Unraveling the City of Riddles

from www.tribune.com.ng

(A Review of City of 201 Gods: Ile-Ife in Time, Space, and the Imagination by Professor Jacob Kehinde Olupona. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2011, at the Public Presentation, NIIA, Lagos, 13 December, 2012.)

It is not every time that a book comes along to challenge the assumptions that undergird the fundaments of being and their relationship with the sacred and the profane in both temporal and spatial contexts, particularly in Africa. It is rarer still to find such a book which takes religion and religious culture within the context of a sacred city as its departure point in explicating a multiplicity of theological as well as
existential concerns involving cultural identity, ritual, historical myth and memory in Africa. If such a book goes further to use the time-space dimensions of a sacred city to conflate, and yet, detach the sacred and the secular in interrogating various areas of scholarship about Africa such as postcolonialism, cultural studies, the theory of knowledge, and hermeneutics, and in reinterpreting indigenous ideas and practices and the lifeworld of one of the most studied ethno-linguistic groups in Africa, the Yoruba, as this book does, then definitely, we have a supreme intellectual and cultural achievement in City of 201 Gods: Ile-Ife in Time, Space, and the Imagination.

Many academic books are unreadable, if not even unfathomable, by the lay public. This book, despite its intellectual acuity, deep insights and uncommon embrace of fundamental riddles and cultural paradoxes (which the Yoruba, in a sense, call aditu), is not only readable for the general public, it is also compelling in its vibrant prose and, in some sections, translatable oral lyricism. Both in its many (translated) proverbs and ancient cosmological wisdom, complete with their lyrical essence, and in its complex yet simple affection for the fluency of cultural thoughts combined with their systematic organization of the practices of the divine and the historically-defined, The City of 201 Gods is a compelling book for anyone who seeks to understand the centrality of religion in the making of the African lifeworld, particularly the location of the Yoruba in that world.

My review will be divided into four parts in illuminating the significance of this encyclopedic book which is also so skillfully written in scholarly yet markedly flowing prose. The first question I will attempt to answer is: What is this book about?

The City of 201 Gods examines Ile-Ife as the centre and the connective source to the ancient Yoruba religion devoted to orisa, the Yoruba gods, through diverse dimensions, including orality, divination, festivals, and the socio-political identity which all form parts of the Yoruba worldview, thought system and society. Using interdisciplinary perspectives from religious studies, cultural studies, anthropology, history, political sociology and the theory of knowledge, the author analyzes the history and religious culture of the Yoruba, one of the three largest ethno-linguistic groups in Africa, through the Ile-Ife sacred cosmos. Borrowing from, but going beyond, Western epistemological traditions manifested in a limited conception of rationality, the book analyzes the ontological, epistemological, historical, theological and socio-cultural implications of the centrality of Ile-Ife, and moves from that to give a concrete intellectual validation, based on evidence and interpretive elucidation, of how and why Ile-Ife constitutes the foundation of knowledge and the place of ancient enlightenment concerning the Yoruba world. (Ni’bi ojumo tii mon wa’ye). Capturing the city, Ile-Ife, as the spiritual, cultural and historical centre of the Yoruba, Professor Olupona, illuminates how the Yoruba approach the world - including among their dispersed descendants in the Diaspora, in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and the United States. As the author writes, this book, “is part of a scholarly effort to preserve for posterity the values, teachings, and practices, of [orisa religion] and its way of life as expressed in Ile-Ife traditions” and “part of an effort to write down an ancient oral tradition fundamental to African values and ethics before these traditions are lost forever” (p. 5). The author, does more than that, he also brings orisa religion into both old and contemporary conversation with Yoruba Protestant Christianity and old and new Yoruba and transnational Evangelical Pentecostalism and old and contemporary Yoruba Islam.

Beyond these, the book also examines the multi-dimensionality, both intrinsic and extrinsic, of the orisa (including Obatala, Oduduwa, Ogun, Orunmila - Baba Ifa - Esu,  etc.) and orisa worship in the Yoruba imagination and everyday socio-cultural practice by relating this to the simultaneous conflation and separation of the divine and the profane in a religious culture which is remarkably adaptable and open to creative meanings and interpretation.

What are the most important things that the author has to say about the subject-matter? There are many critical insights that the author offers in this book, including the theoretical, the conceptual, the methodological, and the practical. I will point to a few of these - some of them, I already mentioned in the answering the first question.

Professor Olupona invites us to reexamine and revise all the concepts and ideas which are important in understanding African religion and religious practices, particularly orisa and orisa worship. One critical example of this is at the level of translation, particularly given how Judeo-Christian ideas and Islamic thought have influenced the perception of Yoruba religion. The author reminds us of how Yoruba cosmological understanding of the world and the relationship between human beings and the gods and the almighty God (Olorun) leads to a problem of translation in modern times. For instance, the early Christian and Islamic missionaries in attempting to reconcile the Yoruba world with Christianity and Islam, respectively, introduced interesting translations of redemption, salvation, sin and the devil which have become part of the problems of understanding traditional religion. The Yoruba “Esu” god, for instance, is erroneously paralleled with the Christian devil or satan (satani) and the Islamic “ashitani”. Also, aje, in the Yoruba cosmology, is much more nuanced than what we have come to translate into witches in English language.

In examining Ile-Ife as the locus of creation, this book also recognizes the pre-theoretical nature of religion and shows how this is so in the Yoruba context. Among the Yoruba, being (wiwa) is the father of its own theory. You only have to examine the concept of iwa to understand the complex relationship of being and theory in the Yoruba cosmology.

This book also points not merely to the connection, but more to the affinity, between Ife and Ifa. If Ife is the centre of the universe and a city that connects the world above (orun) with this this world (Ile aye) and the underground world of spirits and ancestors (ile), and if aarin opon (the centre of Ifa divining board) is ode orun (the centre of Heaven), then, it is no wonder that odu Ifa (Ifa corpus) is able to explain and interpret the world, heal the sick and resolve social crises. Based on both historical and ethnographic insights, Professor Olupona explains to us in this book why and how Ifa “is at the centre of the constructs and meanings of Yorba cosmology and religious ideas” (p. 183).

Using the olojo festival - the royal ritual - against the backdrop of the Ooni (the Arole Oduduwa) as a god-king, Olupona examines how the ritual proclaims the authority and ultimate power of the Ooni, as well as affirms belongingness among the people of Ile-Ife. Given the length of the years that the research for this book entailed - that is one and half decades - the author is also able to track the modern changes in the olojo festival.

In many instances in the book, Olupona uses Yoruba understanding of the order of being, Yoruba theory of justice, Yoruba concept of worship and devotion, and Yoruba theory of liminality, as well as Yoruba theory of causality to examine the orisa’s place in the Yoruba world.

What are the contributions that the author makes to our understanding of the subject-matter? There are many contributions that this book makes to both academic and lay understanding of religion and religious culture. I have mentioned some of these in examining what the book is about and what the author has to say about the subject-matter. I will mention a few more.

In approaching Ile-Ife in terms of its historical, theological, as well as cultural, essence, The City of 201 Gods is an example of the finest scholarship that can be found anywhere in the world on the issue of religion, religious culture, comparative religion and the temporal and spatial  dimensions of cultural evolution.

Despite being one of the most respected authorities on comparative religion in Africa and the African Diaspora, in this book, Olupona does not make pronouncements about what exists in the traditional religious sphere, rather he embraces what exists in order to interpret it. He articulates both the transcendent and the ascendant in a city-centered, but widely-consequential religious culture and the complexities of its overlapping practices and meanings. This can be a daunting task, but the author brilliantly and deftly weaves a compelling narrative of essence and tension, peace and violence, order and disorder, continuity and change, singularity and multiplicity, into a whole that is both readable and enjoyable.

The book provides a prism through which we can understand why a true Yoruba can never be a religious fundamentalist. In a religious culture in which the foundational source of its epistemology - based on Ifa - is exemplified by Orunmila, which full meaning is Orun lo meni ti ola (only the Heavens know who will be saved), this book shows that fundamentalism is an aberration. Orunmila symbolizes an opposition to fundamentalism and leaves all exclusivity of divine wisdom to Olorun or Olodumare. This is a crucial point because Olupona shows in this book how the religious culture of the Yoruba is also the basis of Yoruba secularism and religious tolerance. A people who have 201 gods cannot have a problem with one more!

How can different classes of readers approach the book? One of the most fascinating and perhaps paradoxical things about this book is that in its introduction (p. 7) it asks modest questions, but then goes on to provide big answers. In many ways therefore, the book exemplifies what the Yoruba points to when they say, Ajanaku koja, o ni mo ri nkan firi; b’aba r’erin, ka laa r’erin. (An elephant struts across, and you say that you seen a flicker; if we see an elephant, we should confess that we have seen an elephant). Indeed, this book is an elephant. If you are familiar with the story of the elephant and the blind men, then you can relate it to the different ways in which this book can be approached as an elephant. It can be approached as a whole, yet, you can approach it in its many dimensions.

The book can be read as religious studies, it can be read as cultural studies, it can be read as historical sociology, it can be read as ethnography and it can be read as political sociology. As the moral of the wise man approached by the five blind men to help resolve their disagreement over what the elephant looks like reminds us, The City of 201 Gods, particularly in Part 3 - where it addresses up the interesting questions of change; change in the city, change in the palace, and change in the religious sphere as exemplified by the clash of the orisa and the new evangelicals - instructs us that we should try to understand other people’s points of view.  Doing so enables us to get  proper perspectives on different positions and experiences in the world. Olupona alerts us to the fact that what the Yoruba religion teaches us is not only phenomenological and theological tolerance, but also the absurdity of religious fundamentalism, as well as the mockery of worship and devotion that some contemporary versions of Pentecostal Christianity and radical Islam represent.

As a student of the social composition of power and interest - in this case, as manifested in the political economy of religion - I would have loved Olupona to pursue some of the implications of contemporary Evangelical Pentecostalism for civic culture and politics, in the, and beyond, the city. In the age in which Pentecostal star pastors cater more to winning the pockets of the soulless than winning souls, it is important to reconsider how politics has been reconfigured as a play on spirituality as profanity. This is further interesting in a context in which, for the sake of politics and the pocket, the sacred has become the stuff of the profane and profanities have been turned into the very stuff of the sacred. We are now living in an age in which the propensity of prosperity “gospel” to turn us all into commodities and cash (particularly globally convertible cash, such as the dollar) has become so astounding as to compel even the “unsaved” to shout “hallelujah”!

However, in this book, Olupona one of the most accomplished scholars of comparative religion in Africa and the African Diaspora, provokes us to reconsider the implications of living in a society in which personal salvation now flies in private jets. In relating Yoruba religion to the contemporary challenges of Evangelical Christianity in Ile-Ife and beyond, the author is inviting us to think deeply about a world in which celebrated pastors - who minister to congregations in a country in which more than 70 percent of the population survives on less than $1 a day -  have taken the wings of Angels as a literal translation of the wings of aircrafts. By providing the epistemic basis of a religious culture which abhors extremism, the author also forces a debate about contemporary  forms of devotion that affirm themselves only through an orgy of violence; Olupona therefore, invites us to pay greater attention to the medieval temper masquerading as religion, one for which Allah can only be great when mass murder is committed!

An author cannot say everything that needs to be said in a single book. Indeed, the phenomenon I just described, both in its Christian and Muslim disguises, became more acute shortly after the author finished the research on which this book is based. However, by raising the context of the raging debate on the fate of religion in the age of economic neo-liberalism and religious, social and political intolerance, by raising pointed questions about the fate of civil religion in the age of fundamentalism, the author invites us to a multi-dimensional debate about these and many other issues. By so doing, Olupona also lays the basis for further interrogation of the time-space dimensions and the imagination of the other-worldly by himself and other scholars and students of society.  

Adebanwi is an associate professor in the African American and African Studies Program of the University of California-Davis, USA.