, Brazil. The procession started. Participants moved their bodies, dancing, writhing and heaving in a circle to the tune of the drums and chants. During the procession, care was an integral part. They mopped each other’s brows as sweat accumulated, they fanned the faces of their peers, they blessed each other with palm fronds, letting the fronds land gently on each other’s heads and shoulders, while the receiver raised the palms of their hands up into the heavens.

Every now and then, someone in the procession would gyrate, heave and writhe as if possessed, their movements contorting with a new intensity. I recall a scene etched into my memory where this blithe 170 cm woman heaved as she bent forward at the waist, and a consistent vibration seemed to course through her body. She swayed from left to right, hit the ground on her knees, then on all fours began to slam her hips into the white beach sand and palm fronds that covered the concrete beneath. I was enraptured.

I found it quite wild that I had to cross an ocean to somewhat reconnect with some vestiges of Yoruba indigenous religions (YIR). The pride with which they were practised in Salvador, Brazil captivated me. I didn’t know that pride and YIR could co-exist. My only association had been evil. The irony is this: the same mechanisms of violence that transported Black people to Brazil also preserved the religion and its practices.

I now understand that decolonial reclamation is not about rejecting Christianity or Islam outright. It is about undoing the idea that Yoruba indigenous beliefs are something to be ashamed of, feared or erased. It is refusing the colonial story that our ancestors were naïve and demonic. This story must be unravelled. This is where decolonization begins. Decolonization in this context means remembering that Yoruba indigenous religions are a complete system, which is ethical, communal and grounded. Not a failed version of something foreign. It means allowing Olódùmarè, the orìṣà, the ancestors and the living to exist without being translated into demons or superstition. It is the struggle to hear the word Ajé and think ‘goddess of wealth’ before the colonially superimposed ‘witchcraft’. It is trying to forget everything Nollywood has taught me.

In Salvador, Brazil, I was taught that my indigenous religion is beautiful. A thing of pride, of love and of community. Candomblé helped me see this clearly. It is a religion that survived not as private shame, but as a public practice carried by people who were stripped of land and language, but never of meaning. The rituals, the drumming, the reverence for the orìṣà, the respect for ancestry; all of it remained intact enough to be lived with pride. What was framed as witchcraft at home was treated as heritage there. What was demonized in Nigeria was honoured in Brazil.

A 2025 trip to Brazil did not teach me that Yoruba indigenous religions are beautiful; it showed me that their beauty had been systematically obscured. The pride I witnessed in Salvador was the pride of custodians who had safeguarded a treasure. The love in that courtyard was the love of a community bound not by fear of hell, but by reverence for the earth and the ancestors. I was not blessed by a new god. I was blessed by a truth I had been forced to forget. It taught me that my tradition could hold beauty without apology, that spirituality could be communal without punishment, that it did not have to mean fear. Where I was raised to see danger, I found care. Where I was taught rejection, I found belonging. In that communion with people, history and ancestors, I found something simple and radical: pride without violence, belief without terror, and a love that did not require erasure. Here again, I am grateful for that simple Grindr message⎈