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  • 'Cultural Officer' at home and abroad:Oloye Adebayọ Ogunrinu Ogundijọ, 1939–2005
  • P. F. de Moraes Farias and Ọladẹjọ Okediji

Editor's note: This combined memoir by Paulo Farias and Oladẹjọ Okediji continues the journal's theme of local intellectuals in Africa. Bayọ straddled academic and popular fields. He was the author of several books, a research consultant and mediator, a practising diviner and university employee, a traditional innovator and local cosmopolitan. We are fortunate to be able to publish here the reflections of Mr Oladẹjọ Okediji, the celebrated Yoruba novelist and playwright, on Bayọ's life and death; the memoir as a whole is based on the long and close friendship of all three people.

On the Career of a Christian School Teacher Turned OriṢa Priest

P. F. de Moraes Farias

His friends addressed him as Oloye (Titleholder) and as Bayọ. He was deeply rooted in the world-views, folk classifications of living beings, healing practices and social mores of modern urban forms of Yoruba culture. These are of course widespread cultural forms, which constantly cut across the hypothetical divide between what counts as 'popular culture' and what is classified as 'elite culture' or 'academic culture' in contemporary Yorubaland. They, and the social-networking practices and hierarchical conventions accompanying them, largely shaped Bayọ's assumptions and attitudes throughout his life. At the same time, as his career demonstrates, he was a man of initiative and insight, quick to detect new paths and eager to take them.

For many years, at Obafẹmi Awolo.wo. University, Ile-If&1EB9;, he held the position of cultural officer in the Institute of Cultural Studies, where the 'academic' and 'popular', and the 'modern' and 'traditional' dimensions of Yoruba culture intersect. In Nigeria he published books in Yoruba and English, which are compromises between different [End Page 151] orders of conventions in the presentation of the material.1 Also, as a deservedly trusted transcriber and translator of recordings of oral performances and interviews, and more generally as a knowledgeable source of information and elucidation, he often mediated between academic researchers – both local and foreign – and Yoruba texts and traditional specialists. I think back, with nostalgia and gratitude, to the times when I first became indebted to him for that, in Nigeria and Britain. In England he taught a course in the Yoruba language at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham and, in cooperation with Karin Barber, put together the book Yoruba Popular Theatre, jointly published by them in America.2 In addition, both in Africa and abroad, he introduced to the cult of the Oriṣa a number of foreigners willing to explore new avenues of personal religious experience.

The responsibility for Bayọ's upbringing was distributed within his family in a way that distanced him from the Yoruba traditional religious practices of his parents, and led to his initiation into Christianity. He was a recipient, and later a conveyor, of Christian education (he attended teacher-training courses in 1961–2 and 1966–7). Then, in the fifth decade of his life, he decided to take a Diploma course in Yoruba Studies at the University of Lagos and eventually recreated himself as an Oriṣa priest. He changed his last name from 'Akanbi' to 'Ogundijọ'.3

This was in part a return to parental, and ancestral, practices remembered from earliest childhood. But it was also part of an intellectual quest belonging very much in the late twentieth century, which he pursued along the interfaces of university studies, traditional religious expertise, popular knowledge of Yoruba lore, and neo-traditionalist movements. These movements, often involving active and retired academic staff, and in competition with equally university-based evangelical Christian and Muslim initiatives, have striven to retrieve Yoruba traditional religion while redefining it as a universal religion.

Bayọ both apprenticed himself to traditionalists 'of the old school' and developed an interest in the new ideas behind the Yoruba Ifa Kabbalah Centre, established in 1997 by Dr Samuel Modupe.la Ọpẹọla, a retired senior lecturer who had taught in the Faculty of Education of Obafẹmi Awolọwọ University. (Bayọ became the Centre's first chairman.)4 One of the...

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