Odun Ifa: Ifa Festival, and: Insight and Artistry in African Divination (review)

These works represent two recent and exciting contributions to the field of African literature. Abosede Emanuel's Odun Ifa: Ifa Festival is a scholarly, informative, and unique African perspective on the richness of Ifa, a divination system of several West African peoples, especially the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria. Edited by John Pemberton III, Insight and Artistry in African Divination offers us a number of scholarly works on African divination throughout the regions of West and Central Africa.

As winner of the prestigious Noma award, Odun Ifa is a work of just fewer than seven hundred pages that discusses Ifa, its history, rites, and rituals, and provides an extensive sample of Ifa verses relating to the sixteen principal paired Odu of Ifa, Ifa divinatory poetry. Unlike many previous works on Ifa that have degenerated into endless lists of the same citations, quotations, and photographs, Odun Ifa provides us with a refreshingly new taste of African orality, divination, and ritual from an African perspective. It represents a number of new works coming out of Africa written by local African historians and culturalists—not academicians trained in Western universities. As an "insider," Emanuel provides us with a holistic view of Ifa that reflects the power of its historical myth, orality, and place in the Yoruba worldview.

The work is divided into ten parts: an historical introduction, a discussion of the state of ritual and ceremonies such as the Annual Festival, an extensive look at the Sixteen Principal Paired Odu of Ifa, the inaugural Odu, conjuration Odu, the casting of the kola-nuts, sacrificial rites, chants utilized after sacrifice, and divination itself. We see discussions of the origins of Ifa, its philosophical ideas, as well as a very extensive presentation of a large number of Ifa prayers, verses, and rites.

Odun Ifa: Ifa Festival has the virtue of being part of an insider literature that captures the self-understanding of traditions. It is part of a process in which an oral tradition becomes written but not in a canonical way. This process is not new to the study of religion. We have seen faiths such as Christianity and Islam change from oral traditions and teachings to an authoritative text written down by their respective followers. In this sense, Odun Ifa is a work that is likely to be consulted for years to come. It is a work that lies at the heart of the Yoruba identity. Instead of describing the phenomena of Ifa, Emanuel shows us Ifa by weaving together the complexities of Ifa proverbs, beliefs, and practice.

We must credit Emanuel for including both the relevant Ifa text alongside his English translation. This is crucial, since the Ifa text itself is part of the divine. In this traditional African religion, there is a kind of "reverse anthropomorphism." Key words and concepts that are associated with the gods are the product of the actual transformation of the gods into the words themselves. It is these subtleties of Emanuel's work that give it an awareness and understanding of the academic study of Ifa that few scholars have been able to achieve. Increasingly, I am confident that these emerging African contributions to African studies will become vital in developing future discourse representing African belief, practice, and traditions from African perspectives. Emanuel's Odun Ifa: Ifa Festival is an African work of exceptional excellence in the academic study of the Ifa tradition.

Edited by the doyen of Yoruba arts and religion in America today, Insight and Artistry in African Divination indicates a new body of work within African studies, currently undergoing a metamorphosis of conceptual paradigms, perspectives and methodologies from both African and non-African thematic links. I am reminded, for example, of...