I was recently thinking about some readings I had done on the role of a babalawo (diviner) in pre-colonial Yoruba culture, especially when you strip away the mysticism.
Whenever a client went to seek counsel and described his need, the babalawo would take his divining chain made up of 4 pairs of dried half-pods tied to a string (opele) and cast it on a tray (opon ifa). The opon ifa always had a layer of wood dust (iyerosun) which allowed the babalawo to record the results of the throw. After the first throw, the babalawo counted how many of the half-pod pairs faced upwards and how many faced downwards and recorded this on the iyerosun. He repeated this operation a few more times to narrow down to one of the 256 memorized Yoruba poems, proverbs, or prescriptions (odu ifa) he could then recite as guidance to the client.
Here’s my rough translation of a verse from one of those poems:
“The Egg and the Catapult were close friends.
They wanted to wage war against their mutual enemy.
The Egg was warned not to go but he decided otherwise.
At the enemy’s gates, the friends started a ritual dance.
The Catapult did everything with his full force and found a way through.
When the Egg tried to copy his friend, he was shattered into pieces.
In sadness, the Egg sang a dirge about the pitfalls of imitating others.”
It is human nature to fall into the mimetic trap of keeping up with the Joneses. And I think it’s pretty obvious to someone hearing this exact verse that the takeaway is to stay vigilant against this tendency.
And that’s the brilliance of this pre-colonial “technology”, especially for a pre-literate society. Even without the mysticism, the babalawo was a cultural technologist who leveraged the unpredictable patterns of the opele to introduce some variability into the life of a client who otherwise would never have been exposed to a different perspective.
Originally posted on Substack Notes, September 2025.