Poetry
The Ifa Corpus
Ifá
Anonymous · 1600
Synopsis
A corpus of verses learned by heart, arranged under the figures that the diviner obtains by casting palm nuts or a chain of cowrie shells. Each figure commands its own set of verses, which tell what happened to an ancestor placed in the same situation: whom he consulted, what he sacrificed, what became of it. The client does not receive an answer there but a precedent, and it is up to him to draw his own conduct from it.
Context
Ifá is the Yoruba system of divination: the diviner obtains a figure from among those formed by the combinations of sixteen basic signs, and each commands a set of verses, the odu. The corpus counts two hundred and fifty-six of them, sixteen principal and two hundred and forty composite; the verses that fill them have no fixed number, since they continue to be added. The same system, under other names, is practised in Benin, Togo and Ghana, and mathematicians see in it one of the oldest systematic uses of a binary code.
Who it is for
A corpus that is not narrative in the ordinary sense, best approached through the studies that translate some of its odu.
Prizes and reception
Proclaimed a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage in 2005, inscribed in 2008 on the UNESCO list on behalf of Nigeria; also transmitted in Cuba and Brazil.