Becoming Yoruba, Becoming African
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2025
On modern-day Grenada, African work is the most enduring and significant cultural inheritance of both enslaved and liberated Africans. Using oral narratives produced by M. G. Smith in 1952-3 and collected by this author between 2009 and 2023, Chapters 7, 8, and 9 complicate Smith's early twentieth century conceptualisation of African work as a surviving cultural practice of a large group of Ijesha-speaking Yoruba recaptives. Chapter 7 delineates Yoruba aspects of African work, arguing that some Yoruba influences can be located beyond the Ijesha. Yoruba cultures appealed to a diverse audience, leading to the Yorubisation of various African beliefs. Eventually, Yoruba-derived religious cultures came to be known as 'African' in response to local circumstances, such as the rejection of exogenously imposed labels by practitioners and the appeal from the broader African-descended population.
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