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It is well known that the people today called Yorùbá include many different subgroups, each with their own dialect, spread across numerous kingdoms and polities in southwestern Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. 1 Historically, although the various groups shared many cultural and religious practices and recognized a common origin, ethnic identities were regional or local in scope. It was only in the late nineteenth century, after the forced dispersal of these peoples via the Atlantic slave trade, that the term Yorùbá – originally a Hausa name for the people of a particular kingdom, Ọ̀yọ́ – came to be accepted as an umbrella term referring to all the subgroups. 2
In the Americas, however, other collective terms for Yorùbá speakers were already in use. In the Spanish colonies, they were known as Lucumí. In the Brazilian province of Bahia – our focus here – they were referred to as Nagôs, a derivative of Ànàgó, a relatively small subgroup whose lands lie just west of the Yewa [Ẹ̀gbádò] area. Like so many other Africans whose specific identities were reconfigured into broader, more amorphous categories, termed nações by Lusophone slave traders, Yorùbá speakers in Bahia came to describe themselves as nação nagô in public and legal contexts. 3 At the same time, pre-enslavement identities persisted in private. As one man from the Ègbá region explained in 1835, “Even though we [Yorùbá speakers] are all Nagôs, we each have our own homeland.” 4
By the time the Ègbá man made his statement, Nagôs made up an overwhelming majority of the Africans arriving in the city of Salvador, the Bahian capital, a situation that continued until Brazil’s withdrawal from the Atlantic slave trade fifteen years later. The Nagôs’ rise to demographic prevalence in Bahia largely coincided with the emergence of Candomblé, a spirit possession religion whose pantheon of deities, priesthood, and liturgy were heavily influenced by Yorùbá beliefs and practices. Other African ethnic groups present in Bahia, especially Gbe and Bantu speakers (known respectively as jejes and angolas) also influenced Candomblé’s development. These heterogeneous roots led to the emergence of several ritual styles, which came to be referred to as nações, apparently an adaptation of the term’s earlier usage. 5
The first recorded use of this sense of the...