In the century since Lijadu first published ese Ifa, Ifa has accumulated the representation as a normative monolith with its “corpus” having all the features of written literature. In this paper, by focusing on two towns, Ode Remo and Iperu Remo and their respective texts of origin in the Odu Okanransode and Idi Meji, I hope to bring into discussion that Ifa is in fact totally heterogenous in its material and textual praxes. I will highlight features that might open the field of Ifa textual analysis to its diversity and metonymic discursive methods that privilege difference, diversity, localness, and performative context. By doing so, the perceived dilemma of variation and ‘new’ ese Ifa is neutralized while simultaneously asserting Ifa’s own epistemology and criteria of legitimacy, therefore resisting Ifa’s transformation into a static body of Western literature.

In The Invention of Africa, Mudimbe suggested that African knowledge has been represented and received as gnosis; an inert, unreflective, uncritical body of transmitted lore. Sadly, when assessing much of the contemporary literature of the Orisa/Ifa worshipping diaspora (predominantly North America), Mudimbe’s criticism holds true; the “how-to” manual dominates with its subsequent dogmatic arguments of right and wrong and good and bad. As a diasporic Babalawo, I would like to discuss in this paper the theological idea of meta-practices that would inform our acts of ritual and place them within a larger vision of why and what we are aspiring towards. Utilizing particular ideas from ese Ifa, I would like to suggest that Orisa/Ifa see everyone firstly as human beings (not separated by color, race, or other agonistic inventions) and that being eniyan, we ontologically have moral responsibilities to each other and the world. As part of a global Orisa/Ifa dialectic, by encouraging meta-level discourse (theological rather than just practical) we can elevate our heritage to respond to the calls of our times.