Oyotunji African Village traces to one man's specific religious conversion. Walter Eugene King, born in Detroit, traveled to Haiti and Cuba in the 1950s and there encountered Vodou and Santeria, the Yoruba derived traditions the Caribbean's earlier slave trade had already carried and transformed. Rather than practice a Cuban or Haitian form of the religion, King set out to build a specifically African, rather than Caribbean, route into Yoruba worship for Black Americans. He incorporated the African Theological Archministry as the Yoruba Temple in Harlem, New York, and in 1970 relocated the community's seven temples to rural Sheldon, South Carolina, founding Oyotunji African Village as its own small kingdom on twenty seven acres.
King took the name Oba Efuntola Oseijeman Adefunmi I, and in 1972 traveled to Nigeria, where he was initiated into the Ifa priesthood, the divination system at the center of orthodox Yoruba religious authority. That initiation matters to how scholarship reads Oyotunji: rather than an invented or purely imagined Africa, the village deliberately sought validation from Yoruba religious authority in Nigeria itself, even as it built a governance structure, an Oba and a court modeled on the historical Oyo empire, that exists nowhere in Nigeria today. Kamari Maxine Clarke's ethnography of the village and its transnational ties to Nigeria treats this dual orientation, backward to an imagined Oyo and outward to a living Nigeria, as the community's defining and unresolved tension.