Obatala

The clay had started going wrong under his hands. He had been at the work a long while, and there was a vessel of palm wine standing within reach, cool and cloudy and just at the edge of turning. He drank it. He kept working. The bodies that came out of that stretch of the day were crooked: a leg short of its partner, a spine bent, limbs that never arrived, illnesses that would ride a person from birth to grave. Then he lay down on the wet ground and slept, and while he slept somebody took the world off him.

That is the Yoruba account of Obatala, and it is an odd shape for a creation story, because the creator does not come out of it well.

Before any of it there was an errand. In the beginning the earth was water and nothing else, and Olodumare, the sky god, summoned him and gave him the making of land. He went down carrying a hen with five toes, a pigeon, and a calabash holding a piece of dry soil. He tipped the soil onto the water, loosed the two birds, and they scratched and flung it about until it spread and held. He climbed back to report that the thing was done. Olodumare did not take his word for it and sent a chameleon down to walk the new ground, slowly, the way chameleons walk, and the chameleon came back and said there was much land.

So he was sent a second time, onto the wide ground at Ife, with clay and with the job of making people out of it. Yemòó worked beside him. The method does not vary anywhere in the telling: he shapes the body, every limb and every feature of it, and hands it up for Olodumare to breathe into. He has never stopped. Every child forming in a womb is held to be his work, which makes this less a single ancient afternoon than a shift with no end to it.

The accounts split at the palm wine, and only about who was to blame. Some say Esu, the trickster who carries sacrifices between the worlds, set the cup in his way out of spite at how well the work was going. Some say Ogun poured it. Nobody disagrees about what happened next. He got drunk at work, and people are still living with it.

What he did on waking is the reason he is loved and not merely respected. He looked at what he had spoiled and he did not disown any of it. He gave up palm wine for good and took the marked under his protection: the lame, the blind, those born without limbs, those born with albinism, anyone whose body was settled before they had a say in it. His devotees drink no palm wine either. It is a small hard rule, kept a very long time, on behalf of people who had nothing to do with the mistake.

The other consequence was political. While he slept, Oduduwa took the vessel holding the means of creation, went down to Ife himself, filled it with his own people and settled them under his own rule. Obatala woke to find the ground occupied. The struggle that followed runs through Yoruba tradition like a fault line, and the tradition does not tell it one way. In the account set down by Omofolabo Ajayi, Obatala’s people came to be known as the Igbo and Oduduwa’s as the Ife, and Obatala, beaten, withdrew into exile in a friend’s grove before returning to Ile-Ife, where he is remembered as its fourth ruler. Ife’s own partisans tell it the other way about, with Obatala taking the throne back. Whoever wins the story owns the crown, so the disagreement was never going to settle.

At Itapa the whole quarrel is performed once a year. The festival sequence stages the battle, then Oduduwa’s victory, then Obatala’s banishment, and last of all his return at Oduduwa’s own invitation, with gods and people alike rejoicing. It reads less like theology than like a country rehearsing the memory of a conquest and the difficult peace made afterwards. His priests wear white conical beaded crowns, close enough to the beaded crowns reserved for the sons of Oduduwa to make the point without anyone having to say it.

The Oyo Yoruba keep a separate grievance. Travelling to visit Shango, Obatala fell foul of Esu a second time and was accused of stealing a horse. Shango, not knowing whom he had, put him in prison. He stayed there without once naming himself, and outside the walls the country went wrong: the fields gave nothing, women bore no children, and famine came in behind. Only when Ifa divination turned up the truth was the old man released, and the harvests and the births came back with him. Seven years is a long time to be right and say nothing.

No source gives him a face. What the tradition supplies instead is a uniform. White cloth, unstained, which is where the name comes from, and white beads, and a shrine on which nothing may be the wrong colour. He is one of the orisha funfun, the white ones, and the colour carries two meanings at once, physical cleanliness and the cool unclouded light of a mind that is not agitated. Even the offerings obey it. The giant land snail called igbin goes to him because its blood runs white.

He crossed the Atlantic with the people sold out of Yorubaland, and he is still at work on the other side. In Cuba he is Obatalá, folded together with Our Lady of Mercy, and white is the sacred colour of the entire religion because it is his. In Bahia he is Oxalá, and his oldest road, Oxalufã, is an ancient man walking bent over on a metal staff called the opaxorô, hung with small pendants that chime faintly against one another as he moves. The dove is his bird there and his preferred offering. He will not take palm oil, so his food is cooked with honey. He is also the one male orisha who eats among the female ones, and the priests give different reasons for that, one of them being that the father of creation was never really of one sex to begin with.

His powers are a sculptor’s rather than a warrior’s. He owns heads, meaning both the skull and the ori inside it, the inner head that carries a person’s destiny and stands as their own private divinity. He carries the ase that makes a king’s authority real, which is why the crown at Ife is reckoned his and why the coronation of an Ooni still says so. He settles quarrels rather than starting them. He is the eldest of hundreds, and seniority in that company is a force of its own.

His limits are cut from the same cloth. Being the coolest and the oldest makes him slow, and slow is how a god gets robbed in his sleep. He can be reached through appetite, and once was. He does not fight for what belongs to him; he waits, and the waiting cost him seven years in a cell and a world taken out of his hands. The flaw is also permanent in a way no other orisha’s is, because it is written into the bodies of living people who never asked for it. That is why the palm wine is still refused in his shrines. Nobody there has forgotten what it bought.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Obatala in Yoruba religion?

Obatala is the senior orisha of the Yoruba, charged by the supreme god Olodumare with creating dry land and then with sculpting human bodies out of clay. Olodumare breathed life into the forms Obatala made, which is why Obatala is called the owner of all heads. His name means king of the white cloth, and he is also known as Orisanla, the great orisha.

Why do Obatala’s worshippers avoid palm wine?

Because Obatala himself gave it up. While moulding the first human bodies at Ife he drank palm wine, became drunk, and shaped people with crooked limbs, missing limbs and lifelong illnesses. On sobering up he swore never to drink again and made those he had marked his special charges, so his devotees keep the same prohibition.

What happened between Obatala and Oduduwa?

Oduduwa took the vessel containing the means of creation while Obatala lay asleep, went down to Ife, and peopled it with his own followers under his own rule. Obatala woke to find himself replaced, and a long struggle followed. Yoruba tradition disagrees about the outcome, and the annual Obatala festival at Itapa re-enacts the battle, the banishment and Obatala’s eventual return.

Who is Obatala in Cuba and Brazil?

He is Obatalá in Cuban practice, where he is syncretised with Our Lady of Mercy and where white is the sacred colour of the religion on his account. In Brazilian Candomblé he is Oxalá, and his oldest road, Oxalufã, is an aged figure who walks bent over on a metal staff called the opaxorô. His offerings there are cooked with honey rather than palm oil.

Why is Obatala associated with the colour white?

White stands for both purity and the calm, unclouded state of mind he represents, and he heads the group of orisha called funfun, the white ones. His name itself means king of the white cloth. Offerings to him follow the rule, which is why the giant land snail igbin is given to him: its blood runs white.

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Oduduwa, Olodumare, Eshu, Ogun, Shango, Orunmila, Yemọja, Ori, Oshun, Oya, Babalú-Ayé, Osanyin, Khnum, Ptah, Prometheus