Odu: the Encyclopaedia Yorubanica that was lost for ever

The current perceived wisdom is that Ifa and Odu were one and the same. Indeed, the Odu is claimed to be essentially Ifa verses. Pre-1800 oral history did not support this unitarian view. That concept emerged in the 20th century thinking, and was not what the Yoruba of yore actually practiced. The earliest translators of Yoruba oral history into English in the 1800s narrated that Ifa and Odu were known to the people as distinct and separate entities. Ellis in his 1894 book wrote that Odu was an ‘attendant or companion’ to Ifa. The word ‘attendant’ implied a service provider (noun) or an accompaniment (adjective). The word ‘companion’ implied an assistant (noun) or a complementary (adjective). Ellis himself speculated that the word ‘Odu’ might mean ‘one who emulates’ meaning that his Yoruba informants told him that Odu was someone with matching skills to Ifa, perhaps achieving similar results with a different method. It would appear that the pre-1800 Yoruba oral historians identified Ifa as developer of a probability (Boya) system (ie a mathematician) whilst at the same time identifying Odu as developer of a portentous (Apejuwe) system (ie a philosopher). In the ancient times, an invention bore its owner’s name, so the word Odu would have been the name or part of the name  of its inventor.

As an advisory system, the character of the Odu product, would have been a literary corpus; something much more powerful than proverbs (Owe), likely a collection or compendium (Ikojopo) of ancient Yoruba philosophies, ideas and historical vignettes. The exact content of the Odu is not known with any certainty because it was never explored by the early chroniclers of the Yoruba story. There is no conclusive proof or corroboration that any quoted Ifa/Odu stanza came directly from the old Odu, something that Fela Sowande noted in his 1964 book on Ifa. When people quoted a stanza as Ifa/Odu stanza, it was more of what they themselves had made up rather than what they obtained from the ancient pre-1800 Odu as was. The Ifa/Odu stanza was not an excerpt from an existing body of work. Today’s Babalawo treats the Odu  as a forward-looking horizon, possessing a vague structure that could be added to. Indeed, both Christian-leaning and Islam-leaning chroniclers have added their own worth to the Odu. 

Baasegun (Dr) Olusola Oni, Leader  of the Yoruba Party in the UK (YPUK, www.yorubapartyuk.org