Lecture notes: Baasegun (Dr) Olusola Oni, Leader of the Yoruba Party in the UK

The Yoruba entrusted their story to two groups in the society: the Babalawo and the Woman. The Babalawo recorded ‘community’ history in the Odu or Encyclopaedia Yorubanica. Women recorded ‘family’ history in the Oriki or Genealogy. These two groups then were the official Yoruba ‘oral traditions’.

The Babalawo was a courtier, who worked exclusively for the Oba as his diarist and reference. Samuel Johnson in his 1921 book called the Babalawo a ‘bard’. In the olden days, the Babalawo was not likely to be a profession that would have been accessible to the general public. The Babalawo would have been very few in number because of the Oba employment, rigour of learning stuff, past and present, and learning also how to use Ifa to recall them.

The ‘community’ history of say the city of Ogbomoso self-evidently was different from the ‘community’ history of the city of Ijebu-Jesa, some 100km distance away. As a matter of commonsense, the Odu of Ogbomoso would be expected to be different from the Odu of Ijebu-Jesa, which in turn meant that what the Ogbomoso Babalawo knew as Odu would be different from what the Ijebu-Jesa Babalawo knew as Odu. The Odu thus had several location-related versions, not one single Yoruba-wide compendium. Any Odu that is touted as Yoruba-wide could not be of true Yoruba origin. The likelihood was that the unitary Odu promoted by Ifaologists, like Rev Lijadu, was invented Odu.

The two Yoruba ‘oral traditions’ – the Babalawo and the Woman - were hardly ever consulted by historians. Consequently, the Yoruba history that we know today is just a collection of anecdotes provided by just about any man, and they were almost always men, who claimed to know something. Yoruba men who quickly picked up the English language, for example, acted not just as interpreters and translators but also as sources of the Yoruba story.

The British defunctioning of the institution of Oba rendered the Babalawo effectively jobless. With nothing to do, it was natural for the Babalawo to reinvent himself. This he did as priest, physician, herbalist, fortune teller, charm maker and so on. By the 1800s, the Babalawo had ceased to collect contemporary information about his community, and as a result, the most important source of the Yoruba history was lost for ever. The Babalawo also transformed Ifa from a memory recall system into a messaging system.

The ancient Yoruba deliberately made Babalawo and Ifa inseparable. The Yoruba invented the Babalawo for a reason, as human asset to record contemporary events, practices and thoughts. Since the Yoruba did not write, the Babalawo had to commit these matters to memory. The Yoruba invented Ifa for a reason, as physical asset to enable the Babalawo to retrieve information that he had memorised. These are facts, but some have not been able to  accept that the ancient Yoruba brain was capable of inventing something as ingenious as the Ifa. Rev Johnson, for example, wrote that Setilu, a blind Nupe boy, brought Ifa to Yorubaland. Scholars, like Professor Bolaji Idowu, and Orunmilaists, like Fagbenro-Beyioku, wrote that Ifa was religion ordained by a supernatural. They are all wrong.

The Yoruba deliberately made Babalawo and Odu inseparable. The Yoruba invented the Odu for a specific purpose, as repository of knowledge on past and contemporary Yoruba life, which the Oba then relied on for his governance duties. Only the Babalawo learnt the Odu, no one else did. The Babalawo are known for their reticence in disclosing the Odu to anyone presumably because they had been sworn to secrecy. But recently, Ifaologists have been publishing what they claim to be Ifa ‘stanzas’. The narrative was always the same: a character ignores deity advice, suffers misfortune, finds relief after returning to the right path, praises Orunmila for rescuing him.

Nobody as at this moment in time knows the absolute truth about the Babalawo-Ifa-Odu system because the Yoruba did not write. But the banality exhibited in the construction of published Ifa ‘stanzas’ however reveals imagined interpretation. First, published Ifa ‘stanzas’ have no real attribution, no corroboration; only ‘the Yoruba said this’, ‘the Yoruba said that’ or ‘it’s the Yoruba worldview’. Second, published Ifa ‘stanzas’ appear directed mostly at either encouraging or discouraging defection to Christianity. Third, published Ifa ‘stanzas’ mirrored Christianity in having an intermediary between man and God (eg the Orisa) and a trilogy (ie Olorun-Eleda-Olodumare}. The original Ifaologists were ‘Saro’ Yoruba, rescued slaves or descendants, who had been ordained in the Christian church. Fela Sowande suggested in his 1964 book that some of these Ifaologists were engaged in ‘nationalist’ religious propaganda.

Ifa is mathematics, a pure science. Ifa is the ‘binary system’ that the Yoruba employed as simple building blocks to represent complex information. The Yoruba had been daily using the Ifa binary as memory tool for several centuries before the Europeans in the 1700s assigned its ‘discovery’ to their own Leibniz. The binary system is today the foundational language of almost all modern technology. Ifaologists want us to believe that this fundamental scientific discovery by the ancient Yoruba, this most important Yoruba gift to the world of science, was simply given to them by Olorun as a means of communicating with him via ‘Irunmole’ and ‘Orisa’. They are wrong. The Babalawo-Ifa-Odu system was always just about science.

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