The search for the African origins of contemporary socio-cultural forms found in black populations in the South Atlantic region is a well-established scholarly pursuit. Most scholars have argued that certain institutions and ideas brought from Africa were retained over time and survived in more or less recognizable form. It is further argued that specific institutions can be directly linked to the importation of Africans from specific areas in Africa. Although in the debate on Africanisms many writers have also argued the contrary, the emphasis in the scholarship has been on demonstrating the degree to which Africans in the diaspora managed to retain these socio-cultural institutions (Frazier, 1939; Herskovits, 1968).

Two major omissions fault the published scholarship on the subject: first, the lack of details of the process by which Africans retained, reinterpreted, or abandoned these institutions; and second, given similar circumstances of transfer, an explanation of the varying degrees of faithfulness to the original institutions in different areas. In other words, the lack of survival, though equally interesting and potentially intellectually rewarding, is a neglected aspect of the scholarship.

The case of Yoruba religious ideas is an example of this bias. Yoruba religion apparently remained “so faithful to its ancestral traditions” that it is one of the most frequently cited examples of an African survival. The scholarship on the topic is rather extensive, but none of it is historically or ethnologically sophisticated. Attempts have been made to explain its persistence in some areas by reference to the late arrival of a large number of Yoruba as victims of the slave trade: it is argued that “both the strength of the continuities and their relative lack of modification probably are related to recency of migration and to the presence [in Trinidad] or nearness [in Cuba] of freedom” (Mintz and Price, 1973).