Oyotunji is a village located in Beaufort County, South Carolina, U.S.A. It was founded by Oba Efuntola Oserjeman Adelabu Adefunmi I in the year 1970. Oyotunji is named after the Oyo empire, a powerful pre-colonial Yoruba kingdom lasting from the 1300s until the mid 1800s in what is now Southwestern Nigeria and Benin Republic. The name literally means “Oyo reawakens” or “O̩yo̩ rises again”, referring to the African Yoruba kingdom of Oyo, now rising in a new form near the South Carolina seashore in the Americas.
Oyotunji village covers 27 acres (11 ha) of land and has a Yoruba temple which was moved from Harlem, New York to its present location in 1960. Since Oba Adefunmi’s demise in 2005, the village has been led by his son, Oba Adejuyigbe, Adefunmi II. The village is constructed to be analogous to the villages of the traditional Yoruba city-states in modern-day Nigeria.
During the slave trade period, many Africans were forcefully taken as ‘enslaved people’ into the Atlantic new world. While going, many left with many elements of their intangible and tangible cultural heritage and traditions which they continued within the foreign land they found themselves. They continued with the culture and tradition of their ancestors to preserve and maintain their identity.
The Yoruba in slavery are among the Africans that maintained their culture in this new ‘strange land’ – The Americas, and they handed it down to their children from generation to generation. Many of these children, after the abolition of the slave trade, have continued to remain culturally Yoruba and maintain their connection with their African roots in Yorubaland even after hundreds of years in the diaspora.
O̩yo̩tunji is regarded as North America’s oldest authentic African village. It was founded in 1970 and is the first intentional community in North America, based on the culture of the Yoruba ethnic group of West Africa. In Oyotunji, all the Yoruba traditional customs are preserved and regularly celebrated. Festivals of Olokun, Obatala, Osun, Orunmila, Ajé, Egungun, Sango Etc are a common sight. The Oyotunji people have become a channel of connection between Yorubaland and the rest of the African diaspora in the USA and beyond.
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