Ogbeni Gbolahan

Alhaji Bashir, leave Grok alone, let me give you the real gist of what went down on this thread from start to finish. It all started when one of our eminent scholars in Yorubaland, Dr. Shaykh Imran Eleha, stated firmly that the Yoruba people do not originally own the Ifa divination system. Instead of countering him with history, people started crashing out and getting emotional.  That was when I stepped into the ring. You know A.Y.O is always for the truth, no matter how unpopular it is. I told them to stop the noise and bring pure historical facts.  Right away, the usual suspects who have zero intellectual capacity started cursing the hell out of me. They turned the replies into a market square of insults because the truth touched their nerves. In fact, there is one of them called Femi, a guy already known on this app for spewing cheap propaganda. For someone who claims to defend and worship Ifa, Femi could not even write five lines of coherent analysis on the history or math of the very thing he worships! It showed everyone watching that the guy is a proper blockhead with an empty tank. I had to tell Femi and his gang of abusers that this is an intellectual table, and when it is time for an abuse contest, we will inform them. For those who tried to argue, I laid out the real history and separated the mathematical hardware from the cultural software: 1) Nobody said Arabs wrote Yoruba proverbs, poems, or local folklore (Ese Ifa). That software belongs to Yorubaland.  2) What was imported is the 16-figure binary grid (the 4-line Odu matrix paired into 256 combinations and marked in powder on a board). That mathematical container came from North African and Middle Eastern sand geomancy (ʿIlm al-Raml) down through the Nupe trade corridor. I dropped Reverend Samuel Johnson’s The History of the Yorubas (pages 32 to 33), where Oyo's own royal historians recorded that Setilu, a blind Nupe man who initially practiced divination with Muslims, brought the system down into Yorubaland and settled in Ile-Ife long before it ever entered the Oyo palace. Not only that, I backed it up with Al-Shawahid (corroborating witnesses): Sheikh Adam Abdullah Al-Ilori, Bernard Maupoil (1943), Prof. Louis Brenner, Prof. Wim van Binsbergen, and dated 12th-century Arabic manuscripts such as Al-Zanati and Ibn Mahfuf. Then the comedy started from the few who tried to sound smart: 1) The Oyo vs. Ota confusion: One guy ran to page 158 of Samuel Johnson to shout that Alaafin Onigbogi’s mother brought Ifa from Ota around 1500 CE, while hiding pages 32 and 33 of the same book where Johnson already explained how Setilu the Nupe man brought it to Ile-Ife in the first place! 2) Babatee and the University of Chicago own-goal: I have to give kudos to Babatee. Unlike Femi who only knows how to bark and curse, Babatee at least tried to go and look for academic research, even though he missed badly and could not comprehend what he pasted. He came chest-beating with a link to a 2024 University of Chicago Press paper, claiming "the world's top scholars" carbon-dated Odu Ifa to 500 CE. I opened his link and dropped a screenshot of page 249 on his head. It turned out to be a short essay by one lecturer from NOUN (Emmanuel Ofuasia) who explicitly wrote that Sophie Oluwole's 500 BCE date (Babatee did not even know the difference between BCE and CE!) is unscientific speculation, and admitted his own 1100 CE date is just an approximation based on general town walls in Ile-Ife! Worse still, Babatee quoted a verse saying "Our Ifa became Muslim", not realizing it comes from Odù Òtúrà Méjì, the Odu of the Muslims that records how the Babalawo copied the turban and ways of the Muslim clerics (Alufaa)! Once I posted that screenshot, he tried to play another Maradona style like their forefathers do, twisting my screenshot to claim the first paragraph proved him right.