This collage shows Moyo Okediji in his physical positionings in relation to
his odu ifa visualizations.
Pictures from Moyo Okediji
Abstract
An examination of the controversies provoked by Moyo Okediji in the community of practitioners of Yoruba spiritualities, Isese, particularly in Nigeria, but also resonant in Isese communities outside Africa.
I present Okediji’s positions in terms of how they are seen by his critics, juxtaposing this with an account of his vision and history in relation to Yoruba culture and the significance for the development of the tradition of the debates he has inspired.
The Controversies Provoked by Moyo Okediji
Moyosore Okediji, better known as Moyo to many, has ignited fierce debates,
particularly in the Nigerian branch of Isese, the community of practitioners of
Yoruba spirituality and its associated arts, in its practice in Nigeria, its
origins, and its near global spread.
A good number of commentators wonder what gives Okediji the temerity to aspire to expand the odu ifa, the organizational structure of Ifa, the central, unifying Yoruba knowledge system, odu ifa being a magnificent mathematical structure that has endured unmodified for centuries.
How dare he assert he can improve on Ifa as created by Orunmila, believed to embody divine wisdom, understood to be present at the time of creation, in which role he was even consulted by Olodumare, the creator of the universe?
Who is Okediji to claim to be able to create new ese ifa, Ifa literature, a massive, largely oral corpus of unknown size, believed by one view to be composed by Orunmila, embodying events spanning a vast range of human history since the beginning of time?
How dare he analyze an ese ifa in the odu chapter called Ose Tura, which depicts Orunmila as having sex with the female orisha/goddess Oshun without her consent while she slept, leading to a fierce response from the goddess upon waking, a response from which Orunmila barely escaped with his life, Okediji urging that people examine Orunmila's actions in relation to contemporary understanding of rape?
As if such effrontery were not enough, these critics may be described as arguing, this iconoclast, a would be smasher of traditional pillars holding up the Isese community, dares to argue that women are not adequately empowered in Ifa, being restricted to honorific but ultimately carefully limited roles.
Is he not aware, they argue, that women are highly valued in Ifa, as demonstrated by various ese ifa, Ifa’s scriptural knowledge corpus, as well as the actual practice of Ifa as a social institution?
Further cementing what these critics see as the destructive intentions of Okediji is his argument that animal sacrifice is cruel, as he advocates against the killing of animals in Isese, in contradiction of the fact that animal sacrifice is integral to the tradition and is enshrined in its most authoritative scriptures, the ese ifa, which often prescribe animal sacrifice to address issues brought before the Ifa oracle, such sacrifices having a precise role in the cosmic economy of Isese, using the circulation of life force in various aspects of nature in modifying aspects of existence, as these arguments may be summed up.
Consolidating what his critics understand as Okediji’s ultimately anti-Isese stance is his description of what he describes as the use of animal sacrifices as a primary economic strategy as widespread among Isese priests, particularly a good number of babalawo, adepts in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa, priests capitalizing on the oral, unfixed character of Ifa divination to prescribe animal sacrifices the ultimate justification of which is the enlargement of the food store of the priest, provocative claims Okediji reinforces with eloquent pictures.
Most disturbing of all, his critics may be described as arguing, is his creation of something he calls Ifa Tuntun, New Ifa, a day old chicken, as it were, presuming to rework the biological processes through which living forms exist, Ifa being an expression of cosmic structure and dynamism, its form a distillation of cosmic wisdom by the ageless divine intelligence, Orunmila.
These initiatives have ignited Isese Facebook space because, for more than a decade, Okediji has built and sustained platforms promoting Isese as traditionally understood, his University of Ifa Facebook page and his Facebook wall, platforms escalating his new initiatives in terms of high penetrative power that has alarmed the Onisese, the members of the Isese community, particularly in Okediji's native Nigeria.
Okediji must have been corrupted by his long stay in the West, its being stated.
Westernocentric self hate must have inflicted him, looking down on his Yoruba culture from the Western citadels in which he has become culturally lost as a professor of art at the University of Texas, it is argued.
When did he start his Ifa investigations anyway, so much so that his head has become so swollen that he aspires to tear down the traditional knowledge architecture and replace it with his upstart thinking?
Can a person be more of a traitor to his own Yoruba and African culture than Moyo Okediji?
One view calls him demented, as some cast him in the most vile terms.
The possibility of an Islamic style fatwa being invoked on Okediji, as was done for Salman Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini, was averted only by inward self-search acknowledging that Yoruba culture is alien to violent defense of religion.
The Vision and History of Moyo Okediji
What is going on?
Okediji and his critics are operating on opposite ends of the same goal- the elevation of Yoruba culture.
I have been engaging with and studying Okediji for more than a decade. I have a blog and a website dedicated to his work from as far as 2009. I have written essays on his Ifa innovations from before his recent efforts. I therefore understand myself to be an Okediji scholar, a person studying his work.
I am also a scholar and practitioner of Yoruba knowledge systems, in general,
and Ifa, in particular, having published significantly in those fields, and
developed a number of novel initiatives in those bodies of knowledge, efforts facilitating
my contextualization of Okediji’s work.
I don’t represent Okediji and don’t seek his input in my interventions about him. He has been sufficiently a public figure since his prominence in the 80s and 90s as a notable artist in the second or third generation of Nigerian artists to make such consultation unnecessary in responding to his work.
As a scholar, I’m not bound to share his views about himself and his work. My loyalty is only to a critical relationship to knowledge as I understand it.
Its vital to place Okediji's Isese initiatives in perspective, so their significance to the history and possibly the development of the tradition can be more readily grasped.
I have fought severally with Okediji on Facebook and fallen out with him over the years. Some of those disagreements emerged from my views of him as overly Yorubacentric and inadequately critical at the time in his veneration of Ifa.
It would be hard to be more Yorubacentric and more Ifacentric than Moyo Okediji.
One way to do that is to be a gun carrying Yoruba nation agitator, which Okediji might not be able to do because he is likely to be a pacifist.
I see his Yorubacentric political views, evident in his response to the relatively recent struggle for the governorship of Lagos State and his comments on the ethnic centred stance of UK Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, as evidence of an overly Yorubacentric view of the world.
I once challenged his efforts at using geography in giving credence to a view of Ife, the Yoruba spiritual centre, as the centre of the world.
A debate in which I argued against what I described as exaggerated claims by him for the scientific significance of Ifa is archived under my name on the document platform Scribd.
The Self Recreation of Moyo Okediji from Yorubacentric Veneration to
Yorubacentric Celebration and Critique
So, what is happening with Moyo Okediji?
The man has matured beyond traditional understandings of Yoruba culture.
In the past, he was like the Nigerian/Yoruba writer Wole Soyinka, whose works are centred on a largely venerational approach to Yoruba culture.
He is now more like the Nigerian/Igbo writer Chinua Achebe, whose novels Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God and his great short story "The Madman" in Girls at war and Other Stories, derive their power significantly from both celebrating and critique classical Igbo civilization, the critique not being perhaps obvious to some beceause of the dazzling force of Achebe's narrative genius, and the ironic, subtle character of the critique, provoking questions of alternative ways of looking at the culture so powerfully portrayed.
Okediji’s current responses to Yoruba spirituality, in general, and to Ifa, in particular, emerges from a lifetime of studying Yoruba culture, particularly at the intersection of art and thought, for more than 50 years, having lived inside it in the first perhaps 40 years of his life, before emigrating to the United States, while continuing his study of the culture as central to his artistic and scholarly work.
He was perhaps born in and certainly matured in Ife, the Yoruba spiritual centre, as the son of a writer in Yoruba.
The Ife School of Yoruba Studies
Okediji did his BA at the then University of Ife, and taught there as an academic, all in the decades when scholars at that university, from Pierre Verger to Wande Abimbola to Akinsola Akiwowo, Barry Hallen, Olubunmi Sodipo, Rowland Abiodun, Babatunde Lawal and others, created what is now globally known as Yoruba Studies, taken forward into the present by other scions of that university, such as Toyin Falola and Akinwumi Ogundiran, and others influenced by the Unife initiatives, such as Henry Drewal and Margaret Thompson Drewal and others beyond the Unife radiation.
The Ife School of Yoruba Studies, as it may be called, is characterized by synergy between Western style scholarship and Yoruba knowledge systems and its traditional culture bearers, exemplified by Hallen and Sodipo's work with onisegun, herbalists in Yoruba culture, in their Knowledge, Belief and Witchcraft, a style of study particularly evident in Henry Drewal and Margaret Thompson Drewal's work with the babaláwo Kolawole Ositola in ''An Ifa Diviner's Shrine in Ijebuland'' and Margaret Drewal's Yoruba Ritual, an approach also evident in their other, ground breaking work, penetrating into the esoteric depths of Yoruba culture.
Okediji’s Achievements in Relation to Yoruba Culture and African Art
That is the tradition Okediji is coming from, which shaped his role in Ona, the
artistic movement centred on Yoruba culture, and his teaching at the then University
of Ife, influencing such a currently internationally prominent artist as Victor
Ekpuk, who, influenced by the stance of Okediji, Abiodun and others in the Fine
Arts department, urging students to explore traditional African cultures to
inspire their art, built on the Nsibidi witting system of his native Cross
River region in Nigeria, as Ekpuk testifies in ''My Sources'' ( The Glendora
Review).
In the history of Nigerian art, Okediji’s name is prominent. In the study of Yoruba thought and art and its influence in the diaspora, his name is strategic, as evidenced by his books and essays.
In terms of the visual exploration of Ifa symbolism, he is pre-eminent, as demonstrated by his reworkings of odu ifa in terms of varied visualities, from depicting its complete 256 graphic patterns to recreating them in terms of earth installations, evoking correlations between Ifa and Ile, Earth, as mother of all, as well as his multiple novel visualizations of the opon ifa, the Ifa divination platform and cosmological symbol.
The Significance of Moyo Okediji’s Recreative Initiatives in Relation to Yoruba Spiritualities and Knowledge Cultures
His creation of new ese ifa is the impulse of a person bringing his culture more firmly into the present, using it in examining contemporary issues, instead of limiting its literature to a timeless past.
His critiques of Isese, in general, and, Ifa in particular, address issues that are actually open secrets in the tradition, as diaspora Onisese have been crying out about them for a long time, decrying the way they are heavily billed for initiations and sacrifices and question patriarchal stances in some Ifa schools, such as blocks in some Ifa traditions of women from accessing its highest levels of initiation.
The animal sacrifice question is unavoidable, in the light of growing global ecological sensitivities and needs for more dynamic approaches to spirituality.
The critical stance Okediji is bringing to ese ifa is foreshadowed by such recent scholarly landmarks as Ogundiran’s The Yoruba: A New History and Falola’s Global Yoruba, which explore the social and ideological contexts motivating the creation of ese ifa and developments in Yoruba thought.
It is perhaps because the issues challenging Isese practices are more glaring in the diaspora that the outcry against Okediji’s critique may be seen as centred in Nigerian Onisese, who are perhaps more beholden to the traditional culture, while the general consensus among the traditionalists everywhere is against his positions.
Moving Forward in a Critical Unity
My summation- Onisese everywhere should engage Moyo Okediji attentively and critically.
No culture that remains static survives. Static spiritualities that survive sustain their staticness through violence, as dissenters are killed, attitudes depriving the tradition of fertilization by new ideas, leading to dehumanizations, cultures of violence, social stagnation and regression and an inhumane image of such a tradition, evident in today’s world.
Even those who want to continue with business as usual should engage with those who are suggesting new things so all parties may learn from each other.
This need to learn informs my ongoing book compilation of the debate ignited by Okediji, which can be feely accessed at academia.edu The pagination is changing as the compilation is continually updated.
Rethinking Orisha Spirituality and Allied Systems: From New Ese Ifa to Animal Sacrifice Debates and Beyond
Also published on
academia.edu
