Yoruba religion is unusual among African traditions in the scale and the documentation of its diaspora.
The nineteenth-century wars in Yorubaland produced very large numbers of captives at exactly the period when Cuba and Brazil were importing the most, which is why Yoruba practice is so heavily represented in Santeria, or Lucumi, in Cuba, in Candomble in Brazil, and in Orisha worship in Trinidad. In each place the orisha were identified with Catholic saints, which permitted practice to continue under a Catholic surface, and the house structures that emerged, with an initiating elder and a lineage of initiates, replaced the lineage and territorial organisation that could not survive the crossing.
The traffic has since reversed. Practitioners from Cuba, Brazil and the United States have travelled to Nigeria for initiation and for the recovery of practices lost in the diaspora, Nigerian priests have travelled to teach and to initiate abroad, and a substantial international literature has developed in Spanish, Portuguese and English. J. Lorand Matory's work on the Brazilian case argues that this exchange is not recent contamination of an authentic tradition but has been going on since the nineteenth century, with a class of literate travellers moving in both directions.
A separate development is the Aladura churches, Yoruba-founded Christian bodies emphasising prayer, prophecy and healing, which grew from the 1920s and are now large and international in their own right.