"Against the Odds, A 40-Year Old West African Village in South Carolina Has Thrived"

"At its founding in 1970, Oyotunji African Village never promised its residents a perfect way of life. But it did offer them an idea equally radical: a world without Europe, a space outside white supremacy. A tiny village in South Carolina whose population has waxed and waned from as many as 200 to as few as 25 residents, it has since transformed from a bustling separatist community to a smaller and more-focused religious one...

The village is residential compounds, a café and marketplace, public spaces, and religious ones. There are small garden plots, ancestral altars, above-ground tombs, and at least eight temples dedicated to separate orishas—deities in the Yoruban pantheon that can be described as aspects of a single god, a conceptual framework not unfamiliar to Hinduism or Catholicism. The physical reality of this place is explicitly African. Its commanding entryway looks Hausa. Its flag takes its design partly from Ethiopia (the colors red, gold, green) and partly from Egypt (the ankh). Its afin, or palace, is modeled after Ile Ife’s, in Nigeria. The village’s name, referencing the Yoruban empire that dominated southwestern Nigeria between the 15th and the 19th centuries, means “Oyo rises again.”...

This is the crux of McCray’s argument. While Oyotunji is an important part of America’s black nationalist history, the village also tells a story about who and what is American. It is difficult, if not impossible, to pry apart the systems of power governing the United States from the idea of America. America is slavery, it isgenocide, it is internment and deportation and torture. McCray’s friend was punished for not complying with American, which is to say Eurocentric, standards, while remaining prototypically American. Not only does she have the conventional rights of a natural born citizen, but she also practices a cultural tradition that has been on these shores since about 1619, far longer than many American’s European ancestors. The Yoruban religion in America is older than the nation that now governs it. It is America. At least a part of it."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/against-the-odds-a-40year-old-west-african-village-in-south-carolina-has-thrived