Every year, a small but steady number of Americans — many, though not all, Black Americans reconnecting with ancestry interrupted by the transatlantic slave trade — travel to Nigeria for one reason: to be initiated into Ifá.
It's a journey that runs in the opposite direction of the one usually told. Where the popular narrative is about African traditions fading under the weight of imported religion, here are people crossing an ocean to reclaim exactly what was taken from their ancestors generations ago.
This episode sits with a few of them — people who left churches and mosques behind, who found their way to Ifá through research, community, or a feeling they struggle to fully explain, and who now consider Nigeria a second spiritual home. It raises questions about belonging, authenticity, and what it means to practise a tradition you weren't born into but feel is rightfully yours.