Every thread, one shelf
The belief systems of the continent, told thread by thread — from creation stories to the traditions that crossed the Atlantic. Pick what you're curious about, or start at Origins and follow the sequence.
African Mythology in Fiction: How the Story Reaches the Page
In a Yoruba household, a story does not start on its own. The teller calls out "Àlọ́ o" — roughly, a tale — and the room has to answer "Àlọ́" before anything happens.
Black Folklore: Why the Teller Keeps Stepping Out of the Story
Before the tale begins, the teller says a strange thing. We do not really mean, we do not really mean, that what we are about to say is true.
Children of Blood and Bone: What a Film Adaptation Announcement Can and Can't Do for Orïsha
The advice comes around with every trailer, and it came around again with this one: a big enough movie will finally teach the world about African religion.
African Folklore in Contemporary Storytelling: Àbíkú and Ọgbanje
Two hundred and fifty-six. That is the entire sign system of Ifá, the divination tradition of the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria, Benin and Togo — and one of the deepest reservoirs that African…
Black Folklore: How West African Stories Traveled and Survived
In one Akan telling recorded in the 1930s, the storyteller opens by taking it all back: We do not really mean, we do not really mean, that what we are about to say is true.
African Mythology in Fiction: Why the New Wave Isn't New
In 1938, a schoolteacher in western Nigeria published a novel in Yoruba about a hunter who walks into a forest thick with spirits and does not come home the same man.
Adinkra Symbols in Urban Murals: The Sentence Behind the Sign
The advice comes with so much goodwill that it feels rude to test it. Put the symbol in the work. You paint, or you letter, or you shoot, and somewhere behind you there is Ghana — a parent, a…
African Mythology and Oral Tradition: Reading the Form
There is a question that comes near the end of almost every reading. A hand goes up somewhere in the middle rows, and someone asks the novelist where the magic came from — as though African mythology…
Tomi Adeyemi, Orïsha, and What the Film News Leaves Out
Children of Blood and Bone is not a story from Yoruba religion. It was never trying to be, and its author has been clearer about that than most of her coverage has.
Children of Blood and Bone: The Film Trailer and the Real Orïsha
The word lands early, cut over drums and a horizon of red dust: Orïsha. Three syllables, one diaeresis, the name of a kingdom that has never existed anywhere but on a page.
Magical Realism and Jungian Archetypes in African Storytelling
In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world.
Orisha, Mami Wata, and the Fantasy Novel Review Rule
A reader meets Èṣù on page forty. He is standing at a crossroads, which is where he usually stands, and the book does not stop to explain him.
Not sure where to start?
Begin at Origins. Every other thread makes more sense once you know how each people says the world began.