King of South Carolina
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer

SHELDON, S.C. -- In the courtyard of the royal palace,where peacocks strut beneath six huge statues of bare-breasted women, the priests are sacrificing a
goat to please the spirits of the king's ancestors.

But that ceremony is secret, off-limits to tourists, including the tormented truck driver who has come here to the Oyotunji African Village to find out if
somebody has cast a spell on him.

The trucker is scared. He's pretty sure that a girl he dated four decades ago gave him the evil eye. Now she's on his mind all the time, day and night, which
caused him to flip his truck three times recently for no earthly reason.

"It torments me," he says. "It really does."

He's 60 years old, with a deep North Carolina drawl. His bald pink pate oozes sweat as he sits in the hot sun with his wife, waiting for a voodoo priest to ease
his psychic pain. He doesn't want his name in the paper but he's eager to tell his story. His minister couldn't help him, he says. Neither could a psychiatrist. But a few days ago, a guy he met in a truck stop told him to go to Oyotunji, where the priests work powerful magic.

"All I want to know," he says, "is if it's evil and where it came from."

Chief Adenibi Ajamu saunters over to the trucker. Ajamu, 60, is a high priest in the Yoruba religion and the foreign minister of Oyotunji, a 10-acre village
near the southeastern town of Sheldon in Beaufort County whose residents consider it an independent nation, founded 30 years ago by a divine, polygamous
king. Ajamu is carrying a ceremonial cane and wearing a white tropical shirt and trousers.

He leads the trucker and his wife into an unlit room. They sit down to talk.

Inside the royal courtyard, priests are killing a second goat and presenting it to the spirits of the king's ancestors. Above, the sun shines brightly. But suddenly rain begins to fall. Thunder growls in the distance. The king's peacocks utter their honking cries.

After a half-hour, the trucker emerges from his consultation, smiling broadly, thrilled with Chief Ajamu. "He's real," he says. "He's real!"

Ajamu won't discuss his consultations--they're as secret as a Catholic confession, he says--but the trucker is eager to talk. He says Ajamu could see the spirits that are tormenting him. They're offering him his old girlfriend back if he'll cross over to the evil side. But if he takes the offer, his wife will die and so will his old girlfriend's husband.

Now that he knows what he's up against, the trucker figures he can fight it. He's a satisfied customer. Ajamu asked $50 for the consultation. The trucker left 60, and considered it a bargain.

"These people know how to deal with spirits," he says. "They really, really do."

Voodoo Vatican

The sign out on Highway 17 reads "African Village--As Seen on TV."

If that sounds enticing, you make a sharp turn down a dirt road rutted with holes so deep they can rip off a muffler. The road winds into thick woods for half a mile, then ends at the red concrete gates of Oyotunji. A weather-beaten sign delivers a message in English and Yoruba:

NOTICE
You Are Leaving the United States
You Are Entering Yoruba Kingdom

Oyotunji is a voodoo religious community, a pseudo-independent country and a roadside tourist trap. It was founded in 1970 by King Oseijeman Ofuntola Adefumni I and a few dozen of his followers, all of them African Americans, most of them from New York.

Dressed in African garb, Oyotunju residents dance with a man costumed as an ancestral spirit."

The king was born Walter Eugene King in 1928. Raised in Detroit, he became a dancer in Katherine Dunham's legendary black dance company. In the '50s, after
traveling to Egypt with the troupe, he became obsessed with uncovering the religion of his African ancestors. His search led him to voodoo and Santeria, African-based religions practiced in the Caribbean by the descendents of slaves who added a thin veneer of Christianity to their ancient beliefs.


In 1959 King flew to Cuba, where he was initiated as a priest of the "Orisha Voodoo cults." Back home in New York, he sold African clothing and preached his
religion on the same Harlem street corners where Malcolm X was touting Islam. Both preachers used the same pitch: Their religions were black alternatives to
the white man's Christianity.

King traced voodoo's roots back to the religion of the Yoruba, a West African tribe, and made the first of several pilgrimages to Nigeria. In the mid-'60s he founded the Yoruba Temple on 116th Street in Harlem. In 1970 he moved his temple to South Carolina with his followers, to establish an African kingdom.

It wasn't easy. The land was heavily wooded and the king's followers were city folks.

"Some of us had never held a hammer in our lives," recalls Oshun Kunle, one of Oyotunji's pioneers, now a restaurateur and Yoruba priest in Panama. "The homes were built by chopping down the trees and making lumber out of the trees and using thatch for the roof."

Religious dissidents carving a community out of the wilderness is an old American tradition--think Pilgrims, Mormons, Shakers--but King was more interested in African traditions. He organized Oyotunji as a traditional Yoruba village, complete
with royalty, polygamy and animal sacrifices. King, now the king--or Oba, as the ruler is called in Yoruba--quickly took several wives. At one point, he was married to eight women.

Despite some petty harassment from local whites, the village grew, attracting scores of black Americans who longed to return to their African roots. Some left
quickly. Some stayed for years. One tried to kill the king.

The would-be assassin had been ejected from the village for refusing to obey royal authority. He came back driving a convertible and carrying a shotgun.
When he rammed the Oba with his car, flipping His Highness up on the windshield, he was shot dead.

"I was charged with the killing," Kunle says. But the Oba sacrificed goats to Ogun, the god of war and justice, and the shooting was ruled justifiable homicide. "I went to court," Kunle says, "and the charges were dismissed."

By the late 1970s, Oyotunji was home to nearly 200 people. They wore African clothes and carved three horizontal lines into their cheeks. They took African names that the Oba conjured up by reading cowrie shells and palm nuts. The main sources of income were collecting food stamps and doing shell readings for
tourists.

Slowly the villagers installed electricity, running water, flush toilets. They founded a school, the Royal Yoruba Academy, and made it official with a state charter. Despite those civilized amenities, the population fell in the '80s and '90s as villagers drifted off to find jobs and set up temples in cities around the United States and the Caribbean.

Nowadays, Oyotunji is a kind of voodoo Vatican--home to a couple dozen permanent residents, plus visiting pilgrims and students who live there while studying to become priests. It's a respectable part of the community these days, a member in good standing of the Greater Beaufort Chamber of Commerce.

Among Oyotunji's current students for the priesthood is Olufemi Adewole, 41, a Guyanese immigrant who was studying at the University of Florida when he learned about the village from his reggae band's bass player, who had grown up there.

A spiritual seeker who'd already tried Christianity, Islam and yoga, Adewole was curious. He came to Oyotunji and received a reading from the Oba, who threw the palm nuts and told Adewole that his ancestors were Yoruba nobles who'd lost their power after quarreling with an ancient king.

Adewole took a leave from the university and moved to Oyotunji to study for the priesthood. Upon his arrival, the Oba did another reading.

"It said that the ancestors had sent me to work with the royals," he says. "So my work-study is to be the Oba's valet. I help him get dressed. I help him with
his medicine. I'm his chauffeur. I'm his bodyguard. Basically, I'm here to serve the king."


Goat Skulls for the Gods

"Orisha' means god," says Baba Shango Akinwon. "In Oyotunji, we worship a pantheon of orishas, like the Greeks and Romans did."

Akinwon is standing in front of the shrine to the orisha Elegba, explaining Yoruba theology to a half-dozen tourists. The shrine is a little thatched hut decorated with a cow skull that's painted silver. Inside there's a red candle, a bowl with pennies in it, a goat skull, a sculpted wooden head festooned with rusty nails, and a mound covered with chicken feathers and topped with a cigar.

"Elegba is the messenger," Akinwon says. "We communicate with the deities through Elegba."

Elegba is also the god of luck, he says. And he's a mischievous trickster, a god who sometimes behaves like a naughty boy.

"At the other shrines, you'll see me bow down and touch the ground," Akinwon says, "but at Elegba's shrine you turn around and shake your behind."

He turns around and shakes his butt at the shrine. Then he leads the tourists to the next scenic spot.

Akinwon, 45, is an affable man with a thin gray beard. A South Carolina native, he moved to Oyotunji nine years ago and he's now the village's main tour guide.
Other residents give tours but theirs tend to sound like rote recitations, causing tourists to grumble that they haven't gotten their $5 worth. But Akinwon
gives good value. Now he leads the tourists down Oyotunji's main drag, a
sandy dirt road lined with crude buildings made from cinder blocks and plywood. He points out the huge statue of Olokun, god of the deep sea, which stands 20
feet high in front of a reflecting pool filled with dark green water. But when he gets to the bright yellow shrine of Oshun--goddess of spring and fertility, goddess of art and music, goddess of love and sex--he really gets rolling.

"The Romans called her Venus," he says, smiling. "Whitney Houston. Janet Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor--they are people of Oshun. Elizabeth Taylor has been married eight times. She's definitely Oshun. Oshuns love to have a good time."

Up on the shrine there's an offering to Oshun--a plate of sliced oranges, each one with a cinnamon stick wedged in.

"Somebody left something for Oshun," Akinwon explains. It could be a lovesick girl or a blocked writer, or an old man. "When men get old, they give a lot to Oshun," he says. "You old men know what I mean--and you women married to old men know what I mean."

The tourists laugh. Akinwon leads them on, moving down the dusty road to the shrine to Oya, goddess of wind and storms, goddess of death and graveyards. Atop a five-foot wooden pedestal is a crude concrete statue of Oya, her arms raised, a rusted machete in each hand. At the base of the pedestal are three animal skulls. Beneath her left armpit is a fourth, this one still covered with weather-beaten fur.

The skulls come from goats sacrificed to Oya for protection from hurricanes, he says. Back in 1989, Hurricane Hugo was headed straight for Oyotunji. The
priests sacrificed a goat and the storm promptly changed course, pummeling Charleston instead.

One of the tourists asks how this sacrifice thing actually works.

"In the priesthood, we learn to tap into certain energy forces and make them work for us," Akinwon says. "But there's a price and that's the sacrifice. Blood must be spilled."


Ajamu 1, Viper 0

"I'm not polygamous now," says Chief Ajamu, "but I have been, and I'd like to be in the future."

He unleashes a deep, throaty cackle. He's sitting on a shaded patio at the gates of the royal courtyard. He isn't wearing a shirt, just a bead necklace and a loose-fitting white cloth that hangs from his waist. He cleans his fingernails with the tip of a ballpoint pen and explains why the Oba and his chiefs practice polygamy.

"It's not about a man going out and getting a bunch of sex slaves," he says. "It's the same system that's been practiced in West Africa for centuries."

Polygamy is an ancient form of social welfare among the Yoruba, he says. When parents couldn't marry off a daughter, they'd bring her to the king, who was
obligated to care for her.

"He had to take her," Ajamu says, "whether she was blind, crippled or crazy."

He lets out another raspy cackle. A former Catholic seminarian from Chicago, he was one of village's original pioneers. Now, at 60, he's a high priest and Oyotunji's foreign minister, which means he has to deal with outsiders, including reporters who ask the kind of questions he doesn't want to answer.

He won't say how many wives the king has these days: "That's private."

He won't say how many people practice the Yoruba religion in the United States: "I can't answer that, but even if I could, I wouldn't."

And he doesn't want to talk about the theology of animal sacrifice: "You don't really have the space and time to go into it in depth."

But he will talk, reluctantly, about the divinity of the Oba. "He's considered an earthly deity, like the Dalai Lama."

Does that mean he's a god?

"We don't know what that word means and we try to refrain from using it, " he says. "We recognize a supreme energy but not a supreme being. That supreme
energy is in everything that is, whether it's living or dead."

He notices a photographer snapping his picture and he waves him away. "I don't even have my teeth in," he says. He grimaces to show off the gap in his lower
jaw. "A guy can't even take his teeth out when he gets home anymore," he grumbles in mock anger.

He returns to his theological discussion. He prefers the word "divinity" to the word "god," he says.

As he speaks, a couple of middle-aged tourists wander past, then stop suddenly. "Is that a play snake," the woman asks, "or a live snake?"

Ajamu stands up, takes a look. "Oh, that's alive," he says.

It's a brown snake, maybe two feet long, coiled up next to a pile of lumber, its head up, its forked tongue licking the humid air.

Ajamu turns toward the front gate and yells: "Get one of the brothers to kill this snake!"

The tourists back away, their eyes wide. Ajamu watches, amused. "Women in all cultures are afraid of snakes," he says.

When no brothers show up to slay the serpent, Ajamu grabs a shovel and smashes the beast. Whap! Whap! Whap! He drags the snake closer so he can get a better shot at him and then he smashes again, chopping its head off.

He leans the shovel against a wall and sits back down. Then he notices that his interviewer is scribbling furiously in a notebook.

"You're not going to put that in the paper, are you," he says. It sounds more like a command than a question.

Where's the Parade?

Perplexed tourists are pacing Oyotunji's dirt road, waiting for the Egungun parade.

The parade is a tribute to the Oba's ancestors, complete with drumming and dancing and masked characters. It was supposed to start around 6 o'clock, then around 7. It's almost 8 now and there's still no sign of a parade.

Which is not unusual. Oyotunji is not as efficient as, say, Disneyland. Nor is it as zealous in the great American art of separating tourists from their money. Oyotunji has no restaurant, no refreshment stand, not even a soda machine. There is a gift shop, with bead necklaces and dusty African statues, but right now there's nobody working in it. It's owned by the queen--Her Royal Grace Odufonda Adaramola, a former Black Panther who served time for bank robbery and now drives a Jaguar. But she's not around, and a tourist is complaining that she can't find anyone to take her money.

Hungry, thirsty and a bit confused, most of the day's visitors give up and leave long before the parade begins.

But Iya Oyadele Babasegun stays. She's wearing an orange African gown and matching headdress. She's 31. She lives near Dupont Circle and works for the phone company. She's also an Orisha priestess.

She first came to Oyotunji a decade ago with her African history class from Coppin State College in Baltimore. "I just fell in love with the village and the African setting," she says. "It was hard to shake."

So she came back. She got a reading from the Oba. "He was very nice, very gracious--and he was extremely knowledgeable." He read the palm nuts and told her about her ancestors. "We were from the Mandingo tribe," she says, "a line of powerful priests and priestesses."

She became a priestess herself, a devotee of Oya, the goddess who diverted Hurricane Hugo. In one ceremony, she became possessed by Oya. "I felt like I was on fire," she says, "because Oya is a hot deity."

Back home, she worships at an Orisha temple in Pasadena, Md., with about two dozen members. After all, she can't very well conduct services in her Dupont Circle apartment: Where would she keep the animals for sacrifices?

By now, it's getting dark. The heat of the day has faded and the mosquitoes have emerged. Along Oyotunji's dusty main drag, the couple dozen folks
waiting for the Egungun parade are slapping themselves in a futile effort to fight the bloodsuckers.

Babasegun is telling the story of her first animal offering. She was, she admits, a bit squeamish. "I had to sacrifice a pigeon with my hands," she says, "and it was so pretty I didn't want to sacrifice it."

The priest who was officiating urged her on, instructing her to give the bird's neck a quick, firm twist.

"So," she recalls, "I said, 'This is going to hurt me
more than it hurts you,' and I just did it."


A Six-Pack for the King

First comes the drumming: A half-dozen young men sit in a clearing at the far end of the dirt road, beating out African polyrhythms.

They drum for about 20 minutes before the Egunguns emerge from "the sacred grove," a secret holy place in the woods of Oyotunji.

The Egunguns are the spirits of the ancestors--tonight, they are the Oba's
ancestors--personified in this parade by two men in full-body costumes, like characters at Disney World, with long strips of bright cloth that shake and shimmy as they dance. One Egungun is crowned with ram's horns. The other is topped with a goat's head. That one is carrying a rusty old rifle.

Slowly, the Egunguns dance down the dirt road, jumping, spinning, skipping to the drummers' beat. They are accompanied by the men of the village, many
of them carrying ceremonial canes, and its women, who are singing and dancing in their bright African gowns. It's a gloriously theatrical spectacle, although it
would probably be more impressive if it took place while there was still enough light to actually see it.

The Egunguns pause at each orisha's shrine to bow down and give praise. Then they lead the parade into the courtyard of the royal palace. The actual palace, home of the Oba, is hidden behind a high wall. But in the gate, the king is perched on his throne, awaiting his royal subjects.

He wears a shiny gold robe and a tall multicolored hat. He holds a staff topped with a white horsetail, symbol of royal power. The queen sits beside him in a
blue and gold gown. Their heads are shaded by a striped beach umbrella held aloft by Adewole, the Oba's Guyanese valet. Their faces are cooled by a
thatch fan waved by Chief Elesin, Oyotunji's minister of tourism.

The parade halts in front of the royal couple. The drumming stops. The Egunguns bow to the Oba, then sit in plastic chairs next to the queen. Babasegun, the priestess from Washington, begins fanning them.

Chief Ajamu steps forward. He is wearing a robe, a pair of glasses--and his false teeth. "We're going to start by saying how blessed we are to welcome the royal ancestors," he says. "The royal blood of Dahomey gives our Oba the right to rule over the kingdom."

He reads a long list of the Oba's ancestors--ancient kings of Dahomey, "a royal family who our ancestors tell us came from Heaven." He narrates the story of
the Oba's family, beginning with a grandfather sold into slavery as a baby and ending with the Oba fulfilling his ancestral destiny: "Our Highness was instructed to resurrect African culture," Ajamu says. "African people who don't know their culture know nothing."

A royal aide appears and lays a blue-and-white carpet on the grass at the Oba's feet.

"Anyone who has a gift or offering can come forward now," Ajamu says. "Consider it as your offering for the preservation of African culture."

As the believers sing in Yoruba, people come forward, one by one, with their gifts. They bow to the Oba, prostrating themselves before him. Then they bow to the Egunguns and leave their offerings on the carpet.

When the parade of gift-givers is over, the pile of offerings is visible to the crowd. There is a bowl of fruit and corn. A pair of homemade dolls. Paper money,
carefully folded. A box of cigars. A fifth of gin. And a six-pack of Heineken.


The Oba Explains It All

Chief Ajamu orders me down on my knees: The Oba is arriving!

It's the day after the Egungun parade and I've been granted an audience with the king. Now 71 and ailing, the Oba announced months ago that he was going into seclusion until his birthday celebration in October. So this interview, Ajamu stresses, is a very rare honor.

I kneel in the dirt. The Oba shuffles slowly into the courtyard, aided by Chief Elesin. Clad in a colorful robe, a fez and dark glasses, the Oba carries his
horsetail staff in one hand and a cigar in the other. His valet shades his head with a beach umbrella.

Elesin helps the king into his throne--a black wooden chair with a red velvet cushion--then sits at the Oba's right hand, which is shaking. The king's face is
pale and drawn, his goatee just a tiny wisp of gray.

how do they feed all those goats?

Goats are interesting things, they'll eat anything, good for keeping places clean... kind of like pigs but not like pigs. Odd that people won't touch pork for that reason but will eat goat.

Cool thread DSP.

i remember a farm on the side of the road on the way to Arkansas that had goats, the bark on the trees was eaten off and the ground was dusty bare. we had one as a pet when i was a lad. it got into my mom's flower bed and we ate in at the juneteenth celebration.

but years later when my dad was too old to keep the weed back he would by a goat and stake it in the area he wanted the weeds down and the goat would eat it bare of briars and what ever was there...

Not sure I could do that, one thing buying meat from a butcher or supermarket and another having to nurture it, keep it healthy and then eat it. Guess it would be easier if it did something wrong, fair enough punishment I guess. .lol.

Why do people eat goat and not pork?

The reporter is biased and the use of the word "voodoo" shows his lack of knowledge of South Carolina African-American culture.

I've been to Olatunji Village.

One thing the report does not mention is that, while South Carolina has a school system that ranks among the bottom among our 50 states, the children of Olatunji Village surpass the entire state and are equal to or better than children who have had private school education or went to the better public schools.

They are beautiful and disciplined and in maturity, are far more mature than other South Carolina children their ages.

Attempts by the states to force the Olatunji kids to attend regular South Carolina schools have been vigorously fought because they are better than the predominately white schools they would attend.

Every year, the children of Olatunji Village are used in the opening ceremonies for the annual Gullah Festival, held in Beaufort, about 30 minutes west of Olatunji Village.

porks biggest problem is the fat content....

but as with the goat apply the proper heat treatment and you are good to go...heat destroys all bad as it will in the end....

know why your body gets feverish? it heats up to kill or destroy what ever has entered that is not good...

if the thing is not soon killed the fever will cook you too soon...