The twins worked for nine years as food sellers and maidservants in Salvador, saving every coin toward passage home. Otampe Ojaro, already initiated to the orixá Oxumarê, the serpent-rainbow, eventually made her way back to Dahomey, married a cousin named Alaji, and bore a daughter called Akobi-Odé. But Brazil called the family back. They purchased a farm in Matatu de Brotas and built a shrine to Oxossi, the orixá of the hunt and their clan's mythic ancestor. They named it Ilé Ọmọ-Aro Alají, the House of Alaji of the Aro clan, and shortened it over generations into Ile Maroia Laji. The couple took Portuguese names with quiet defiance. They chose Régis, meaning 'regal,' as their family name.

Seven high priestesses have ruled the terreiro since its founding, each initiated to a different orixá, each holding the lineage intact through abolition, republic, dictatorship, and democracy. Akobi-Odé took over after her mother. Her last will, dated 1867, is the oldest document preserved on the grounds, examined by the anthropologist Vivaldo da Costa Lima. Mother Dionísia, initiated to Xangô, led the house into the twentieth century and died in 1948. She passed the sacred authority to her twenty-three-year-old grand-niece, Olga Francisca Régis, who would become the most famous of them all.

Nicknamed Olga de Alaketu after the royal lineage, she led the temple for fifty-seven years. Initiated to Oya-Iansan, goddess of storms and change, she fit her orixá. Under her, the terreiro gained international recognition, and Candomblé began its long work of standing on its own spiritual feet, no longer disguising its deities behind Catholic saints to escape persecution. Mother Olga lived to see the moment she had worked toward. On 28 September 2005, just after the Ministry of Culture declared Ile Maroia Laji a National Heritage Site, she died of complications from diabetes. Her eldest daughter, Jocelina Barbosa Bispo, Mother Jojó, initiated to Nanã Buruku, holds the succession now.

The compound itself is unassuming. Whitewashed walls, red-tile roofs, a sacred grove where the trees are individuals with names. But every stone and every drum here carries a specific memory. The clothes of the orixás are sewn from Yoruba-patterned cloth. The language of ceremony is an archaic Yoruba carried across the Middle Passage and preserved in ritual while it faded in West Africa itself. Scholars call this 'cultural resistance,' which is accurate but flat. What happened at Matatu de Brotas is that a family refused to forget, and built a house where the memory could be practiced out loud, generation after generation, until the nation that had once criminalized that memory finally recognized it as heritage.

Brazil has hundreds of Candomblé terreiros, but only a handful can trace their founding to named individuals taken from specific Yoruba royal lineages. Ile Maroia Laji is one of them, which is why the 2005 designation mattered beyond ceremony. It acknowledged that the history of Brazil runs through Ketu as surely as through Lisbon, that what the country calls its culture was built in part by enslaved people who remembered what they refused to lose. Visitors arriving at the terreiro today are asked to show respect rather than curiosity. This is a living religious community, not a museum. The house is still a home.