Ifá: the Yoruba divination system and the wisdom of the babalawo
Ifá, the divination of the Yoruba: Orunmila, the babalawo, the opon tray, the 256 odù and the verses passed down by memory, recognised by UNESCO in 2008.
In West Africa, across south-western Nigeria, Benin and Togo, the Yoruba people developed one of the most complex divinatory systems in the world. It is called Ifá, and it is at once a technique of consultation, an immense corpus of oral texts and a form of religious wisdom. The anthropologists who studied it in the twentieth century, such as the American William Bascom in his 1969 book, described it as a true unwritten library, passed down for generations from master to pupil.
Orunmila and the babalawo
According to Yoruba tradition, Ifá is linked to Orunmila, the deity of wisdom and of knowledge of destiny, who is said to have been present at the moment when every human being chooses their fate before birth. The sacred city of Ile-Ife, regarded in Yoruba mythology as the place where the world began, holds a central place in these stories.
The specialists of Ifá are called babalawo, an expression usually translated as «father of secrets». Their training is long and demanding: it requires years of apprenticeship with a master, during which the pupil memorises an enormous number of verses and learns to interpret them. The babalawo is not merely a diviner but a guardian of the community's cultural memory.
The tools of consultation
Consultation takes place with tools charged with meaning. The best known is the opon Ifá, a wooden tray, often round, decorated with carvings and with the face of Eshu, the divine messenger who mediates between humans and gods. A powder called iyerosun is spread on the tray, and in it the babalawo traces signs. A carved tapper, the iroke, is used to call the attention of the deities.
To obtain the signs, sixteen consecrated palm nuts called ikin are used, or else a small chain called opele, to which eight seeds or half-shells are attached. Depending on how they fall, the seeds show their concave or convex side, and the result is recorded as a figure. It is a binary structure that some scholars have compared with Arabic geomancy, although the historical relationship remains debated.
The odù and the verses
The basic figures number sixteen, and combined in pairs they give two hundred and fifty-six odù, the signs of the system. Each odù is associated with a great number of verses, called ese Ifá, which tell myths and stories of deities, animals and ancestors. The babalawo recites the relevant verses and the person consulting recognises their own situation in them: interpretation arises from the dialogue between the story and the enquirer's life.
In 2005 UNESCO proclaimed the Ifá divination system a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, and in 2008 inscribed it on the Representative List. With the Atlantic slave trade, Yoruba traditions reached the Americas, where forms of Ifá have survived above all in Cuba and Brazil, adapting to new religious contexts.
Ifá shows that divination can also be a form of literature and moral education. Behind the palm nuts and the carved tray lies a heritage of stories that, verse after verse, has preserved for centuries the worldview of an entire people. To study it is to enter one of the great intellectual traditions of Africa.