Ethics That Matters: African, Caribbean, and African American Sources

Chapter 4: Religious Pluralism in Africa

51 Chapter 4 religious Pluralism in Africa Insights from Ifa Divination Poetry .Jacob K. Olupona. in thiS eSSay, i problematize the concept of religious pluralism in Africa as a trope for analyzing and interpreting sets of oral tradition called Ifa divination poetry. My objective is to examine Ifa divination poetry so as to uncover the way that this indigenous tradition understands religious pluralism. I argue that the oral narratives of Africa’s triple religious heritage present a religious universe in which Islam, Christianity, and indigenous religion share a common space that is the earmark of the complexity of interreligious relations in African society.Whereas we know a good deal about how Christianity and Islam relate to each other, we know very little about how indigenous religious traditions assess these two monotheistic traditions. Therefore, my ultimate goal and objective here is to illuminate how Ifa tradition engages an ethics of tolerance not only within the larger society and culture but also in relation to Islam and Christianity. I will disclose this ethics of tolerance through the commentary on Islam and Christianity that is expressed in Ifa divination poetry. This essay is based on almost two years of field research among the Yoruba of Western Nigeria, where I conducted extensive field work among Ifa diviners, several of whom have converted to either Islam or Christianity and some who retain their indigenous religious tradition. 52 Jacob K. Olupona What Is Ifa Divination? Ifa is a form of geomancy—a process of divination—and the name of a deity of divination; it is regarded as the highest religious tradition in Yoruba culture and society. The Ifa tradition of Nigeria also extends to the neighboring countries of Benin and Togo and the African Diaspora in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. Most practitioners are born into a lineage of diviners, but the practice can also be learned and transmitted from generation to generation.The divination process begins when a client consults a diviner on a particular problem or issue, such as a future marriage, to explain a bad dream, or to determine what the gods have in store for the client. While holding the divination chain, which consists of about sixteen cowries, the diviner recites a prayer formula appealing to the gods to provide an ultimate answer to the client’s question. The client takes a coin or a currency, whispers his or her problem to it, and places it on his or her forehead, joining the ori (inner head) and his or her destiny to determine the answer to the queries.The money is placed on the divination chain, and the diviner, reciting some prayerful incantations , begs Ifa to provide and reveal the true answers to the client. He throws the divination chain on the divination mat, and suddenly a form of message or text appears, which the diviner will then read or recite and interpret for the client. Because the divination chain is in binary form and contains sixteen cowries, in principle, it is capable of producing 256 different signatures and chapters of oral recitation. Each signature produces hundreds of verses of oral poetry.The poetry consists of narratives, myths, folklore, songs, prayers, and so forth that contain powerful images and metaphors of archetypal figures of past and great diviners who are seen as models of human character. The client believes that the message relayed is related to his or her problem because Ifa is the spokesperson for the gods, and it is through his divinatory process that the gods reveal themselves to humans. Through further divination, the diviner will pinpoint to the client the exact nature of his or her problem and prescribe the proper sacrifice. Because Ifa poetry, in principle, is the Yoruba encyclopedia of knowledge , it is assumed that the poems deal with all kinds of topics—that there is no topic that is not reflected in Ifa divination poetry. Since the religious Pluralism in Africa 53 end of the nineteenth century, scholars have begun to collect this poetry for the purpose of understanding not only the Yoruba religious universe and secular life but also for interpreting the messages that these texts carry. The poems are sources of epistemological, metaphysical, existential , and pragmatic events and meanings that pertain to the totality of Yoruba life; it is assumed there is no problem under the universe that is not addressed by Ifa. In the past two years, I have collected...