Outskirts Press, INC.

Reparations for a Stolen Spiritual Inheritance

Displaced African people built the so-called “New World” on stolen indigenous land for European settlers’ profit. To perpetrate this crime against humanity, white settler societies systematically policed and sought to suppress the inter-generational transmission of African language and spirituality. While ultimately unsuccessful, this attempted cultural genocide is an unredressed violation with long-lasting effects. This book is an effort to connect generations through the voice of Afro-Brazilian lineage bearer Nancy “Cici” de Souza, an eighty-one-year-old priestess of the Yoruba-based religion Candomblé. The resident oral historian of the Pierre Verger Foundation’s community space in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, she has spent decades studying the culture of her ancestors. Her fifty years of initiation to the Yoruba divinities Osun and Obatala have earned her the title “ebomi,” which means “elder.” This book is the translation and compilation of interviews with Ebomi Cici regarding spirituality and history. All royalties go to the elder herself, and the Portuguese version is available for free at www.camelliadaoling.com.

I’ve noticed that the Fon/Jejé elders preserve more than the Yoruba. The Yoruba prefer silence. They do not want to talk anymore, especially once young people start to correct them. They close up. After the youth go to universities they start to correct the elders, and the old ones decide, “I’d better stay quiet.” Then they forget what they do not pass on, and this is what my generation and those older than me will lose. And then the current generation will have distorted information altered by the way they want to hear it. If you do not search, do not look to the past, you will not have the true stories.

Candomblé is changing because young people do not want to learn the way my generation and those before me did. They want to open a book or computer, ba-ba-ba! Done. That is not how it works and it cannot be done that way. This is a phenomenon you can find in any culture today. 

What is Cici saying? Do I tell the children my stories the way I learned or the way you want it? There are many pedagogues who correct me, and some who are ashamed to do so. There are also some who don’t want to learn. This is part of my story...

The media teaches that if you touch a button, you’ll see a number and get an instant response. Children nowadays hear so many electronic sounds and assume everything is on the computer. Grandma Cici knows stories that the computer cannot tell. I will tell you enchanting stories that, if we lose, we die.