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Odun Ifa: Ifa Festival, by Abosede Emanuel. Lagos: West African Book Publishers Limited, 2000. 680 pp. ISBN 978-153-062-8.
Insight and Artistry in African Divination, ed. John Pemberton III. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution P, 2000. 209 pp. ISBN 1-56098-884-3 paper.
These works represent two recent and exciting contributions to the field of African literature. Abosede Emanuel's Odun Ifa: Ifa Festival is a scholarly, informative, and unique African perspective on the richness of Ifa, a divination system of several West African peoples, especially the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria. Edited by John Pemberton III, Insight and Artistry in African Divination offers us a number of scholarly works on African divination throughout the regions of West and Central Africa.
As winner of the prestigious Noma award, Odun Ifa is a work of just fewer than seven hundred pages that discusses Ifa, its history, rites, and rituals, and provides an extensive sample oflfa verses relating to the sixteen principal paired Odu oflfa, Ifa divinatory poetry. Unlike many previous works on Ifa that have degenerated into endless lists of the same citations, quotations, and photographs, Odun Ifa provides us with a refreshingly new taste of African orality, divination, and ritual from an African perspective. It represents a number of new works coming out of Africa written by local African historians and culturalists - not academicians trained in Western universities. As an "insider," Emanuel provides us with a holistic view of Ifa that reflects the power of its historical myth, orality, and place in the Yoruba worldview.
The work is divided into ten parts: an historical introduction, a discussion of the state of ritual and ceremonies such as the Annual Festival, an extensive look at the Sixteen Principal Paired Odu of Ifa, the inaugural Odu, conjuration Odu, the casting of the kola-nuts, sacrificial rites, chants utilized after sacrifice, and divination itself. We see discussions of the origins of Ifa, its philosophical ideas, as well as a very extensive presentation of a large number of Ifa prayers, verses, and rites.
Odun Ifa: Ifa Festival has the virtue of being part of an insider literature that captures the self-understanding of traditions. It is part of a process in which an oral tradition becomes written but not in a canonical way. This process is not...