This is the third collection of essays on a major Yoruba orisa that Indiana University Press has produced over recent years. Like its predecessors on Ogun (1989, revised edition 1997) and Osun (2001), it covers both Africa and the New World, and is interdisciplinary, ranging from history and anthropology to literary and cultural studies. There are sixteen chapters in all, of which two of the best – those by Marc Schiltz on the two thunder deities of a remote Oyo town, and Luis Nicolau Pares's on Xango's rise to pre-eminence in Afro-Brazilian religion – have been published before. To be properly understood, a cult like that of Sango – the thunder god and the orisa most widely worshipped in the New World – needs analysis at three distinct but interconnected levels: those of its discourse and symbolism, of its rituals as enacted, and of its material impact in the community. These may be seen (to adopt a somewhat marxisant terminology) as set on a gradient from the more superstructural features to the more basal ones, and in this volume the first of these gets the most attention and the last the least. So there are very decent treatments of how Sango is represented in various modern media – D. A. Akintunde on movies, Stephen Folaranmi on art and Akintunde Akinyemi on literature in Nigeria – while others deal with Sango's aesthetic and literary faces in the New World. A. G. Adejumo's account of Sango worship in the Oyo town of Ede is especially valuable because it is concrete and locally specific. G. O. Ajibade writes on Sango's 16-cowrie divination system, and Henry Lovejoy on the role of the bata drum in Sango worship in nineteenth-century Cuba. Stephen Glazier's account of Sango worship in Trinidad tells a story with some parallels with Pares's chapter on Brazil.

Throughout these essays there is constant reference to Sango's origins and political importance in Oyo, and it is obvious that this baseline must be crucial to understanding the cult's later development. Yet it is here, in dealing with the material realities of the Sango cult in pre-colonial times, that the book is at its weakest. Akinyemi is bothered by the contradictions between traditions relating to what he calls the ‘mythical Sango’, and the ‘historical’ Sango, conventionally regarded as the fourth Alafin of Oyo. The quality of his historical thinking can be gauged from his argument that since Sango and other orisa lived and intermarried in primordial Ife (because Ifa tells us so), then Sango's deification must have long predated the reign of the fourth Alafin. No wonder, then, that the book is all but silent on what we might call the ‘Muslim Sango’. The present Alafin of Oyo, when I interviewed him in 2008, insisted Sango was a Muslim, invoking an epithet Akewugberu (‘Who gets a slave for reciting the Koran’). What does one make of such traditions, which have long been current (cf. Idowu, Olodumare, p. 100)? The issue is not which tradition we should select as the vehicle of truth about Sango – since no single tradition may be ‘true’ – but what we can infer from the ensemble of traditions about the history of the Sango cult.

Since so much attention is given to traditions regarding Sango's origins – problematic data from which it is difficult to draw firm conclusions – it seems extraordinary that there is virtually nothing here on the Sango cult as it operated in nineteenth-century Yoruba towns, where the evidence is relatively plentiful and which is the essential baseline for its further development after it crossed the Atlantic. Ijaye, where the Sango cult was a key resource for the regime of the Are Kurunmi, is altogether unmentioned. So too is the best contemporary account (from no less an eye-witness than Samuel Johnson) of the Sango cultists going into action after lightning had struck a house – in fact a CMS mission station in Ibadan – on the evening of 29 September 1883. Or again, the attempt in 1879–80 by a group of Sango people to exploit a smallpox epidemic to establish the cult at Ondo (where it had not existed previously). This last case clearly shows that, contrary to what is several times stated in this book, Sango was not a pan-Yoruba deity. Rather, up to the late nineteenth century he was regarded as alien and intrusive over a large swathe of eastern Yorubaland. Premature ‘Pan-Yorubism’, if I can call it that, has two detrimental effects. In the first place, it encourages a distorted view of orisa cults outside the Oyo area, as when it is casually asserted (p. 8) that Sango was worshipped at Ile-Ife as Oramfe. In fact Oramfe, worshipped in the Ife/Ilesha/Ondo triangle and associated there with thunder, was an orisa of a wholly different character. Second, it is inconsistent with something that several contributors stress, namely Sango's strongly expansionist character, both in Yorubaland and in the Americas – for a cult cannot expand into space it is claimed to occupy already. The real irony of the book (which the editors would surely disavow) is that it provides so much evidence for the view that it was only when Sango got to the New World that he became a truly Pan-Yoruba deity.