On a June 2018 state visit, the Ooni of Ife — the spiritual head of the Yoruba people and custodian of the Ife creation cosmology — visited the Casa Branca terreiro in Salvador, the oldest documented Candomblé house in Brazil. Standing inside the temple, he proclaimed Bahia 'the headquarters of the Yoruba nation in the Americas' and announced a twin-city treaty between Ile-Ife and Salvador da Bahia. The ceremony was attended by Bahian state officials, Candomblé priests and priestesses, and members of the Afro-Brazilian religious councils that have preserved the Orisa tradition since the 16th-century slave trade.
The proclamation was extraordinary on its own terms: a Nigerian traditional ruler — without the cover of federal foreign policy — extending claimed jurisdiction over a religious-cultural diaspora four million strong, scattered across Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad, Haiti and the United States. It came at a moment when the Ooni had been actively rebuilding the international prestige of the throne (founded Hands of God charity, multiple state visits across the Americas and Europe), and when Afro-Brazilian Candomblé communities were under sustained attack from evangelical-led religious-intolerance campaigns in Brazil. The Ooni's framing of Bahia as a Yoruba 'capital in the Americas' was widely received in Afro-Brazilian religious circles as a long-awaited recognition.
The Ooni returned to Brazil in March 2023, declaring the Quilombola community of Quingoma (in Lauro de Freitas, Bahia) a 'Yoruba territory' — extending the 2018 framing from the colonial-era plantation towns to the quilombo settlements founded by escaped enslaved Africans. He also inaugurated a 'National Orisa Day' in Brazil. Cumulatively the two visits are the most explicit assertion in living memory by a Nigerian monarch of cultural sovereignty over the African religious diaspora — and they ran ahead of, not behind, the Nigerian federal government's diaspora-policy apparatus.