One of the most important outside witnesses to the transatlantic religious connections that shaped Yemoja's transformation from river goddess to ocean mother was the French photographer and ethnographer Pierre Verger, who settled in Salvador, Bahia, in the mid twentieth century and spent decades traveling repeatedly between Brazil and the Yoruba-speaking regions of West Africa, documenting the ritual, artistic and personal connections that Candomble communities in Bahia maintained, and continued to renew, with specific towns, families and shrines in Nigeria and Benin long after the transatlantic slave trade had formally ended.
Verger was eventually initiated into the Ifa divination tradition in Nigeria himself, an unusual step for an outside researcher, and his photographs and written scholarship, produced across a career spanning from the 1940s into the 1990s, remain a primary visual and documentary record of how thoroughly the religious world of the orishas, including Yemoja under her Brazilian name Yemanja, continued to be understood by Bahian practitioners as directly, specifically connected to particular places and lineages in West Africa rather than as a vaguely remembered ancestral inheritance. His work helped establish, for both scholars and practitioners, that the relationship between West African Yoruba religion and its Brazilian, Cuban and other diaspora forms was not simply the past imposing itself faintly on the present, but an active, two-way, continuously maintained connection, with Bahian priests and priestesses visiting and being recognized by counterparts in Nigeria across the twentieth century, evidence of exactly how concretely linked the two shores of Yemoja's worship have remained.