I just watched the PBS Sacred Journey's "Osun-Osogbo" episode and need to carefully gather my thoughts before I attempt to decimate the production.
Careful examination of African and diaspora culture is a hard thing for the West. Since the global North is dependent almost entirely on the global South, is sustained by it, and continues to this hour to be fueled by it, old habits are not only hard to break for white-supremacist culture but also discouraged. The niggers must always be kept in their place in order for the master to keep his.
This makes empathy challenging. It has produced a hundred years of mostly bad cinema where the global South in general and Africa in particular are demeaned in Technicolor. And this institutionalized chasm will confound even the most well-meaning documentary film maker, who cannot let too much daylight in on the scam.
If I am ever dissected by biographers, they would not start my African recovery with reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X or a special friendship with a certain Moroccan, as they should, but perhaps being initiated an oloricha to Ochun, the supposed subject of this PBS feature.
I say supposed, because almost immediately "Osun-Osogbo" inadvertently brings up critical topics that Malcolm X critiqued and planted in my head, and which multiply like rabbits throughout the production of this documentary until, towards the end, I have other things on my mind than the oricha herself. And I began to wonder if by some conspiracy of silence Bruce Feiler cut things out or was it the sheer, willful ignorance one finds in so many liberal whites, ass-kissers, and Negro house pets that he just didn't see what was in front of him.
And so, the best part of "Osun-Osogbo" was what was left in the periphery, like how Feiler treats of the state of oricha worship. He glosses over the invasion of missionaries and what this is doing to African culture all over the sub-Saharan part of the continent.
Islam pre-dates the early Christian invasions of Africa we know because the Christian Portuguese slavers kidnapped Muslim Africans. Christianity came later with the Europeans, for the most part, along with and a part of the 19th century "scramble" for Africa.
Yet both these monotheist religions have become Frankenstein monsters of their former monstrous selves since the end of the Cold War; they have become more venomous and radicalized among global South peoples and I daresay unrecognizable to their 19th century counterparts.
The documentary barely shows how monotheism and indigenous culture are not only competing for office space but the monotheists, armed and funded by Western sanctimony, are also forcing through political policies which are anti-women, anti-gay, and, most importantly, anti-indigenous. In short, the West and monotheism are waging a culture war of extermination, which the indigenous cultures are losing.
I recognized this tension in the documentary and found the attempts to "save" the sacred shrine and the indigenous ways problematic and unchallenged. Does Feiler? Bringing in Western artists to do make-overs and making the shrine into a global theme park signal an impossible battle.
If the UN ever makes the Vatican a "World Heritage Site" we will know that Roman Catholicism has ended and a museum opened in its place.
Speaking of museums, enter the anthropologists. The worst parts of the documentary are how Feiler relies much on academics, and academics of a certain Western caliber, for testimony and experience.
Academics are an incestuous lot. They write for the foundations and for each other, not their subjects. To imply as the documentary does the preservation of this culture in the diaspora via PhD candidates is utterly false. Their arrival signals the spiritual transference of the culture from Ile-Ife to Harvard Square, where the Ford Foundation will decide the future of the religion.
The late Cuban journalist and writer, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, mused a lot about the survival of African culture in the diaspora. He observed the Jazz genre and African religions were preserved and nurtured not by the whites, the nobles, and the social climbers but rather by the lowest and most marginalized in colonial society. The curators and generators of the old ways were the enslaved Africans and their oppressed progeny, prostitutes, and social rejects. Those are the experts that official narratives ignore because their status cannot be discussed let alone displayed as evidence of Western crimes against humanity.
Cabrera Infante mocked the recent phenomenon of academics and New Class aspirants appropriating these forms and making them acceptable and then electing themselves as the "experts" to mainstream audiences. So do I.
Then, writer Richard Rodriguez has similarly mused on the uniquely US phenomenon of this same cultural appropriation by high-class wanna-be's to think they can go on a week-long "pilgrimage" and experiential vacations to, say, Ireland, Mexico, or Nigeria, buy a shamrock, pancho, or kinte cloth, and somehow transform into Irish, Mexican, or African, and implicitly less American, and come back to the global North laboring for research grants and defending their dissertations, with a new identity.
One of the gaggle of academics "Osun-Osogbo" says that wearing the cloths she buys in the African marketplace will identify her in the US as having a connection with her roots! This is pure Disney. Brace yourself, Pocohontas!
Since oricha worship has barely thrived in the US, even among the Black community, I would have liked Feiler to accompany some Cuban or Brazilian elder olorichas to the Osun Festival, those who live in Matanzas or the Diez de Octubre barrio of Havana, Port-au-Prince, or the favelas of Bahia, those who have been inter-generationally nurtured by this religion. But this would have robbed the US market of its white hero, who in this instance are these light-skinned, Ivy League doctoral students who are padding their CV's to gain one of the dwindling tenure-tracked endowed professorships. And the Black American audience -to the extent there would be one - would be so mis-educated as not see their cousins in the Afro-Cubans, Haitians, and Afro-Brazilian worshipers.
The poorer counterparts of these scholars - as has been seen when Cuban olorichas have gone to Nigeria to find similarities, or Nigerians have gone to Brazil to find the same - will not have books printed by university presses that no one will read.
In a diaspora starved of the images contained in this one-hour production, showing the constant devotion and work of the adherents, albeit in the background, to honor this magnificent oricha, it's easy to find my words harsh and hyper-critical. The documentary producers might argue they didn't set out to study history and they could not find anyone but academics to interview. But this is always the defense mechanism of the global North, that what purports to be a dialogue comes out to be a one-sided lecture. The global North, I argue, cannot have a dialogue with the global South, ever.
I welcomed the images contained in "Osun-Osogbo," since the West has been very reticent to give them to us. But hunger does not make me stupid. Having been to Havana, I know the difference between Diez de Octubre and Cambridge, MA.
The global North must be expelled from its occupation of our African Meccas. The pilgrimage of the diaspora is more of a jihad where, as the late Lakota activist said, "Europe must die," not thrive in the perspectives of Ivy League Negro academics. This is what is wrong with the United States, where everything is for sale, and if it is not for sale it is for the stealing. If you do not believe me, just ask Mobil Oil or British Petroleum, who with the force of the Western governments are continuing to suck the life out of Africa and making sure the peoples are powerless to object. This leaves a less than honey-sweetened taste in my mouth.
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