Children of Blood and Bone: The Film Adaptation Announcement

The most anticipated African-inspired fantasy film in years is not about an African religion. Say that plainly, because everything after it depends on it. The Children of Blood and Bone film adaptation announcement is news about a novel, and the novel is an invention that borrows its vocabulary — the name of its kingdom, its word for power, the names of several of its gods — from Yoruba tradition, a living faith practised today in southwestern Nigeria, Benin, and across the Americas. The book is not a retelling of that tradition. It has never claimed to be.

Meanwhile, in Osogbo in southwestern Nigeria, the Ọ̀ṣun river runs past a forest of iron and stone. Every year a procession walks down to the water behind the Arugbá, a young woman who carries a covered calabash on her head, with the Ataọja of Osogbo and a crowd of thousands behind her. The Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2005. The people in that procession are not waiting for a trailer to explain them.

Both of those things are true at the same time, and holding them together is the whole job of this piece.

What the announcement actually said

Tomi Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone was published in 2018, the first book of the Legacy of Orïsha trilogy, and it sold before most readers had heard of it — the film rights went in a reported seven-figure deal ahead of publication, first to Fox 2000, then, after the studio was folded into Disney's acquisition, to Paramount. The version now in front of audiences is the one that survived nearly a decade of development. Gina Prince-Bythewood, who directed The Woman King, is attached to direct. Trade coverage has put Amandla Stenberg in the lead as Zélie, with names including Viola Davis and Idris Elba among the announced cast.

That is roughly the shape of it, and it is worth saying that casts and dates in a production this long-running have moved before and may move again. Anyone reading this after release will know more than this paragraph does.

What the adaptation news does not contain, and what no trailer will have room for, is the part that matters to readers who came to the books because a name in them was already familiar. Adeyemi is Nigerian American. She studied West African mythology and religion in Salvador, Brazil — a city where Yoruba practice crossed the Atlantic and became Candomblé — and she has been open in interviews and in the books themselves that she wrote a fantasy, not a catechism. Her characters speak incantations in the Yoruba language. Her kingdom is called Orïsha. Those two choices are the seam where a novel touches a religion, and the seam is where the interesting questions live.

Is Children of Blood and Bone based on a real religion?

No. It is an original fantasy that borrows names, language, and imagery from Yoruba tradition and arranges them into a magic system of its own design. The maji clans, the white hair that marks a magic-bearer, the royal purge that stripped magic from the land — none of that is drawn from Yoruba belief. The names of some of the deities are real. The system they sit inside is fiction.

The distinction matters more than it might sound. Readers routinely leave the trilogy believing they have learned something about how Yoruba people understand the divine, in the same way a generation left a film believing something about voodoo. In this case the borrowing is affectionate and the author has said so out loud, which is a better starting position than most. But affection is not accuracy, and the novel's own architecture — ten clans, ten powers, one inherited gift per bloodline — is the architecture of a video game, not of a religion.

Here is what sits underneath.

The òrìṣà were never a set of ten

In Yoruba tradition, the òrìṣà (roughly aw-REE-shah) are not gods in the Greek sense — not a committee of rivals on a mountain. Above and behind them is Olódùmarè (o-LO-doo-mah-reh), the supreme creator, who is not depicted, not sculpted, and not approached with the daily intimacy the òrìṣà receive. The òrìṣà are the faces through which that creative power meets human life: Ògún in iron and in every oath sworn on a blade, Ọ̀ṣun in a specific river with a specific bank, Ṣàngó in thunder and in the memory of a king.

How many are there? Versions differ, deliberately. One traditional count says 401 — four hundred irúnmọlẹ̀ plus one, the plus-one being the point. Another says 201. Another 601. The number is not a census; it is a Yoruba way of saying more than you will finish counting, because new òrìṣà have entered the reckoning across centuries as towns, lineages, and rivers were brought into the tradition. A system of ten is a design decision. It is a good one for a novel, where a reader has to keep the rules straight. It is not a summary of anything.

Then there is àṣẹ (ah-SHEH), the word the fantasy genre has been steadily converting into a synonym for magic. In Yoruba thought àṣẹ is closer to the power that makes a thing come to pass — the force in a word that lands, in a blessing that holds, in an elder's agreement. It is present in speech, in leadership, in the correctness of a thing done properly. It is spoken at the end of a prayer for the same reason amen is. A film that renders àṣẹ as a glowing hand effect is not lying, exactly. It is translating a concept about authority and consequence into a concept about firepower, and something goes missing in the trade.

One more term the trilogy makes no use of, and which is arguably the centre of the whole system: orí (o-REE), a person's inner head — their destiny, their own chosen portion, the part of a person that must be in agreement for anything else to work. In Yoruba tradition your orí is closer to you than any òrìṣà is. There is a saying that orí is the only òrìṣà who will follow you everywhere. Whatever else African fantasy takes from this tradition, it has barely touched the idea that the most consequential spiritual relationship a person has is with themselves.

The story in brief: how the ground was made at Ilé-Ifẹ̀

In the beginning, in one widely told version, there was water below and Olódùmarè above, and the work of making solid ground was given to Ọbàtálá (aw-bah-TAH-lah), the òrìṣà of white cloth, of clarity, of the shaping of human bodies. He was given a chain to descend, a snail shell packed with sand, a hen, and a palm nut.

He came down. He poured out the sand. The hen scratched at it and scattered it, and where it scattered it became land. He planted the palm nut and it grew. The place was called Ilé-Ifẹ̀, and it is a real city in Osun State today, spoken of as the place where the world began.

In another telling, and this is where versions part company sharply, Ọbàtálá stopped for palm wine on the way, drank, and slept — and Odùduwà took the sand down and finished the work, which is why Odùduwà is remembered in Ifẹ̀ as the founder and the ancestor of the Yoruba kings. Which version a family tells has never been a neutral matter; it touches who has the right to rule. In some accounts Ọbàtálá's drunkenness is also the reason some children are born differently formed, and those people are called ẹni òrìṣà, people who belong to the òrìṣà, held as his particular concern. His devotees do not touch palm wine.

That is a creation story that contains an argument about kingship, a moral obligation toward disabled people, and a dietary rule, all in the same breath. It is not decoration. This is the altitude the tradition actually operates at.

Why the licence costs more here than it does at Asgard

Nobody writes a thoughtful essay when Marvel gives Thor a haircut. The reason is not that Norse myth is less serious; it is that the number of people who will be misread at work on Monday because of a Thor film is close to zero.

The Yoruba case is not symmetrical. Òrìṣà tradition is practised now, by millions, in Nigeria and Benin, and — carried across the Atlantic in the holds of slave ships and kept alive under the cover of Catholic saints — as Candomblé in Brazil, Lucumí (often called Santería) in Cuba, the Orisha faith in Trinidad, and in congregations across the United States. Ifá divination, in which a babaláwo (bah-bah-LAH-wo) reads the odù, a vast memorised body of verse, is consulted daily. On the second day of February, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians go to the beach for Yemanjá. A reader in Lagos or Salvador or Hialeah encountering the trilogy's ten clans is not meeting an old story dressed up. They are watching their neighbours' religion get a costume.

That is not an argument against the film. It is an argument for reading the film as what it is. The novel is a story about the violent suppression of an inherited power, written by a Black American author in the years of Ferguson and after; Adeyemi has said the anger in it came from watching Black people killed by police and finding no fantasy that put Black faces at the centre. Yoruba names give that story its texture and its dignity. They do not make it a Yoruba story, and the millions who could tell you a Yoruba story are still right there to ask.

Why Èṣù is not the devil

If a big-budget film does one quiet piece of repair work, let it be this one.

Èṣù (EH-shoo) stands at the crossroads. He is the messenger — the one who carries offerings and speech between people and the òrìṣà, the one who opens the road or closes it, the one addressed first because nothing else gets through otherwise. He is unpredictable and he is funny and he is fond of testing people, and in Yoruba thought that is a description of how the world actually works at junctions, not a warning about evil.

The confusion has a documented origin. When the Yoruba Bible was translated in the middle of the nineteenth century — the work associated with Samuel Ajayi Crowther, himself Yoruba, freed from a slave ship as a boy and later the first African Anglican bishop — the name chosen to render Satan was Èṣù. One translator's decision, taken inside a mission project, and a century and a half later you can still find Nigerian films in which Èṣù is a horned tempter. In Cuba and Brazil the same figure is Elegguá and Exu, and the same misreading followed them, sharpened by Hollywood's long habit of filming any African-derived faith as a horror set.

A film cannot undo that in two hours. But a film that shows a crossroads figure as a messenger rather than a menace, and gets the register right, does more repair in one weekend than a shelf of corrective books.

Names and terms

• Òrìṣà — the divinities of Yoruba tradition, the faces through which creative power meets human life. Also the name Adeyemi gives her fictional kingdom.
• Olódùmarè — the supreme creator, distant, not depicted, above the òrìṣà.
• Àṣẹ — the power that makes a thing come to pass; also spoken at the close of a prayer.
• Orí — a person's inner head: destiny and self, the closest relationship a person has.
• Ifá — the divination system, its verses memorised and interpreted by trained priests.
• Babaláwo — literally father of secrets; an Ifá priest and diviner.
• Irúnmọlẹ̀ — the primordial divinities; the traditional counts of them vary on purpose.
• Ilé-Ifẹ̀ — the city in Osun State, Nigeria, spoken of as where the world began.
• Candomblé, Lucumí — the Brazilian and Cuban traditions in which òrìṣà practice survived the Middle Passage.
• Maji, kosidán, divîner — terms from the Legacy of Orïsha novels. These are Adeyemi's, not Yoruba tradition's.

One name, four coasts

The same òrìṣà travelled, and the name changed at every landing. What changed with it is worth a table.

What a good adaptation owes, and what it doesn't

It does not owe accuracy. That is the thing worth being clear about. A fantasy novel is allowed to invent, and demanding that Adeyemi's clans match a real cosmology would be a category error — the same error as asking Norse specialists to sign off on a Marvel script.

What an adaptation does owe is register. Living practice filmed as spooky is a choice, and it is the choice that has been made about African religion on screen for a hundred years — the drums under the menace, the shrine lit like a crime scene, the word juju used as a synonym for threat. The novel does not do that. A film has more surfaces on which to slip: a score, a colour grade, a marketing campaign written by people who have not read the acknowledgements.

The second thing it owes is not pretending. An adaptation that leans on the language of authenticity — ancient, sacred, the real African magic system — to sell an invented one does damage that the invention itself never did. The honest position is the one the book has held from the start: this is a story, these names are borrowed with respect, the tradition they came from is alive and can speak for itself.

What this piece hasn't answered

Several things, deliberately. Whether the production consulted òrìṣà practitioners, and which ones, is not public in any detail worth reporting. How the film lands in Lagos and Ìbàdàn — where the names are not exotic but ordinary, and where Pentecostal churches have their own strong views about them — will be a different story from how it lands in Atlanta or London, and that story cannot be written before release. What the film does with Ifá, which the novels touch only lightly and which is the intellectual centre of Yoruba religion, is unknown. And whether the soundtrack's Afrobeats framing reads as continuity or as atmosphere is a question a trailer cannot settle.

Where to look next: read Adeyemi's author's note, which says more plainly than any coverage what she took and what she made. Then leave the film entirely and look at the tradition on its own terms — the Ifá corpus and the odù verses, the Osun-Osogbo festival each August, and the profiles on this site of Èṣù, Ọ̀ṣun, and Ṣàngó, where the names in the credits get a full page each without a plot attached.

There is a Yoruba proverb: an elder is not present in the market while a newborn's head hangs crooked. The elders are in the market. Whatever the screen makes of these names, there are people who can still tell you what they mean — and they are not hard to find.