By Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún

.

“Il suono di pan” (2017)

.

I am Yorùbá by birth and by blood, a privilege that has sat me in good stead, professionally and personally, through a wide network of associations, resources, legacies and traditions. From great award-winning novels (many in translation) to great art works curated in museums all over the world, there are many valuable responses that attend my questing glances around the world for validation and direction. In today’s world, to be Yorùbá is to embody all that is complex and dynamic in a culture and civilization that predates even the birth of Christ.

But due to centuries of colonial contact, my identity today is a complex one. I say complex, because saying “incomplete” would carry too much of a burden of judgment. My identity is complex because were we to return to early Yorùbá societies of 4th Century BC in Ifẹ̀, what I am would embody not just the language I speak, my racial composition, the clothes I wear, the scarifications on my face and my role in society, but also my religion, yet untouched by the crusading powers of Christianity that would come centuries later. 

In that 4th Century BC in Ifẹ̀, I would either be a citizen, with roles and responsibilities, or a member of the priesthood – which isn’t the same as the Christian one, but which carries similar significance to the proper ordering of society, or a royal. An important group of citizens, a hybrid between genuine plebeians and important religious personas, are the sculptors. The working class men — it was a more gendered time — whose role was to continue the tradition of preserving and interpreting the culture through the moulding of bronze heads. (A similar tradition would take root decades later in Benin — 270km SE of Ifẹ̀ — with more bronze heads of different shapes and styles moulded in the same lost-wax tradition not before conceived in the capitals of Europe). 

Because of the hard work of thorough artistry sustained through both civic and religious significance by the practitioners of those times, a record of who the Yorùbá were, what they did, and how long they have been around, was set. This would be helpful in 1938 when Leo Frobenius and his crew came across them at the Wunmonije Compound in Ifẹ̀, buried deep into the soil. So stunned were the European archeologists at the sophistication of the art works (they “compared them to the highest achievements of ancient Roman or Greek art” – source: Wikipedia) that they began to doubt that they could have been created by Africans. They must have been imported from Greece or Rome, they suggested, full of hubris.

In today’s Yorùbáland, I am still a citizen with roles and responsibilities. But I have embodied a new role, that of a citizen of a larger entity called Nigeria, brought into being in 1914 through colonial force, and before that by other forces of globalization, including the transatlantic slave trade and Christianity. (I’ll speak more on that in a second). The internet is a latter-day version of that movement, arriving in time to complete the cycle of connecting what is an individual culture and worldview to a supposedly larger one. In submitting myself to the forces of this expansion of our social and religious space, I also surrender to a new way of thinking. Christianity, in the intervening period, has taken over the world, through the invading forces of colonialism and slave trade. Our religious and cultural autonomy was destroyed and replaced with what is said to be superior and benign.

A friend of mine once visited Brazil and met with a number of caucasian residents of Bahia. In approaching him, because of his mode of dressing, they were curious about his origin. When he told them that he was Yorùbá, they were very excited, and they told him that they, too, were Yorùbá. Never before been exposed to this kind of unfamiliar acculturation, he became disoriented. How, his face wondered, could people of this skin tone and racial make-up be Yorùbá? Then, after recovering himself in a few seconds, he began to speak to them in the language. And to his consternation, they could neither speak nor respond. “But you said you were Yorùbá” he wondered. “Yes,” they responded. “We belong to the Yorùbá religion. We do not speak the language!” That cleared it up, and he learnt something new. Belonging to a religion is not always the same as belonging to the culture.

The Yorùbá religion, consisting of hundreds of Òrìṣà in a dynamic network, centers around Olódùmarè as the supreme being. And through Ifá divination, and its founding father of wisdom—Ọ̀rúnmìlà—the will of the divine one is made known to the people. Ifá as a symbol of divination has been the bedrock of Yorùbá belief system since its recorded history. Along with a corpus of stories, admonitions, aphorisms, songs and chants, that body of knowledge is one through which Ifá priests and priestesses predict the future and understand the past, and one with which the inidividual Yorùbá citizen understands his/her place in the cosmos. So when, in the 16th century, the transatlantic slave trade began, and citizens from inside Yorùbá country were stolen and sold off into the new world, the only valuable resource not capable of being destroyed by the invading slavers and their accomplices across the ocean was the knowledge of these old systems of religious knowledge. Though their bodies were broken down by hard labour, dehumanization, mutilation, separation and other forms of indignity, they held onto these songs and religious rituals and passed them to their children, sometimes in secret.

It is unclear why the religion did not survive in a stronger form in the United States as it did south of the Rio Grande. But we know that in Latin America, particularly in Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad, and Jamaica, variations of the indigenous African religious practices, particularly from the Yorùbá country survived, sometimes in isolation but mostly in syncretism and other forms of mutation, so that today, there are racially and culturally different people who are nevertheless religiously Yorùbá. Their worldview may be Western, as is their racial composition and language, but their soul and heart are Yorùbá, or aspires to be. This is in a sharp contrast with the homeland where many Yorùbá citizens today are Christian or Moslem (converted through a later trans-Saharan slave trade that came through the north), but Yorùbá only in cultural and linguistic heritage, that is, possessing everything but the third leg of the tripod of identity.

It is tempting, then, to assume that the spiritual identity of the Yorùbá has undergone a weakening since the dawn of European civilization. This would have been true only without the knowledge of the depth of hold that the religion has had around the new world, and among those at home who have retained the independent cultural, spiritual, and mental identity away from what the imported religions recommended. In any case, the “suspension” of this leg in Nigeria and much of Africa, deplorable as it is, has only deepened the support for the religion among those to whom that is all that is left after centuries of plundering. And so there is the silver lining. Over the last couple of decades, practitioners of Lukumi (a religious variation of the Yorùbá Òrìṣà religion, which uses Ifá as its divinatory centre, and modified Yorùbá incantations and songs for liturgy) have made pilgrimages to Nigeria and connected the relevant dots of their religious ancestry. And through a fertile continuation of that relationship, the practice of Ifá and Òrìṣà worship has resumed around the country. A number have also started taking to learning the Yorùbá language as well, as something to add to what they already have in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. And while the Yorùbá in the home country have also shown a lukewarm attitude to the language, the diaspora comes in to save it through a warm embrace.

In 2008, Ifá became classified as an “Intangible Cultural Heritage” by UNESCO. There is a sort of delightful ending in the fact that Ifá had to travel all the way across the world in a slave ship before returning home to rescue its people at home. But maybe that was necessary, especially in its now inevitable expansion across all hitherto forbidden spaces. 

_________

(first published, in a slightly different version, in English and Italian; in Il Suono di Pan, an anthology edited by Prof. MM Tosolini and launched at Cividale del Friuli, near Udine in Italy. November 2017)

_________

For Further reading