Ifa Says Respect Women!

This past week was my last working with the Araba in 2010, and it was honestly one of the most interesting. It started out on a sad note as the Akoda of Ode-Omu (a good friend of the Araba, and a very knowledgeable Babalawo) lost his younger brother. So on Monday we went to visit him and give him some money to help with the funeral preparations, and didn’t really do much else. I felt pretty bad for him, not just because he lost his brother, but also because he had told the Araba the week before that he didn’t have any money and I think he is expected to finance most of the funeral. He’s a really nice guy, and he kind of reminds me of what a Yoruba Santa Claus might look like because all his hair is white, he’s a little portly, and he likes to laugh a lot.

Whenever I hear about problems that people are having or have had here, I like to try to think of an Ese Ifa that would address that problem to imagine which sign would have come up for him/her if (s)he were to have come to a Babalawo, like the previous governor of Osun State and Irosun-Agbe. The next day the Araba taught me another Ese Ifa, Idin Yeku, that foretells immanent sudden death, which I thought might have been a possibility since the disease that killed the Akoda’s brother was very sudden.

Sometimes for some of the more incredible Ifa messages, I ask the Araba if he has even cast them for someone and what happened, and I did that for this one. He told me that about a year or two ago, he cast it for two brothers in the neighborhood, who didn’t believe him and said that he just wanted to eat the goat that was prescribed in the sacrifice (along with white clothing that is currently in the person’s house and two wooden statues, and some money). To make a long story short, both of the brothers died a few days later in an accident with some kind of machine on the street and the Araba showed me the spot where it happened. It was pretty scary stuff!

I learned about a few other interesting ones that the Araba cast as well. I think the most interesting one was Irosun-Opinmi which contains a story about a man named Sasore who’s destiny it was to become king even though he had to struggle to realize it (the story is pretty fascinating and reveals a lot about the Yoruba concept of Ori [destiy] and how it can and cannot be changed). Anyway, the Araba said he had cast it twice, once for his friend who is a cripple, but was able to become the king of Ode-Omu even though many people protested because of his disability, and the current Ogunsua, or King, of Modakeke who also had to fight a lot of rivals before taking the throne. There is another one about infidelity that warns the person to stop cheating with someone else’s wife (or husband/significant other) because he will soon die as a result of it most likely because of Magun, a medicine you can make if you think your spouse is cheating on you. The Araba told me he cast this one for a guy who enjoyed “pleasurable company” too much, and when he warned him, the guy got mad and stormed off, and a few weeks later he died while in the process of doing what Ifa warned him not to do...

We didn’t get to finish all of the Ese in this Odu (Irosun) but in all of them, except for the last two that I haven’t learned yet, Ifa has something to say about women’s issues. I think about 10 or so have to do with having babies, others are about taking care of children, most of the stories contain female characters and/or are about the issues listed above. One of my favorites is Irosun Okanran, which explicitly prohibits the client from touching women inappropriately or forcing them to do anything against their will. The explanation the Araba gave for it’s meaning was incredibly unforgiving and contained serious worldly and supernatural repercussions if the person does not heed Ifa’s warning. Another one that I found really interesting prescribed monogamy even though traditional Yoruba society is very much polygamous (The Araba himself has 5 wives, I think...). The way Ifa described it was fascinating; it says that this person will only be able to have one wife, but he can chose the way that happens. He can either marry one woman and treat her well, or he can try to find a second, and one of them will leave. It used the analogy of light and darkness and says, “When light enters the house, darkness must flee.” I think if I keep doing work on Ifa in grad school I might have to write a paper or something on this section of Ifa because it is very clearly focused on women, while it’s hard to identify a specific focus of any of the others.

So far I have studied exactly 100 chapters of the 256, sometimes when I try to think about all of them it makes my head spin a little bit. About a month ago, the Araba told me that it would take about a year for a Babalawo in training to reach the place that I had then. Since I'm not memorizing all of the verses word for word, I get to move much more quickly, but it has made trying to memorize the meaning of the messages very difficult since on some days like Thursday and Friday the Araba and I went through about 8 chapters or more per day with at least 2 verses per chapter. I have typed them all up on a Word document to help me study, but it is now about 20 pages long single spaced, and is only the shorthand notes that don't contain the full sacrifices, stories, songs, etc. I'm going to try to use this next week to catch up on all of the verses I haven't completely memorized yet, but we'll see how far I can get.

In other news, I’m in Ibadan right now, and I’ll be going to Lagos early tomorrow morning. Aunty Bimbo came to pick me up from Ife yesterday, and we’re just hanging around my grandparent’s old house on Agbeka street for the day because the Lagos-Ibadan expressway is really terrible on the weekends and Sunday in particular. When I get to Lagos I’m going to buy a whole bunch of fabric to start making clothes because there’s only about a week left until I come home briefly for Christmas! I think it’s going to be pretty weird when I come off the plane because it’s bee over 80 degrees every day here and the sun is really intense, so it’s tough for me to imagine something like snow...

I(fa) Told You So

The biggest news around Osun State right now is how the current governor, a member of PDP of course, has just been found guilty of voter fraud and stripped of office! PDP is by far the most powerful party here and everyone has always kind of known that they weren’t quite playing by the rules, but for whatever reason just recently people have been calling them out. Osun State is just the latest in a group of 5 states (Edo, Ekiti, Anambra, and one other I just forgot) that have ousted their PDP governors. When the ruling came out over the radio, people were running out on the streets and honking horns, it was great. The funniest part about the whole thing, is that there were tons of PDP candidates who had spent lots of money on the coming election in 2011, but since the ACN Candidate won this court case, he is going to serve his term of 4 years, which means no election and a lot of money wasted by those guys. Every time I see their billboards I chuckle a little bit...

I also think about a few Ifa verses like one in Iwori-Aate/Wole that warns the person not to abuse the great power (s)he holds even if it will provide a short-term benefit. In the long run it will come back to hurt you more than you were able to gain from it. Mostly I think of a story from Irosun Agbe about the bird who got too cocky and greedy and started to do things he wasn’t supposed to and ultimately lost his power (I think I wrote something about it a few weeks ago...). Anyway that got me thinking about how people like to look down on politicians who patronize Babalawo, and to be honest a lot of it is making charms to hurt rivals or enemies, and of course I don’t support that, but I can’t help but wish that some of these guys would let Baba Araba cast one of those figures for them and see what happens. It might not be such a bad thing. On the radio today, I heard something about a man who was running for a position in the local government, and the Araba stopped what he was doing and told me that he had come to him not too long ago. He pulled out his record book and showed me his name and the figure he cast for him. I forgot to ask him if Ifa said he would win or not, but I will do that tomorrow.

A few days ago a guy I had never seen before came by the Araba’s house for divination and Baba did his usual thing while I was putting something away, and when I came out he asked me what the figure he had cast was. I recognized it as Oyeku-Ogunda, but then he asked me for the meaning because it is one of the about 80 we have studied, and to be honest I was a bit lost, but after a little while I remembered its alternate name, Oyeku-Ojo (k)o da, and that triggered everything. I told the Araba that in that Odu Ifa tells the story of Orunmila and Ikun or Vulture and how someone or some people have abused this person but (s)he needs to be patient and not retaliate. The person in question needs to take the matter to Olodumare (or God in Yoruba) in prayer because vengeance belongs to Him alone. If this is done, justice will be served, even if it takes up to 16 years (which figuratively means a long time in Yoruba). After I finished the guy was a bit surprised because apparently it was spot on and the Araba started to laugh and recited everything for him. I’m still not sure exactly what had happened to the guy, but I think some people had cheated him and were treating him really poorly and he wanted to find a way to get back at them, but I think he’s doing as Ifa said now.

I have a friend here, a Muslim guy, who sells DVDs and CDs who has been telling me all about how he wants to hopefully get married next year and maybe move into a bigger apartment and/or expand his business, but money is pretty tight. Just this week he asked if we could go see the Araba and see if there was anything he could do for him. So the Araba cast Ifa for him and said that he’s having trouble advancing in his business, and that for the amount of time and effort he has put into it, he should be further along than he is now. He said part of the problem comes from people in his family, perhaps because they ask too much of him. That all sounded about right to me because he’s not old, but he’s been working for a while and doesn’t have too much more to show for it than when he started and since he is the oldest child in his family, he carries the most responsibility even though he isn’t the most financially secure. So the Araba made a sacrifice for him today and we’ll see if business begins to pick up for him.

This past weekend I went to visit Kyle in Ibadan and we had a good time watching Arsenal put on a show at Villa Park, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching my favorite player Robert Pires come out of retirement, even if he was a bit rusty. The coolest thing that happened in Ibadan was that I was able to find a really nice Ayo board! Ayo is a Yoruba board game that uses the same board as Mancala but has some different rules. I had been looking for one for several years now, and I found a great one carved in the shape of hands praying, and the best part was I used the J+ genes from my father (Ogunnaike joke courtesy of Uncle John Orife) to pry it away from the seller for about $10! I have been trying to resurrect my Ayo skills, but it has been a while since I played and I’m not quite where I would like to be, but it’s been a great way for me to take a break from staring my computer screen when I’m trying to type up notes, stories, edit videos and all that good stuff.

One last funny anecdote from here is a story the Araba told me about some medicine he made for someone once in his hometown. We went to his village of Ode-Omu on Monday and as we were coming back he pointed to a little grove by the side of the road and started to tell me about how he had made medicine there, and then he started to laugh and turned around to take me back there. When he pulled over he showed me two charms that were stuck on sticks and covered to keep the rain off of them and he told me they were for protection and told me the story about them. He had a friend who wanted to plant some plantain trees but didn’t have land to do it, so the Araba made these charms for him and they planted them by the road in the bush. The charms apparently prevent people from stealing and keeping anything near them, and so when somebody from the town took some of the plantain when they became ripe, the Araba said within two days he went to the house of his friend and just handed him the plantain and said, “I stole these.” I thought that was pretty hilarious and I wish I could have been there. The Araba told me about some other ones he knows how to make that make thieves go blind or not be able to walk until the owner of the thing they stole gets it back. I would really like to see it in action some time, but we’ll see if that happens...

Keeping the Faith

Sorry it’s been so long since the last post. I don’t have a good excuse, I just didn’t update it! At any rate a lot of really interesting things have happened recently, which probably makes it worse that I haven’t updated this site, but oh well. To make sure you read the whole thing, I’m going to save the most interesting parts for the end. Although since you know that now, if you get bored, you can skip down to tha last few paragraphs...

First, I have become very aware of the fact that I lucked out in being able to work with the Araba. I knew I was lucky because he is just a genuinely good person who is most concerned about my welfare, but he is also very very knowledgeable. Nowadays it is very rare to find a Babalawo who knows a verse in all 256 chapters of Ifa, and we have gone through over a quarter and he hasn’t drawn a blank yet! Sometimes he gets stuck, and has trouble remembering a verse, but he’ll either have me come back the next day, or suddenly he’ll just start chanting a verse and tell me that he has it. Furthermore, over the past two weeks I’ve seen the Araba making a lot more Oogun or traditional “medicine.”

Now the word Oogun, while translated as medicine, could maybe be better translated as medicine/charm/magic/talisman etc. It is not always medicinal in the western sense of the word. For example, someone broke into the house of the Araba’s former teacher who has unfortunately passed away. His wife came to the Araba to tell him about it, so he came up with a whole bunch of materials (I wrote them all down, but I remember hair from a dead body is one of them!) and put them into little calabashes and made medicine to prevent thieves from being able to enter the house. He showed me where he has them in his house and said nobody has ever robbed him of anything, in any of his houses, even during the Ife-Modakeke wars.

He has made medicines for all kinds of things and I have to admit that I get pretty lost when trying to follow him on them. When he mixes plants and all kinds of other ingredients together it always ends up looking like the same dark brown paste to me. There is one really cool medicine I watched him make for a woman who came from a town called Ilesa (this story is incredible and found at the end) that he said works for many different things, from the common cold to diabetes! He also made one this week with peppers and several plants that makes people like you. He said hot peppers were the key ingredient because even though they can be caustic, people always seek them out and everybody wants to have them. I thought that was very insightful and I wonder about whether or not all of the medicines have some kind of physical or mundane characteristics that are mirrored on a metaphysical level and that is what gives them power.

At any rate two days ago, we went walking around the neighborhood and the Araba started picking up weeds that we just growing everywhere, and told me that they were important for the medicine he was making and that they would be gone soon since the dry season is in full swing. As we were walking around I was really proud of myself that I recognized it somewhere, but they had already been pulled up by someone. I’m sure this person knew they were weeds and didn’t want them growing by his/her house where I found them, but I thought about what a shame that was. These “weeds” have an incredible amount of power to help people, but they just got killed for almost no reason and were now no good to anyone. Then I thought about how many plants we have like that elsewhere in the world that have either disappeared or are heading in that direction because we just don’t know how to use them. I can’t lie it made me pretty sad, especially since there are so few people studying this type of thing anymore.

That is another thing the Araba told me recently when he found some old papers with Ifa verses on them in his village of Ode Omu. He said he has forgotten so many Ifa verses because there is nobody coming to study them seriously anymore. Before when people were always coming to learn from older Babalawos, a bit like I am now, the Babalawo were forced to recall many verses from all of the Odu on a regular basis so they were kept fresh in their memory. But now when nobody come to ask about a specific Odu, he only thinks about them if or when they come up in divination mostly. This made me sad too for two main reasons. First it means that lots of these verses and medicines are being lost, but also that the few people who still take Ifa very seriously will not be able to know it as well as their predecessors.

One change that I have noticed which I find to be much more positive is that fewer and fewer people seem to be wearing ties in the huge quadruple windsor knots that only reach halfway down the shirt. I don’t know why, but they always make me want to adjust them for whoever is wearing one. Instead I have noticed more and more people wearing skinny-ties, of which i happen to be much more of a fan, and since everything is much cheaper here I think I will pick up a few before I come back.

Now for the most interesting part. I have to admit that I always believed in the power of Ifa and traditional religion even if it sounds like mumbo-jumbo or simple superstition to others, but after the past two weeks any lingering doubts I may have had are now gone. Last week a lady from ilesa was brought to the Araba by her three children because she was so sick she could barely walk. When she came, I honestly thought she was about to die at anytime and she even had trouble drinking the water we gave to her to drink. It was really painful just to see her, and she couldn’t even speak to us. Her children had taken her to numerous hospitals and none of them had been able to do anything for them, so after spending a small fortune trying to heal her, they decided to come to the Araba.

So the Araba cast Ifa for her and Odu Oyeku-Ika came out. I learned that this verse states that the person in question has a sibling, most likely an older sibling, who is jealous of him/her because of what this person has accomplished in life and is trying to ruin or even kill him/her. The Araba told her this and also said that this sibling either has or is going to invite her to go somewhere with him/her and that she should not go because it is a trap.

To make a long story short, the woman’s children answered that there was indeed an older sister who had not done as well as they had in life and had stopped talking to them for some time, but had asked their mother to go with her somewhere. Since she was feeling sick she hadn’t gone on the trip, but they asked if the Araba was really sure that this person was using charms or medicine to make their mother sick. The Araba answered that that is what Ifa said, but that if they made the sacrifice they would know for sure. So they got all of the materials for the sacrifice and not long after it was finished she was able to talk again. They left after that, but they called the next day and said that she had been able to sleep for the first time in weeks the previous night, and I was pretty impressed. The next day they called and said that she was now eating food and looking much healthier. When I looked surprised again, the Araba just laughed. After that he started getting medicine ready for her because even though the supernatural aspect of her affliction had been treated, there was still a medical issue to deal with, so he made the medicine and gave it to her children that weekend.

I learned a bunch of other crazy things as well, like how shortly after I left one day, a man came to the Araba and after casting Ifa for him, the Araba said Ifa said he was a thief. The man was really surprised but had to admit that he was indeed a thief. Needless didn’t want to have much to do with him, and in fact wanted to make medicine to stop him from being able to steal anymore, but said he couldn’t make it because he didn’t have a chicken that had been killed by the god Ogun (which translated means hit by a car or something similar to that).

I also learned about another Odu Oguna-Mo Ro Gbe or 8.1 as I call it. The general meaning of this Odu is impending death. It means that sudden death is ahead of this person, and in certain cases within a period of no more than four days. The Araba said that he had cast this figure twice for someone, and that each time the person had died. In one of the cases the person didn’t make the prescribed sacrifice for some reason and on the fourth day he just fell down dead on the side of the road. Nobody found anything wrong with his body, but Ifa says that it was the work of Aje (witches or people/spirits that use supernatural powers for evil purposes).

While I found that one to be a bit scary, it makes it very clear to me why people still patronize Babalawo so often, and also the last thing I want to post on the blog: how even though Ifa is changing, not much has changed in Yoruba religion in my opinion. After spending lots of hours in prayer, church, and talking to people of all three major religious traditions here (Christianity especially, Islam, and traditional worship) I have noticed that people’s prayers and interpretations of religion seem to be almost verbatim what the Araba has been telling me are the words of Ifa. I have seen lots of very passionate speeches, sermons, and prayers in real life and on TV/radio that are regurgitations of the predictions of Ifa if people make sacrifices, but this time they requirements is praying, fasting, or tithing. They usually revolve around financial success, defeating enemies and supernatural powers that may be working against a person, gaining honor and glory, having children, living a long life, etc. Pretty often when I am with the Araba and I head the predictions I think of specific people I have heard making that same prayer in church...

Ifa for President!

While I learn the different messages of Ifa from the Araba I like to imagine situations in which they are applicable and it’s absurdly easy for some of them. For some like in Oturupon Meji, where Ifa warns against the treachery of a hunchbacked friend or Irete Agbe where Ifa says a person should make a sacrifice with a friend who possesses the same red piece of headgear as the client, very little imagination is required. But my favorite this week was in Irosun-Agbe. Since elections are looming here, I thought this one was incredibly pertinent. It tells the story of two birds who are brothers and goes like this:

Their father went to a Babalawo to cast divination to see the future of his sons. The Babalawo told him that they would become important and successful provided they made a sacrifice he prescribed and were never greedy. The elder brother was a little cocky and full of himself and didn’t bother to make it. The younger brother, however, was a very meek person and made the sacrifice right away.

A short time later their father died and the king announced that a title had become vacant. This title was hereditary and had to be occupied by someone in that family. Usually there are power struggles for a title or chieftaincy, but the younger sibling knew how much his brother would want it and also that he must not be greedy, so he didn’t even offer his name for consideration. So the elder became the new chief and thoroughly enjoyed himself there.

One day there was a huge festival in the town, and the townspeople made lots of food. The elder brother had a great time sitting on his throne, eating all of the wonderful food prepared for him, but out of the corner of his eye he noticed a butterfly getting caught by thorns in the bush not too far away. Now it just so happened that butterfly was this bird’s favorite food, so he naturally exclaimed that he was going to go eat it. All of his attendants begged him to stay put, after all it was a festival and there was no shortage of delicious food. No matter how much the people begged, the elder brother wouldn’t listen and flew out to eat the butterfly. Unfortunately for him he too got caught in the bush while he was trying to get to the butterfly and died there. Since his office was now vacant, the younger brother became the new chief, fulfilling what the Babalawo had said at the very beginning.

Lots of the politicians here employ Babalawo to help them gain power, so I hope some of them will cast Irosun-Agbe for them and they listen. Especially some of our friends from a certain political party that has recently had lots of “birds” who have been caught by “thorns” while trying to catch “butterflies” when they already had plenty of food. Oju kokoro...

Politics aside, I think I am starting to really get a grasp on Ifa. I’ve seen the Araba cast Ifa for clients tons of times, and he always seems to have a grasp on the situation even though he hasn’t been told... The most fun part for me is that several times this week when certain signs have come up, I have recognized them and known exactly what the Araba was going to say about them. He even had me cast the Opele for his daughter a few days ago. I didn’t really have much to do with the whole process, I just dropped the Opele, and he interpreted everything, but it is pretty cool to be able to look at a chain and have so much information pop up. I’m only about 3/16ths of the way through the whole corpus and I already have so much of it in my head sometimes when I think about it, it feels like my head is going to explode...

I also thought I noticed that a lot of the messages were the same (I can’t even remember how many of them say for example that this person is having trouble having children for example), but when I went back and started studying my notes some more, I realized that they are almost all at least slightly different. While the description of the problems are almost identical (the problems are usually, enemies, death or sickness, lack of children, lack of money or respect or some variation thereof) but the solutions to these problems are usually different. Sometimes a sacrifice needs to be made with special objects (like the red hat I mentioned earlier or another in which two statues need to be carved and buried in front of the front and back door so death will try to take them instead of the inhabitants of that house), sometimes the sacrifice needs to be made to different deities, and sometimes it is attributed to the work of enemies. When I realized that I was really fascinated, especially in the case of the ones that had herbal remedies attributed to them, and I wished western medicine were a bit more like that. We tend to try to come up with a one-size-fits-all prescription drug for every disease when every person needs something a bit different and reacts to treatment differently.

The dry season has officially hit, even though it’s very late this year. It has stopped raining every day, and it’s gotten a bit too hot for my liking, especially since NEPA (Nigerian Electrical-Power Association or Nigerian Electrical Paralysis Organization depending on whom you ask) went on strike and we were without power for about two and a half days. It also means that everyone is going to be trying to have parties and celebrations. The reason I knew was because there was little chance of it literally raining on someone’s party, but the Araba told me that people with farms will also start having more money for their crops now so they will want to spend it. The Araba has gotten invited to too many parties already and he’s pretty sick of it already. On Friday he wanted to run away to his unfinished house to avoid everyone but there was too much work to do. I’m pretty glad I don’t have to show up to too many.

Well that’s all for now. I think I am going to go out and buy some red hats for all of my friends, just in case a Babalawo every casts Irete-Agbe for me (just kidding).

I Don't Have a Golden Ticket

This week I’ve been focusing on trying to memorize the messages I have learned from each divinatory sign, which I found was surprisingly easy. It’s still amazing how some of these Babalawo can start spitting them out, but after getting very familiar with them, I have learned some of the parts that are the same in many of them, and I am able to recite them with the Araba as he’s telling me for the first time. Most of the Odu (chapters) have second names like Odu Ogbe-Osa is also called Ogbe Ri Ku Sa, or Ogbe-See Death Run, and these names are often tied to the verses or stories. So in Ogbe Ri Ku Sa there is a story about how Ram was pretending to be Rabbit’s friend until he put him in a box and ran with the box on his head to a place where he planned to kill Rabbit. It’s pretty tough to forget the meanings in that way. There’s also another one called Ogbe-Tomopon, and anyone who speaks Yoruba won’t be surprised to know that the verses in this Odu largely deal with having children, so there’s two down already!

What I’ve been doing, is casting the Opele for myself and trying to see what Ifa says about whichever sign comes up. Since I’ve really only done the twins, and all of the verses in Ogbe, I know about 1 eight of them so I have to cheat a bit and change some of the signs, but it makes it a lot easier to remember them that way. Maybe just because I’m more of an hands-on learner, but I started learning them more quickly that way than I ever did when I was just reading them on a piece of paper. The Babalawo who developed the Ifa Corpus were really smart in how they set it up, because the more I learn the easier it seems to be to keep it all straight, relatively speaking. I’m starting to see how it’s possible for one person to have memorized literally a quantity of information that would literally take months to recite.

Since so many of the stories are about animals, I am also reminded practically every day of some of them. For example, every time I see a rooster or chicken they are often kicking their feet around in the dirt and it reminds me of the story of Oduduwa coming down from heaven and spreading the earth with such a rooster. I also noticed a specific kind of weed called Odogbo, and how it used to have trouble growing until it made a sacrifice to its destiny on a river. From that day its future became brighter and even the river lets it grow in the water because it liked the sacrifice. I’ve come to realize how some Babalawo (especially the really knowledgeable ones generations ago) really did see the world differently. They knew stories about the nature of everything in the world, and supposedly they knew/know secret names for all of these plants, animals, etc. that give them power to control them to a certain extent. I am going to ask the Araba about that this week to see if he can explain how that works and/or if he knows some of them.

I have also noticed that even though the Ifa corpus is completely oral in nature and the Babalawo memorize the words exactly to preserve it, it is still remarkably malleable so it can stay relevant. First, since the advice Ifa gives is somewhat vague in nature like, you will succeed in your business if you do this, it is easily transferable to more modern settings. What is really interesting though is that some of the interpretations have now changed to include issues like politics, international travel, and using more modern items in sacrifices based on the prescriptions in the verses. I think the idea here is that even though Ifa says some very specific things like, “You have a hunch-backed friend who is plotting to destroy you behind your back,” the Babalawo view these messages as having their own meaning within a certain context, and when the context changes the message must also be adapted to fit it.

You might remember that when I came the Araba told me Ifa said to watch out for people related to Ifa who want to take my money, well he was right again! The Araba’s son pulled me aside one day and gave me a story about how a flashdrive he was using for school had broken (he just got it a few weeks earlier), and he needed a lot of money to buy a new one. I honestly didn’t remember the advice of Ifa at first, I was just used to people trying to take money from me, so I told him I’d get him a bit of money later, but not much. So I gave it to the Araba and waited for him to bring it up again. Sure enough a few days later he came asking for the money, and I asked the Araba to give it to him. In the end he got 200 Naira, but I don’t think he’ll be asking me for any more money when he doesn’t need it.

I also met with Dele, the guy I worked with the last time, and of course he was asking for more money, and I gave him some even though he never gave out the money I sent for lots of different people. When I asked him about it, he said he didn’t give it out because he thought they would suspect him of stealing it. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I think his story is unlikely because he never told me there was any problem, and I could have straightened it out pretty easily if that were the case. At any rate, Dele like several other people I have met, seems to think he is Charlie and I am a golden ticket to get to the US. We had a 90 minute conversation yesterday about how the best thing for him to do to come to the US was to enter the visa lottery and there is literally nothing else I can do to help him. Just this week I have had about 3 or 4 people I don’t know, but who just see me somewhere ask me in all seriousness to take them to the US, and while I thought I was used to it, I’m starting to get sick of dealing with it every day. Maybe I should just tell people that my number is the number for the US embassy...

Ose Meji

This week went by really quickly, I think partially because I’ve gotten into a real groove with the Araba. Every day we try (we don’t always succeed) to cover 4 Ifa chapters. He usually tries to think about them the day before after I have left, and sometimes has them written down already. For each chapter he usually tries to come up with at least 2 verses and I write down the words he has memorized and he explains what Ifa is trying to say through them. Most often the verses just record the name of a Babalawo and the client for whom he divined and that’s it. Sometimes there’s a long story that comes along with it, but not always. The names of the Babalawo are almost like riddles themselves and often contain the lesson from the verse. These names are very esoteric in nature. I’m not sure if I have this name exactly correct, but one of them was the rich man is never guilty in the court of the king, but the poor man doesn’t loose his water in court. I think the obvious message from this name is that money is power, but the real lesson to take away is that this Babalawo most likely had something to do with a case brought before the king in which a poor person failed to repay a loan from a rich person (since a rich person has no need to break a rule or has no excuse for needing to break a rule). Furthermore even though the poor man is guilty he should still be treated with respect and the rich man cannot be given everything the poor man owns IE his water since that is most likely the least valuable of all of his possessions.

Anyway, since the Yoruba can be tricky and the lessons are often obscure, the Araba tries to explain them to me, so by the time he’s done I have the text and an interpretation. I made a word document with what Ifa says for each sign/chapter and I’m going to try to memorize them if I can since I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to memorize around 20 verses in Yoruba a day. I’ll try for the English interpretations and see how far I get. Right now I have reached Ogbe-Odi/1.3 or the 18th Odu/chapter of 256 so I still have quite a ways to go.

I have also gotten good with the videos I’ve been recording. I split them up into my little archiving system and put them into the folder for each chapter, and for the verses which have songs associated with them, I’ve been extracting the audio from the parts where the Araba is singing. I put those in the chapter folders too and I have an iTunes playlist of them on my computer now too. Some of them are really cool, there is one I like in particular about a lady who had trouble with money and business, but after consulting some Babalawo she wore expensive clothes and sat on a cushioned chair in the market.

This Friday I went with the Araba to his hometown of Ode Omu because one of his uncles died there last week. On the way there some policemen stopped us, waving their AK’s around, and expecting to get a nice bribe I’m sure. After they pulled us over they asked Mr. Ajayi (another Babalawo who lives in Modakeke who helped me a lot with my thesis last year since he is both a Babalawo and a Muslim!) where he was going and what he was doing, and another one came over to me and did the same. He was a little surprised when I answered him in Yoruba and he asked to search my bag. I’m glad I didn’t leave anything valuable in the main pocket (I had my recorder and a few other things in a small somewhat hidden one). When he saw a book I have on Ifa he looked even more surprised and then asked what we were doing exactly, and Mr. Ajayi told him that we were Babalawos, were not happy about being detained, and that the Araba was right behind us. Fortunately that did the trick and they let us go and started harassing the next people...

I went to Ibadan on Saturday morning to visit Aunty Bimbo since she has been staying at my grandparents’ old house there for a while. It was really nice to see her up to her usual tricks making fun of everyone and bossing them around. I impressed Mr. Toyin, Aunty’s driver, Mama Ibeji and some of her kids by reading my Opele for them and telling them that the Odu of this post (Ose Meji) is the Odu that was cast on the founding of Ibadan. Kyle also came Saturday afternoon after taking a trip to Benin City. We couldn’t stay too long and left this morning so we could be ready to start the week. That’s all for now, but I’ll try to write another update soon!

Ifa-filter

I’m trying to upload the song I recorded last week about the salve Eji Obara bought, so I hope it works, but we’ll have to see...

Today I recorded another not-so-funny Ese (verse) that used equally clever wordplay in Odu (Chapter) Ogunda-Di. In this Ese, Ogun knows a woman named Adi in the biblical sense. In Yoruba the most important part of the verse is the sentence, Ogun do Adi (Ogun slept with Adi), which is pronounced Ogun d’Adi, which is practically the same as Ogunda-Di. These guys are really clever, and the Araba gets a kick out of it when I put the pieces together for myself and start laughing.

I have noticed that for a lot of Ese the Araba has to go into his room and pull out a huge stack of mis-matched papers he has to check the names of some Odu and some details of the verses. I’ve read in a lot of books that the Babalawo now don’t know as many verses as they used to, and don’t know them as well, most likely because of technology like radio and TV. It reminds me of this quote from Black Elk that goes something like, “One day people’s minds will be so weak they won’t be able to remember anything without writing them down. Since the Araba can lean back and spit out 15+ minutes of literature at the drop of the hat, I don’t think his mental faculties are weak, definitely much stronger than mine, but it did make me feel a bit sad that it has become more difficult to keep these Ese in modern times. Then I thought that maybe technology could help to, since that is exactly what I am trying to do; preserve verses like that one in Ogunda-Di or 9.4 as I call it.

I recently devised my own method for archiving Ifa verses since I’ve never seen one. Since there are two figures in each Odu and there are 16 total signs that can take each of those two places, with the first being the most important and the second acting almost like an adjective and modifying it. So for Ogunda-Di I have been using the number 9.4 because Ogunda is the 9^th sign and Odi is the 4^th. The only tricky part about my archiving system is that the chief Odu are the one’s that are repeated, like Ogunda-Ogunda or Odi-Odi which would be called Ogunda Meji and Odi Meji respectively. Since they are more important, I just call them 9.0 and 4.0 and leave the positions they would otherwise take (9.9 and 4.4) empty. It makes finding the verses on my hard drive infinitely easier.

I went to the market today and bought another soccer jersey from a guy on the street. After we agreed on the price, he asked me if I was Nigerian, I think because I bargained with him almost exclusively in Yoruba and made him give me half of his original price and told him I knew it was still 100 Naira too much. Usually people just ask me where I’m from assuming I’m not from around here. He flipped out when I told him I was studying Ifa, and he wants me to come back sometime soon so I can cast Ifa for him even if I can’t tell him what his future holds! I’m going to study up some more and see what I can do.

Even though my market skills have gotten better, I haven’t been completely happy with how fast I’m learning Yoruba, so I think I’m going to go a bit extreme and just stop speaking English unless it is absolutely necessary because I know the key to proficiency is learning to think in the language. So if I stop using English, soon I’ll stop thinking in it, I hope at least...

Tomorrow I am going to try to visit my friend Dr. Saah, a really nice professor from Cameroon who teaches French here. He just stopped me one day and was really surprised when I could speak French to him. I usually see him at least a few times every week to try to keep my French up, and he said he might bring me to a few of his classes. He also told me that I should try to make some time in the spring to visit his village in Cameroon, which just so happens to be the village of my new favorite soccer player, Alexandre Song! If we actually make it, that would be awesome!

No Ifa Censor

I’m trying to upload the song I recorded last week about the salve Eji Obara bought, so I hope it works, but we’ll have to see...

Today I recorded another not-so-funny Ese (verse) that used equally clever wordplay in Odu (Chapter) Ogunda-Di. In this Ese, Ogun knows a woman named Adi in the biblical sense. In Yoruba the most important part of the verse is the sentence, Ogun do Adi (Ogun slept with Adi), which is pronounced Ogun d’Adi, which is practically the same as Ogunda-Di. These guys are really clever, and the Araba gets a kick out of it when I put the pieces together for myself and start laughing.

I have noticed that for a lot of Ese the Araba has to go into his room and pull out a huge stack of mis-matched papers he has to check the names of some Odu and some details of the verses. I’ve read in a lot of books that the Babalawo now don’t know as many verses as they used to, and don’t know them as well, most likely because of technology like radio and TV. It reminds me of this quote from Black Elk that goes something like, “One day people’s minds will be so weak they won’t be able to remember anything without writing them down. Since the Araba can lean back and spit out 15+ minutes of literature at the drop of the hat, I don’t think his mental faculties are weak, definitely much stronger than mine, but it did make me feel a bit sad that it has become more difficult to keep these Ese in modern times. Then I thought that maybe technology could help to, since that is exactly what I am trying to do; preserve verses like that one in Ogunda-Di or 9.4 as I call it.

I recently devised my own method for archiving Ifa verses since I’ve never seen one. Since there are two figures in each Odu and there are 16 total signs that can take each of those two places, with the first being the most important and the second acting almost like an adjective and modifying it. So for Ogunda-Di I have been using the number 9.4 because Ogunda is the 9^th sign and Odi is the 4^th. The only tricky part about my archiving system is that the chief Odu are the one’s that are repeated, like Ogunda-Ogunda or Odi-Odi which would be called Ogunda Meji and Odi Meji respectively. Since they are more important, I just call them 9.0 and 4.0 and leave the positions they would otherwise take (9.9 and 4.4) empty. It makes finding the verses on my hard drive infinitely easier.

I have also noticed that after collecting quite a few myths, there is a large number that I will definitely not want to put into a children's book because many of them are really graphic. I think at least half of them involve sex in some way shape or form, and while I could write a way around it in some of them, there are some that are just a bi too explicit. Then there are some like another one I collected today that involve cutting off heads and other kinds of violence, which makes sense within the context, both of the verses and the use of Ifa in general, but renders a fair number of these verses a little bit out of the Walt Disney age-grade, so I'm going to have to be a bit discerning in choosing myths and even more careful about the way I write them up...

I went to the market today and bought another soccer jersey from a guy on the street. After we agreed on the price, he asked me if I was Nigerian, I think because I bargained with him almost exclusively in Yoruba and made him give me half of his original price and told him I knew it was still 100 Naira too much. Usually people just ask me where I’m from assuming I’m not from around here. He flipped out when I told him I was studying Ifa, and he wants me to come back sometime soon so I can cast Ifa for him even if I can’t tell him what his future holds! I’m going to study up some more and see what I can do.

Even though my market skills have gotten better, I haven’t been completely happy with how fast I’m learning Yoruba, so I think I’m going to go a bit extreme and just stop speaking English unless it is absolutely necessary because I know the key to proficiency is learning to think in the language. So if I stop using English, soon I’ll stop thinking in it, I hope at least...

Tomorrow I am going to try to visit my friend Dr. Saah, a really nice professor from Cameroon who teaches French here. He just stopped me one day and was really surprised when I could speak French to him. I usually see him at least a few times every week to try to keep my French up, and he said he might bring me to a few of his classes. He also told me that I should try to make some time in the spring to visit his village in Cameroon, which just so happens to be the village of my new favorite soccer player, Alexandre Song! If we actually make it, that would be awesome!

Guarantee Trouble Bank!

Sorry it took me so long to put up another post. The internet modem I bought went south a little over a week ago and I’ve had a real adventure trying to replace it. Damini wired me some money, but my bank (GT Bank) wouldn’t let me take any of it out! In Nigeria you need people to fill out reference forms for you before you can set up a bank account, and I filled out the two they asked for, but apparently they didn’t like either of them, even though they didn’t tell me. So I had to go find two other people to fill out new forms for me, but since those people had accounts with other banks they said I wouldn’t be able to get my money for at least 2 weeks, so I got more people to fill out forms for me, but they didn’t like those either so I just kept going to and from the bank trying to track down people with certain kinds of GT Bank accounts all day until they finally accepted them. Even then I had to give them more trouble the next day for them to finally let me have my money. If I hadn’t gone through all the trouble already I would have taken my money out and put it somewhere else, but I’m too tired for that now.

Jesse, a PhD student from Stanford came last week with my new Flip camera, which is working really well so I’ve been able to record a whole bunch of Ifa verses and songs, even though I missed about half a weeks worth of interviews because of the bank/internet problems. I’ve also had a lot of fun watching the people who come to see the Araba. One man came, and I’m not sure why, but he wanted a charm to protect him from bullets. I wrote down all of the steps required, and it was pretty fascinating to watch. The guy had to eat gunpowder after it was all done too. There have also been several politicians who have come because the elections are coming up, but I haven’t seen any of them asking for charms or medicine or anything. So far they’ve just been asking for support or advice, but the Araba really doesn’t like dealing with them. He says they aren’t terribly honest and since it’s so hard to figure out what they really want, he prefers to just help people who are sick, but he doesn’t have much of a choice.

Today two boys from OAU (Obafemi Awolowo University, where Dr. Ajibade teaches) came to see him, and one of them got a bit nervous because he recognized me from campus. I didn’t know the other one, but apparently he does 419 (those sketchy e-mail scams Nigerians send out to people asking for bank account details so they can “give” you millions of dollars). The Araba wasn’t a big fan of him either, but he said he could make Ifa for him if he wanted, but since the guy is greedy he doesn’t want to pay the money for it. The other student who recognized me was a much nicer guy, and I was pretty impressed with how well the Araba was able to help him.

The way the divination process works is that the person coming for advice either whispers the question to some of the divination instruments or just holds them up to his/her head and says them silently to Orunmila. Then the Babalawo cast the Opele or divining chain and recites verses that accompany the sign that comes up. Then there’s another process for answering yes or no questions to resolve any remaining issues. In this guy’s case, without knowing what was going on, the Araba told him that he’s trying to get money from someone, or someone is try to send him some money or assistance of some kind, but they are having trouble with it. Then he told the boy that the problem is on his father’s side of the family because there is someone there who is actively trying to disrupt their plans. I was impressed by how specific it was, and I have to admit even a bit more surprised that the Araba was spot on. He said that he was indeed having that problem and that there was some quarrelling going on his father’s side of the family. He said he would come back later to see if there was a sacrifice he could make to resolve the issue and investigate it further since he didn’t have a lot of time. I’d like to be there for that part too if I’m lucky enough.

Most of what I have been doing with the Araba now is going through each one of the 256 Odu and recording him explaining what it generally means if it comes up in the divination process, reciting some of the verses and lessons to take from them, and then his favorite part (and mine too I think) are the Kiki or songs that accompany them. I think I’m going to try to extract the audio from the interviews so I can make a playlist of the kiki for each Odu that I could maybe include with the book.

Sometimes understanding/translating the songs and verses can be pretty tough because of how vowels elide and words combine in Yoruba, but the songs and verses are really clever. One of the ones I recorded today from Obara Meji is about one of the sons of Orunmila (named Eji Obara) who was a king (oba) who bought (ra) a slave who gave birth to a son, thus making his slaves two (meji), hence the name Oba-ra Meji. You could also read it as O (he) ba (should) ra (buy) meji (two), which is exactly what the Babalawo in the verse told him to do. I’ve never been huge on literature, but some of the wordplay in Ifa is really fascinating.

I’m going to try to memorize the lessons that accompany each Odu so when I cast the Opele myself I can tell what each sign means, even though for me it will be completely random since I’m not a Babalawo! I’ve been pretty busy this week especially, but if I get some time this weekend I will try to extract one of the songs and post it here since my new connection is infinitely faster than my old one, but I learned that in Irosun Meji that if there may be good things in store for you, but you always have to wait patiently and work slowly for them to come, which has definitely been true for me so far with just about everything!

Ifa says a lot!

Hi everyone, things have been moving along pretty quickly here for me this past week. Fortunately I’ve been able to use my digital camera to record some Okiki (songs derived from Ifa verses) from the Araba and I must have collected somewhere around 20 myths so far. Every one of them is really fascinating and carry great lessons. Today I learned several myths that taught me not to belittle anyone because you never know if that person may be able to help you or be more powerful than you, that the character of human beings is in constant decline (kind of like entropy in the laws of thermodynamics, thanks Dad!) and Olodumare (or almighty God) changes his interactions with us as a result of that, and a whole lot about destiny just to name a few.

I have also noticed a lot of similarities between the Bible and some of the Ifa verses the Araba has been reciting for me. I think I mentioned the similarities between the creation stories before, but there are also verses about how people used to live to be incredibly long like Noah and Methuselah because they were so close to God, and that everyone used to speak one language until they started misbehaving so God confounded them and created many different languages just like the Tower of Babel. I don’t think the Araba is aware of those similarities, but I might bring it up with him tomorrow to see what he has to say about it.

It’s pretty amazing how the Araba can rattle off these complex verses once I get him started. Sometimes I’ll just ask him a general question about something, like “Why do people die?” for example. Then he will think for a few seconds and say, “Ifa says that...” and then tell me the Odu (Chapter) and rattle it off. He’s even more efficient than me having an encyclopedia because it hardly takes him any time to come up with relevant verses. It’s sometimes hard to believe how much information he has stored up in his head. It honestly makes me feel pretty small because I haven’t memorized anything like that ever. I can’t even remember my phone number here!

I have learned a whole lot about the Araba over the past week too. He’s building a new house and took me to visit it today and it’s really nice in a more quiet part of town. I asked him if he was going to sell his current house once the new one is completed, and he told me that he’s just renting the one he has now because his previous house was burned down in the most recent war. Although things are very calm now, the people in Ile-Ife and Modakeke have had a series of wars stretching back about a hundred years since the people from Modakeke came to the area to escape wars further north. The Araba was very active in these wars, which is why the Ife attacked it and burned it down! On Thursday he showed me a vest he made with a series of charms that made it impervious to bullets. Apparently it worked because he said despite his house being attacked and him being one of the leaders in the war, he’s never been shot once! Apparently it’s cheaper than Kevlar, but you need a Babalawo to make it for you, not DuPont...

For the past couple of days he has also been doing some prayers for someone in Germany with a continuous fire in a small bowl of palm oil and some other things. He told me that he has clients all over the place, from Chicago to London to Sao Paulo to London to Berlin. This particular person had a messy divorce in which his wife ran off with their child. The Araba has been making these prayers on his behalf so that he’ll be able to find his wife and bring her to court to see if they can work out custody. Apparently he has been working with this man for years, and I think it was right after the Araba made some other kind of prayers for him that he and his wife had their child.

In other news, I think I have found a football team. I played with a bunch of medical students on Saturday who told me that I should try to go pro, but we got kicked off of the field early because some guys wanted to play cricket there. It was pretty fun watching them all get heated and argue over the patch of dirt we were using. I also played a game with the team from Dr. Ajibade’s church. They gave me a trial run for part of the first half of a game on Sunday, and ended up giving me a full 90 minutes and a spot on the team, so it looks like I’ll be playing with them every weekend from now on. The guys are pretty fun and funny so I’m looking forward to it.

Well all the football and moving around has made me pretty tired, so I’m going to go to sleep while there’s still electricity to power my fan!

They Drink Schnapps, I Drink Schweppes

Sorry for the delay since the last post, we didn’t have power for about two days here, and I ran out of credit for my internet modem. The guy who sold it to me forgot to tell me that I need a special code to start adding credit to it, and didn’t answer his phone for a while so that made life a bit more difficult after power came back, but that’s Nigeria.

I’ve started to get pretty used to my routine here, and a lot of the people around have gotten used to me too. There’s this one Al-Haji who begs for change right by where I switch busses to do to Modakeke who always gets excited to see me because I usually give him some change, or at least say hi to him everyday. Some of bus drivers recognize me and love it when I can say a few sentences for them in Yoruba. There are also these drummers who are always sitting outside this house close to the Araba’s who really get a kick out of me giving them traditional greetings. Then there’s this lady who sells all kinds of drinks by the busses. She’s not very nice, but I’ve been buying schnapps from her pretty often because the Babalawo like to drink Schnapps before reciting Ifa verses. I recently met another lady in Modakeke who is much nicer and agreed to sell me the same thing for less money, so I think I might take my business there instead from now on.

I went to play soccer with all the boys this Saturday and did pretty well. I joined this group of about 9 boys playing on a patch of dirt in the athletic complex (there are groups of people playing all over the place), and I think I surprised them by dribbling someone and nutmegging the keeper on the first play! It was a lot of fun, but after only about an hour and a half everyone has so tired because the sun gets pretty brutal by about 9 am. After it was all over I stuck around with a few of the boys to work on tricks and dribbles before I got an Okada driver to take me back home since I was way too tired to take the 30 minute walk back to the boys quarters.

Since I memorized all of the signs for the Odu Ifa so quickly the Araba likes showing me off to the visitors he always has coming to his house. I think he really likes showing everyone that he has someone from the US coming to study with him, and that I’m learning a lot. Most of the people who come for his help are amazed because they usually greet me in English and then he tells me in Yoruba to cast the Opele and I tell him which Odu it is and then speak back to them in Yoruba (well only as much as I can...). I’m really lucky to be working with the Araba, he’s a celebrity in Modakeke. Every time I am out on the road with him, every other person stops him to say thank-you for something or just to greet him since everyone seems to know him. He is also always picking up leaves and bark that honestly all look the same to me, but apparently all have different medicinal and spiritual purposes. Just today he drove all the way out to some obscure river to pick some plants that can only grow in streams and help people remember things. I have no idea what the botanical name is, but he calls them Ewe Eleyeye.

Yesterday this lady came by apologizing to the Araba for something saying that her son was feeling ok, and thanking him for his help, but I could tell the he was not happy with her. After she left he told me that her son had come to him about 2 years ago for help with some sickness or paralysis he had in his back that the hospital couldn’t treat but the Araba was able to remedy. He said that the guy was supposed to pay him 6000 Naira, but he hadn’t seen a dime since he got better until his mom just now brought 1000. He told me that this isn’t uncommon and complained that nobody treats the hospitals like that.

Even though my video recorder doesn’t work, I have been able to record two myths on my camera, and they were really interesting. The first one was the origin of the world, which I thought I knew, but I found out that I didn’t know the entire story. The Araba told me that almost nobody still remembers it in its entirety, and he only knows because he jut happened to learn it from his grandfather (who was also an Araba) right before he died. In short, the commonly known story is that Oduduwa (the first person) came down from heaven on a chain with some sand and a rooster. Oduduwa put the sand down on the water since the world was completely covered in water, and had the rooster spread the sand out all over the face of the water to create the land we have today. Apparently that was actually just the third time the earth had been made, and God had created it and destroyed it twice before that in a manner pretty similar to the story of noah and the flood. I thought it was pretty interesting that almost every culture has some kind of flood story, and that the earth at the very beginning is almost always described as completely water.

The second story that I heard was about how white people came to the earth! Apparently three gods who were having trouble having kids were destined to have some amazing children who couldn’t eat hot pepper, wouldn’t like doing hard labor, and would go off to live in a more prosperous land across a big river. Sure enough when they had children they weren’t black like everyone else, but white and went far away and became prosperous and wealthy, and eventually came back, but let all the black people keep farming for them. I thought this one was pretty funny, and the whole version of it is actually pretty fascinating. I think I will definitely want it to be one of the ones that makes it into the book.

Oh, I forgot, while I the Babalawo drink Schnapps, I have been drinking Schweppes Bitter Lemon like it’s my job. Unfortunately it’s really cheap, just like puff-puff, which means it might also become a bit of a problem, just like puff-puff. I’m going to buy some chewing sticks to make sure my teeth don’t rot...

Eji Ogbe (First Chapter)

Since the last post I have now had three days of work/training with Ifaniwale Ogundiran, the Babalawo (diviner) who agreed to work with me. When I worked with him last year he was the Awise of Modakeke, kind of the spokesperson for Ifa in his town, but the old Araba or head of all Babalawo in the town died not too long ago, and Chief Ogundiran was the one who succeeded him!

Getting to his house is no trouble for me anymore, and I know exactly where to get which busses to get as close to his house as possible and some of the people in the neighborhood even recognize me! Before starting to record Ifa verses the new Araba wanted me to understand all of the basics about Ifa Divination, so he made an Opele (divining chain) with training wheels for me. It is made with some string, three cowrie shells, and eight pieces of igba Esu, or Esu’s Calabash (Esu is anothe Yoruba deity who is very close to Orunmila and Ifa Divination). I’m going to try to upload a picture of the Opele, but we’ll see if my connection will allow for all that...

The first thing I did was to start learning all of the 16 major Odu Ifa or signs of Ifa. On the Opele there are 2 sides of the chain, each with 4 pieces of the calabash. That means that there are two possibilities for the way each piece can land, either with the concave face up, or the convex face up, called open and closed respectively. That means for each side of the chain there are 2^4 different combinations or 16. So my job after the first day was to learn the first 8 combinations called Eji Ogbe, Oyeku Meji, Iwori Meji, Odi Meji, Irosun Meji, Owonrin Meji, Obara Meji, and Okanran Meji. Since I was pretty familiar with them, I went home and just memorized all 16 of them for the next day so we could move right along.

Once you know those basic 16 combinations, all of the other ones are just pairings of one of the 16. Since there are 16 possibilities for the right hand side of the chain, that means there are 16 possibilities for the left-hand side for each one of the 16 on the right. That makes 256 total, even though I only really had to memorize 16. The Araba would take my opele and turn the pieces of the calabash to make certain Odu and had me tell him what they were as a test, and after I kept answering him correctly, he taught me how to cast the divining chain. It was pretty easy, hold the opele in the middle of the chain and lightly tap the two dangling ends onto a surface three times, and then drop it so that the ends are closest to you. Then I would tell the Araba which Odu “came up.” It’s pretty cool, and I was really happy that I had learned the basics of the process in about a day!

On the second day the Araba made some prayers called Isoye to Orunmila for me so that I would be able to learn everything I needed to learn quickly and that Orunmila would look on my work with favor. Then he did another kind of divination with kola nuts in which he would ask questions with them cupped in his hands and then cast them on the ground. Depending on how they came up, he got a yes or no answer from Orunmila. He told me once it was finished that Orunmila said I should beware of some Babalawo who will want to take advantage of me for money, which was actually spot on! I really trust the Araba because he bent over backwards to help me last year without expecting any money, and Professor Ajibade has worked with him several times and says he is the most trustworthy Babalawo he knows, so I wasn’t too concerned about him. I did find out, however, that another one who had helped me last year, Dele, hadn’t acted so honestly. I had sent a bunch of pictures and money back to Nigeria with Damini in January last year for Dele to give to each one of the Babalawo who had helped me with my thesis research, and since I had worked with over a dozen I think, it was a fair amount of money. Apparently Dele kept the whole thing for himself even though he told me he had given it to everyone, and kept asking me for more money afterward too. I had actually been thinking about getting Dele to help me again, but I think I will take Orunmila’s advice and pass this time.

I wish I could have done divination before coming to Nigeria because I would have known that the Flip (a nifty handheld video recorder)I bought before coming wasn’t going to work. I tried two days in a row to record some Ifa verses, but it always freezes up on me. Fortunately for me it should be under warrantee, and I think I’ll be able to use my digital camera as a camcorder at least until I come back briefly, but it was pretty disappointing. Tomorrow I’m going to try my camera, but if that doesn’t work I’ll be in big trouble and my project will have hit a wall!

Tomorrow is also Nigeria’s 50th birthday and I heard some events will be going on at the University, so I might check that out once I’m done working with the Araba. I’m interested to see what it will be like in town/what people will be doing, and I think it might be even more interesting to talk to some people like my father who have been alive since the colonial days to see what they think about Nigeria’s development as a country. It’s a little strange to think that there are lots of people who are older than the country itself. Maybe I’ll ask the Araba to cast divination and find out what the future holds for Nigeria on the big day...

This Nigeria!

Sorry for the delay since the last post, things have gotten surprisingly busy since the last time! I decided to start tutoring sessions with Dr. Ajibade in Yoruba so I can become fluent more quickly and move my project along a bit better. He agreed to only speak Yoruba to me (except when it’s something really important), which I really wanted and think should help me a lot. Even though I’ve been flying through my lessons since we started with some basics, I have a lot to learn, and it’s a bit tougher since everyone wants to speak English with me if they can. I really like surprising some people who don’t think I understand any Yoruba, like last night I was taking a bus back to Ife from Ibadan, and the guys stuffed too many people into the bus (the buses are about the size of a Chevy suburban and usually carry 15 people but these guys started forcing 20 in!), and once we were all on the bus they demanded too much money. Everyone was getting heated and yelling at them in Yoruba and when the guy collecting the fare came to me, I told him he was acting like a thief and everyone started laughing!

I had a really interesting ride on that bus. At first I was a bit upset that the guys were charging so much and taking so many people, not because I had to pay an extra dollar since that’s not much to me, but because the ladies who were coming back from the markets to their smaller towns could really use that money. Then we must have gone through at least 5 or more “security checkpoints” which are just groups of policemen with their AK-47s stopping cars on the road. For us to pass each time, the driver had to give one of the officers a bribe. That’s nothing new or unusual, but it was getting dark and I wanted to be able to see when I was walking back to my room so I got a bit frustrated with the whole thing. Then I remembered that I shouldn’t get too angry with the policemen. Sure some of them are just crooked, but some of them have kids to feed and send to school and life is tough in Nigeria, so I don’t like to get too angry. After that I started thinking, since the drivers of the buses know that they will have to pay the policemen, they will naturally have to make their fares a bit higher. The guys taking me were still being exorbitant, but I realized that at least partially, because the government makes life so difficult, everyone seems to pay their own tax to each other to make sure things can still run somehow. That is, the policeman takes bribes, the bus man charges some more money so he can pay the policeman, the ladies at the market will raise their prices a bit so they can pay the bus fare, etc. That’s pretty typically of Nigeria, patching up whatever it is that you have been given and making it work somehow, even if it’s not correctly.

At any rate, I had gone to Ibadan to visit Kyle on Saturday morning to see how he was doing, which was why I was coming back last night. I think I’ve gotten really comfortable with transportation in Nigeria; I knew not to get on the bus going to Ibadan right outside of campus because they charge a bit more, and as an Ijebu man (the Ijebu are the sub-group of the Yoruba that my family comes from and are particularly tight with money) I couldn’t do that on principal. So I took another bus into town, to a place called Mayfair and then walked around the roundabout to the cheaper bus, which really only saved me a few cents, but it made me feel a lot better about myself which I decided made it worth it, even if I hadn’t saved more money!

We had a pretty good time at UI, we played soccer with a bunch of little kids who of course had all given themselves names of professional soccer players like Benzema, Walcott, John Mikel Obi, etc. The guys were pretty good, but Kyle and I had fun dribbling around them and juggling over them until we were all tired out. Then we crowded into the same sweaty room as last week to watch two English Premier League matches, but I’d rather not talk about them. More interestingly, I told Mrs. Biksin who runs a campus convenience store that I would come visit her next time I was there, so I made good on my promise and stopped in to greet her. I’m not sure why she likes Kyle and I so much, but she was so glad to see us! She asked us if we would go to a birthday party with her the next day, and I said as long as I could leave early enough to get back to Ife that would be fine. So on Sunday after eating some breakfast and watching more soccer, but in an air-conditioned, much less-crowded room I showed Kyle how to wash his clothes/sheets by hand and we went to the party with Mrs. Biksin. Unfortunately I think we had to leave before things really picked up, but her family was really nice to us and gave us some rice and juice to take with us back to school.

Today I was planning to start working with the Awise of Modakeke, the Babalawo who is going to be reciting the Ifa verses for me, but if I knew how to do Ifa divination myself I would have known it wasn’t going to happen! After my Yoruba class with professor Ajibade I went to the bank to try to set up my bank account, which meant going to the bank, getting passport photos taken and printed out, filling out 4 forms, and getting two people who also have accounts t the bank to fill out reference forms as well. Needless to say that took quite some time, and in between I met a really nice man from Cameroon, Dr Saah. Since I hadn’t practiced French in so long, I thought I would just take a few minutes to talk to him, but the five minutes turned into maybe an hour or hour and a half! When I finally did get back to the bank they said one of my references had the wrong kind of account, and since I didn’t feel like fighting or bribing I decided to come back later.

On the way out I ran into another pastor who stopped me and tried to convince me that I need to come to his church. This has happened just a few too many times for my liking since every other guy you meet is the pastor of some church somewhere, and they are incredibly persistent in recruiting you for one ministry or the other. I had asked Dr. Ajibad for directions to the Awise’s house, and he told me how I could take a bus to get close and that everyone there should know where he lives if I just ask or take an Okada (motorbike). I already knew how to take the bus, but when I got off and asked around, nobody seemed to know where it was, even after talking to him on the phone, so after spending a bit more money and time than I would have liked I just decided it wasn’t worth forcing it today. Fortunately for me, I have no set schedule so if things aren’t working, I have the luxury of adjusting my plans accordingly. I just wish my water supply was as flexible, I haven’t had running water for a few days and I just did laundry so I need a bit more water before I can take a shower and it’s raining now, so I’m going to go put a bucket out...

Return to the Source

After a brief spell in Lagos, I left with Uncle Seun, Aunty Bimbo, my cousin Gbebemi, and Kyle to go to Ibadan to take Kyle to the university there. As expected the Lagos-Ibadan “Expressway,” which should only take about an hour and a half to travel took about four or four and a half, which wasn’t too bad all things considered. Like many things in Nigeria I don’t think the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway has been seriously renovated or expanded since the 70s, and since the road conditions are so poor there are always accidents and a whole host of other impediments, but fortunately we made it to Ibadan without too much trouble.

When we got to Ibadan I greeted the family of Mama Ibeji, the lady who takes care of my grandparents’ old house on Agbeja street in Ibadan, and chopped (ate) quite a bit of her food. There is a new man working there that I had never met before, named Mr. Toyin who played some soccer with me and Kyle before we went to sleep. We got up fairly early the next day to go to the University of Ibadan so Kyle could get set up before starting work the next day (Monday). Before we left Idaban, we made the obligatory stop to Papa Odukoya’s house. Papa Odukoya was a very good friend of my grandfather, from the same village who ended up living just a few blocks away from my grandparents’ house on Agbeja Street. We like to call him our other grandfather because he was so close to my real one. This was the first time I had seen Mr. Odukoya since his wife passed away in June, and it was clear that it had affected him since they had been married for almost 56 years! Still he was very happy to see us, even though it was only briefly this time since we had to get to U.I. quickly.

U.I. looks like a great place! I was surprised how many hours of electricity they had, and Kyle’s room in the graduate dorms was really nice too. Uncle Seun had to take off after dropping us on campus so he could head up to Ilesa to move my cousin into school, so Kyle and I explored campus a little bit after we moved his things into his room. We took a taxi to the gate of the university (the universities here are almost like self-contained cities with enormous plots of land and practically everything you could need from restaurants, to banks, to barber shops), and then I picked out a driver who looked like an honest guy who could take us to a market so Kyle could pick our some things he would need. Walking around the market was a bit strange for me, because for the first time everyone wasn’t staring at me! I heard a little boy say, “Ejo, ri oyinbo!” which means, “come see the white person!” and to my surprise he wasn’t pointing at me, it was Kyle!

After getting what Kyle needed at the market, we came back to campus, ate some rice made by a lady with a shack by the gate, and then went to find a place to watch Super Sunday football since Liverpool was playing Manchester United at Old Trafford. We found a room with about 80 other guys packed in front of a TV run by a generator (no power), and sat on the windowsill to watch the match. Unfortunately Man U won, thanks to a hat-trick from Berbatov including a pretty spectacular bicycle kick, but Stevie G made the game really interesting by scoring a PK and a free-kick which both got everyone pretty animated. Afterward we found a little shop run by a woman from Abeokuta who immediately took a liking to us and said she’ll watch out for Kyle while he’s there. Then we went back to Kyle’s room and read a little and eventually fell asleep.

The next morning Uncle Seun came to pick me up and take me to Obafemi Awolowo University in Ife, the mythological birthplace of the Yoruba, and depending on who you ask mankind itself. I was going to be staying in the boy’s quarters (a smaller building for serving boys usually behind a full-size house) of Dr. Ogungbile who had been a DuBois Fellow at Harvard for a few years, but there were some problems with the electricity in his house, so for a few days I am going to be staying in the boy’s quarter’s at Dr. Ajibade’s house. Dr. Ajibade is a professor of African language, culture, and literature who helped me immensely with my thesis last year and has connected me with the first Babalawo with whom I’ll be working.

I met up with Dr. Ajibade at about 10 am, and dropped my things off in his boy’s quarters. It was great seeing him again, and the boy’s quarters are a lot nicer than I had expected! The room has a ceiling fan, power outlet a couple desks, and is about as big as a college dorm room! Dr. Ajibade told me he was going to try to change the toilet there because it is what he calls “colonial” (its just a squat toilet) and there’s an American lady who is coming to stay here in a month or so. Dr. Ajibade has three kids who have made me laugh a little bit because they all speak German at home. He studied in Germany for several years so his children are all fluent in German, but it looks really funny to me seeing Yoruba kids speaking German of all languages, but the world has become a pretty small place I guess.

Yesterday Dr. Ajibade went with me to see the Awise of Modakeke, whom I had interviewed for my thesis and will be helping me again with my project this time around. He told me he was excited about it and was looking forward to getting started in the next few days, which is great for me because he is very knowledgeable about everything pertaining to Ifa and well respected by all the other Babalawo so he can help me find other Babalawo as well. In case I haven’t already explained what a Babalawo is, they are the priests and diviners of the Yoruba god Orunmila or Ifa. They memorize and use all of the myths I hope to record in their divination process, and the oral corpus of these myths addresses every aspect of traditional Yoruba life.

After leaving the Awise a policeman pulled Dr. Ajibade over and asked for his “particulars...” Anyone who has been to Nigeria knows that means there really isn’t anything wrong, the policeman just wants to extort a bribe before he lets you go. Unfortunately for the policeman, Dr. Ajibade got really angry and refused to pay him a single kobo (the Nigerian equivalent of a cent, which is worth less than a hundredth of a penny). Unfortunately for us, the policeman was just as stubborn, so Dr. Ajibade called the Awise, and after the Awise came and talked to the guy for about 2 or 3 minutes he became much more reasonable and let us go.

After I got back I had a lunch that consisted entirely of puff-puff (my favorite food which is basically just dough deep fried in oil...)! The best part wasn't just that each piece was the size of a plum, it was that 6 pieces only cost me about 33 cents! That's all for now, but I'm hoping to start some Yoruba classes and go back to the Awise soon so I can start collecting some Ese Ifa (Ifa verses).

Odaabo (Yoruba for goodbye)