Robert Voeks, PhD
Professor of Geography
California State University, Fullerton CA
Author of “The Sacred Leaves of Candomble”
It is a considerable honor to write a letter of recommendation for James Weeks’ documentary project—16 Sages. By way of a brief introduction, it is important to appreciate that the story of the Yoruba and their forced American diaspora represents one of the Atlantic World’s most compelling narratives. Over ten million kidnapped and enslaved Africans arrived on the shores of the Americas—North, Middle and South—over the course of three plus centuries. They hailed from all points of the sub-Saharan compass, from Senegambia in the northwest to Mozambique in the southeast. Denied the most basic opportunities to introduce their native material culture, and confronted with the exigencies of new languages, religions, and power structures, Africans were forced to abandon vast repositories of their material, intellectual, and spiritual heritage during the Atlantic crossing. Seemingly alone among this protracted drama of wholesale cultural erosion stands the Yoruba, a people whose spiritual and healing traditions arrived in the hearts and minds of the diaspora, fused to a greater or lesser extent with Catholicism and Amerindian beliefs, and miraculously survived in the evolving New World cultural landscape. From southern Brazil, along the coastal zone of South America to Trinidad, Tobago, and especially Cuba, wherever Yoruba arrived in large numbers, significant elements of their cosmology, belief system and healing traditions survived and prospered. The religion of the orishas, previously endemic to a few hundred kilometers of western Nigeria and Benin, was adopted by Africans and their descendents throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Later, with increased religious tolerance of the 20th century, these Yoruba-inspired spiritual traditions spread across the Americas and Europe, now incorporating people of numerous faiths and ethnicities, and in the process becoming a globally significant religion.
The source of this amazing New World florescence of spiritual and medicinal knowledge—the healer/diviners of Yorubaland—have an intellectual legacy reaching deep into African prehistory. In spite of their importance, there has been surprising little scholarly research with this group (after the pioneering work of the late Pierre Verger) and to my knowledge no video documentation whatsoever. Nigeria is of course a very complicated place to carry out this sort of work, and the Yoruba are notoriously recalcitrant in terms of sharing their vast knowledge. As an adjunct to all things spiritual, the Yoruba also maintain one of the most complicated and cohesive indigenous ethnomedical systems in the world. And their knowledge of the medicinal properties of the West African flora, by all accounts, is legendary. However, unlike most other regions of the tropical realm, where ethnobotanists have partnered with indigenous groups to explore the medicinal properties of healing habitats, the Yoruba ethnoflora remains largely terra incognita. The unfortunate historical perception of sub-Saharan Africa as an intellectual backwater, combined with the difficulty of working in this region, has severely restricted our knowledge of the healing properties of this land and people. Given these factors, the Yoruba are clearly the right people to showcase in such an ambitious project.
Having spent over a decade apprenticing with several of the highest ranking healer/diviners of the Yoruba nation, James Weeks is probably the only person alive with the language expertise, spiritual training, and intellectual prowess to carry out such a valuable enterprise. As an accomplished photojournalist and writer, James brings to the project a rare combination of cultural knowledge and technical expertise. However, as he points out, in addition to myriad environmental challenges, the world is witnessing a global crisis of cultural erosion. This is manifest through the precipitous loss in languages, and the associated decline in wealth of cultural meaning and knowledge that accompanies it. In addition, indigenous understanding of the healing properties of nature is declining as rapidly as the languages that sustain it. Young people throughout the tropical realm are abandoning this cognitive connection with nature in favor of urban lifestyles and western values. In the case of Yoruba herbalism, the legacy of many generations of knowledge of the natural realm is dying out in a single generation with the passing of the great Ifa diviners. It is crucial therefore that this work be carried out sooner rather than later. This documentary project, by capturing in intimate detail, the daily lives and prayers and healing traditions of this elite caste of elders, promises to provide a rare and enduring glimpse into this unique and poorly known culture. This is a critically important project, one that is sure to receive critical acclaim, and I can think of no one more qualified to carry it out than James Weeks.
