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...