Destiny, character and interpretation in Yoruba thought

What could still depend on you?

Imagine an apprentice furniture maker who has been told that a fine future awaits her. She stops checking her joints and stops keeping her promises to customers: if success is already hers, she reasons, it cannot depend on such small things.

Her teacher objects that a promising future gives her something to work toward; it does not make the work unnecessary. Both are talking about a future that has been allotted to her, but they disagree about what that allotment means for how she should act now.

Yoruba philosophers have explored the same tension: if a life has a destiny, what can still depend on effort and character? It is a question about agency, our ability to act and affect what happens. The previous lesson asked what explains the fortunes of a political community; here we ask how an account of a person’s future bears on what that person ought to do.

A voice with a history

The Ifá poem we read was performed by the priest Oyedele Isola of Beesin Compound, Paakoyi, Oyo, Nigeria, and collected by Wande Abimbola in 1963–1970; it was published in 1977. Its individual recording date is unspecified. [1]

As lesson 3 showed, a surviving witness, a source that preserves one particular version, has a history of its own. The date a performance was recorded is not the date its poem originated. Oral transmission can involve remembering, teaching and interpreting, and publication adds the collector’s selection and translation. What we have, then, is evidence we can examine, without pretending to hear an unchanged voice from an undated past.

Ori and the problem of choice

In his account of Yoruba philosophical discussions, Segun Gbadegesin explains that ori, literally head, also refers to an inner head that bears a person’s destiny. This is a religious account of a person’s place in the world, and reducing ori to personality or self-confidence would lose what makes the question difficult. [2]

Gbadegesin examines several accounts of how destiny is acquired: some describe receiving it while kneeling, others choosing it before birth. Each raises its own question about responsibility. If a destiny is imposed, why is its recipient responsible for it? If it is chosen, what kind of choice was that?

The second account raises further puzzles, which Gbadegesin sets out. Does the chooser know what the alternatives contain? And how could someone already have preferences, if the destiny being chosen is what will give that person a character? A comparison of our own, not an Ifá narrative, makes the difficulty plain. Imagine being told to choose between closed boxes without knowing what any of them contains. Choosing a box is one thing; knowingly choosing the life hidden inside it is another. The word “choice” alone cannot establish responsibility.

What does one poem show?

Ifá is a divination tradition, a way of seeking guidance by consulting divine powers, and its poems are grouped into units called odù. [2] Our selection, from Òtúúrúpòn Méji, turns Ori and Character into figures in a story: Ori follows advice to offer sacrifice, and prospers. [1]

A reader could ask how the apprentice’s refusal to act fits a story in which responding to advice matters. Yet the story leaves much unexplained. How free is Ori’s response? How does Character affect what happens? Giving a figure a name and a part in a story is not yet an argument about responsibility.

Character and a promising future

Abimbola’s wider discussion treats iwa, character, as something people must improve in their relations with others; sacrifice does not replace that obligation. [1] As in lesson 4, where a religious teaching made demands on conduct, understanding this demand means attending to the religious account it belongs to.

Gbadegesin considers one way to explain why effort matters: destiny might supply a possibility whose fulfillment still depends on what someone does. He discusses the hand and the leg as images of work. On this view, favorable prospects leave room for someone to squander them through laziness or fraud, because a possibility can go unrealized. [2]

The proposal still leaves a question. If destiny already fixes a person’s character and outcome, how can a change of character alter that outcome? And if destiny fixes only possibilities, what exactly has been settled? Gbadegesin presses such difficulties instead of treating any one answer as the conclusion of all Yoruba thought.

Effort is not a guarantee

Return to the apprentice. Careful work can help her become a capable maker, and dishonesty can destroy the trust her workshop depends on. Neither observation proves that everyone who struggles has been careless or dishonest.

Gbadegesin raises the case of a person harmed by a natural disaster: the misfortune need not arise from the person’s character. [2] If a flood destroys the apprentice’s timber, we cannot read her moral worth in the empty workshop. Explaining a particular failure takes evidence about its causes, and assigning blame takes more: we must also establish what the person could understand or affect.

The distinction cuts the other way too. A prosperous workshop does not, by itself, tell us whether its owner treated people well. Success, effort and good character are different things, even though they sometimes support one another.

Interpreting without speaking for everyone

We have met a recorded performance, its editor’s explanation, a later philosopher’s critical questions and our own examples, and each contributes something different. The poem preserves a voice within a tradition; the philosopher asks whether claims about destiny and responsibility can hold together.

Neither is a survey of every Yoruba person’s convictions. An oral tradition can sustain argument, differing emphases and further interpretation, and respecting the material means making room for those differences instead of treating one formulation as a creed that everyone shares without question.

Try the workshop case

Someone says: “The apprentice’s destiny gives her a good future. Therefore her choices cannot matter. If she nevertheless fails, that will prove she had bad character.” What goes wrong with this argument? How much help can the selected poem give us? This exercise is optional.

Read a possible response

The argument pulls against itself. If destiny guarantees success whatever she does, bad character could not prevent it; if success requires good conduct, her choices matter after all. A favorable destiny might instead be a possibility whose realization requires effort, and failure alone would not establish bad character anyway: the workshop might have been flooded. As for the poem, it makes responding to advice significant within its story, but it does not settle every question about freedom or responsibility, and we should identify its particular version and interpretation before claiming that everyone in a tradition accepts the same answer.

Carry this forward

A belief about what awaits us can encourage effort, invite resignation or offer comfort after loss. Ask which role it plays in a particular argument, and whether that role justifies the conclusion being drawn. The next lesson, Living well on an unstable earth, turns to advice about balance in a Nahua discourse and asks how good conduct can matter when it cannot secure us against every misfortune.

Sources and limits

[1] Wande Abimbola, translator and editor, Ifá Divination Poetry, NOK, 1977, for the poem, its collection details and Abimbola’s discussion of ori and character.

• Acknowledgments: p.vii.
• The poem: XII(d), pp.123/125, with its note on p.166. XII(d) identifies the fourth selection in the twelfth odù.
• Ori and character: the introduction’s selected discussion, pp.32–34.

The selected English poem, note and contextual discussion were read, with the publication and collection details. The text contains errors introduced when the printed pages were converted to searchable text; no source images, original recordings or Yoruba-language collation were inspected. No whole book was read. Public discussion of this selection does not authorize sharing other ceremonial knowledge.

[2] Segun Gbadegesin, “Toward a Theory of Destiny”, chapter 23 in A Companion to African Philosophy, edited by Kwasi Wiredu, Blackwell, 2004, pp.313–323, for his account of ori and his questions about destiny and responsibility.

The complete chapter, note and references were read in the electronic edition. The lesson draws especially on “Ori and Destiny,” “Ori, Destiny, and the Problem of Choice,” “Ori, Destiny, and Responsibility,” and the later discussion of rationality. Page numbers follow that edition’s labels; no print copy was compared. The other works discussed in the chapter were not independently read, and no whole book was read.

The apprentice, closed boxes and workshop argument are original examples. No independent specialist review, community consultation, learner testing or measured reading time is claimed. Understanding these interpretations requires no declaration of religious belief.