Oral Poetry from Africa
This is one of the most important poems of Ifá, the divination system of the Yorùbá. In this long and fascinating poem we meet many of the principal Yorùbá Òrìṣà (gods) and each is characteristically described. But the central argument is that each man’s fate is ultimately decided by his own character.
Orunmila said that one always bends down when entering the doorway.
Ifa asked the question,
‘Who among you Gods could follow your devotee
to a distant journey over the seas?’..
A Yorùbá Oríkì (praise-poem) from Nigeria. Ògún is the god of iron and metallurgy. He is pictured as a blacksmith, but presides over every activity in which iron is used — hoes for cultivating, cutlasses for reaping, guns for hunting, cars for travelling, and so on. He therefore becomes a god of creativity and of harvesting, of hunting and of warfare, of invention and exploration and destruction.
Ogun kills on the right and destroys on the right.
Ogun kills on the left and destroys on the left.
A Yorùbá Oríkì (praise-poem) from Nigeria. As the god of fate, the uncontrollable element in human life, Eshu (Èṣù in Yorùbá) is praised as a kind of trickster god, bringing about the unexpected, the contradictory and the downright impossible.
Eshu turns right into wrong, wrong into right.
When he is angry, he hits a stone until it bleeds.
