To Her Ladyship, the Onisegun, and to this distinguished assembly of masters of the mysteries. Greetings, from the deep south. We bring you the greetings, of course, of the chiefs, queens and priests of Oyotunji. Meanwhile, we would call your attention to the reading of the year.

In our reading of the year, which emphasized so much of 'Oyeku Meji', the indication is that this is a period of time in which the ancestors of every people are summoning them to preserve and to resurrect their culture and their traditions. So we see it everywhere. We hear terrifying phrases and words like ethnic cleansing. We also hear all kinds of racial epithets. So, there is a great deal of apprehension as to just where the world is headed.

Quite naturally, there is going to be a lunatic fringe who will carry every movement and every issue too far. With the result that there is going to be a great deal of conflict, controversy and in some cases even bloodshed, as we see in certain of the European countries, and among certain of the Islamic world. We regret these extremes; however, in as much as it is such a period that we are passing through, it is of importance to note the degree to which Afrikan Americans are also participating in this extraordinary cycle.

So, we find ourselves just returning from the Republic of Benin, where, to our great surprise, the government has produced a series of posters, which you will find in the customs offices, which you will find in all restaurants, announcing that Benin is "Berceau de Vodoun", "the cradle of vodun". Then there is a large image of a priestess dancing and at the bottom there is a salutation to the "vodunsi". The vodunsi are what we would call, of course, aborisa or olorisa.

Observing then, that we were fortunate enough to take a team in research of the mysteries of Ifa. We were headed for Nigeria, but after we once visited Whydah, that frightening sanctuary where so many of the souls of our ancestors returned and where so much suffering occurred, [we discovered that it] is still very much a dynamic center of Afrikan tradition today. So, there is a sense of defiance, which we do note throughout that particular country because directly across from the Roman Catholic church is the Temple des Pythons, the Temple of the Pythons...Directly accross the village square, standing there in opposition to the encroachment of that powerful Western religious system.

So, we visited the chief priest of the Temple of the Pythons with our team and discovered there a way to go into the bush region where we found a tiny village smaller than Oyotunji itself. (On less acreage.) But, nevertheless, a very dynamic center for the preservation of Fa, as it is called by the Fon speaking people of the former kingdom of Dahomey. So, they preserve all of those mysteries to a very intricate degree, which is one of the reasons we were concerned, of course, to go there; since Dahomey, as it used to be called, or now the Republic of Benin, does indeed have a reputation for maintaining, to the most ancestral degree and intensity, the cultural traditions of Afrika. Among them there is no embarrassment, nor shame, nor attempt to conceal their devotion to the cultural traditions of their ancestors.

We did also make a tour to the capitol of the Dahomean kings, up to Abomey, that city of endless walls where they have preserved the ancestral shrine for His Royal Majesty, King Gelele, iba ara t'orun. There they maintain his couch as well as a priesthood who daily bring offerings to him and for him and praise his name and recite his exploits. Obviously, it is through the preservation of those ancestral figures who really make our nation and make us who we are and what we were that we do indeed receive a special power and sustenance.

The emphasis, therefore, at Oyotunji over the years has been on the resurrection of the ancestral customs, the ancestral traditions and the ancestral celebrations. For us at Oyotunji all power for the resurrection and the safeguarding of the Afrikan people comes via the ancestors. Of supreme importance, therefore, has been the resurrection and restoration of the powerful Egungun worship.

We were fortunate, during our visit to Whydah to see a very elaborate Egungun ceremony for some deceased Ahosi. The Ahosi were those Amazon warriors, women warriors, who were the terror of the surrounding kingdoms of Abeokuta and Ketu. They were being venerated and celebrated there in the Egungun worship, [as were] a deceased group of chiefs. A very exciting event it was, with the participation of some six Egungun.

It was during that ceremony that we realized how vitally important it is to preserve the ancestor cults. For it is through them that we gain our morality. For in the theology developing, emerging and being produced at Oyotunji, it is not through the orisa that we receive our morality, but it is from the ancestors. They are the ones who decided what was good and bad. They are the ones who decided how we should go about every one of the 'Rites of Passage' through which all of us must pass. So, in tracing and restoring our ancestry there has arisen a form of nationalism and ethnicity which perhaps in many cases many people consider out of place in the restoration of orisa worship. However, were it not for those ancestors, we would know nothing about orisa today, so we venerate them. Above all else they are the most powerful source for our resurrection and in time our hegemony. So, that is why we have the motto at Oyotunji, "Eluju di ipe di eluju ekun", "in time the field belongs to the leopard". We look forward to the resurrection of our cultural traditions as well as our political hegemony.

At this time, then, we are confronted by one of history's great moments. We are either being asked or expected to participate in this historical moment. By our presences here today, the indication is that we are all participating in what is taking place throughout the Afrikan world. Many arguments, pro and con, on the issue of the resurrection of Afrikan traditions are being shouted and there are a number of positive as well as adverse results which emanate from this period that we are passing through. So, it is altogether fitting and proper that we should address ourselves at this time to that most important issue so vitally interesting and acute to the Afrikan Americans as to who is going to control, [therefore] decide the future of Afrikan culture and tradition and the resurrection of our people in this hemisphere.

We note that over the centuries, different schools of Yoruba culture and religion have emerged. There is the Brazilian school, there is the Cuban school, there is the Trinidadian school, and now the Afrikan American school of orisa theology. This is to be expected. It is not at all inconsistent with the 'Pagan Intellect'. (We have no compunction about referring to ourselves as 'pagan' since the word does mean 'the worship of nature or of nature powers'. The powers of nature. It come from the Latin word "pagani" which meant "country people".) So country people, being closer to nature, were bound to have a stronger sense of the relationship and the influence of nature on their lives. You who went through the recent New York flood, (which we watched on television from Abijan and the Ivory Coast), had a difficult time. Despite the benevolence of the water goddesses, they also have an aspect which is destructive, terrifying and beyond explanation in many cases. The fact remains that these powers are the powers of nature, so we have no reservation about declaring ourselves heirs of the 'Pagan Intellect'.

We realize at Oyotunji that the emphasis is on the resurrection of Afrikan culture and traditions and that it is not necessarily a racist nor a negative attitude which motivates us. We have devoted ourselves to the rehabilitation of the Afrikan American people who had suffered most grievously during the slave trade. For hardly any remnant of our ancestral custom, traditions, holidays nor language were left to us. We have had to start from the very beginnings of our civilization and the thought of our ancestors. We have tried to parallel the conditions under which our ancestors evolved their theology. So, we have had to redefine a number of terms in order that we might be able to more clearly understand and participate in the spiritual life of our ancestors.

We've had to redefine 'religion', for one thing. Religion for us is not simply a search for a supreme god or a faith. Nor to have something to believe in. For us, a religion is composed of the ethnic heritage of a particular people. It is composed of important events in their cultural and political history. [It is composed of] those events and thos philosophies which they evolved based upon the environment in which they lived. So, that is why religion is essentially an 'ethnic celebration'. If we study any of the great religions of the world invariably their holy land is the place where they evolved, and their holy and sacred people are the people who produced that thought; those rituals, and who preserve them on a regular basis.

It is for that reason that the theologians at Oyotunji do indeed think of it as mischievous to export ones culture or ones religion or to impose it either by force or by persuasion upon another people. Because it means that a particular people will have to relinquish their own culture, their own history, the veneration of their own language, their own cuisine, in preference for an entirely new invasive cultural ideal, standards and patterns of behavior. The Afrikan Americans have been terribly victimized by the proselytization of Middle Eastern Theology. As we live our lives on a daily basis and celebrate each one of the festivals of our ancestors and the festivals of the orisa, we have sought in one way or another to anticipate the coming of a period when we will have to decide whether we would vigorously export Afrikan religion or we should maintain it as a particularly ethnic expression.

It is for that reason that we recognize that, in the Old Testament of the Jews, the entire treatise is based on the history of the Jewish people; their justification for invading Canaan, and the belief that it is heaven itself which has an anthropomorphic morality and can decide, as it were, who is right and who is wrong. We decided that it is an abominable thing to teach an Afrikan child that a Middle Eastern people are the "Chosen People" of the greatest force in the heavens. We think of it also an abomination to teach that same child that his own complexion represents a curse by that particular anthropomorphic deity. In consequence, we recognize that each religion is going to reflect the philosophies, the prejudices and the ideas of one particular people.

We have, therefore, the terrible Adam and Eve myth which presupposes that the male was created from the very soil of the earth while the female was created from a piece of the male...A piece of his boney skeleton! Implying, therefore, a certain inferiority which has filtered down on the mundane level to the fact that women in that Middle Eastern world do not share the same spiritual heights, nor power, nor genius as would a male. Today we have seen a great refutation of that in the women's lib movement, which is determined to prove in defiance of this chauvinistic god that they too are equal to the male.

Of course, in the Afrikan tradition we have no such conflict. In the first place the first order of the universe is Olorun, defined by Araba Ajanaku as the "Owner of the Mysteries of Heaven". We have given a great deal of thought to this, trying to analyze precisely what he meant. [These arguments are found in Fela Sowande's little booklet, Ifa.] There the argument is, and our conclusion is, that the First Order of the Universe, Olorun, is a Universal Energy permeating everything. This is more than just a belief. It is a point of fact, a conclusion arrived at by atomic scientists. Everything has life, everything has energy. But this particular force has no anthropomorphic characteristics! It has no human feelings, it has no likes nor dislikes, it has no favorite people, it has no cursed people. Nor does it have any special day of service or worship. Rather it is a passive energy, dictating no laws, nor rules, nor morality. Indeed, there is no force in heaven which dictates a morality.

So, the orisa are not dictators of morality. It is the ancestors who have decided how to live on this planet. It is they who give us the guidelines for managing and relating, or attempting to neutralize certain destructive forces of nature.

Having learned that, we are very happy to recall that during the threat from hurricane Hugo, which was headed for Beaufort County after coming up through the South Atlantic, all announcements warned the people of Beaufort County to vacate. So, the roads were jammed as we heard, and it was difficult to get out of Beaufort County. Everyone was leaving. So, what the Otu priests at Oyotunji were instructed to do was to sacrifice to Oya, because this was not 'Hugo', this was Oya who was on her way! Following our ancestral traditions, we made the sacrifices to Oya, chanted and danced her praises and recited her oriki. One hour later the report came over that the hurricane had changed course. It was no longer headed toward Beaufort, it was now headed toward Charleston. While we might sympathize with those who received that unhappy news, we, nevertheless, felt very gratified that the metaphysics of our ancestors had once again triumphed. There, are so many episodes in the history of Oyotunji where we have had no other recourse except to the orisa, or to our ancestors for the survival of that tiny Yoruba enclave. So, the ancestors emerge as the arbiters of morality--and without them--people will invent all kinds of new theologies and reinterpretations.

We know that in the search for Afrikan religion by Westerners; in as much as they had already decided that religion was the worship of celestial forces, they searched out only how Afrikans related to celestial forces. Very often they ignored or overlooked the worship of ancestors because it was not a part of the traditions handed down from Greece, nor Rome, nor of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In fact, in those traditions, particularly the Christian tradition, the emphasis was on determining that all morality and all perfection should reside in a devine figure. This universality is what has brought about the idea that one religion is for everyone, and everyone has a right to buy it or shop around for it as one might a package in a market.

We do know, as we study history, that both Christianity and Islam have decided that everyone must have this package. So, either it was a hard sell to receive the Christian package, or it was a physical assault as in the case of Islam to compel people to accept the religious or spiritual package. Which, of course, meant that the converted had to give up the worship and respect of their own ancestors, and to venerate alien nations. So, we see tens of thousands of Afrikans and people from conquered nations making their way to Mecca as the center of the universe and as the 'holy land', rather than to the heart of Afrika, or to Egypt or to ancient Kush, or to Ethiopia. They are making their way to the countries from which the imported religions came.

So, obviously, we believe we have produced a sound argument that religion is essentially ethnic. Ethnic to such an extent that today we see in India a terrific conflict with Indians who would destroy Indian culture, and who would suppress it. That is the main reason for the burning or destruction of that particular mosque which started off the present rioting and blood shed in India. With the Islamic invasion there had been the destruction of the Temple of Siva which originally had existed there, and an Islamic masjid had been erected on the spot. Now, the Indians, being imbued with that current which is passing around the world for cultural preservations and ancestral resurrection, decided they wanted that site back where they could worship their cosmic ancestor Siva. So, the result is that one ethnic culture is being pitted against another. Those who preserve their own ethnic culture and their own ethnic tradition are deciding that it is in their own country that their own culture must prevail. Not at all an arguable issue or decision.

We Afrikan Americans find that it is not necessary that we be anti-white, but it is necessary that we be very pro-Yoruba, very pro-Afrikan. It is necessary that we be supremely Afrikan, indeed. We must be conscious of who we are. We are a people who have returned to the most vital and sensitive mysteries of the Afrikan genius. We are able to do this gracefully and successfully because we are the direct descendant of the thinkers and occultists who expounded it. Yet we have often stood silently by while another ethnic people have co-opted, usurped and capitalized on everything that our ancestors have discovered or revealed.

Santayana reminds us that, "Those who do not know history are condemned to live it over and over again". So, the lessons of history have to be remembered. If we are an intelligent people, history, which is the worship of the past--the worship of ancestors--certainly is going to teach us and guide us to that successful resurrection which we so intensely desire. It is a fact that we all know what is happening, and we all see what is happening, but we are often too obtuse and passive to join together to beat what is happening. The question is, is it reasonable that we should maintain such a paralysis and suspension of action when it come to that most vital of issues: the preservation and control of our own cultural institutions.

Among the Hindus for example there have been a great many mathematical and scientific inventions and discoveries based upon facts that came out of their own pagan traditions. Out of their religion they have discovered the very source and foundation of science. We discovered from our own ancestors, particularly those who evolved Ifa, that it is a very intricate and advanced mathematical system. Indeed, as we learned from Baba Epega, Ifa is a binary system with a base of the number two.

We are concerned, therefore, that the lessons of Afrikan history should not be shuffled aside in the name of "the brotherhood of man". Especially when this brotherhood is advocated by a big brother who is violent. This doctrine of brotherhood was preached to all of the Indians of the Caribbean islands, it was preached to the Indians of North America, it was preached to the Egyptians, to the Ethiopian and to the Chinese after which a wholesale exploitation, deception, genocide and confiscation of property was let loose by the advocates of world brotherhood. So, we know that this is a cliche of a particular imperialist culture or imperialist doctrine and we, therefore, cannot mistake it for the real truth of human life, nor for the truth of the doctrines of "common origin" which Marcus Garvey so eloquently expounded.

So, we must look back then. Where did this concept or this idea come from that one religion is for everyone to grab, to leap into and to imitate another people? We have to trace this back then to Asikunder. Better known as Alexander of Macedonia, the world's first known compulsive imperialist. It was he who spawned what I refer to as the 'Macedonian syndrome'. The 'Macedonian syndrome' is an aggressive ambition to use violence to compel the world to conform to a single ethnic culture.

In Alexander's case it was the Hellenic culture which had swept over the Greeks who were a white people inhabiting a cluster of islands along the southeastern coast of Europe. Asikunder, or Alexander, succeeded on a grand scale to impose his ethnocentrism upon a vast aggregate of peoples. Even after death, the idea of cultural imperialism persisted. It inspired a young warrior, descended from an Italian tribe known as the Romans, to envision the same dream. So, in time, the 'Macedonian syndrome', inherited by the Italians, produced the Roman Empire.

Thus the doctrine of an ethnic superiority spread, and was taught from northern Europe to southern Egypt. All kinds of people from the ghostly leukoderms of Scandinavia to the ebony blacks of upper Egypt were forced to worship the Roman pantheon, speak the Roman dialect and pay taxes to the agents of Rome. What had started out as a muddy little village along the banks of Tiber River became an aggressive, conquering world power.

Overcome by this pseudo Hellenism also was a young Jew born in the colonial Roman city of Tarsus, named Saul. Saul, as the story goes (though he vehemently denies it), was literally knocked off his seat when the idea occurred to him that a persistent Jewish myth about the coming of a revolutionary Jewish messiah could serve his dream of bringing the Hebrew religion out of its suffocating racism and ethnocentrism--and more in line with the Hellenistic ideal of universalism. So, when the idea was put to the Judean Essene Society by Saul, he was assaulted, he was cursed for blasphemy and only barely escaped from Judea with his life. But Saul, now changing his name to the more Europeanized 'Paul', proceeded--through his newly invented Christianity--to initiate Gentiles into Jewish religion!

I remember distinctly, Queen Mother Moore, at the time we were building and developing 'Mount Addis Ababa', said that she encountered a Rabbi down in lower Manhattan and she said, "Rabbi, you gonna bless me?" He said, "The religion is for the Jewish people." What Saul had done, therefore, was to commence the initiation of Gentiles into Jewish religion, never realizing nor imagining that, in time, the Gentiles would completely alter his Christianity to fit their own Greco-Roman form and practices...Or that they would twist his carefully edited gospels to condemn vital Jewish doctrines and customs: that in point of fact, they would create from his Christos a new god and reduce the ancient Hebrew, Yahwe, to an ill-tempered, bumbling, old fogey whose dictates, commandments and curses had to be reformed, reinterpreted or rejected completely. Indeed, so overpowering did the converts to Jewish religion become that they began to violently condemn and punish the Jewish people themselves! Charging them with deicide. The killing of a god, which no one has ever proved--ever existed.

Now the Jews themselves are hopelessly outnumbered by their converts to Jewish theology. Their converts have usurped the authority to interpret and define Jewish culture and religion to the world. We Yoruba Americans face a parallel possibility unless we move with great vigor to establish ourselves and our own as inimitable arbiters and managers of our own cultural institutions. For we have seen how certain of our ancestors, who lacking foresight or full knowledge of the nature of the oyinbo, invited them into their lands, with the result that in time the descendants of these oyinbo became masters of the land and controllers of all Afrikan affairs. To keep Afrikan affairs in our own hands we must learn by our own mistakes just how far to open the arms of friendship and how closely we can embrace the non-Afrikan!

We conclude these remarks by announcing or pointing out certain of the rites of passage through which every Yoruba boy and girl at Oyotunji must pass. The 'Akinkanju' which takes a young man at thirteen years old and has him make his vow for the preservation of his nation and of its people. So, to the argument that politics and religion do not mix, we can only refer you to all of the nations around the world who have used religion as a means of extending their political power and destroying other civilizations and cultures.

We will refer you, certainly, to Maryse Conde's book, Segu, when she describes the tragedy of a family separated and torn apart by conversions to imported cultures and religions: to the extent that ultimately the descendants of that convert destroyed the very city of his own ancestors declaring that it was not 'righteous'...by a whole set of new terms and evaluations which had nothing to do with the Afrikan people as a whole.

So, each Yoruba boy and girl, then, begins each day in school with the recitation of the oath:

Ni ase kan, ki F'agbara se. Emi ekojujasii si oba ati asia Yoruba mo bura igbajumo lai-lai. Nje nko, l'orunko oba mi, no bura Se gbogbo'hun l'aagbara mi--mo mu sise amuba yiyeni olukuluku--fun alafia Enia Logo ati ipamo ise dale ati ofin atawadawo ariku baba wa. Jeki ebi yi koja, ogidiga osa Afrika

I am compelled by a spiritual force I cannot resist to swear my eternal allegiance to the king and the flag of the Yoruba nation. I also solemnly swear to do everything in my power and use every means conceivable (remember that line?) for the welfare of my people and the preservation of the culture and tradition of my ancestors. So let it be, oh, ye gods of Afrika.

Each child is reciting this every morning as class begins in the Yoruba Royal Academy, which is, of course, our own school system. It is our conviction that every Afrikan child has a right during his primary years to be educated by his own people, in his own culture, and to venerate all of his ancestors as sacred people. Then these initiates, as they progress, are also to recite that Afrika is great...or Yoruba is great, and must come before all else! Yoruba is Aido Hwedo, "the beginning and the end". "The King has said that a nation must be loved by it's people. That is why he has forbidden his people to intercourse from one people to another, because a wanderer can never have a great love for his own people. The King has said that Yoruba is an enemy of all the world. That, therefore, you must use as much force in killing an ant as you would to kill an elephant; because it is the small things which bring on the large. The King has said that the Yoruba are a warrior people, so it must never come to pass that a true Yoruba admit before an enemy that he is vanquished, because the King does not wish for another dog to bark louder than his own. The King has said that among our people there are those who are refractory. Who, though they are rivers; have the will to imitate the ocean. Such small wholes must be stopped up...and you must see to it that from the crown alone the sun may shine. The King has said that the chiefs are like the bellows which iron workers use to make their fires red. So that if any chief withholds for himself the air which is necessary for the fires of Oyotunji, such a chief should be used as coal to keep the fires hot. In closing, the King has said that those who represent his power, aught not do evil things. He forbids the strong to take advantage of the weak; for this is the way of the chicken hawk which steals chicks without asking leave of the owner of the chicken yard."

So, with these oaths the Afrikan child is prepared not only to maintain his own spiritual identity above all else, but to assume responsibility for its preservation, and its protection, and its settlement.

Therefore, we find that there can be no separation between politic and religion. In point of fact, politics is the highest religion because it, indeed, preserves the locus or the location for a people to worship their particular gods.

And there is no separation between economics and religion, which is one of the unfortunate cliches which have been passed on to the young Afrikan-American. As the preachers told us when we were young, "Son, don't think about money all the time. Don't go after money. Remember that you have mansions in heaven." And yet because those mansion were in heaven we were unable to occupy them. And we had to congregate on the streets of Manhattan and Detroit in order to find a place to live. So, if you are planning no longer to be concerned with life on earth, we would advise that you do not reproduce issue who are going to have to survive on what you did not leave.

So, every generation is bound to preserve certain traditions and to produce a certain legacy, often economical, for the next generation to inherit. If every father has sworn to this and every mother has sworn to this, then the pursuit of your own happiness must then be greatly reduced. For the most part most people in America are pursuing happiness as if it would never appear or it was going out of style. They pursue happiness to the extent that they have neglected to prepare, or to take care for the next generation. So, the next generation has instinctively begun to organize: through gangs!

We see also, among the Afrikan people, a great deal of weeping over what is thought to be the breaking up of the 'Black family'. The 'Black family', of course, has been defined for us by European theology and philosophy and was not of our design. It was not an Afrikan family. So, if we see the breaking up of the 'Black family', as it were, it is because it was predicated on European marriage ideals. It often began, of course, without an investigation into the family in which you were going to marry, but it began with an animal attraction! Two persons attracted to each other, usually long enough to have sex and produce an offspring. And then suddenly, the infatuation had ended and we saw a break up. But this was not the Afrikan way. It was not an Afrikan family. It was based on the Code Napoleon and British Common Law.

Many people argue about 'Christian marriage'. And yet there was no such thing as Christian marriage. Marriage was disparaged by Paul in the first place, and in the second place, the prototype of the Christos or the Christ never married! He never had a family. So this is not the ideal, then, that a man can follow if he expects to preserve and to build his nation. He is going to have to marry. He is going to have to have children. He is going to have to learn to support those children. These are things, of course, the messiah never bothered to do. He is going to have to pay rent or buy a building or a home where his child is going to live. He is going to also have to buy food. Of course, these are things which no liturgy in the New Testament provides for.

Let us conclude by saying that there are a number or a series of new world cliches to which we are bound to respond. Well, we have already responded to the argument that we are mixing politics with religion by pointing out that religion itself is political. The movements or the activities of any people is political. 'Don't care what they are doing. If they are moving and converging on a river, that in itself is politics. Whatever they do, if they fight for their rights, if they declare that they are going to overthrow an alien power, that is political. If they use, as the Haitians did, the voodoo to do it, then politics and religion certainly worked admirably well during that decent from the Bois Caiman. So we, therefore, must refute that cliche.

We have also heard the argument, and have addressed ourselves to it, that economics and religion have no place in the same boat. We have heard that all humans were created at Ile Ife...Black, white, red, yellow...And so, they are all entitled to know the mysteries of the ancestors of the Yoruba. Our response to that is that when one member of the human family betrays another through enslavement, or selling or genocide, then the offended family may repudiate the offending member; who by his betrayal of the family forfeits his right of inheritance to the family fortune or the family legacy, or in our case the family secrets.

The question has also been put to us, how does Oyotunji appoint itself the cultural authority to rule on who has the right to preside over new world Yoruba revivals. Our response to that is, firstly by virtue of primogeniture. Oseijeman Adedunmi was the first of the Afrikan Americans to lay claim to the legacy of his ancestors through initiation into the priesthood of Obatala. He was the first known Afrikan American to return to the priesthood of Orunmila. The Yoruba Temple of New York, and the settlement of Oyotunji were the first public havens for the reception of the ancestral gods and goddesses. The Bale of Oyotunji is the first Afrikan American to be handed a sword of state by the reigning Ooni of Ife, His Divine Majesty Okunade Sijuwade Olubuse, II, and to swear allegiance to that king of the Yoruba nation. Adefunmi I was the founder of the African Theological Archministry. The first instrument for restoring the religious institutions of Afrika. In conclusion, Adefunmi is an Afrikan himself and he was appointed by the ancestors in a seance at Matanzas, Cuba, held in 1960. He was told that he was "a king sent to destroy a king!". Thank you.