In recent years, a deeper awareness has emerged of the sustained historical relationships across Afro-Atlantic worlds, and of the fact that the diasporas involved may be rethought in many ways. Necessarily, African and American societies, spaces, and relations are now being understood as extensions of each other. These understandings include refreshing ways of seeing how communities extending from the Bight of Benin to the Caribbean and the Americas are contiguous and integrated in their histories, thus forcing us to rethink our notions of discrete regions. Along with the reconsideration of region in exploring these transnational flows is the movement of religious culture as a means to identity for Yoruba nationalities through different Atlantic contexts and societies. The research offered here on the Cuban connection of the Aguda of Lagos reveals the extent of these diverse historical and cultural copenetrations, and how these flows influenced their reception in Lagos.

Movement of slaves from Africa to Brazil began early on through Portuguese colonial routes. In one study, Verger suggests that trade between Bahía in particular and Africa expanded from 1770 until 1851, and that these voyages included the selling of slaves for gold, tobacco, and sugarcane. In pointing out groups of free Africans moving back and forth across the Atlantic in the early nineteenth century, Bay and Law draw our attention to prominent individual travelers, including ambassadors from African royal courts to Brazil and Cuba on voyages launched from Dahomey, Porto Novo, and Ouidah.