Odua: archivist of the ancient Yoruba Civilisation

The Yoruba creation story is unique amongst all creation stories in that it had human beings as being created elsewhere from whence they were then led by Obatala to Ile Ife. The ancient Yoruba claimed that initially there was no land, only water. Obatala descended from the sky (Para) on a rope bringing a bag of soil and a chicken. He placed the soil on the water and commanded the chicken to spread it thereby creating land (Ile). Thereafter, Obatala persuaded human beings, who then were already ensconced in the firmament, to follow him down the rope onto the earth (Aye). In the very different Christianised version, life began at Ile Ife, the Holy City, with two humans; Obatala, who was male, and Oduduwa, who was female, and blind. They mated and started the beginning of mankind. The Christianised version was not unlike the Bible story where Adam (now Obatala) and Eve (now Oduduwa) lived in the Garden of Eden (now Ile Ife). Hard science supports only the Yoruba version. Hard-water analysis of the earth’s core confirmed that the world indeed began its existence as water-world whilst genomic studies provided evidence that the Yoruba were the first human beings, as we know them today, to inhabit the earth.

Odua is very commonly treated as the shortened version of Oduduwa but that might be misrepresentation. Oduduwa was a name confirming that Obatala’s companion was a dark-coloured (Dudu) woman. This was an odd name to be bestowed on her considering that Obatala was not likely to have been exposed to women other than the dark-coloured variety. And in the ancient times, women did not exist simply to adorn men. Odua was clearly a very important figure in the Yoruba story. She was a contemporary of Obatala in the Era of Intellectual Investment of the Ancient Yoruba Civilisation (between 1000 BC and 1000AD). She must have achieved a significant physical feat to make her so revered by the Yoruba of Yore.

In the traditional Yoruba community, women not men were the archivists, collecting, organising, and preserving family history and biographies (Oriki), providing access to that wealth of information through poetic utterances, singing, and story telling. It follows that there also would have been a female archivist for the town or city as a whole who because of the large volume of information would have employed some form of memory-enhancing tools. It is more likely than not that Odua was that archivist, which explains the meaning of the word Odua; a compound word comprising of ‘Odu’, meaning ‘body of knowledge’ and ‘wa’ a verb meaning ‘to exist’.

The Yoruba story as currently told and understood is not just incomplete, it is distorted, and in some parts, totally incomprehensible. The reason for this tragedy and regrettable state of affairs is this: men, ignorant non-archivists, were the earliest oral historians to the English writers - these were men who could be spared from the farms, who were able to quickly learn rudiments of the English language, and who were recent and over-enthusiastic converts to Christianity. Today, the pre-1800 Odu, which contained the complete information about the ancient Yoruba Civilisation, is hidden from view, and there is no mechanisms by which it could be accessed.

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