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!
