Ọdun Ṣango

Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve updated this page. Life has been a bit busy here, maybe a bit too much so as I was sick for a little while too. I’m perfectly fine, and I hadn’t gotten sick in over a year so it was bound to happen sooner or later. What took up so much time was the Sango festival, which is about a week and a half long, and at times it can run straight from one day into the next. Because I didn’t have much downtime and the electricity isn’t always reliable, it was a challenge being able to record and take pictures of it all, but the festival is really something, and I would highly encourage anyone in this part of Nigeria in October to come to Ede to see it.

The whole thing starts with a night vigil in the palace and a procession to the Osun River the next morning where they do several rituals for Sango and the whole town, and while that attracts a lot of people, I think the most popular part is what comes in the following days. Each day after that for almost a week a different Sango possession priest comes out into a big square by the palace does some dances, prays for the king and the town, and performs lots of “magic tricks” which is what really draws the big crowds. I say “magic tricks” because some of them are a bit like parlor tricks that a magician in the US would do, but then there are others that I’m pretty sure are only possible because the priests are supposed to be impervious to pain while possessed, and certain things are not supposed to be able to affect them!

One of my favorites was one priest/Sango who had a folded piece of paper, poured water into it, unfolded it entirely and showed everyone that it was dry! Then he folded it back up again, poured the water into his mouth from a height so we could see it, and then spat it out on the ground! Another trick one of them did was to give one of the chiefs a rope while his acolytes held both ends tightly, then he cut it in the middle, put the cut section in his mouth, chewed on it, and when he took it out of his mouth, the cut was gone and the rope was whole. These kinds of ones got paired with other more scary displays such as driving a metal rod through Sango’s tongue and/or lips and removing it without leaving a hole (probably the most common and well-known), literally eating flaming hot coals and breathing out the smoke, hammering nails into different parts of his head (usually under the eye and into the nostrils), or putting sizzling hot iron in his mouth! This happened in the afternoon everyday for almost a week, and each day the crowd got bigger and bigger, and harder and harder to keep under control. People, especially kids, went crazy for Sango’s magic, especially another common trick where he pulls out a box, shows that it is empty, then closes it, and when he opens it there are tons of pieces of candy that he throws to the crowd.

I have videos of almost all of the performances that I am likely to put online at some point when I get back so you can see them if you’d like, and because of all of the pictures and videos that I managed to take, I have a meeting with the head of the committee that plans the festival to help them promote the event for next year. Practically the whole committee is Muslim, interestingly enough, but they and the king have been very deliberate about wanting this festival to become a major cultural event in Yorubaland that attracts people from all over. While most people who were there weren’t traditionalists, I ran into several Muslims and Christians who said they wouldn’t go because it’s against their religion, but I heard that practically everyone was happy with all of the money that came into the city as a result of it!

After all of the Sango displays are done, there is a very curious ritual in which a man from a certain family (it has always been and will always be the same family) comes out and carries a special ritual fire in a calabash and has to carry it around the entire town for almost 24 hours before he can go back home. What makes it even more strange is that he initially comes out wearing several layers of fancy clothes, but when he begins going around town, he is almost completely naked! Once he is ready to go back home, several of the most prominent Egungun masquerades come out, but they can’t do so until this man (called Baba Agbajere) returns to his house. I think I have figured out the meaning behind all of these strange particularities, but you can read about it in my dissertation if you’d like!

The Egungun ancestral masquerades come out that following day and dance around that same square for quite some time, attracting huge crowds, and when the king comes out, the come to him in succession to pray for him, for the town, and to receive some gifts of money in return. Then they run all around town for a while before returning back to their houses. The noise from the drums and the crowd was almost overwhelming, and it is really fascinating to see all of the different masquerades and their unique attributes. If I have enough time, I am going to try to visit the houses that maintain each one to hear the story behind them and why them appear the way they do and behave the way they do since each one seems to have its own personality.

The next day, there is a really incredible program in the palace in which a different set of Egungun masquerades come and do a series of tricks and performances. They do things like turn their costumes inside out without revealing themselves underneath, changing into costumes that can grow up to 4-5 times the height of a person but also shrink to a third the size of a person, do impressive dances, and (the best part for me) was their acrobatic displays. There were some young kids in them who did a great job, and the most impressive guy had two others hold up a piece of cloth as high up as they could and he did a backflip over it! One of the guys in the masquerade also told stories and jokes while they were preparing for different acts, and he kept referring to a time when he went to American with the king, and he even mentioned going to Delaware, which surprised me! Later that evening there is one more Egungun called Ondoru who comes out, and I think it has to be the most interesting to me. This is because people get really excited when they see it, and yell “O ru ooooo!” and then it throws sticks at people! I have no idea why this happens (although I will definitely find out!), but people like getting close to it, and then run away when it starts winding up. Ondoru usually has several young men following him with bundles of these sticks, and I noticed several people get hit with them, sometimes in the head, and more than once Ondoru tossed them over his shoulder at the unsuspecting people behind him! Once they are on the ground though, everyone scrambles to get the sticks, and I managed to get one before leaving for the day. During this whole series of events during the festival, the king was very kind to me and let me get very close to him (which nobody but his servants, wives, and brother are usually allowed to do) so I could take pictures and so he could give me some information on all of the things that were going on. He even took some time after it was all over to talk to me 1 on 1!

Another interesting thing about the festival is that it takes place at the end of the rainy season, which means it usually rains heavily each and every evening. This, of course, is right when the Sango displays take place, but it never rained while they were happening. It would rain before and after, but never during. The chief Sango priest told me that it is because the first Sango worshippers did some kind of rituals when Ede was founded to prevent it from happening, and told me stories about how people were concerned about it raining, but as soon as they get started, it stops abruptly. On the day when Baba Agbajere came out and carried the fire all around town, it started raining heavily (despite the fact that they were burning some leaves that were meant to stop that kind of thing), but a young guy came out of nowhere with an egg that he threw up toward the sky. When it came down, it broke on the ground, and everyone said the rain would stop. Sure enough, 5 minutes later the rain had stopped even though there were lots of stormy clouds in the sky! I know the Araba knows several of these rain-stopping techniques, and I’m very curious about them because I know our family used to know things like that several generations back as well.

I have spent a lot of time with several pastors recently to hear a bit more of what it is like for them in Ede, and I’ve been getting a lot of information on the history of specific churches in town. They have all been very, very nice and helpful (like everyone else), and they also seem to love the king a lot. They have stressed that one of the most important things the churches have done in town is providing education and medical services to everyone, regardless of religion, and while it sometimes draws people into their churches, several have told me that they are less concerned about that than with helping people. One of them actually told me a very funny story about the way another pastor helped a woman who came to him to help her son pass an important exam. Many people treat pastors the same way the treat traditional priests or diviners who can provide spiritual services in the form of charms or certain rituals in addition to prayer to help people succeed in one thing or the other, and that’s what this woman was hoping to get from the pastor. This particular pastor doesn’t consider that to be the way his office should work, but he wanted to help her and came up with a brilliant strategy. He told her to go buy him 7 candles and come back 24 hours after dropping them off. When she came back, he told her that he had specially prepared them to make her son succeed in the exam, and all she had to do to unlock their power was to make her son sit down each night for 7 nights and study in front of the candle until it went out. Sure enough, her son did well on the test, and she began telling everyone how strong this pastor’s spiritual power was!

I’ve also enjoyed talking to some Ogun worshippers or hunters as they specialize in just this kind of spiritual power and have wild stories about things they have done or seen. One of them told me some crazy stories about people who have killed animals they weren’t supposed to and how the animals came back to life, walked out of their houses and went back to where they lived in the forest, and also clever ways they have come up with to try to make sure that people don’t abuse the impressive power they have. Still, people always seem to mess things up, so each successive generation seems to know and be able to do a bit less than the one that came before it since the old men don’t always trust the younger ones to use it appropriately. This is something I’ve heard and seen with the Araba as well, and while it’s a bit of a shame, it’s certainly not worse than the alternative.

In some of my other interviews, I’ve been surprised by how – despite the fact that there isn’t much overt religious conflict here – practically every instance of conversion, and especially inter-religious marriage, causes serious family drama. One person I talked to was disowned by his parents, one woman’s parents didn’t come to her wedding, and it’s clear that it has hurt all of them. At the same time, they all without fail pray that their own kids will marry only within their religion, so the same thing is likely to happen if their kids make the same decision. I can certainly understand both of those sentiments, and both pastors and alfa (muslim clerics) have cited marrying across religious lines as a serious issue, although they each chose to approach it differently. It’s a very touchy subject, but I’ve also met just a few people who marry across religious lines without any issue, but they tend to be older and say that they are very much in the minority these days.

One thing that has started happening to me while going around everywhere with Wale is that people just call me “wọli” (a Yoruba word for prophet) or pastor. I think part of it has to do with the fact that I just look so different, but one woman insisted that I was a prophet, even I after I politely tried to tell her that I’m not a prophet or even a clergyman. She just kept shaking her head, looking at Wale and saying, “Irọ, wọli ni. Wọli ni…” or “Nope, he’s a prophet, he’s a prophet.” Wale just laughs and laughs whenever it happens. A few days ago I went to the cafeteria here on campus, and I asked a really nice woman who works there how things were going. When she answered that she’s fine, just needs more money, I did what most people usually do and said a short prayer/wish for her that things would get better. Next thing I knew, another guy came up to me and said, “What about my prayer?” so I said one for him too, and then another guy ran up to me and asked for one for himself as well. After I finished, he said, “It’s pastor/prophet what?” and I again had to say that I’m just a regular guy, and he looked really confused. I snuck away as quickly as possible since I had work to do and didn’t want to start an all-night prayer meeting right there and then!

See Me See Trouble!

Sorry it has been so long since I updated this page… Things have been busy on many different fronts, and as the title suggests, I’ve seen lots of trouble, but fortunately very little that has affected me directly. I talk to my friend that Araba pretty regularly, and about 2 weeks ago or so he had his annual Ifa festival, which he has always wanted me to be able to see, but I’m always at school and unable to attend. This time around, I wasn’t too far away, and I’m very glad I got to go. He, too, was so happy that I was there, even though this year’s was very low-key. He didn’t want to celebrate too much because his younger brother had just died recently. He introduced me to a lot of younger babalawos (Ifa priests) that he has trained at one point or another, and I managed to make all of them laugh by reciting an Ifa verse with a slight modification to tease one of them who apparently pays more attention to women than he does his work.

Part of the trouble the Araba has been having is that the king in Modakeke (his town) has been picking fights with him about all kinds of things over the past few years and hasn’t been giving him the salary he is meant to collect for serving as the town’s chief Ifa priest. The Araba hasn’t retaliated, but most recently the king sent a bunch of police officers to tear down a sign on his property and mess with some of the construction he has been doing by his house. The Egungun people (Yoruba ancestral masquerades) in Modakeke gave him some trouble too, as has another family that – out of nowhere – started claiming that they did not sell a plot of land to him about 20 years ago. It got pretty bad at a certain point, but within the past few weeks, one of the chief Egungun guys got so sick he almost died, and one of the people from the family that wanted to take the Araba to court had a dream in which some spirits gave him poison to drink and he woke up deathly ill! Both of them came running to the Araba for forgiveness, which he said he was happy to give, but when I called him after this had all happened, he told me he was as shocked as they were because he hadn’t done anything. According to him, God didn’t like what they were doing, and the sickness was a warning to get them to behave appropriately. He might well be right, because the first thing they did was to right their wrongs!

Another set of issues arose with the Akoda, the main person I had been working with, and this made me decide to keep a more respectful distance (especially since I don’t need to work with him as much anymore). Although life is tough for everyone here, almost everyone I have worked with has been very happy with the money I have given them, and some have even offered to give some back. The Akoda however, always seems to want more, and more, which put me on my guard. I went with him and a large group of the traditionalists to what is called Isese Day, or the annual festival in Osun State for people who practice traditional religion. I had previously promised the Osun priestess that I would talk to her son about applying to schools outside of Nigeria, but she took me to the side to talk to him about it, the Akoda got really, really angry. She apologized to him and explained what we we talked about, but he refused to calm down. Since I am fairly familiar with Ifa by this point, there were a few things he has done that made me unsure about how truthful he is about everything, and the fact that he became so possessive of me made me uncomfortable. I haven’t been back to see him too much as a result, and I only plan on stopping by to say hello in the future. There are so many other people who have been very open and kind to me, and there always seems to be one kind of trouble or the other with him, and I’d rather avoid that.

I’ve spent much more time with the Sango devotees recently, in part because the person who takes care of the royal Sango (the deity of thunder and lightning) has amazing stories to tell (which I’ll save for the end because they are so good!), and also because they are gearing up for their massive 10-day festival next month. On the 7^th, they had a special meeting in the palace in which they performed Sango dances for the king and major chiefs, and went around to tell everyone that they would begin the festival in a month’s time. What I found most interesting is that they did this more than a month in advance! When I asked why, the Sango priest said it was because it happened to fall on the day of Ileya (‘eid al-Kabir) for Muslims, so the King and chiefs wouldn’t be able to take part in it. He and the king had worked together to find another time, and they both settled on that particular one. This is something I am going to ask the king about because I have noticed that this is a pattern of his. For at least two other festivals in recent times he has adjusted when they occurred to make sure that those who are Muslim can attend, and also that the traditionalists who are putting it on will have the benefit of a larger audience and people who will give them money for performing these services for the town. The king seems to be really good at this balancing act, because all parties involved seem to be happy with the way it has been working out.

Still, there has been a little bit of trouble… I learned about a particular Egungun masquerade that almost got into a bit of a fight with some kids from a Muslim school here, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time going to both sides and asking people what happened. Interestingly enough, both sides seem to think that they were the victims, but what everyone can agree on is that the masquerade was going down Islamic Street, where the school is located, and some of the young kids didn’t want to let it go by. Depending on who you ask it was either because the kids don’t approve of traditional masquerades, the masquerade people wanted to fight the Muslims to reclaim lost territory, or because the masquerade drummers mocked the head of the school with their song! Whatever the cause was, it took one of the senior teachers at the school to calm everyone down, as some people started throwing rocks, and he smoothed things over with the head Egungun chief afterward. What I found most interesting about this is that the people playing the drums, singing, inside the masquerade, and inside the school were all Muslim!

I met another very interesting guy here who in essence practices every religion he can get his hands on. When I went to go interview him, I had to wait at his house for a while because he was at the mosque praying, but when he showed us into his house, I saw quite literally every orisa that exists in Ede there! In fact, at the end of the interview, he put down is tasbih (Muslim prayer beads) and asked me to record him talking to his Osanyin (the deity of plants and medicine who actually speaks to his devotees in a high-pitched squeaky voice). If you ask me when I get back, I can play it for you so you can hear it. However, I have met other Osanyin people before, and I am pretty sure that very powerful ones cannot be recorded (I tried once and the audio file was completely useless!), so it made me think that this guy may have spread himself a little thinly between all of his different religious activities, but God only knows.

I have done several interviews with alfa (Muslim clerics) here over the past 2 weeks, and it has been very interesting hearing from them after hearing from so many traditionalists. Although none of them has fully approved of traditional religion, they have very sophisticated arguments for why religious tolerance is a necessity for Muslims, and every one of them has quoted the Qur’an or Hadith for me to those ends. It has also been funny hearing some of them code switch between Yoruba and Arabic at times, and one of them in particular loved to say “fahimtum?” after every sentence, which means “do you plural understand?” Yoruba people will recognize this as a literal translation of “so ti ye yin?” which is just a kind of filler phrase even if you are addressing one person. It caught me completely off-guard the first time he said it, and gave me a bit of a laugh once I realized what was going on. The alfa also thought the Ifa story about Ileya being a Sango festival was really funny and clearly taken from the Qur’an (and not the other way around), but strangely enough, the night after Ileya there was a massive thunderstorm. I couldn’t have made this up, and I need to ask the Sango people how they interpret it.

Ileya was a huge deal here with people coming back to Ede from as far away as Benin Republic, and there were rams tied up literally everywhere. On ‘Eid al-Kabir, Muslims usually sacrifice a ram to commemorate the time when Ibrahim/Abraham almost sacrificed his son (usually believed to be Ismail/Ishmael, but possibly Ishaq/Isaac) but was given a ram instead by God. Consequently, the price of rams and other animals jumped significantly, and every day there seemed to be more people riding okada/motorbikes with rams tied on the back. On the day itself I followed the king to the main prayer ground, and it was fun watching everyone come out to catch a glimpse of him as he passed by on his way to pray. It was even more crowded this time than it was for ‘Eid al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan, and we actually had to fight our way through just to let the king through to his spot right behind the Chief Imam. After the prayers, the town was pretty quiet as everyone went home, and people took a holiday for at least 2-3 days to be with their families. The market woman who sells me fabric even gave me a few pieces of ram’s meat as a gift, which I gladly accepted even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat it.

I know I said I would save the best for last, and here it is. Everybody commonly calls this Sango priest, Sango, but he told me that at a certain point, he stopped worshipping Sango, had gone to Qur’anic school and was a practicing Muslim. That all changed when one day he got possessed by Sango while praying in the mosque and fire started coming out of his mouth and burned the clothes of some of the people praying next to him (fire came out of his mouth because that is one of the things Sango is said to have done when he was alive)! There is a something very interesting going on between Sango and Islam that merits a closer examination, and I might look into that with him further down the line. Keeping with the theme of this post, although an incredibly friendly and simple man, Sango seems to have found himself in the middle of lots of trouble over the years, starting from the time when he decided to marry the daughter of the assistant chief imam of the town! That didn’t sit well with her family, and it took the intervention of the king along with the birth of a child to sort everything out, and somehow (I’m not entirely sure how) he managed to win them over. Now his wife worships Sango with him, and he is on very friendly terms with his in-laws despite the fact that they swore he could never marry their daughter!

Another time he got written up in a local newspaper because of a conflict with an alfa (the headline read “Alfa Fights Sango”), and after he showed me the cloth he used to worship Sango with a different alfa just the day before, he told me a wild story about the big Sango statue that is inside the palace. It is a massive statue (if I can upload it, one of Baba Sango’s kids is standing next to it in the picture), and apparently it used to be out in front of the central mosque. There is a light bulb inside Sango’s mouth to represent the fire he used to spit, and the electricity used to power it came from inside the mosque. Just to stir things up a bit, a local musician wrote a song in which he said “Bi mosalaasi Ẹdẹ ga to, Baba Olukoso lẹmọmu wọn/As grand as the central mosque of Ede is, Sango is their chief imam!” This of course didn’t go over well with the Muslims, and it caused a huge row in town. For a while certain areas were off-limits because it was so dangerous, and one of the leading Muslims begged the traditionalists to let him pay to have the statue moved into the palace. I had always thought that it seemed a bit strange to run a power line all the way out to where the statute currently is in the palace, and now every time I look at it, or the very beautiful central mosque, that song comes to mind, and I keep thinking “see me see trouble” or “there is so much trouble” in non-Nigerian/Yoruba English.

See Me See Trouble!

Sorry it has been so long since I updated this page… Things have been busy on many different fronts, and as the title suggests, I’ve seen lots of trouble, but fortunately very little that has affected me directly. I talk to my friend that Araba pretty regularly, and about 2 weeks ago or so he had his annual Ifa festival, which he has always wanted me to be able to see, but I’m always at school and unable to attend. This time around, I wasn’t too far away, and I’m very glad I got to go. He, too, was so happy that I was there, even though this year’s was very low-key. He didn’t want to celebrate too much because his younger brother had just died recently. He introduced me to a lot of younger babalawos (Ifa priests) that he has trained at one point or another, and I managed to make all of them laugh by reciting an Ifa verse with a slight modification to tease one of them who apparently pays more attention to women than he does his work.

Part of the trouble the Araba has been having is that the king in Modakeke (his town) has been picking fights with him about all kinds of things over the past few years and hasn’t been giving him the salary he is meant to collect for serving as the town’s chief Ifa priest. The Araba hasn’t retaliated, but most recently the king sent a bunch of police officers to tear down a sign on his property and mess with some of the construction he has been doing by his house. The Egungun people (Yoruba ancestral masquerades) in Modakeke gave him some trouble too, as has another family that – out of nowhere – started claiming that they did not sell a plot of land to him about 20 years ago. It got pretty bad at a certain point, but within the past few weeks, one of the chief Egungun guys got so sick he almost died, and one of the people from the family that wanted to take the Araba to court had a dream in which some spirits gave him poison to drink and he woke up deathly ill! Both of them came running to the Araba for forgiveness, which he said he was happy to give, but when I called him after this had all happened, he told me he was as shocked as they were because he hadn’t done anything. According to him, God didn’t like what they were doing, and the sickness was a warning to get them to behave appropriately. He might well be right, because the first thing they did was to right their wrongs!

Another set of issues arose with the Akoda, the main person I had been working with, and this made me decide to keep a more respectful distance (especially since I don’t need to work with him as much anymore). Although life is tough for everyone here, almost everyone I have worked with has been very happy with the money I have given them, and some have even offered to give some back. The Akoda however, always seems to want more, and more, which put me on my guard. I went with him and a large group of the traditionalists to what is called Isese Day, or the annual festival in Osun State for people who practice traditional religion. I had previously promised the Osun priestess that I would talk to her son about applying to schools outside of Nigeria, but she took me to the side to talk to him about it, the Akoda got really, really angry. She apologized to him and explained what we we talked about, but he refused to calm down. Since I am fairly familiar with Ifa by this point, there were a few things he has done that made me unsure about how truthful he is about everything, and the fact that he became so possessive of me made me uncomfortable. I haven’t been back to see him too much as a result, and I only plan on stopping by to say hello in the future. There are so many other people who have been very open and kind to me, and there always seems to be one kind of trouble or the other with him, and I’d rather avoid that.

I’ve spent much more time with the Sango devotees recently, in part because the person who takes care of the royal Sango (the deity of thunder and lightning) has amazing stories to tell (which I’ll save for the end because they are so good!), and also because they are gearing up for their massive 10-day festival next month. On the 7^th, they had a special meeting in the palace in which they performed Sango dances for the king and major chiefs, and went around to tell everyone that they would begin the festival in a month’s time. What I found most interesting is that they did this more than a month in advance! When I asked why, the Sango priest said it was because it happened to fall on the day of Ileya (‘eid al-Kabir) for Muslims, so the King and chiefs wouldn’t be able to take part in it. He and the king had worked together to find another time, and they both settled on that particular one. This is something I am going to ask the king about because I have noticed that this is a pattern of his. For at least two other festivals in recent times he has adjusted when they occurred to make sure that those who are Muslim can attend, and also that the traditionalists who are putting it on will have the benefit of a larger audience and people who will give them money for performing these services for the town. The king seems to be really good at this balancing act, because all parties involved seem to be happy with the way it has been working out.

Still, there has been a little bit of trouble… I learned about a particular Egungun masquerade that almost got into a bit of a fight with some kids from a Muslim school here, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time going to both sides and asking people what happened. Interestingly enough, both sides seem to think that they were the victims, but what everyone can agree on is that the masquerade was going down Islamic Street, where the school is located, and some of the young kids didn’t want to let it go by. Depending on who you ask it was either because the kids don’t approve of traditional masquerades, the masquerade people wanted to fight the Muslims to reclaim lost territory, or because the masquerade drummers mocked the head of the school with their song! Whatever the cause was, it took one of the senior teachers at the school to calm everyone down, as some people started throwing rocks, and he smoothed things over with the head Egungun chief afterward. What I found most interesting about this is that the people playing the drums, singing, inside the masquerade, and inside the school were all Muslim!

I met another very interesting guy here who in essence practices every religion he can get his hands on. When I went to go interview him, I had to wait at his house for a while because he was at the mosque praying, but when he showed us into his house, I saw quite literally every orisa that exists in Ede there! In fact, at the end of the interview, he put down is tasbih (Muslim prayer beads) and asked me to record him talking to his Osanyin (the deity of plants and medicine who actually speaks to his devotees in a high-pitched squeaky voice). If you ask me when I get back, I can play it for you so you can hear it. However, I have met other Osanyin people before, and I am pretty sure that very powerful ones cannot be recorded (I tried once and the audio file was completely useless!), so it made me think that this guy may have spread himself a little thinly between all of his different religious activities, but God only knows.

I have done several interviews with alfa (Muslim clerics) here over the past 2 weeks, and it has been very interesting hearing from them after hearing from so many traditionalists. Although none of them has fully approved of traditional religion, they have very sophisticated arguments for why religious tolerance is a necessity for Muslims, and every one of them has quoted the Qur’an or Hadith for me to those ends. It has also been funny hearing some of them code switch between Yoruba and Arabic at times, and one of them in particular loved to say “fahimtum?” after every sentence, which means “do you plural understand?” Yoruba people will recognize this as a literal translation of “so ti ye yin?” which is just a kind of filler phrase even if you are addressing one person. It caught me completely off-guard the first time he said it, and gave me a bit of a laugh once I realized what was going on. The alfa also thought the Ifa story about Ileya being a Sango festival was really funny and clearly taken from the Qur’an (and not the other way around), but strangely enough, the night after Ileya there was a massive thunderstorm. I couldn’t have made this up, and I need to ask the Sango people how they interpret it.

Ileya was a huge deal here with people coming back to Ede from as far away as Benin Republic, and there were rams tied up literally everywhere. On ‘Eid al-Kabir, Muslims usually sacrifice a ram to commemorate the time when Ibrahim/Abraham almost sacrificed his son (usually believed to be Ismail/Ishmael, but possibly Ishaq/Isaac) but was given a ram instead by God. Consequently, the price of rams and other animals jumped significantly, and every day there seemed to be more people riding okada/motorbikes with rams tied on the back. On the day itself I followed the king to the main prayer ground, and it was fun watching everyone come out to catch a glimpse of him as he passed by on his way to pray. It was even more crowded this time than it was for ‘Eid al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan, and we actually had to fight our way through just to let the king through to his spot right behind the Chief Imam. After the prayers, the town was pretty quiet as everyone went home, and people took a holiday for at least 2-3 days to be with their families. The market woman who sells me fabric even gave me a few pieces of ram’s meat as a gift, which I gladly accepted even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat it.

I know I said I would save the best for last, and here it is. Everybody commonly calls this Sango priest, Sango, but he told me that at a certain point, he stopped worshipping Sango, had gone to Qur’anic school and was a practicing Muslim. That all changed when one day he got possessed by Sango while praying in the mosque and fire started coming out of his mouth and burned the clothes of some of the people praying next to him (fire came out of his mouth because that is one of the things Sango is said to have done when he was alive)! There is a something very interesting going on between Sango and Islam that merits a closer examination, and I might look into that with him further down the line. Keeping with the theme of this post, although an incredibly friendly and simple man, Sango seems to have found himself in the middle of lots of trouble over the years, starting from the time when he decided to marry the daughter of the assistant chief imam of the town! That didn’t sit well with her family, and it took the intervention of the king along with the birth of a child to sort everything out, and somehow (I’m not entirely sure how) he managed to win them over. Now his wife worships Sango with him, and he is on very friendly terms with his in-laws despite the fact that they swore he could never marry their daughter!

Another time he got written up in a local newspaper because of a conflict with an alfa (the headline read “Alfa Fights Sango”), and after he showed me the cloth he used to worship Sango with a different alfa just the day before, he told me a wild story about the big Sango statue that is inside the palace. It is a massive statue (if I can upload it, one of Baba Sango’s kids is standing next to it in the picture), and apparently it used to be out in front of the central mosque. There is a light bulb inside Sango’s mouth to represent the fire he used to spit, and the electricity used to power it came from inside the mosque. Just to stir things up a bit, a local musician wrote a song in which he said “Bi mosalaasi Ẹdẹ ga to, Baba Olukoso lẹmọmu wọn/As grand as the central mosque of Ede is, Sango is their chief imam!” This of course didn’t go over well with the Muslims, and it caused a huge row in town. For a while certain areas were off-limits because it was so dangerous, and one of the leading Muslims begged the traditionalists to let him pay to have the statue moved into the palace. I had always thought that it seemed a bit strange to run a power line all the way out to where the statute currently is in the palace, and now every time I look at it, or the very beautiful central mosque, that song comes to mind, and I keep thinking “see me see trouble” or “there is so much trouble” in non-Nigerian/Yoruba English.

Nigeria ti baje... But Ifa Will Mend Our Broken World!

I’m usually not a very pessimistic person, but something I kept hearing over the past two weeks (and which I completely understand) is “Nigeria ti ba je” or “O ti da ru,” which roughly translated means, Nigeria has become rotten or is ruined. One day I went to Ife and Wale and I were getting ready to jump-start his car the way we usually have to do when he noticed that the lock on his door was broken. After taking a quick look we realized that someone had broken into his car, stolen the battery from under the hood, taken his speaker out of the trunk, and tried to take his sound system too. The Araba got sick a little over a week ago because he had been working too hard getting ready for his annual Ifa festival and couldn’t find enough money (I found out that he was trying to grow his own food to feed his family), the car I took yesterday from Ibadan to Ẹdẹ died after a few minutes, and we had to push it to a gas station because the driver didn’t have enough money to buy gas before we paid for the trip, and just about everyone I know has asked me for money (just today a woman in one of the markets in Ẹdẹ called me over out of the blue to buy something/anything from her).

Prof. Olupona, my advisor at Harvard and a sort of second father to me, was gave a lecture on religion, citizenship, and ethnicity in Nigeria at this years meeting of  the Nigerian Academy of Letters at the University of Lagos, and we were all (even the Nigerian-based professors) a bit shocked and disappointed by how degraded the facilities at the UniLag were and how poor the service at its guesthouse was. My father studied and then taught Chemical Engineering there a long time ago, and I remember growing up with stories about how great the place used to be. Despite all of that, the past few weeks have been very interesting for me, and I’m very grateful that I am here to research a topic that still makes this part of the world fairly unique and is encouraging even when so many other aspects of life here are pretty dire.

One such encouraging event happened when I was conducting an interview with the high priestess of Osun (the Yoruba deity of fertility and wealth whose festival is coming up very soon!). She had made some kind of medicine for a young woman who came in partway through our discussion, and although she only produced a fraction of the money she was supposed to pay the priestess, she let the young girl take it anyway and just said to bring the rest of the money whenever she could. Shortly after that happened, the Osun priestess told me that she used to be a Muslim for quite a while, and then she completely blew me away by quoting the Bible in Yoruba as a response to one of my questions! She even tried to refuse the money I offered her after the interview, but especially since I just saw that she hadn’t been paid for some fairly extensive work, I insisted that she take it. This priestess is a really wonderful woman, and I think I may write about her and her family as a prime example of the traditional Yoruba approach to religion. My dissertation will have a more complete account of her, but her father was a babalawo, her mother an Osun priestess, she married a Muslim and tried practicing Islam for quite some time, eventually became and Osun priestess herself, and has children who are Muslim, Christian, and devotees of various orisa. Beyond just being a lovely person, she’s really sharp and incredibly well-versed in religion – and not just her own!

I haven’t observed any new festivals (although Osun’s is coming up very soon), but I managed to conduct several follow-up interviews here in Ẹdẹ. One of my most significant findings was that in my interviews with the chief priest of Ogun and Egungun, both of them told me that they were also Muslim, and while the Egungun chief said all of the members of the Egungun cult here are Muslim, the Ogun cult contains both Musims and Christians in its membership. I had already suspected this might be the case, but what was most interesting is actually the way for which it was mentioned as an afterthought by both men, especially in light of the fact that some Muslim clerics had assured me that orisa devotees would not be at the ‘Eid celebration (although they apparently were quite numerous…)

I also spent more time with the Akoda and learned some really fascinating information from him. He recounted an indigenized version of how the Prophet Muhammad’s favorite daughter Fatimah was born and how she came to get her name - Ifa tu imọ (ọta) – for those who understand Yoruba, and he gave me some more deep insight on some of the rituals performed during the Ifa festival. For example, I noticed that nobody got up to dance around the lamp after a certain part of the Ifa corpus had been recited, and I asked him why. He smiled and said it was good that I had noticed that because that part of Ifa deals with death and was ceded tothe deceased kings of Ede so they could come up out of the ground and dance around the flames just like the living had been doing. When taken with all of my other notes on the rituals and significance of this festival, this had an incredible amount of meaning, and it made me think that a whole book could be written on just this one night. I’m glad there is a sizable (if still relatively small) number of young people very actively involved in Ifa here because it would be such a shame for any of this to disappear.

I also accompanied the Akoda to the babalawo’s Ile Ijọsin (or church/house of worship), and I found that to be very fascinating. This is because it was a sort of service for Ifa devotees, but in form it had a liturgy almost identical to that of some of what we call the “mainline” or “orthodox” churches in Nigeria (namely the Anglican, Methodist, and Baptist churches). Having spent so much time in Anglican services, I felt strangely at home standing up, sitting down, and listening to announcements and scriptural readings at certain times. I’ve gone twice now, and this is another fascinating phenomenon I’m going to pay close attention to in my section on Ifa!

While I spent some time in Ifa’s church on Saturdays, I’ve been spending my Sunday mornings in Christian churches (although I don’t think I’ve ever had to specify a church as Christian before…). I’ve been going to a very early morning service at First Baptist Church which was the first church created in Ẹdẹ (in 1900), and I’ve met two of the pastors who are both very nice people. The first one is a fascinating guy who actually wrote a fiction book about Harvard, which I will have to read, and the senior pastor just got appointed  two weeks ago. I’m looking forward to learning more about this history of the church and what they think its place is in such a heavily Muslim town. I also visited the main Christ Apostolic Church here (CAC is what academics call an African Indigenous/Independent/Initiated Church and what we commonly call an “Aladura” or prayer church). It is of a distinctly different flavor to that of the Baptist church, but attracts a lot of members as well. I got to meet the pastor briefly, but he had to run off somewhere after service so I will have to come back another time to talk with him some more.

This past week was mostly spent on non-research activities. Prof Olupona told me about a conference on Global African Indigenous Religions being held at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife (where I have done research in the past and lived when I was studying with the Araba), and since the conference was being convened by our good friend and former student of Prof. Olupona, Prof. Ogungbile, I quickly put together a presentation and went! It was a lot of fun being back in Ife, seeing most of the professors I knew from before, and meeting several new ones. One professor, Ivor Miller, wrote a well-known book on Ifa with former OAU Vice-Chancellor and incredibly famous babalawo ‘Wande Abimbola, and it was great getting to meet him, talk about Ifa, Afro-Caribbean religion, and I even got to give him an iroke or Ifa divination tapper.

For my presentation on the deep importance and function of the palm tree in Ifa divination and traditional Yoruba life (tip of the hat to Prof. Kimberley Patton and her great course on trees in comparative religion), I used a beautiful new Ifa divining board (ọpọn Ifa) that a carver Damini and I know very well just made for me. The carver is in Ife, and he finished carving our name on the board just before I had to give my presentation. He did such a good job on it that Prof. Miller and a really nice senior chief from a Yoruba town in the Republic of Benin both asked if they could get one. I called the carver, had him bring several over, and bought a board for the chief from Benin since he loved them so much. He was so happy that I was Yoruba, knew about Ifa, and could speak Yoruba and French to him that he insisted we take a picture with his new divining board. He was a very impressive man who delivered an opening speech at the conference on the history and importance of indigenous religion. Apart from having a great grasp of the topic as well as a keen perspective on its trajectory and current state, he also delivered his remarks first in Yoruba and then in French, which elicited applause from everyone there (I clapped for Prof. Mugane who surely would have approved as well).

After the first few days of the conference, Prof. Afe Adogame (another one of Prof. Olupona’s former students and graduate of OAU) was kind enough to give me a ride to the university of Ibadan and then to the university of Lagos for Prof. Olupona’s lecture. When we got to the University of Ibadan, I spent the night with the Adewales, the family that hosted both me and Makinde when we were there (although at different times), and it was great to see them. The most exciting part was seeing their new baby daughter, whom they named Ayomide, and whom I had wanted to see for a long time. We had a great time catching up, and they really want to take me to the festival of the Ogiyan (king of Ejigbo) because Mr. Adewale’s father (whom I met in 2013) is now one of the most senior and well-respected chiefs in the town and they get royal treatment there. As long as I don’t have to be in Ẹdẹ for anything else, it sounds like it would be a lot of fun, especially since Ejigbo is so close to Ẹdẹ.

Despite all of the issues I’ve witnessed over the past few weeks (like my bus to Ife breaking down the morning when I was scheduled to give my presentation or not having runningwater for so long I almost ran out of clean clothes!), it was great to see Profs. Olupona, Adogame, Ogungbile, and Adesina (from the University of Ibadan who has also spent some time at Harvard) again, and meeting some of the Fellows of the Nigerian Academy of Letters like the famous Prof. Emeritus Ayo Bamgbose was a real honor and a great reminder that somehow despite all of the wahala (Nigerian word for trouble/nonsense) that exists in Nigeria, it has produced and still is producing some really wonderful people and academics. I’m looking forward to working with some more of them here in Ẹdẹ in the coming weeks and maybe meeting some as the students are going to start their semester here at Redeemer’s University this coming week!