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Yoruba Indigenous Religion in Church and Mosque: What Carried Over
The service ran two hours and ten minutes, and I spent most of it with a notebook on my knee, counting. Eleven congregational songs.
Children of Blood and Bone: African Fantasy Fiction and Real Yoruba Belief
Look at the poster long enough and you notice the dots. Orïsha, the kingdom in Tomi Adeyemi's novel, carries two of them over the i.
Children of Blood and Bone: What the Film Announcement Tells You
The advice comes around every time a studio options a novel with African gods in it: check the music credits.
Vodou Spirituality and Practice vs. the Hollywood Zombie
In parts of rural Haiti, a family will sit with a fresh grave for a few nights before they leave it alone. The fear behind that vigil is not the one Hollywood sells.
Adinkra Symbols in Cloth, on Walls, and on the Kristo Asafo Tomb
At Ntonso, a town north of Kumasi in Ghana's Ashanti Region, a printer works with a stamp cut from a piece of calabash shell.
Orïsha on Screen: The 401 Behind the Film Adaptation Announcement
There is a Yoruba way of counting the divinities that refuses to close. The figure most often given is ọ̀kànlénírinwọ́ irúnmọlẹ̀ — four hundred and one. Four hundred, and then one more.
Netflix Releases, Nollywood, and Africa's 1,700 Screens
The film opens on a compound at dawn. A woman sets a calabash down at the foot of a tree, straightens, and says nothing.
Children of Blood and Bone: What a Film Adaptation Can Carry
Ask a babaláwo how many òrìṣà (or-EE-shah) there are and you may get a number, then a correction, then a pause that means that is not really the question.
Children of Blood and Bone Film Adaptation: The Yoruba Craft Behind Orïsha
The first studio-released look behind the scenes on Children of Blood and Bone spends a surprising amount of its short running time on fabric.
Jungian Archetypes and the African Mother: How Authority Forms
In more than one household I have sat in, an argument has ended the same way. Someone older, usually a woman, says one short sentence, and the room puts the fight down. Nobody voted.