URE ola: The fascinating Priest “Non literate peoples can retain, codify and transmit profound systems of knowledge without recourse to writing.
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.”