Lagos: Supernatural City by Tim Cocks

Author:Tim Cocks
Format: epub

Like the creation myths of Europe and the Middle East that shaped the thinking of the West, Yoruba stories reflect the fears and dreams of complex farming so-cieties forever just one crop failure away from famine. There is an obsession with the future and how to foresee it; a fear of natural forces—like rain, winds, fertility, and sickness—over which they have no control; and a related idea that these forces need to be appeased to work in your favour. They also speak to a sense of awe at the sheer vastness and wonder of Creation, the mystery of how it came to be, but also a sense that something must have gone wrong with it for there to be so much suffering and deformity. They reveal a conceit that human beings are somehow special, more divine than other animals, and that this whole cosmic show is really all about us. We are not just another animal among many struggling for supremacy like all the others, because our dramas are somehow divinely ordained. And therefore—and here’s where most sacred stories find their real purpose—the inequalities in power and wealth between fellow humans must also have a divine basis.

Again, as with farming peoples everywhere facing potentially lethal hazards, Yoruba culture is strongly wedded to the idea of fate. In Yoruba, someone’s destiny is called her ori, which literally means her head. The Yoruba say everyone has two heads: a physical, visible one and an invisible one, sometimes called a ‘guardian spirit’, that determines one’s fate. But unlike in the Abrahamic religions that would later make such a huge mark on Nigeria, fate is not a straight line stretching from creation to an apocalyptic future. Fate is rather more like a circle: part of the cycle of birth, growing up, death and reincarnation through the rebirth of ancestors in later generations down the family. Because of this circle, individual fates are never distinct, but always bound up with the fates of the family and community. There is no separating someone’s fate from that of his people.

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