(ominous music) - [Narrator] From the West Coast of Africa, the North and South America, Cuba, and the whole Caribbean, the Yorubas came in masses.

(flute whistling) From the 15th to the 18th century, enslavement of the Africans was the most lucrative business all over Europe.

From the Atlantic coast of Badagry, Cotonou, Port of No Return, to the Goree Island in Senegal, 90% of the enslaved Africans taken out of the continent took their last steps on the West Coast of Africa.

- [Narrator] Hundreds of African cultures and ethnic groups left the continent, but one remains prominent to this day in the New World, the culture of the Yorubas.

Growing up in Trinidad, the culture that I identified as African was Yoruba.

Shango people and Shango is Yoruba.

(tranquil music) - [Narrator] From the shores of Africa to distant Americas, the retention of Yoruba heritage bridges oceans and centuries.

We were opening Yoruba culture to the black people that had no knowledge of where they came from no knowledge of ancestors.

Some people say there was two movements.

There was the civil rights movement and there was the cultural movement.

- [Narrator] It is all around us, from city to city, in music and fashion, religion and arts.

(tranquil music) It was not only the Yorubas that was taken as slaves.

We have Angola people, you have Mozambique people.

You have from different places.

Why actually people talk about Yorubas?

Why they don't talk about the other African cultures?

(tranquil music) As of 1976, over 3000 works of literature have been written on the Yorubas making it one of the most researched cultures of the world.

- From the 14th to the 18th century, one of the largest and most formidable empires in West Africa was the Yoruba empire of Oyo, spreading along the coast of modern day Nigeria, Republic of Benin, Togo and some parts of Ghana.

(tranquil music) (tranquil music) - [Narrator] The Yoruba culture and mythology has been compared to that of other great cultures of the world, with its own profound religious beliefs which has Olodumare as God, the Supreme being.

- The Yorubas, they don't worship people that have died.

The Yorubas worship Olodumare.

In the mythology of the Yorubas, Olodumare, there is one God, one supreme being and there are different divinities.

Yoruba believes that you cannot contact direct with God.

You always have this divinities in between, one Olodumare, different divinities or different prophets, like Jesus in Christianity.

You have to go through Jesus to reach God.

- [Narrator] From Togo to Cuba, Republic of Benin to Brazil, one consensus of all the Yorubas was that Ile-Ife is their origin and their ancestor from Ife is Oduduwa.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] What is widely known about the Yorubas has always been their spirituality.

But their system of governance is just as profound shaping a society where law, ritual and leadership flow from the same source.

(upbeat music) Ile-Ife played a very pivotal role in which all the descendants of Oduduwa actually left the land, to go and resettle in some other places.

Oyo Empire further improved on the structure.

- [Narrator] From Ife to the formation of the largest West African state of the era, the Oyo Empire.

- [Narrator] Many things were said to have been introduced to the Africans by the Europeans To the Yorubas, democracy was definitely not one of them.

The monarchical system among the Yoruba was very democratic.

The Oba's powers were limited by council of chiefs, sometimes known as the Ogboni conclave and the Oba couldn't be as autocratic as he might've wished or as autocratic as many outsiders view the Oba, because he's a revered figure, but he's primus inter pares, first among others, the chiefs and so on and so forth.

And that evolved into a kind of democratic setting, which might seem strange.

- [Narrator] This oral constitution is well-structured that not even the king, whom they call Oba is above the law.

When the Oba went beyond his bounds, when he tried to flout laid down traditions, the controlling mechanisms, to go around the controlling mechanisms of society, he was duly invited to go in there and open the calabash that he would find there and this meant commit suicide.

- [Narrator] With the Yorubas controlling the most politically stable empire of West Africa, European exploration of world politics will later conflict with their states.

In 1580, the Portuguese reached the shores of the Oyo Empire.

What followed was a tragic exodus of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.

In this era, fighting for freedom and maintaining one█s identity became an uphill battle for people of African descent.

This group, the Yorubas, relentlessly left clues of their passage everywhere they landed.

We are the ones who have started the slavery, and we didn█t bring the slaves to Europe.

We bring the slaves to South America our colony, to Brazil.

Two separate ports of no return lie in the heart of the old Yoruba empire.

Any unfortunate African that made it this far was never coming back home.

(ominous music) When we brought the slaves to Brazil, I know that we forced them to adapt to Christianity.

We baptized them.

We believe the Africans don't have any religion or any belief.

- [Narrator] Orishas are mini gods and deities, worshiped by the Yorubas.

They're regarded as an intermediary between human beings and God, like Oshun, the goddess of beauty; Shango, the god of thunder; Yemoja, the goddess of the sea; Ogun the Warrior, the god of iron, and many others among the 401 Yoruba Orishas.

- They would go to the church and they would amalgamate themselves, come together and they would put the image of Jesus but in the back, they would put Obatala.

(somber music) And if you go to Brazil, you can see the Candombles.

- [Narrator] This disguised effort of masking the Yoruba deities within the Catholic church marks the origin of what is now known as the Candomble worship today in Brazil.

(Candomble worship songs) (Candomble worship songs) The most profound influence of the Yoruba culture in Brazil could be the religion, but inheritance of Yoruba culture abound every corner, alley, city, and way of life of many Brazilians.

- [Narrator] In the Yoruba system of governance, no man is allowed to represent in women's affairs.

There is a seat reserved for a woman representative as part of the cabinet of Oyo Empire.

Moreso, they were the business people of the family.

- [Narrator] Inspired by the heritage of the Yoruba, Olodum became the biggest black musical festival in Brazil that has attracted various artists of African descent from around the world.

(Olodum group singing) Yoruba culture became a powerhouse of emotional strength and resistance for all Africans in Brazil.

(festive music) (festive music) (festive music) (festive music) (festive music) (festive music) - We must always remember that the quality, the nature of oppression, of racial oppression, the nature of colonialism was different from country to country.

(man holding torch) - [Narrator] Unlike Brazil, Cuba was a Spanish colony.

(drums beating) In the mid 1800s, Cuba refined over 450,000 tons of sugar crystals.

That's roughly about 30% of the entire world's consumption.

The majority of these sugar laborers were Yoruba slaves, arriving from West Africa.

(waves crashing) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) The syncretism of Yoruba religion with European faiths did not end in Brazil.

This syncretism was not only called Santeria in Cuba, but also across Latin America.

- Various aspects of human activities, social activities are embedded in the spirituality of the Yoruba, the dances, the attires, the music.

(upbeat music) (audience applauding) Yoruba speakers from West Africa to date could still pick up many words from the Cuban songs and traditions.

- When Fidel Castro led his rebellion against Batista in Manzanillo in the Oriente Province, he was able to succeed as much as he did, at least it was aided by the fact that Yoruba culture was strongest there.

And Yoruba culture did not teach turn the other cheek.

On the contrary, Yoruba culture contains the God of war, celebrates the God of war.

So you can see that Yoruba played a role in liberation struggle in Latin America and in the struggle for human rights.

(Cuban music) - [Narrator] In the Yoruba spirituality, a Babalawo is considered the priest.

(worshipers singing) - [Narrator] The study of the Orishas has influenced many artists throughout Cuban history.

- Tourists from all around the world gathered every Sunday at Callejon de Hamel in Havana to watch the Yoruba folklore on display.

Even though the pronunciation may have eroded over time, songs about the old Oyo Empire can still be clearly heard.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) To say the Yorubas brought their religion here to Trinidad and Tobago should no longer be surprising.

One thing that might be different here was the way they came.

A lot of people don't recognize it but Trinidad, was a very late settlement for sugar.

If we look at Barbados or we look at Jamaica, they were settled by the Europeans in the 17th century, 1620s, 1650s.

Trinidad was not settled until the late 18th century.

By the time we had begun to develop a sugar economy, the slave trade was stopped.

So, Trinidad never had the influx of slaves directly from Africa that the other countries had had.

When the English put an embargo on slaves leaving Africa, those freed slaves, those slaves that were taken, they were called liberated Africans, many of them were Yoruba.

They came as indentured or liberated Africans.

While we would have had Yorubas coming throughout, but not in large numbers, we had a large influx of Yoruba between about 1840 and 1860.

- [Narrator] An embargo in the early 1800s did not stop the slave trade among all Europeans.

Illegal slave trade continued until the late 1800s, an action that almost cost Africa another one of its finest (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Heroic feet must have been in the blood of the Kuti family for generations.

At the time when there was no airplane, nor GPS, imagine walking over 1,500 miles in the jungles of West Africa in an effort to locate your homeland.

Despite this heroic act, we have to count him lucky.

How many did we know that took the same leap of faith and never made it?

Perhaps the same could be said for those that made it to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

How many did we know that never made it through the brutal middle passage?

Some Yorubas who made it landed here in Trinidad and Tobago.

(spirited music) (spirited music) (spirited music) - [Narrator] Neither the Portuguese, French, Spaniards nor the British were comfortable with the Yorubas and their drums, simply because of their ability to utilize them for more than just entertainment.

(upbeat music) - In the 1880s, the skin drum was banned in Trinidad and the Africans used the bamboo, tamboo bamboo to get the rhythms.

And along with the tamboo bamboo there was always a sort of iron.

There is always the clan of the iron.

(upbeat music) There was a very strong Yoruba input in the development of the steel pan.

- Some of the earliest steelpan's men were, in fact, Yoruba.

Many of them were butchers.

Many of them were committed to the god of iron.

(Eintou singing Ogun song) (worshipers singing) - The pan brought melody, but the rhythm continued to be a very strong African rhythm.

♪ How long shall they kill our prophets ♪ ♪ While we stand aside and look ♪ ♪ Some say it's just a part of it ♪ ♪ We've got to fulfill the book ♪ ♪ Won't you help to sing ♪ These songs of freedom ♪ Redemption songs ♪ Redemption songs In the past we have a strong oral tradition, where many of the stories were handed down through verbal influence.

Gone are the days where a child would sit and listen, evening after evening to the stories of grandparents or great-grandparents.

Gone are the days where grandparents and great-grandparents have the time to sit with young people and have the patience to sit with them and tell the stories as their great grandparents would have with them.

We also have to accept that they learn and they are exposed to information in a totally different way.

To this day, we still have not caught up with the documentation required to ensure that future generations would understand where we came from.

The struggles that we would have been through and therefore, using it as the light to guide their future.

But we cannot undervalue the strength of oral traditions to ensure that we utilize our brains effectively and to stretch the capacity of our brains to half the level of memory that our ancestors would have had.

(upbeat music) The enduring legacy of Yoruba culture continues to thrive across the Atlantic.

Transforming, adapting and ever-evolving.

(upbeat music) Out of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement, a new Oyo was reborn in North America complete with its own king and council of chiefs.

Welcome to Oyotunji, the African village in South Carolina.

(tranquil music) Oyotunji was developed by African-Americans who were seeking something African, but did not have a spiritual community in which to do so.

The 1960s, this was a very powerful time in African people's history in this country.

We, as a people, were tired of being second class, third class, fourth class citizens in this country.

- (DR.

MARTIN LUTHER KING) I think this march will go down as one of the greatest demonstrations for freedom and human dignity ever held in the United States.

- The Yoruba Cultural Restoration Movement began in Harlem, New York, back around 1956.

Baba wanted African culture but he did not know which culture to practice.

As you know, Yoruba culture is all over the world.

However, the African-Americans never developed a culture based on African traditions.

In North America, we are descendants primarily of Yoruba and Dahomean.

In this area, was mostly Sierra Leone and Ghana, but the rest of Louisiana and parts of South Carolina were Yoruba and Benin or Dahomey And so Baba met a gentleman from Curacao, his name was Chris Oliana and he knew people in Cuba.

So they traveled to Cuba.

And when he came back, he came back with the culture of the Yoruba.

It was during the civil right ages and we were opening up Yoruba culture.

- What was happening in the '60s was rather overshadowed what Oba Efuntola was doing because Martin Luther King had a massive movement.

- My father, the first king, he was arrested many times for practicing African tradition in North America.

Baba didn't even care.

His biggest care was the re-implementation and restoration of African culture, so that children in America forever and ever, after he's gone, will know about the culture of their ancestors.

And we filter that culture through Yoruba.

(Orisha music & dance) Most of the people who came to America came from the west coast of Africa.

Oyotunji means, Oyo rises again.

- Baba realized that Africans in America did not know their culture.

Baba started to teach them through the dress, through the language, through an understanding of the sociology of the Yoruba people.

Baba built this African village here on an old plantation land.

This is a part of an old plantation.

So, Oyotunji is sitting in the light of the plantation.

- I am one of the living founders left from New York City.

And we worked very closely with the Black Panthers.

And all Serik had to do was snap his fingers and they were there.

They were very loyal to Your Highness.

- Baba was a part of a group called the Republic of New Africa.

Their idea was they were gonna take over five southern states with guns and military.

They were gonna take over Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.

And the reason they wanted to do this was because they said, we built South Carolina, we built all of those states.

As black people for 300 years, we built all of that.

At one time, in South Carolina, the Europeans who would travel from Massachusetts or New England to have a vacation in South Carolina, they called it a black country.

They said, "This is more like a black country than a white colony," because in South Carolina, Africans outnumbered the Europeans 17 to 1.

Because they were bringing in so many Africans from West Africa to South Carolina, the state legislature had to pass a law.

They would have concurrent ships coming in back to back, to back, to back.

So they went to Detroit, Michigan at Aretha Franklin's father█s church.

Aretha Franklin's father's church was the place where a lot of people would come.

Historically, it was a place to talk about the movement and what we needed to do to get from under oppression.

Detroit Police Department showed up and just unloaded on the church.

- They just came in and they started shooting up the church.

We had women and children with us.

Our soldiers fired back, until they had no more ammunition.

Meanwhile, the Black Panthers got ahold of what was happening to us.

They came immediately.

- The people who began the village came from the Black Panthers, they came from the Martin Luther King movements, they came from the Civil Rights Movements, the Malcolm X movement, Stokely Carmichael.

They were fired up.

(horn blows) By 1885, the Europeans had shifted from slavery to colonization, opening a new chapter in the long struggle of the African.

- [Narrator] As it did on the entire continent of Africa, the Berlin Conference of 1885 created borders between these brothers and they will begin to answer as citizens of different countries under European colonies.

- [Narrator] Everything African was taught to be primitive, a stigma the entire continent of Africa still struggles with.

(melancholy music) I've met few people who have come from Yorubaland, per se, and some of them I found they do not satisfy me, you know, they too have been robbed.

Yes, I'm Yoruba, but I'm so many others.

Staying in a particular piece of geography don't make you it.

Geography is geography.

And I want to say this to anybody and confront you with that so you would say who the hell do you think you are?

So I could repeat it.

- [Narrator] Ideas and innovations of these progressive people will be suppressed and relegated.

To silence the drum is to silence memory itself.

Long before European genealogy and ancestry records, the Yoruba have their own identity database called Oriki.

This oral database traces lineages for generations and can identify family places of origin, family occupations, status, physical looks, character traits and so on.

Each family knows theirs but their collective database is kept by the drummers and entertainers.

(Bonsue Fuji music) (crowd cheers) Everybody have different Oriki.

Every houses have their own different Oriki.

- [Narrator] It was a tool to evoke emotional pride in people for which the musicians are generously rewarded.

- Oriki reminds you of where you came from, gives you a permanent link with origin, brings clan, family together.

And, ultimately, in fact, it is pure poetry, which appeals to the artistic in those human beings.

(K1 De Ultimate █ Fuji Music) These were people who came from a thriving empire, an empire that had subject states, an empire that was well-organized, well-structured, well-founded.

This is a culture, but this is also a historical group, a traditional group, an established group.

The religion is only part of it.

(upbeat music) - The fact that they were able to influence non-Yorubas to behave in ways that reflected Yoruba culture, I have always been trying to figure out in terms of the elements of the Yoruba culture that had a universality that was able to bring in whether it was the Congos or the others.

- [Narrator] 400 years and counting, the presence of these West Africans remains a force across the Atlantic.

(Eintou sings) (Eintou sings) (Eintou sings)