The Findings: Africa | Encyclopedia of Mystery

Yoruba8
- Ọ̀rúnmìlàThe oldest surviving Ifá tray was in Germany before 1659, in Christoph Weickmann's Ulm collection; Museum Ulm calls it sub-Saharan Africa's oldest known carved wooden artwork.
- Ifá DivinationIfá's oldest surviving object is a carved tray from Allada, in Weickmann's Ulm collection before 1659: Museum Ulm calls it sub-Saharan Africa's oldest known artistically worked wood.
- ÒgúnNigeria's Oaths Act of 1963 names Koran, Bible and Old Testament, then admits any lawful manner 'customary or otherwise'. Iron, sworn upon across West Africa, goes unnamed.
- Opón IfáThe earliest dated opón, at Ulm, was Weickmann's before 1659, recorded as from Allada. Bassani (1994) read it as Yoruba; Biton (2015) as a Fá tray of the Bight of Benin.
- OriIn the Ifá verse Abimbola printed in 1975, Àjàlá, potter of heads, hides from his creditors. Only Afuwape, for whom Ifá was first consulted, chose a good head.
- The OrishasSamuel Crowther's Yoruba vocabulary (1852 edition) glossed Èṣù 'devil; Satan', and Yoruba scripture followed. Idowu objected in 1962: 'we cannot call him the Devil'.
- Odu IfáThe 256 odù are fixed; their verses are not. UNESCO, inscribing Ifá in 2008, counted about 800 per odù and said the number keeps increasing.
- Wande AbimbolaBy his own account he was apprenticed in Ifá chanting before school at twelve. His Ifá corpus study (1976) followed the outsider William Bascom's Ifa Divination (1969).
Diaspora Yoruba (United States)2
- Luisah TeishThe preface in Jambalaya's 2021 edition calls the Yemaya and Oya tales original, distinguishing them from five retold traditional stories.
- Oyotunji African VillageOyotunji's Yoruba came by way of Cuba: Adefunmi was initiated in Matanzas in 1959, and his Harlem temples of 1959 and 1960 set out to transform Cuban Santería.
Haitian Vodou2
- Rada and PetwoMoreau de Saint-Méry (1797) records that in 1768 a Black man of Spanish origin at Petit-Goâve began a faster Vaudoux-like dance, the 'Danse à Dom Pèdre', later banned.
- The Vodou Service and PossessionBois Caïman (August 1791), hailed as the revolution's beginning, has no first-hand written account: the colonist Antoine Dalmas first described it in 1814.
African Diaspora1
- Katherine DunhamDunham was never possessed at her Haitian initiation; Ramsay Burt (2016) notes the priests took her intense dancing as the gods' approval.
Akan1
- SankofaNo adinkra cloth before R. S. Rattray's catalogue of 1927 shows a sankofa, which he gave in heart forms only; Bowdich's cloth of 1817 lacks it, as Erik Seeman showed in 2010.
Azande (Central Africa)1
- The Azande Poison OracleEvans-Pritchard had published the oracle in 'Oracle Magic of the Azande', Sudan Notes and Records, 1928, nine years before his book. In 1964 the philosopher Peter Winch made it a central example in 'Understanding a Primitive Society'.
Black Atlantic1
- Flash of the SpiritWyatt MacGaffey (2016) says he coined 'cosmogram' in 1970, in talks with Thompson, for improvised ritual marks on the ground; Thompson popularised it. The diagram itself, he adds, is authentic.
Bwiti (Gabon)1
- Bwiti and IbogaMissionary reports of 1914 already record Fang elders complaining that their young people had taken up Bwiti from the Galwa. It spread fastest during the First World War and the 1920s.
Ethiopian and Sudanese1
- The ZarIn 1844 William Cornwallis Harris reported that Christians of Shoa sacrificed each June to 'Sar, the evil spirit', despite a royal ban.
Hausa (Nigeria and Niger)1
- BoriA. J. N. Tremearne's The Ban of the Bori (1914) was gathered not in Hausaland but over four months among Hausa bori devotees in Tunis and Tripoli.
Hoodoo1
- Harry Middleton HyattHe recorded rather than took notes: from March 1936 Hyatt put 1,606 informants on more than 3,000 Ediphone and Telediphone cylinders, published only in 1970–78.
Hoodoo (United States)1
- The CrossroadsIn 1937 a Charleston root doctor told Harry Hyatt he had tried the crossroads compact to learn guitar. Robert Johnson's crossroads is traced to LeDell Johnson's account of his brother Tommy, printed by David Evans in 1971.
Jamaican Revival1
- Myal and Revival ZionMyal's first chronicler did not set it against obeah: in 1774 Edward Long wrote that obeah-men 'introduced what they called the myal dance'.
Juǀʼhoansi (Kalahari)1
- The Healing Dance of the JuǀʼhoansiHealing was no specialist's office: notes to John Marshall's film N/um Tchai (1969), shot in 1957–58, say most Juǀʼhoan men practised as healers at some point.
Louisiana Voodoo1
- Congo SquareBenjamin Latrobe's journal (1819) records some 'five or six hundred persons' dancing to drums and an African stringed instrument on 'the Common in the rear of the city'. He described music and dance, not ritual.
Lucumí1
- Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of HialeahThe church said in April 1987 it would practise openly; Hialeah's council met in emergency session on 9 June 1987. In 1993 all nine justices struck the ordinances down.
Mende, Vai and Kpelle (Sierra Leone and Liberia)1
- Poro and SandeOlfert Dapper's Description of Africa (Amsterdam, 1668) already describes both among the Quoja: Belli-Paaro for youths and a girls' forest rite from the Gola.
Southern African (Nguni)1
- Ubungoma and the Thwasa CallingThe 2007 Traditional Health Practitioners Act left the 1957 Witchcraft Suppression Act in force; in 2022 the Law Reform Commission was still urging repeal.
Spiritual Baptist (Trinidad)1
- Spiritual (Shouter) BaptistsSt Vincent banned its Shakers in 1912, Trinidad its Shouters in 1917 and Grenada in 1927. Trinidad repealed its ban on 30 March 1951, a public holiday since 1996.
Xhosa1
- NongqawuseIn 1989 Jeff Peires identified her uncle Mhlakaza as Wilhelm Goliat, an archdeacon's servant, explaining the prophecy's Christian content; Sheila Boniface Davies disputed it in 2007.
Yoruba and diaspora1
- Ìyánífá and the Women's Initiation DisputeCuba's first ìyánífá were initiated in secret in Havana in 2000; an open quarrel among Cuban, Nigerian and American Ifá lineages followed in 2004–07.
Zulu1
- Isangoma and UkuthwasaPsychiatrists followed 42 ukuthwasa apprentices in KwaZulu-Natal for three years: six of the seven with a psychotic disorder at the start had no psychiatric diagnosis at the end.