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.