"Concerned that the Orisha culture and its practices were being scorned and forgotten, Ifawemimo took to social media six years ago in an effort to educate a broader audience about indigenous Yoruba spirituality. Her inspiration? Nollywood, or Nigeria’s film industry, which she blames for depicting Yoruba spirituality as a practice based on sorcery, love potions and get-rich-quick charms, distorting its history and contributing to negative stereotypes. “Though our people have been brainwashed already, [Nollywood] has made our people lack knowledge and enlightenment about their roots,” she says...
She is helped in her mission to revitalize Yoruba spirituality, she says, by a current thirst to understand it in its original form before it made its way to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade, reaching countries like Cuba, Brazil and Haiti, where the Santeria and Candomble communities adopted and adapted it. She believes that its growing visibility in the diaspora has been a driving force for many on the continent to both learn and reclaim the practice.
It’s a renaissance that has even found its way into pop-culture iconography — from Beyoncé invoking the Yoruba tradition in Lemonade (she appears as Oshun, a Yoruba water goddess, in the album’s second single) to the French-Cuban duo Ibeyi’s chants to the Orisha spirits Oya and Eleggua on their debut album."
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