Yemoja

In Yorubaland Yemoja is a river goddess. She belongs specifically to the Ogun River, which runs through Abeokuta, and her name is generally read as Yeye omo eja, mother whose children are fish. The Egba people carried her cult with them when they settled at Abeokuta in the nineteenth century. Her concerns there are those of a river: water for the town, the fertility of women, safe childbirth, the protection of small children.

Across the Atlantic she became the sea. In Cuba, Yemaya is the ocean; in Brazil, Yemanja is the ocean; and the shift is one of the clearest pieces of religious evidence for what the middle passage did to the people who survived it. A tradition centred on a particular named river, one you could walk to, was carried by people who would never see that river again to places where the defining body of water was the one they had been carried across. The goddess of the water became the goddess of that water.

What grew from it is now enormous. On the night of 31 December on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, and at Rio Vermelho in Salvador at the beginning of February, crowds dressed in white push small boats loaded with flowers, perfume, combs and mirrors out through the surf. If a boat comes back the offering was refused. Those present include Candomble initiates, Umbanda practitioners, Catholics and people with no religious commitment at all, and the festival is simultaneously a rite, a civic occasion and a tourist event.

In Cuba she is masked behind Our Lady of Regla, the black Virgin of the harbour across the bay from Havana; in Brazil behind Our Lady of the Navigators. Both are patrons of sailors, which fits the ocean rather than the river, so even the Catholic layer records the change.

One of the most important outside witnesses to the transatlantic religious connections that shaped Yemoja's transformation from river goddess to ocean mother was the French photographer and ethnographer Pierre Verger, who settled in Salvador, Bahia, in the mid twentieth century and spent decades traveling repeatedly between Brazil and the Yoruba-speaking regions of West Africa, documenting the ritual, artistic and personal connections that Candomble communities in Bahia maintained, and continued to renew, with specific towns, families and shrines in Nigeria and Benin long after the transatlantic slave trade had formally ended.

Verger was eventually initiated into the Ifa divination tradition in Nigeria himself, an unusual step for an outside researcher, and his photographs and written scholarship, produced across a career spanning from the 1940s into the 1990s, remain a primary visual and documentary record of how thoroughly the religious world of the orishas, including Yemoja under her Brazilian name Yemanja, continued to be understood by Bahian practitioners as directly, specifically connected to particular places and lineages in West Africa rather than as a vaguely remembered ancestral inheritance. His work helped establish, for both scholars and practitioners, that the relationship between West African Yoruba religion and its Brazilian, Cuban and other diaspora forms was not simply the past imposing itself faintly on the present, but an active, two-way, continuously maintained connection, with Bahian priests and priestesses visiting and being recognized by counterparts in Nigeria across the twentieth century, evidence of exactly how concretely linked the two shores of Yemoja's worship have remained.