This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported in the Times.
Growing up in Detroit, Walter King wondered why his family didn’t celebrate cultural holidays like his Jewish and Polish classmates did. So he went to his mother.
“Who is the African God? That’s what I want to know,” he asked her when she was 15 years old.
His mother didn’t have the answer. “Black people really had no knowledge of their history and culture before slavery,” he explained, as quoted in the book “Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism” (2012), by scholar Tracey E. Hucks.
The exchange was pivotal: King began a quest to answer his own question. He read all he could about Africa, taking an African name for himself which would evolve into Ofuntola Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi I.
It was while reading National Geographic magazine that he learned about the Yoruba. The Yoruba are one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, with roots that can be traced to the ancient city of Ile Ife in Nigeria. The slave trade spread its religion throughout the African diaspora, where it is recognized by various names, such as Candomblé in Brazil, Santería in Cuba, and Vodou in Haiti.
But according to Mary Cuthrell Curry’s Making the Gods in New York: The Yoruba Religion in the African American Community (1997), “religion has ceased to exist” in the United States—if it ever existed. That is, until Adefunmi I created an annex called Orisa-Vodun and the one-of-a-kind village in South Carolina that embodies it, Oyotunji.
“His mission was to bring the African Gods to African Americans,” Hucks, the scholar, said in an interview. She spoke with Adefunmi at length about her book and he lived in Oyotunji, which he called “a central place for African Americans” and “a Mecca where one could go to initiate.”
About 25 people live today, but the population reached a few hundred at its peak in the 1980s. Scholars estimate that thousands of people worldwide have been initiated into the Yoruba priesthood through connections to the village.
Between 1956 and 1961 in New York, Adefunmi established three temples in Manhattan. A festival on the Hudson River to honor Osun, the Yoruba river goddess Beyoncé channels on her ‘Black is King’ album. and a parade that included black nationalists in African garb on horseback. The Ujamaa African Market he founded in 1962 sold all kinds of African goods, such as ileke waist beads. jelly, or head wraps; drums? and dashikis — baggy T-shirts, which he made himself.
Dressed in a robe, Adefunmi would preach about the world and African deities from a soap box on 125th Street in Harlem. Visitors to the 1964 World’s Fair may have seen him drumming in the African Pavilion. Anyone who tuned in to watch the 1977 TV miniseries “Roots” saw Oyotunji residents dancing on a stage produced by Adefunmi.
In 1996, The Miami Herald called him “the father of the Yoruba cultural restoration movement.” He was eventually crowned Oba, or King of the Yoruba in North America, by the Ooni, the spiritual leader of the Yoruba people in Nigeria.
Walter Eugene King was born on October 5, 1928 in Detroit to a Baptist family, one of five children. His mother, Wilhelmina Hamilton, worked for the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal agency. His father, Roy King, owned and operated an upholstery and furniture moving company. They were followers of the Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey and were committed to his Back to Africa movement. But Walter was more interested in learning about African cultures and religions than immigrating there.
By the time Walter graduated from Cass Technical High School, he had stopped going to church. At 20, he joined the Katherine Dunham Dance Company in New York. Dunham’s shows often included songs about Orissa, Yoruba deities, and the company played in places like Egypt and Haiti.
The Yoruba Temple in Harlem, founded by Adefunmi in 1960, attracted Black activists such as poet and playwright Amiri Baraka and Queen Mother Moore. The three served together in the Republic of New Africa, a black nationalist organization founded on the idea that a self-governing black nation should be created from five southern states. The group also sought $4 billion in damages.
“He was a territorial nationalist,” Hucks said, “and he really wanted to know, how do we build a nation for ourselves in this country?”
The answer was Oyotunji Village, the South Carolina community that Adefunmi founded in 1970 as “a place of restoration for African Americans in search of their spiritual and cultural identity,” he told Essence magazine. The name refers to the Yoruba African kingdom of Oyo and means “Oyo rises again”.
Adefunmi chose a rural location in Sheldon, in the heart of the Gullah Geechee Corridor, where the descendants of enslaved West Africans maintained their indigenous traditions on the remote sea islands located on the southeast Atlantic coast.
A sign posted in both Yoruba and English welcomes visitors to the village: “Get out of the United States. Enter the Kingdom of the Yoruba… Welcome to our Land!”
Walking through the village, filled with sculptures and life-size shrines, “you see the magnificence of the buildings,” said Kamari Clarke, author of Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities (2004). an interview.
“You’d hear the roosters crowing in the mornings,” he added, and you’d see “people walking around with their loaves wrapped around them to go get water, speaking only Yoruba.”
Clarke lived in Oyotunji and traveled with his community members to Nigeria. Its evolution from a blacks-only space to a place of pilgrimage and learning open to all is one of the things that has sustained it, he said.
When Adefunmi’s son, Oba Adejuyigbe Adefunmi II, went to public school, before the village established its own, he was sometimes ridiculed for his African clothes and tribal markings.
“We lived in two different worlds,” the younger Adefunmi said. “We’d say, ‘Why can’t we be regular?’ Our parents used to tell us that we are not regular.”
He was destined from birth to be the next king of their village, which Adefunmi II said “was a terrible thought my whole life — I wanted to be a rapper.”
He was appointed the new omba of the village after his father died of heart disease on February 11, 2005. He was 76 years old.
Adefunmi II estimated that Oyotunji receives about 20,000 visitors annually. He said the growing popularity of Yoruba changed his view of the village and its importance.
“Everyone is practicing Yoruba culture today,” he said. “I can hear the language people laughed at us for speaking in Savannah when we were kids. I’m listening to it on Spotify. I hear it all over the radio,” via artists like India Arie, Future and Beyoncé.
“That makes us proud,” he added. “All this is the residual effect of what our elders did and what my father did.”