Why Ifa?

I strongly believe that the ability of humans to invent abstract concepts and subscribe to them, in large numbers, is the principal driver of human progress and civilization because subscribing to a common abstraction, in large numbers, creates mutual trust among the people, facilitates social cooperation, ameliorates social conflict and promotes nation building. As such, for a group of people to progress, in this world, and build a sustainable civilization, they must be able to subscribe to a common abstraction or story: myths, deities, spiritual philosophy and other “isms.” Unfortunately, when I look at Africa, specifically Yorubaland, I see a society where the people neither promote their traditional abstractions nor invent new ones. They mostly subscribe to different foreign abstractions. By the way, foreign abstractions are not necessarily bad except that they are often divisive and not germane to the local realities in Africa.

The question now is, if indeed subscribing to a common abstraction in large numbers creates mutual trust among the people, facilitates social cooperation, ameliorates social conflict and promotes nation building, what common or unifying abstraction should Africans embrace in order to build a progressive civilization? I cannot speak for other African nations but I can speak for the Yorubaland. I think Yorubaland should accommodate different abstractions or systems, but the unifying one must be Ifa.

Why Ifa?

1.  Ifa is the Yoruba knowledge base or the literary corpus of Yoruba mythology, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy (moral, spiritual and natural philosophies), cosmology, and natural science. As such, without Ifa, the Yoruba, as a collective, are naked and empty.

 2.    It’s not enough to have a unifying abstraction or a common story that appeals to the populace, the abstraction must be malleable or adaptable to the present reality because human reality is dynamic and not static. Accordingly, Ifa should be nationally embraced because we find in the Ifa divination system some elements of mathematical, philosophical and technological knowledge that are relevant to the current information technology world.

     3.    In terms of information processing, the Ifa divination system converges not only with digital computers but also with quantum computers. In addition, the Ifa divination system has relevant applications in cryptography and quantum physics.

All in all, Ifa is qualified to be a unifying system in the Yorubaland because not only is it an indigenous system, its divination system, if properly studied and promoted, has some elements of mathematical, philosophical and technological knowledge that are useful in today’s information technology world. 

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