Background
My recent investigation into the conservation status of the Vulture led me to Professor Wande Abimbola,who seems to sway in his chair as he chants from Ifa while he answers my questions. He is not an Ornithologist, but he can comment on the Vulture if you ask him, because he is an Ifa priest and he draws from Ifa, the ‘Holy book’ of Yoruba religion, when he answers. He is the first individual to graduate with a PhD on Ifa from a Nigerian university, and he is the first Babalawo to become a Vice Chancellor of a Nigerian university. This was at the University of Ife, which later became the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, and his tenure was crisis free. He has many publications to his credit, including Sixteen great poems of Ifa, and Ifa: An exposition of Ifa literary corpus. I am a bit awed at the meeting which is in one breath, both interview and performance.
Let me explain or describe one aspect of the experience: He will chant in Yoruba and then translate into English and then return to Yoruba, only to translate into English for my sake. Those moments were brief beautiful interludes of song and chant. Those were rare and uplifting seconds. Again, there is that gentle, childlike sway, and you don’t need to look keenly to notice it. In between, guests would turn up and bring the interview to a brief halt. But each time after a few apologies from the professor who was the first to get a PhD from the University of Lagos, the interview continues. Last December he turned eighty five, but his mind is still young and the power of recall so precise and very fresh. Again, he moves and speaks with the ease of a much younger person. He has served as a Senator, and been an adviser to President Olusegun Obasanjo, who holds him in high esteem. The depth of his knowledge and his simplicity are powerful memories of the two hours with him. Once I wanted to become a professor, and I ask myself as I listen to him, stirred by his example, whether such hopes are still possible now that I am in journalism. His house in Oyo town, 45 minutes’ drive from the main gate of the University of Ibadan as he had earlier told me, is immaculately white. Immaculately white with a few nice illustrations on the wall by the main gate.
Babalawo
He is a priest of Ifa, and he tells me “In the year 1981, I was installed as the Awise Ni Agbaye spokesperson of Ifa in the world.I travel all over the world. There’s no year that I don’t travel somewhere in Africa, if I am invited .People practice the Yoruba way of life around the world.” Then he speaks directly about Ifa “There is a divinity by that name, whom we believe bequeath that system of knowledge to us. But Ifa also refers to its literature. There is also medicine in it.Ifa is amazing. There are two hundred and fifty six books in it, and each one has eight hundred stories. This gives a total of two hundred and four thousand eight hundred stories.” According to him Ifa began as an oral form, and has become the property of the entire world. “There are many universities where in the next ten or twenty years, any major university that calls itself a university, and wishes to study something about Africa, will have something about Ifa. There is no other form of literature that is that extensive.” But, what about his roots? Ivor Miller in his introduction to Ifa Will Mend Our Broken World, by Wande Abimbola, sheds some light ‘The Abimbola family is one of the few lineages in Nigeria never converted to Christianity or Islam…they have maintained their indigenous Yoruba traditions from one generation to another.”
Writing, enemy of remembrance
Next, Prof. Abimbola talks about the benefits of an orientation in Ifa “We are ignorant of our own things. My conclusion in my PhD thesis is that non literate peoples can retain, codify and transmit profound systems of knowledge without recourse to writing. It is writing that is an enemy of remembrance. When you know how to write, you don’t care about making any information that you receive as part and parcel of yourself. You just write it somewhere, because if you wish to use it again, you go back to where you wrote it down.”
‘Ifa enriches the mind’
Arguing that Ifa is not folklore, he says “Folklore is used for traditions of Europe, especially in the Nordic countries where a lot of their traditions are still alive, and not part of any religion anymore, not part of any living processes anymore. These are bits and pieces of what people remember, when that aspect of their culture has disappeared. That’s what folklore is. Whereas this one, in this town, Oyo, there are one thousand Babalawos and two temples. Ibadan has about the same number.” On his early growth in Ifa as a body of knowledge “I was initiated in 1971, but I started learning Ifa between the ages of four and five. In those days you will study Ifa for twenty to twenty five years. If twenty children start learning Ifa, by the time they finish, only three or five of them will be left. It’s rigorous. You have to learn sixteen stories in each of the two hundred and fifty six books, which we call Odu, by heart, making a total of five thousand stories. In those days you live with the Babalawo, and he takes you to his farm. You learn and work for him. You are like an apprentice.”
He suggests “Among the Yoruba, if we can make sure that from primary school to secondary school we can teach Ifa, it will enrich the mind. I went to primary and secondary school, and it was as though I were playing. Because of my background in Ifa, there was nothing strange, nothing rigorous in all that I was taught, in all that I encountered. Ifa teaches you to listen, to have rapt attention. Writing any information down, interferes with your attention span. Ifa is something you cannot forget, and which cannot perish. When you have a tradition that’s so profound, it won’t die. That’s why they say traditions die hard.”
Ifa is not restricted to Yorubaland, he explains “Igbos have Ifa, and among them it is known as Afa. Ifa is a West African thing, and it started in Ile Ife. Over a long period of time, it has become West African.” He tells me that in 2005 Ifa was proclaimed by UNESCO as a masterpiece of the oral intangible heritage of mankind, and that he has an institution in Oyo town where Ifa is propagated.
Yoruba
In the course of the interview, he comments on the spread of Yoruba way of life, and Yoruba religion across the world “In Brazil, there are fifty five million people who claim to be of Yoruba origin, and practice Yoruba religion even more than we do at home. Another thing that people don’t know, even the Yoruba people themselves, is that there are in excess of fifty million Yorubas on the African continent, and they live in seven countries. There are millions of Yorubas in Nigeria, Benin republic has four million, Togo four million, Ghana two million, and there are two hundred Yoruba villages inside Ghana. There are a few Yoruba in Burkina Faso, and a million or more Yorubas around Freetown in Sierra Leone. The most mysterious one is in the Sudan where there live between two and three million Yoruba, and they have marks like we do on their cheeks.”
He speaks on Yoruba religion which has spread in leaps and bounds across the world “In excess of fifty million Brazilians practice Yoruba religion. In the city of Salvadore in Brazil, there are more than ten thousand temples to Yoruba divinities, such as Ifa, Ogun, Sango, and these are all over Brazil, as well as Cuba. The population of Cuba is twenty million, and more than half claim to be of Yoruba origin. Today, Yoruba religion is probably the fastest growing religion in the world. The trend today, as far as religions are concerned, is that people of European origin, their younger folk, don’t go to church. They are more interested in nature based religions, which is an offshoot of the environmental revolution, which is going on all over the world. People want to preserve the environment.”
