The African Nationalist Independence Partition Party (The Alajo Party) was founded in 1961 by Ofuntola Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi I, born Walter Eugene King to an African American Baptist family in Detroit in 1928. King’s father had been a member of the Moorish Science Temple, participated in the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and passed along his nationalist ideals to his son. King traveled to Haiti and Cuba, where he studied Vodou and Santeria; his blending of these religions and his nationalist views led to his adoption of a new name and the foundation of the Yoruba Temple in New York City, as well as the Alajo Party. Adefunmi’s goal, and that of the Party, was the establishment of an African State in America by 1972. Adefunmi and his followers later established a Yoruba-modeled village near Sheldon, North Carolina, which they named Oyotunji. Little information is known about The Nationalist and its affiliation with Adefunmi’s party. Sources on Adefunmi and the Yoruba Temple do not mention the newsletter and this copy is the only one reported to be held by a U.S. library. Whether additional issues were published is unknown.
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