Commonalities and Disparities in the Iconography of Opón Ifá and Ìróké Ifá in Òyó, Sábe, and Ifè-Ana Yorùbá Communities

Scholars abound in the study of Ifá divination and its worship artifacts. The present study, however, focuses on the transfer of these artifacts from Òyó-Yòrùbá—their community of origin—to other parts of West Africa: Sábe-Yòrùbá in the Benin Republic and Ifè-Ana Yòrùbá in the Atakpame region of Togo (Fig. 1), especially the variations in iconography that have arisen over time. Ifá is a popular divination system in Yòrùbá communities, carried out by a babaláwo who throws sixteen palm-nuts (ikin Ifá), whose permutations result in any of the available 256 odù,¹ or divination poems, of Ifá. These poems or storylines will shed light and proffer a solution to the problem of the babaláwo's client. Among the Yòrùbá, Ifá divination is carried out for a wide range of reasons, from attempts to know the esèntáyé/àkosèjáyé (destinies) of newborn children to finding out the reasons for the untimely deaths of sovereigns and the likely outcome of certain journeys or, generally, to foretell the future or know the likely outcome of events. The popularity of Ifá divination indeed led, in 2005, to UNESCO proclaiming it an intangible cultural heritage of humanity and listing it on the organization's Representative List in 2008.² Traditional wooden artifacts of the Yòrùbá religion used in the worship and divination of Ifá include opón Ifá, ìróké Ifá, and agéré Ifá.

Opón Ifá and ìróké Ifá are selected in this study as cultural traits found in three Yòrùbá communities located in different geographical contexts. They were chosen with the aim of identifying shared commonalities and points of divergence in their iconography. Elsewhere, I established that some traditional Yòrùbá religious artifacts in wood have travelled from the west (Nigeria) to the east (Benin Republic, Togo), and even farther in West Africa (Akande 2015). I maintained that many of these artifacts have continued to maintain their archetypal model in their new environment. I further observed that these carved wooden paraphernalia (opón Ifá, ìróké Ifá, agéré Ifá, and Èsù, osé Sàngó, and Gèlèdé masks) are resilient because they have retained their iconographic features outside their original geographical locale, despite their displacement in time and space and the presence of extant autochthonous cultures of their new "worlds." Furthermore, they have metamorphosed into cultural icons in their own right. The present study is a continuation of this work, focusing on the iconographic similarities and disparities in Yòrùbá opón Ifá and ìróké Ifá in Òyó-Yòrùbá, Sábe-Yòrùbá in the Benin Republic, and Ifè-Yòrùbá in Togo.

The Yòrùbá, one of the major cultural groups in Nigeria, are found mostly in Lagos, Òyó, Kwara, Èkìtì, Kogí, Òsun, Òndó, and Ògùn states in the southwestern region of the country. The 2006 population and housing census (the last actual counting) records them as constituting about 23.8% of the total population of Nigeria (National Population Commission of Nigeria, 2017).³

In times past, the Yòrùbá built large, strong empires and kingdoms. These expanded beyond their immediate domain to distant lands. For various reasons, ranging from war to dispute to economic and social reasons, large groups of Yòrùbá people moved from the central group to form communities of their own; that is, many from the core Òyó-Yòrùbá in Nigeria travelled to other lands to form independent Yòrùbá communities (Ojo 2017), including the two communities in this study. At its establishment, the Sábe-Yòrùbá community was simply an extension of the Òyó-Yòrùbá community. Unfortunately, during the imperialist colonial rule of the British, these two Yorùbá communities were partitioned into different geographical countries for administrative and ownership reasons.

According to scholars, Sábe-Yòrùbá people dispersed mainly from...