Time, Causation and Misfortune

Two things are joined in this file because they are joined in practice. Yoruba time is structured by a four-day ritual week in which each day belongs to particular òrìṣà, so the calendar is a schedule of obligations rather than a neutral grid. And Yoruba explanation of misfortune is a diagnostic procedure that runs on that same ritual infrastructure, sorting causes among the person's own action, their destiny, the state of their relationships with the dead and the divinities, and the action of others. The second half of the file deals with àjẹ́, which is the most sensationalised subject in the whole field and which has to be handled carefully or not at all.

The four-day week

The traditional Yoruba week, ọ̀sẹ̀, is four days, and each day is dedicated to particular òrìṣà 1. The commonly given assignment is:

Day one: Ọbàtálá, Ṣọ̀pọ̀ná, Ìyàmi Àjẹ́ and Egúngún. Day two: Ọ̀rúnmìlà, Èṣù and Ọ̀ṣun. Day three: Ògún and Ọ̀ṣọ́ọ̀sì. Day four: Ṣàngó and Ọya.

Different sources give different starting points and slightly different assignments, and there is regional variation. Some accounts name the days Ọjọ́ Ògún, Ọjọ́ Awo, Ọjọ́ Ọ̀ṣẹ̀ or Ọjọ́ Ọ̀ṣun, and Ọjọ́ Jàkúta, where Jàkúta, one who fights with stones, is Ṣàngó. Confidence: medium on any particular list, high that the cycle is four days with òrìṣà dedications.

Time-keeping was a specialist function. The priests of Òrìṣà Oko, the farm divinity, were responsible for keeping the calendar, and the fixing of festival dates was done in consultation with them; the method recorded includes sacrificing a pigeon at each new moon and keeping the head in a designated calabash 1. This is a working astronomical and administrative practice, not an approximation, and it existed because the ritual and agricultural year had to be coordinated across a town.

The year is given as thirteen months of seven four-day weeks, ninety-one weeks in total, and 364 days, running from 3 June to 2 June 1. Month names are recorded: Òkúdù, Agẹmọ, Ògún, Ọ̀wẹ́wẹ̀, Ọ̀wàrà, Bélú, Ọ̀pẹ, Ṣẹ́rẹ́, Èrèlé, Ẹrẹ́nà, Ìgbé, Ẹ̀bìbì 1.

Two cautions. Claims that the Yoruba calendar counts a specific very large number of years, the Kojoda era, come from a modern reconstruction and are flagged as unreliable even in the sources that report them 1. And the neat reconciliation of the four-day and thirteen-month schemes into a 364-day year is tidier in modern presentations than the historical evidence supports.

The seven-day week is a colonial-era accommodation, and modern Yoruba names the seven days: Ọjọ́ Àìkú, Ọjọ́ Ajé, Ọjọ́ Ìṣẹ́gun, Ọjọ́rú, Ọjọ́bọ̀, Ọjọ́ Ẹtì, Ọjọ́ Àbámẹ́ta 1. The two systems now coexist, with the four-day cycle continuing to govern ritual observance and market days while the seven-day cycle governs commerce and administration.

What the calendar implies

The four-day week is a structural fact worth pausing on, because it is one of the clearest instances of a Yoruba category that has no European counterpart.

The market cycle and the ritual cycle are the same cycle. Yoruba markets rotate on the four-day period, so a town's market day is also a ritual day, which is one reason the market is a site of both economic and spiritual significance and why Èṣù's shrine stands in it. Trade and observance are not separate schedules that happen to overlap.

Nothing in the arrangement corresponds to a sabbath, a day of rest set apart from ordinary time as holy. Every day belongs to some òrìṣà. There is no secular remainder, and this is the calendar's expression of the point made in the file on ọ̀run and ayé: the sacred and secular division is not present in the system.

The unit is four rather than seven, so it does not derive from the lunar quarter, and the Yoruba week is not a subdivision of the month in the way the Semitic week is. It is its own cycle.

On Mbiti's claim about African time, that African languages lack a developed future tense and that African thought therefore has no real conception of the distant future, this corpus does not rely on it. The claim has been extensively criticised on linguistic grounds, and the Yoruba material tells against it directly: a calendar of thirteen months maintained by a specialist priesthood, with festival dates fixed in advance by astronomical observation, is not the product of a culture without a future 2.

How a diagnosis proceeds

The practical question is what happens when something goes wrong: illness, a failing business, childlessness, a run of accidents, a death.

The procedure is not to identify a culprit. It is to establish which kind of cause is operating, and Yoruba explanation recognises several kinds that are not competitors.

Àfọwọ́fá, self-caused. From fi ọwọ́ fà, to draw with one's own hand. The problem the person brought on themselves through their own action, located in the natural order and empirically observable 3. This category is larger than outsiders expect and it is the first resort, not the last. A man who drinks, quarrels and neglects his farm has a diagnosable problem and it is àfọwọ́fá. People are punished for wrongdoing precisely because they are held responsible for it 3.

Ordinary natural causation. Yoruba medicine is a developed practice with a materia medica, and an illness has physical causes and physical treatments. Consulting a herbalist for a herbal remedy is not a religious act with a naturalistic veneer, and the onísègùn's knowledge of plants is knowledge in the ordinary sense, tested in the way described in the epistemology file.

Destiny. Where a pattern persists after everything reasonable has been tried, the explanation refers to orí. This is the residual category, not the default 3.

Relations in disrepair. An ancestor neglected, a divinity's obligation unmet, a taboo broken, a vow unpaid, one's own orí unfed. The trouble arises from a relationship that has fallen out of good order, and the remedy is repair.

The action of others. Including àjẹ́ and hostile working. This is one option among several and not the standard answer.

Divination is the instrument that sorts among these, and this is its practical function. What emerges is a diagnosis and a prescription, and the prescription frequently combines categories: make this offering, and also stop doing that, and also take this medicine. Yoruba explanation is not either naturalistic or spiritual, and the question of which it is has no answer inside the system because the distinction is not one the system makes.

Notice how much of this resembles a competent consultation in any tradition. A problem is presented, a specialist applies a procedure, causes are sorted, and a course of action is prescribed which typically involves the client changing their own behaviour. The picture of a people paralysed by fear of malign spirits does not describe this.

Àjẹ́

This is the subject that has to be handled with the most care, and the reason is straightforward: a Yoruba reader raised Christian has been taught that àjẹ́ means witch, that Yoruba society was gripped by witchcraft, and that this proves the darkness of the inheritance. Almost every element of that is a distortion, and correcting it does not require pretending that nothing troubling is involved.

The word

Yoruba tone distinguishes two words that English collapses. Ajé is a divinity of the marketplace and, by extension, wealth. Àjẹ́ is the power in question and also, as a noun, the women who hold it 4. They are different words and the confusion of them in non-tonal writing has caused real damage.

Àjẹ́ is not a synonym for witch as the English word is normally understood, and the mismatch is not subtle. English witchcraft, shaped by the European witch trials and by the Christian identification of witchcraft with pact with the devil, is rarely thought to be compatible with good intention or benevolent power 4. Àjẹ́ is a power that can be used for negative and for positive purposes 4, and the same women who hold it are addressed as protective progenitors, healers, and guardians of morality, social order and the just apportionment of power, wealth and prestige 4.

The respectful terms are ìyá mi, my mother, and àwọn ìyá wa, our mothers, and these are the terms most used 4. Àwọn ìyá wa Ọ̀ṣọ̀rọ̀ngà is rendered as Our Mothers Arcane, or after Pierre Verger, Our Mothers Sorcerous 4.

What the sources say the power is

The account is consistent across the scholarship on a few points.

The power is held to be very great. The sources describe àjẹ́ as more powerful than the òrìṣà, and as intermediaries between Ọlọ́dùmarè and the divinities, second in power only to Ọlọ́dùmarè, who is itself without gender 4. Lawal, Drewal and Drewal, and McIntosh all report this 4.

Its origin is given in Ifá verse in more than one version. In the account Lawal records, Ọlọ́dùmarè created three òrìṣà, gave special powers to the two male ones, and when the female, Odùduwà, asked what her power would be, handed her a closed calabash in the shape of the earth containing a special àṣẹ. Asked what she would do with it, she said she would punish anyone who insulted her and would not hesitate to benefit those who supported her, and this power is àjẹ́ 4. In another verse recorded by Lawal and by Raymond Prince, it was Èṣù who gave àjẹ́ to the women, instructing them first to visit Ọ̀rúnmìlà, who made them swear to uphold certain materials and signs by which men could protect themselves, the oath then being taken before Ọlọ́run 4.

The second version is worth noting for its structure. The power is granted, and it is granted with a limitation built in: a countermeasure exists, by agreement, sworn. This is not a picture of unchecked malevolence. It is a picture of a great power under negotiated constraint, which is the same structure as everything else in the cosmos.

It is held to be possessed especially by older women and by women past menopause, on the reasoning that they retain their blood 4. It is connected in the sources to fertility and infertility, to the control of men, to success in trade, and to political influence 4.

The scholarly disagreement

Whether àjẹ́ is inherently negative is disputed in the literature and the disagreement is substantive.

Andrew Apter's position in Black Kings and Critics is the darker reading: that àjẹ́ denotes the woman who consumes life and blocks the flow of reproductive fluids, and that àjẹ́ are accordingly implicated in miscarriage and menstrual disturbance, the inverse of fertility and successful delivery 4. On this reading the power's fundamental valence is obstruction.

Teresa Washington and others emphasise the positive dimension, including àwọn ìyá wa as agents of fertility rather than its blockage 4. Sarah Mathews's summary is that if they represent fertility they must also be able to represent infertility, given that the power runs in both directions 4.

The honest statement is that the sources sustain both readings because the power is genuinely ambivalent, and a tradition that describes a power as capable of great harm and great good is not being incoherent. It is describing power.

What was done to this material

Two historical points belong in any accurate account.

Accusation tracked female economic success. Karin Barber's finding in Okuku is that a woman who displayed wealth the way a Big Man did would certainly be accused of witchcraft 4. Belasco found that women who accumulated through trade attracted the accusation 4. The case of Ẹfúnṣetán Aníwúrà and the treatment of Madam Tinubu, the Ìyálóde of the Ẹ̀gbá, a major trader driven out of Lagos and nicknamed the Terror of Lagos by European and returnee traders who resented her, are the standing examples 4. The accusation was an instrument used against women who had become powerful.

And there was a witch-hunting movement, and it was a twentieth-century phenomenon with an economic driver. In the mid twentieth century the Atinga movement came eastward from the southern Gold Coast into western Yorubaland to eradicate witches, and people identified or made to confess were beaten and sometimes killed 4. Apter's argument in "Atinga Revisited" is that the movement was driven by the cocoa boom, which intensified structural contradictions already articulated by the logic of witchcraft, pitting men against women and literate youth against elders, and that Atinga attacked the female body as the icon and agent of commodity value, of unbridled circulation and hidden accumulation 4.

That sequence should be read carefully by anyone who has been taught that Yoruba tradition was a reign of terror over witches. The organised, lethal, mass witch-hunt in Yorubaland is documented in the colonial period, driven by a cash-crop boom and by an imported eradication movement, and it targeted the economic position of women. Whatever anxieties àjẹ́ generated in the older order, they were managed by the older order's own institutions, and the institution that managed them is Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́.

Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́

Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ is a masked public spectacle honouring àwọn ìyá wa, our mothers, meaning female ancestors, female divinities and the elderly women of the community, and acknowledging their spiritual power and their place in society. Its concerns are fertility, motherhood and right social conduct 5. It is strongest in the western Yoruba area with links to Ọ̀yọ́-Ilé, Kétu and Ìlọ̀bí, Kétu having among the oldest and most elaborate performances, and it is inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of intangible cultural heritage 5.

Its governing maxim is worth its own treatment.

Original

Ayé ṣọ́ra.

Literal gloss

Ayé (World / life) · ṣọ́ra (watch out / exercise caution).

Idiomatic English

Tread carefully in the world. Translator: Ìpilẹ̀ṣẹ̀ editorial rendering, unreviewed

The maxim is given in the source as Eso l'aye, glossed "the world is fragile", with the sense that life requires caution, diplomacy, consideration, respect and harmony 5. This corpus is unable to establish the Yoruba original with confidence: the printed form is untoned and the intended segmentation is ambiguous, and the reconstruction offered above is not reliable. Confidence: low. The English sense reported in the source is given here without a three-layer treatment because the original could not be verified, and the corpus does not reconstruct a Yoruba text it cannot confirm.

What matters for this file is the institution's logic. The response to a great and ambivalent power held by women is a public festival in that power's honour, performed by both men and women, with women predominating, organised by a society whose head is the Ìyálaṣẹ, mother of the shrine, alongside the Bàbálaṣẹ 5. The festival opens with an all-night performance called Èfè, in which a male masked performer uses satire to entertain and to instruct, and the Èlẹ́fẹ̀ who carries the Èfè mask prays for the wellbeing of the community 5. The headdresses carry sculpted scenes of people, animals, objects and sometimes contemporary items such as sewing machines, and Lawal's observation is that the headdress is to the costume what the orí is to the human body, the essence of the masker's personality 5.

Set Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ beside the European witch trial and the difference in institutional logic is total. Confronted with the belief that certain women hold formidable and potentially dangerous spiritual power, one tradition prosecuted, tortured and executed them. The other built a festival to honour them, in which the community collectively acknowledges the power, entertains its holders, satirises social misconduct including its own, and asks for wellbeing. Both are responses to the same anxiety. They are not the same response, and the record of which one killed more women is not in dispute.

Oyèwùmí and the gender question

One further scholarly dispute belongs here because it bears on how all of this is read.

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí argued in The Invention of Women that gender was not an organising principle of Yoruba society before the colonial encounter, that seniority was, that the Yoruba language lacks gendered terms and gendered third-person pronouns, and that the category "woman" as it functions in Western thought did not exist in Yorubaland, so that scholars have been reading Western gender assumptions into their Yoruba material 6.

The argument has been influential and it has been vigorously contested. Bibi Bakare-Yusuf argues that the research is insufficiently supported, that gender does operate in Yoruba culture though masked behind seniority, and that Oyěwùmí opposes Yoruba culture to "the West" in a rigid and essentialist way that ignores movement between them 6. J. Lorand Matory holds that she has invented an imaginary pre-colonial community in which gender did not exist 6. Sarah Mathews's specific objection from the àjẹ́ material is that Ifá verses about women, their power and men's protection against it are unlikely to be post-European creations, and that the whole institutional complex of female power in the market, in Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ and in the Ìyálóde and Ìyálọ́jà offices presupposes the category the thesis denies 4.

The relevance for this file is that the àjẹ́ material is one of the strongest bodies of evidence against the strong form of Oyěwùmí's thesis, and readers should know both that her linguistic observations are correct, Yoruba genuinely has no grammatical gender and no sexed pronoun, and that the inference from that to the absence of a social category of women is where the argument is contested.