Ifa Historiography: Exemplified in Relation to Akinwumi Ogundiran and Olabiyi Babalola Yai
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Ifa Historiography
Exemplified in Relation to Akinwumi Ogundiran and Olabiyi Babalola Yai
On the Fall of the Oyo Empire, the Triumph of Ibadan and on Pitan
“Deriddling History”
Great Stories Powerfully Told
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
Abstract
This essay develops an approach to studying, interpreting and writing about history inspired by the Yoruba system of knowledge and divination, Ifa, exemplified in relation to the work of Akinwumi Ogundiran and Olabiyi Babalola Yai, whose works take forward Yoruba cognitive systems in dialogue with other bodies of thought.
Ifa historiography may be adapted in interpreting the narrative strategies of Akinwumi Ogundiran’s The Yoruba: A New History, and Olabiyi Yai’s “In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of "Tradition" and "Creativity" in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space’’ as well as Yai’s review of Henry John Drewal et al’s The Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought.
This historiographic vision may be described in the quotations from those texts under ''Rivers of Becoming''.
All the subheadings are mine, except ‘’House Breakers and House Savers’’ which comes from Ogundiran.
All suggestions on these efforts are welcome.
Contents
Part 1
Theory of Ifa Historiography
The Origin of this Essay
Ifa Historiography as a Confluence of Cognitive Strategies in the Study of History
Examples of Ifa Historiography
Rivers of Becoming
Tan and Pitan
Adaptations and Quotations from Yai
Adaptations and Quotations from from Yai and Ogundiran
Part 2
Demonstration of Ifa Historiography in History Writing
Turbulence, Courage and Destruction in the Fall of the Oyo Empire
The Political, Cultural and Social Implications of the Fall of the Òyó
Empire
The Historiographic Reckoning
House Breakers and House Savers
The Triumph of Ibadan
Part 1
Theory of Ifa Historiography
The Origin of this Essay
Is there such a phenomenon as Ifa historiography? Not as far as I know but it can be conjectured, even constructed, and exemplified as I try to do by correlating Olabiyi Yai’s and Akinwumi Ogundiran’s writing, in terms of theory, building primarily on Yai, and practice, represented by Ogundiran, selections unifying abstract ideational synthesis and poetically luminous and intellectually reflective narrative.
All I originally set out to do in composing this essay was to showcase Ogundiran’s splendidly written account of the fall of the Oyo empire and the triumph of Ibadan over the Fulani jihadists who had defeated Oyo, sharing the narrative force and reflective power of his writing as he sums up the implications of his vividly constructed historical scenarios.
As I did this, it gradually began to occur to me that Yai’s summation on the
understanding of life as a river in Yoruba thought was also deployed by
Ogundiran, and that Yai’s description of a Yoruba conception of history
represented by pitan are conjunctive with Ogundiran's historiographic method, even though Ogundiran does not
reference endogenous Yoruba philosophies of history, although these may be
inferred from his writing, as in the great section on the consolidation of
Yoruba cosmology at Ife at the hands of Ifa specialists, babalawo, adepts in
the esoteric knowledge of Ifa.
The interpretive elasticity of Ifa, central to Ogundiran’s analysis, began to dance before my eyes in the form of its yet unmeasured corpus of imaginative literature, an imaginative culture facilitating open-ended exploration of a limitless range of phenomena using the tools of imaginative recreation.
Ifa Historiography as a Confluence of Cognitive Strategies in the Study of History
Ifa historiography may be developed as an approach to the study of history at the intersection of factual narrative and imaginative recreation, storytelling and philosophical reflection, unifying history, literature, philosophy, spirituality and other disciplines.
It is inspired by the Yoruba Ifa system of knowledge and divination understood as an exploration of the tension between fate and free will, between self and circumstance, probing progression and possibilities across different horizons of time, through the use of imaginative narratives and poetry.
Its historiographic dimension emerges from the fact that Ifa transmutes history in terms of imaginative literature, using experience as a springboard for creating poetry and stories about what may not have been experienced, and employs these literary forms as a means of interpreting the significance of human history, a movement from history, to beyond history and back to history.
The movement from history to imaginative literature is justified by the
perception of reality as never fully transparent in its significance, with
imaginative recreation understood as vital to grasping its experienced and
yet to be encountered possibilities, in the spirit of the Yoruba expression,
''owe lesin oro, ti oro ba sonu, owe lafi wa'', ''imaginative expressions are
the steeds of discourse, used in seeking meaning when it is lost'', meaning
being understood as often lost to human awareness and needing the swift
velocities of the steeds of discourse to discover it, steeds which, in their
imaginative constructs, their expressive indirectness, correspond to the
complexity of meaning.
In this context, lived experience is seen as a network of interpretive
possibilities and of possibilities of action and of outcomes, both
anticipatable and unanticipatable, requiring depth of knowledge to fully
understand, an approach adapted to the study of history.
Existence may be perceived, in this framework, as a metaphysical narrative, a story being told by or through the convergence of factors shaping the universe, raising the question of who is telling the story, a single intelligence or the totality of intelligences constituting the cosmos, and the question of the validity of the idea of a storyteller before the emergence of humanity, and the role of imaginative expression in the telling of this story, as exemplified by Ogundiran's use of Yoruba proverbs in vivifying and interpreting his narrative.
These perspectives are inspired by Ogundiran's statement of purpose, which presents his goal of writing a history foregrounding the development of ideas in the development of Yoruba civilization, and by my understanding of his efforts, except for his use of Yoruba oral traditions and his use of the Yoruba conception of history as a river, as relying largely on Western historiography, conceptions of the nature and significance of history and how to write it, not surprising, since the idea of Yoruba philosophy of history in terms of theories of the nature of history and their relationship to ideas of how to examine and write history, though referenced by Ogundiran, might not have achieved the level of cohesion and development that would have enabled him employ them in dialogue with the Western hermeneutic techniques he employs. It is this cohesion and expansion I'm seeking through extant ideas and others that may be developed from Yoruba thought.
If Yoruba thought describes history as a river, what kind or kinds of river/s may be so understood? The river of experience, the river of becoming, the river of reflection on the dynamism of becoming, the river represented by the ''sea of stories'' of Ifa, (adapting a book title unrelated to Ifa or African thought by Pakistani-UK novelist Salman Rushdie ) Ifa stories which explore being and becoming, existence and change through imaginative narratives, the better to probe aspects of being beyond adequate appreciation in terms of the linearity of everyday discourse?
May this image of a river not be correlative with the network of resources Ogundiran deploys in examining this history through various lenses in order to arrive at a coherent narrative, itself one out of a potentially limitless number of ways of examining the same narrative?
In asking these questions, I am trying to work out how to integrate Ogundiran's efforts in terms of a historiography inspired by Yoruba thought in dialogue with other examples of classical and post-classical African thought and with cognitive possibilities beyond these.
Rivers of Becoming
Tan and Pitan
Adaptations and Quotations from Yai
Life is akin to a great river, a river of experience and reflection, a process of encounter and response by innumerable actors, human and non-human, a spectacle eluding comprehensive understanding, “Odo laye, Who can comprehend a river?’’
Making progress in understanding this river constitutes the process of itan, a multidirectional and multidisciplinary concept. The Yoruba verb tan (from which the noun itan is derived) means to irradiate, to illuminate, to enlighten, to relate, to investigate, to discern, to disentangle, to spread.
The verb tan and the derivative noun itan are polysemic, integrating at least three fundamental dimensions, the chronological dimension through which human generations and their beings, deeds, and values are related, the territorial or geographical dimension through which history is viewed as expansion of individuals, lineages and races beyond their original cradle, and the discursive and reflexive dimension of the concept.
Adaptations and Quotations from from Yai and Ogundiran
Tan is therefore to discourse profoundly on these dimensions. The noun itan when used for the reflexive dimension, always requires the active verb Pa. Pa itan (pitan in contracted form) is to "de-riddle" history, to shed light on human existence through time and space in the fullness of experience, encompassing history, geography, archeology, literature, sociology, philosophy, and aesthetics, among other disciplines, juxtaposing, blending, integrating, disaggregating, and aggregating different knowledge systems, each of these sources demonstrating different imports for various experiences of time, their assortment and varieties enabling rich cross-referencing, and their divergence from one another as informative as their convergence, thereby developing an eclectic approach necessary for the study of the historicity of experience, feeding creativity in interpreting the information derived from these multifaceted sources in which the imagination deployed is shaped by the kinds of questions one seeks to answer and the story one wants to tell.
History is more than the facticity of what happened, who did what, when, how it happened, and why it happened. It is also about what it meant to those who lived the experience and about its changing meanings across time, to the descendants of those who had the experience and others exploring those experiences.
Pitan is grounded in Yoruba verbal genres such as Ifa divination poetry, proverbs, myths, and praise poetry (oriki), complementing other expressive forms, dramatizing sensitivity to the idea that owe lesin oro, “imaginative expression is the steed of discourse’’, toro oba sonu, owe lafin wa, “the loss [or confusion] of discourse is rectified through the probing power of imaginative expression’’, in the spirit of the understanding that the gbenug-benu (mouthsmith, oral critic) is the necessary complement of the art of the gbenagbena (sculptor, carver, artist), the latter representing life as an artistic process, as is ritualized in the metacritical saying "Gbenagbena se tire tan, O ku ti gbe-nugbenu" (Here ends the work of the visual artist. Let the oral artist [critic] take over.’’
Part 2
Demonstration of Ifa Historiography in History Writing
Quotations from Ogundiran
Turbulence, Courage and Destruction in the Fall of the Oyo Empire
''Yoruba intellectuals describe their civilization as “the river that never rests.” They conceptualize the experience of time as a highly modulated continuous change that often shifts between swift-and slow-moving currents and that can be either deep and quiet or turbulent and overpowering.
By the end of the fourteenth century, there were signs that the discharge and velocity of the river of the Yorùbá community of practice were becoming slower and more unpredictable. Over the next 150 years, there were eruptions and other disturbances, metaphorically speaking, in the riverbeds and watersheds of the Yorùbá civilization that significantly changed the direction and currents of the region’s history.
These aquatic and geological analogies refer to the political, economic, and
security upheavals that destroyed several dynasties; led to the collapse,
displacement, and truncation of many polities between the early fifteenth and
the mid-sixteenth century. The crisis also forced the migration of individuals,
families, and households across the region. The river never ceased moving, but
the perturbations changed the course of Yorùbá history. The account of the
causes and sources of these problems is the focus of this chapter.
With the transition of Májotú, the events that led to the collapse of the metropolitan [Òyó] area accelerated. More provinces peeled away from the metropolis. The empire’s cloth was being removed layer by layer. The Ìlorin jihadists seized on this opportunity. Following their killing of Àfonjá, the jihadists (now led by the Fúlàní) installed an emir in Ìlorin.
About two years after Májotú’s death, they invaded Òyó-Ilé for the first time. They ransacked the capital, reportedly looted the palace of its valuables, and proclaimed the aláafin as a vassal of Ìlorin’s emir. The new aláafin who suffered this indignity was Olúewu, a son of Aólè.
Described as handsome and haughty, like his father, the new king vowed to revenge the humiliation. Destiny, heritage, and an uncertain future became his burden. Ikú yá j’e sín, “To die is better than living in disgrace,” is a popular Yorùbá refrain underpinning the spirit of honor and bravery.
He was the descendant of Obalókun and Àjàgbó, and son of Aólè, the monarch might have reminded himself. His fathers did not bow to anyone. Why should he? Rather than holing up in the capital, Olúewu decided to fight for the restoration of the dignity of the institution of aláafin and the survival of the empire.
Olúewu proved to be better than his father as a builder of a coalition. As his ancestors had done in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century when confronted by similar challenges, he appealed to his Ìbàrìbá neighbors for assistance. They, like the Nupe, were also facing the threat of the rising power of the Fúlàní jihadists within their territories.
In fact, the Ìbàrìbá were already feeling the brunt of the jihadists, who frequently raided these territories for captives. They feared that should the jihadists establish full suzerainty over Òyó-Ilé, they would be next in line for conquest. Again, as in the calculations that their forebears had made more than three hundred years earlier, many Ìbàrìbá chieftains considered it necessary to ally with Òyó in order to also save themselves.
At least four Ìbàrìbá kingdoms and principalities—Nikki, Bussa, Kaiama, and Wawa—responded to Olúewu’s appeal by sending strong military contingents to the war effort. Olúewu also rallied the support of several Òyó provinces and new Òyó towns that had emerged in the south—especially Ìbàdàn, Ìjàyè, and Àgó-Òjá.
In the final effort to remove the thorn of Ìlorin jihadists already buried deep in their flesh, the combined forces of Ìbàrìbá under Siru Kpera, the king of Nikki, and Òyó under Olúewu, marched in the dry season of 1837 against Ìlorin. Revealing the religious character of the war, Ìlorin was supported by soldiers from the Gwandu Emirate (the patron of Ìlorin) and fought under the banner of the Sokoto Caliphate.
The Ìbàrìbá proved to be a formidable ally, but Olúewu did not seem to have received the full support he desperately needed from many of the chieftains of the metropolis and provinces. Aso obá Omó yem Omó yeti rin ihoho wo ja: “It’s too late to clothe Omóye, she has already walked into the market naked.” The proverbial Omóye is the aláafin institution.
The rank and file of the leaders of Òyó provincial contingents that assembled for the decisive war were rife with deception, disunity, and disloyalty to Olúewu. Many of them were not fully committed to the cause. While the king was fighting to save the empire, some of his provincial governors were either fighting for their own independence from Òyó or wishing for the king to fail. As a result of a lack of collective will and unity rather than as a result of errors of combat strategy, the Òyó-Ìbàrìbá coalition lost the battle.
Thousands were killed, including Olúewu and his son. Siru Kpera, the potentate of Nikki, as well as the potentates of Wawa and Kaiama, also perished in the war. Dubbed the Eléduwe War, after the Òyó stock name for Ìbàrìbá potentates, this was the final and failed attempt to restore the lost glory of the empire. As the news of the fall of Olúewu reached Òyó-Ilé and its environs, the remaining residents quickly packed up and began to evacuate the capital and the surrounding towns and villages.
The Political, Cultural and Social Implications of the Fall of the Òyó Empire
And so the largest Yorùbá political experience in the early modern era came to an end. Òyó-Ilé and scores of other cities, towns, villages, kingdoms, and principalities in the northwest Yorùbá region have since lain in ruins. The alleys and avenues through which mounted men of chivalry once galloped and the old compounds of the elite and the underclass are now taken over by the thickets and thorns of woodland savanna and other wildlife who now call the place home. Today, the once colorful and boisterous Akèsán market is in utter silence, with the ageless boulders and some of the baobab trees being the only witnesses of the past transactions.
The evacuation of Òyó-Ilé marked the final phase of the Yorùbá demographic shift from the north to the south, savanna to the rain forest belt. Many of the evacuees headed west to the Sakí/Kìsì area, and others moved eastward, even to Ìlorin. But most traveled farther south. Some went to Àgó-Òá, where the capital of the New Òyó kingdom was being established by an Òyó prince, Àtìbà. Yet others moved to the war camps and towns that had emerged in the upper reaches of the rain forest, especially Ìjàyè, Ìlorà, and Ìbàdàn.
The evacuation of Òyó-Ilé and the collapse of the empire was the end of an era in the history of the Yorùbá world. The detailed story of what followed is outside the scope of this current study. It belongs to a different horizon of time. Understanding and making sense of the post-1840 Yorùbá history requires a different conceptual framework and a treatment as long as this book.
The Historiographic Reckoning
Nevertheless, the nineteenth century has enjoyed the most detailed attention in Yorùbá historiography. The historical events and dramatis personae that defined the collapse of the “house of cards” that merchant capital and hegemonic states had built are well known in the literature. The aftermath—wars, political reorganization, the transition to agricultural commodity export, religious change, and the advent of European colonial modernity—has also been well attended to in the historiography. A holistic cultural history of that era, however, is yet to be written. I will provide a summary of the aftermath of 1837 in order to bring this book to a close.
House Breakers and House Savers
With the defeat of Olúewu-led forces, the jihadists of Ìlorin and their allies were intoxicated by the fermented fruit of victory and were determined to take over the entire Yorùbá region. They, therefore, shifted their focus toward those new Òyó towns already planted in the upper reaches of the rain forest. Their goal was to “dip the Koran in the sea,” a metaphor for subjugating the Yorùbá world to the control of the Sokoto Caliphate via the emirate of Ìlorin.
For what this implied, no existential crisis that enormous had ever confronted the Yorùbá, not even the Nupe crisis of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Displaced and demoralized, most of the Yorùbá region, especially in the old territory of the Òyó Empire, was still licking its wounds.
The Triumph of Ibadan
The only Yorùbá polity brave enough to confront the jihadist threat was Ìbàdàn. It was a new kid on the block of regional politics, but it was a rising military power in the aftermath of the fall of Òyó Empire. While the Ìlorin army was advancing southward, Olúyolé, the second ruler of Ìbàdàn and a grandson of Aláàfin Abíódún, rallied to confront the enemy. He presided over the military plans to stop the advancing Ìlorin army. He mobilized other scattered Òyó elements to the cause of saving their ancestral land from what he rightfully considered a foreign invasion, although there were high-ranking Yorùbá soldiers in the Ìlorin contingent.
There was nothing in his favor to assure victory, but his foresight, audacity to act, and timely intervention paid off. Under the command and leadership of his war commander Balógun Odérìnlo, the advance of Ìlorin’s ambition was halted on the outskirts of Òsogbo in 1840. The Ìlorin army was thoroughly beaten. The victory put to rest the threat of the jihadist agenda in the Yorùbá world. With this, Olúyolé achieved what had eluded Olúewu and five other aláafin.
This military victory was the most consequential event in Yorùbá history during the nineteenth century. According to the patriarch of Yorùbá historiography, Samuel Johnson, the outcome of the war marked “a turning point in Yorùbá history. It saved the Yorùbá country . . . from total absorption by the Fulanis.” If not for Olúyolé and his military superstars, many beaded crown kings and potentates of Yorùbá kingdoms would have since been replaced by turban-wearing emirs.
Ìbàdàn’s victory over Ìlorin saved the House of Odùduwà (Ilé-Ifè), the House of Sàngó (Òyó), the House of Obòkun (Ilésà), the House of Òràngún (Ìlá), the House of Obánta (Ìjèbú-Òde), and others from becoming emirates. The victory was not only over Ìlorin. It was also a defeat of its patron, the Gwandu emirate, and of the Sokoto Caliphate as a whole.
Olúyolé must have felt a sense of pride and satisfaction that he had avenged the desecration of his ancestral home by preventing the Ìlorin jihadists from overrunning the Yorùbá region and dipping the Koran in the ocean.”